Gyokuyoutama

Okay, what the fuck is this:

Most good 8 bit and 16 bit games are designed in such a way that they naturally teach you how to play the game without explicitly telling you how to. Usually to teach you how to get past an obstacle they'll put you into a situation where it's simple to get past, but where you can't proceed until you've done it, and then later on the same obstacle will be used in more complicated settings, now that you know how it works. Mario 1-1 has several good examples of this, and since everyone knows it, it's the best way to explain what I mean. The first teaching moment is the very first goomba. You're small, and he's right in front of you. If you don't jump you'll just die and not be able to do anything whatsoever. If you mess around with the buttons (and there's really only two that could do something here) you're going to hit jump and realize that you need to jump to get out of the way. On top of this, the first coin block is positioned so that you'll likely hit it during your jump, which teaches you that hitting blocks also is a good idea. Later on we have a great example of this sort of thing with the a set of staircase blocks with ground in the middle, immediately followed by another set of staircase blocks with a pit in the middle. If you screw up your platforming on the first set of blocks, no big deal, you're just mildly inconvenienced. But you learn that you need to be careful in such situations and therefore are ready for getting over the dangerous pit that comes next. These all teach you very basic lessons, but if you had never played a platformer before (and the audience for the game largely hadn't) you do have to learn these things. What's interesting about Carnival Night Act 2 is that it is almost the exact opposite of this sort of approach. To get past the spinning barrel you must control it by pressing up and down. But you've never had to do that before, nor have you had to press up or down at any point in the game before (and I don't think that you have to afterwards for that matter). Now if this was the first time that you encountered a barrel you might try pressing up and down anyway by random experimentation, it's not like there's much else to do in that room. Unfortunately you have seen spinning barrels before, and they've always served as platforms. Thus you go into the room thinking "this is something that I should jump on." To make matters worse it's just almost possible to bring the barrel down far enough through jumping to get past it (and apparently it is possible with two people) which reinforces the idea in the player's mind that jumping is the way to go. Worse still, the room is thin and has a high ceiling, thus naturally encouraging you to jump. If they really wanted you to learn to press up and down they should have made it so that the platform didn't descend when you jumped on it, but only when you pressed up or down, and/or made the room have a short enough ceiling that you could barely jump. Additionally, that should have been the first time that you saw one of those barrels. Really though they just should have taken that section out entirely, since learning the skill was frustrating even if you did figure it out (due to the up and down momentum of the barrel) and added nothing to the game past that point.

Shadowverse is neither really a traditional phone game, is Japanese, and is arguably a gacha (especially with the new leader distributions) and on top of that to my understanding it's horribly optimized on phones so it's not what you asked for but... ...you should really play Shadowverse.

Let's be honest. The time to worry about that was long, long before now.

My favorite part about sonic shuffle is how super sonic is arguably worse in all ways to just sonic.

I wonder how badly the community would tear itself apart if the jetpack ended up being only a cosmetic, with no gameplay effects whatsoever.

This information was false and was clearly a ruse to get me to "like" your post to test it.

At one point I started reading it in my head as "mai-yer,", like the supermarket chain.

First episode of Pop Team Epic anime got released in October after all:

It's a TF2 asset. Originally created for MARIO_KART.

I guess this is the Halloween update as well then?

Let's see you translate it.

Spent 20 minutes writing a Halloween webding reply only to learn that the necessary unicode characters aren't allowed. EDIT: I guess this will have to do.

It always tickles me that Talisman set the standard for Ameritrash games, but was made by Brits, and Acquire set the standard for Eurogames, but was made by an American.

Just remember, a line is the same thing as a circle whose center is at an infinity in a perpendicular direction to it.

Negatives are just positives with directions reversed.

Just thought of something that I'm actually curious about: They're pretty much obligated to have someone get a hand chopped off in a lightsaber fight. They seem to be aping Episode 5, where Luke loses his hand, but Episode 2 also had Anakin lose his hand, setting up an additional precedent that someone has to get a hand chopped off in the second act. (This in addition to the relatively high amount of general limb-losing that happens in Star Wars). But who's it going to be? With the way that they've treated Rey, having her look perfect from her introduction despite living in a desert for years with insufficient nutrition, I don't think that they have the stomach to chop her hand off. Luke already had his hand chopped off, so it would be dumb to have him lose another one. And there doesn't seem to be any other good candidates for hand-choppery. I guess maybe they'll have Kylo lose his hand to further solidfy his chump status. He'd probably like it anyway, since it'd make him more like grandaddy Vader.

Damn it now I'm thinking about these movies again and the more I think about things the more I realize how many flaws are in them. In particular the Luke Skywalker map made no sense from either an internal standpoint or a storyteller standpoint. As I mentioned before, it's not clear why they needed to find Luke in the first place, since at the end of the movie he's valuable because he could train Rey, but no one knew about Rey at the beginning of the movie. Were there other Jedi trainees that they wanted to send to Luke? If so, why didn't they show up in the movie? Why weren't they even mentioned? Did they need Luke's strategic advice or something to help out against the First Order? If so, why don't they send anyone with Rey at the end to meet with him and get that advice? They basically need to find him because the opening crawl said that they did. Dramatically, it's a completely unnecessary plotline. It only exists to give the BB-8 to have something to smuggle to the resistance, so as to bring together the important characters and get them to the final battle. But they could have just as easily had him have information about the super death star. I get that would be highly unoriginal, but I doubt that they really care about that with how much else they lifted from A New Hope. And for most of the movie the major focus is on stopping the First Order and their super weapon with no one really seem to care about finding Luke, so having military information as the plot device would make a lot more sense. On top of that, if they didn't have the dumb Luke map plot device, they could have had him show up as a surprise at the end of the movie (okay it would have been leaked by marketing so it wouldn't be a surprise, but you know what I mean). Maybe he could have even saved Rey from being killed by Kylo in the final duel, so that Kylo would have actually looked like a threat. So from a storytelling standpoint it's baffling why they added this map to the story. From an internal standpoint it makes even less sense. Why does the map even exist? Luke seems to have become a hermit because he doesn't want to train anyone (to avoid his mistake with Kylo) and he doesn't want to get involved with all this shit anymore. So it wouldn't make sense for him to make a map. But he's apparently alone on a planet in the middle of nowhere, so who else could know where he was? And given that someone did figure out where he was, why would they make and hide a map rather than just directly using that information? Beyond that, why is the map in parts? What purpose does that serve? From a storytelling perspective I might give it a pass if it formed the framework of the plot, as in throughout the movie they have to go through diverse and interesting trials to get them, but between the very beginning and very end of the movie they don't find any of it, R2-D2 just wakes up and fills in the rest without any additional effort at the end. From a storytelling perspective it would have been the same if R2-D2 just woke up and told everyone where Luke was without this map bullshit to begin with. So why is the map in the movie at all? It's nonsensical in-universe, serves no storytelling purpose, and it's clear that the writers didn't care about it when they were writing the movie. It's just baffling.

With how Valve has been lately, I'm not sure if I even expect them to activate the Halloween events. I'm not even talking about adding anything, just activating gift drops on old maps.

I remembered that it took over a year for them to get out issue 6, but forgot that they missed the "once a year" mark by over four months.

How many times did they give us this exact line with regards to the comic before they finally released it? I want to say there were at least three different assurances that it would "release really soon" over at least four months.

Part of what makes it hard for me to get into the Last Jedi was that the Force Awakens ended in such a way as to generate practically no tension. The movie did a horrible job explaining the relative political situation, but the feeling I got was that the First Order was relatively small compared to the New Republic as a whole, with the New Republic controlling most of the galaxy. They were a threat partially because the New Republic was a bunch of Gundam Federation style do-nothing bureaucrats, but mainly because they had a fleet about a super duper death star. Since Return of the Jedi stressed the difficulty of constructing something even on the scale of the Death Star II, and that was with the resources of the entire Galactic Empire, I got the feeling that this project probably must have consisted of the bulk of the First Order's attention, as both the scale of the project was far larger and the First Order has less resources to pull from. Now that the Resistance destroyed the Starkiller (and at seemingly little cost to the Resistance), they would seem to pose little threat. Yeah, they did blow up a few planets, but the movie gave absolutely no indication of whether any of those planets were meant to be important or if their loss would cripple the New Republic in any way. Even if they were super important the Resistance seems to be a nearly completely separate entity at this point, so that it wouldn't be much affected, and even if they were the First Order would seem to have gotten hit about as hard by their loss of their super death star, so it wouldn't change the balance of forces yet. (To throw in a Gundam reference, the situation would be nearly identical to the end of the first series, where a Zeon superweapon knocked out a good chunk of the Federation fleet, but the Zeon fleet was so far behind the power of the Earth in general at that point that they were still screwed in the long term, with the only drama coming from whether they could be taken out immediately or whether the Federation would have to remobilize first). Now it's possible that I'm completely misreading the situation, but if so it's because the movie didn't explain anything about the political situation. It's the movie's job to get me to understand the stakes. And as they stand it looks to me like the First Order isn't in a great position to do anything. But this new trailer seems to want us to believe that they are now on the brink of taking over the galaxy. Sure, I guess anything's possible, but I didn't get that impression. Similarly we're supposed to be involved in Rey's training and the threat that Kylo poses towards her if she isn't properly trained. But Rey excelled in practically everything she did in the Force Awakens, and her confrontations with Kylo were more a less a draw (in the final duel) and a clear victory toward her (during their conflict of wills when he tried to use the force on her). In fact The Force Awakens ended with Kylo needing to get extra training, and the context made it look like he needed it much more than Rey. If they wanted me to be invested in the dire need for her to be trained they should have had Kylo wipe the floor with her at the end of The Force Awakens, with Rey having no chance to do anything as a result of his skill and her lack of training. You know, like how Vader kills Kenobi in A New Hope with Luke helpless to do anything, making their rematch in Empire Strikes Back more interesting because we know Luke had to catch up? I guess you can say that Kylo killed Han, but seeing as how is neither a Jedi and that he did absolutely nothing to defend himself, it's hardly the same thing. Really now I think about it I'm confused about why everyone was so set on finding Luke in the Force Awakens to begin with. All they seem to need him for is to train Rey, who doesn't need training and who nobody knew about at the beginning of the movie when they were first looking for him. And they seem to forget all about him from the middle of the movie until the final seen, when blowing up Starkiller becomes the central theme. I guess they read the script and knew that Luke had to be the Yoda figure in the second movie so they needed to find him in the first movie.

Apparently duckduckgo figured out that my name should be associated with a Our Home's Fox Deity wiki, which would make sense in that I did derive my name from that show, but said wiki only has five pages and none of them mention the character Gyokuyou, so I'm a bit confused about how it was able to do that.

Valve support staff:

Pfft. You think that I actually log in to anything google related? EDIT: Though actually even logged out there does seem to be an option to do that. Thanks.