Gyokuyoutama

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Here's one of those stories that you can dismiss as BS but it's true.
 
The first time I played Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, I triggered the Chris Houlihan room.  Specifically this happened about halfway through the light world sequence, where I decided to go back in the pit that you use to enter the castle at the very beginning.  This triggered the room, and I just assumed that this was an Easter egg for going back somewhere you'd never have any good reason to go to.  I have no idea if I accidentally triggered the bomb pegasus boots glitch or what, but somehow I triggered the error catch and went to the room.
 
I remember trying to go back there again and getting really confused by why dropping into the same pit didn't send me there later.  It wasn't until years later that I found out that it's actually tricky to accidentally end up there.
 
Also my name is Justin Bailey and so I'm the first person to find that password in Metroid.  Okay, that one is a lie, but the Zelda thing is true.

I bet if there was a Mario horror game there'd be too many jumpscares

Whenever I see anyone comment "savage" I fully expect to see it followed up by "UNATCO?"
 
When it is not, this disappoints me more than anything else on the internet.

Deus EX shitpost had lasting consequences on my sense of humor.
 
  

Whenever I see anyone comment "savage" I fully expect to see it followed up by "UNATCO?"
 
When it is not, this disappoints me more than anything else on the internet.

Whenever I see anyone comment "savage" I fully expect to see it followed up by "UNATCO?"
 
When it is not, this disappoints me more than anything else on the internet.

Desperate.

I had a dream where I went to the library on a walk.  I looked through the a few non-fiction books but didn't find anything I was interested in, so I left.
 
Then the whole thing turned into a Kafka story.
 
Despite not checking anything out I was called over by an employee and forced to do a "sign-out".  This annoyed me as a matter of principle, kind of like when stores say "do you we have your phone number yet?" when you are buying something.  I complained more about this than I would in real life, but went along with it.  In theory I just had to put my name down and something that was a number (it wasn't a phone number, might have been something like "how long have you lived in the neighborhood.")  But every time I did this I would be sent to another person and forced to fill it out again.  Eventually I got to someone who asked me "why have you been giving us a name for a person who doesn't exist?"  I took out my driver's license and even my library card to show that I was in fact real and in the system and then got told "such things can be forged" without them even being looked at.
 
Things continued in that way for over an hour of dream time, and then I decided to leave.  I was warned that the police would be called on me but I was firmly in "fuck this" mode.  The door to leave was actually locked, but it was one of those internal house locks that you can just pop by sticking something into the knob so I got out that way.  Then I saw it was pouring rain outside, and I had walked to the library, so now I either had to wait for the rain to stop or get absolutely soaked.

My best attempts to understand this in Kanji/"Literal Meaning"/Sparkle Name/Explanation format
 
夢姫 /"Dream Princess"/Pudding/I don't get it
駆馬/"Flying Horse"/Pegasus/Self Explanatory
七音/"Seven Sounds"/Do-Re-Mi/First three notes of the musical scale, which has seven notes
紅葉/"Crimson Leaf"/Maple/A fucking leaf
大海/"Big Sea"/Ocean/Self Explanatory, but it should be noted that this isn't the Japanese word for ocean (which would be 海 by itself.)
詞/"Poem"/Poem/Self Explanatory
今鹿/"Now Deer"/Nausicaa/Uses the English reading of "now" for the first character and the Japanese reading of "shika" for the second character.
黄熊/"Yellow Bear"/Pooh/Winnie the Pooh
爽斗/"Refreshing Ladle"/Mint/I don't get it.  The second character can have a reading of "to" so it might be a pun solely on the first character, like we saw for Nausica, but I can't figure out the joke that makes the first part read as "min".
心姫/"Heart Princess"/Heart/Self explanatory, the "princess" part is just there to look it sound like a girl's name.
心人/"Heart Person"/Heart/Like the last one, but with the girly "princess" replaced with something neutral.
一心/"One Heart"/Pure/The joke is that the instructor assumes this will be another "Heart" but instead we get "pure" by the idea that a pure person has their heart set on only one thing.
愛羅/"Love Covering"/Tiara/I'm not sure on this one.  The second character is read as "ra", and the instructor even gives a guess of "Aira" for the name, so it could be another joke on just hte first character. Or it could be a poetic description of a tiara as a lovely covering for your head.
桃花/"Peach Flower"/Pink/Because that's the color of the flower.
皇帝/"Emperor" (I mean if you want to get technical the first means 'Emperor' and the second means 'Sovereign' but together they just mean 'Emperor')/Caesar/Because Caesar is history's most famous Emperor
新一/"New One", but also a way of writing the common name "Shinichi"/Conan/Detective Conan reference, as discussed above.
一三/"One Three"/Nitori/I'm not sure what the name here is supposed to mean, so I just listed the phonetics.  I'm pretty sure that the the "Ni" is the "ni" for "two", but I'm not sure what the "tori" would mean.  Could be "birds."  My best guess here is that "two" appears as some sort of averaging of the two numbers?
美姫/"Beauty Princess"/Beauty/Self Explanatory
星凛/"Star Frigid"/Kirari meaning "A flash of light"/Probably a poetic description?  But there's another level of this joke in that the teacher seems to be guessing "Starry" instead of something like "Hoshirin."  You could get "Starry" by using the English meaning of the first character and phonetic meaning of the second, but this student is on another level of bullshit.
ららら/Rarara/Rarara/It's not funny when you explain it, but the joke here is that the name is very clearly spelled out phonetically and after all the bullshit we just encountered that's exactly what it is.
るるる/Rururu/Rururu/Same
プリンセスキャンディー/Purinsesukyandii/Princess Candy/Just "Princess Candy" written out in Katakana, without the sparkle Kanji bullshit.  (This easily could have been 姫飴.)
爆走蛇亜/"Explosion Run Snake Bad"/Back Soldier?/Pretty much just a phonetic reading.  This is not really a "Sparkle Name" but rather a reference to a trend where biker gangs in the 80's would use phonetic readings of "badass" kanji instead of kana.  A famous example of this is 夜露死苦 which means "Yoroshiku" which translates to something like "best regards" and is used as a polite greeting.  But the four kanji mean night, naked, death and suffering.
 ABCDE/ABCDE/ABCDE/It should be noted that this student is both blonde and speaks with a foreign accent.
笑冠/"Laugh Crown"/M-Cup/I think this comes from the first character being used in the verb 笑む/emu "to smile" and the second character being interpreted as "cap" or "kappu" which then becomes "cup".
愛保/"Love Preservation"/Love-Ho/I'm not sure if the last character is just phonetic or the English "Ho." Also I don't know if I'm reading too much into this but the teacher's first attempt at "Aiho" is very similar to "Aho", i.e. "idiot."
珍子/"Rare Child"/Yoshiko/Yoshiko is an actual Japanese name, though the first character would usually be something like 芳 (perfume).  It also might be a variant on "Yoiko" or "良子" meaning "good child."  But i don't get how the first character really works here.
宇宙/"Outer Space" or "the Universe" (technically the two characters have their own meaning, but it doesn't matter in this compound.)/Earth/The teacher guessed "Space" which would be a reasonable sparkle name, but Earth makes so little sense that we get the X-Files theme.
星/"Star"/Apple/The teacher gives two good "normal" guess than "star" but again the joke is that this reading makes no sense.
火星/"Fire Star" i.e. "Mars"/Jupiter/The teacher even says "This one's definitely Mars. It couldn't be anything other than Mars." But alas.
翼/"Wing"/Tsubasa/The joke here is that due to prior conditioning the teacher guesses the English "Wing" but in fact this is a not a sparkle name but rather anormal Japanese name written in a standard way.
And finally it is revealed that the teacher, Mr. Suzuki, has a full name of 鈴木力.  The last name is "Suzuki", written in a standard way, but his personal name is read as "Power" instead of "Chikara" or something similar, meaning that he's had a sparkle name all along.

I didn't get that one either, but now that you say it I'm pretty sure it is a Detective Conan reference.  Since the main character of the show goes by the alias of Conan, but has a real name of Shinichi.  It's even got the same written form of 新一 which is significant since Shinichi can also appear as 真一, 信一, 伸一, etc.
 
Judging by the comments on the video, that's also the favorite of the JP fans.

The timing/set up for the heart and space segments got me.
 
Was the Conan one just a reference to Detective Conan? I love the structure of the joke there but I definitely missed the content of it

I've long thought that 99 Luftballons is the most 80s sounding song ever written.  I know that the decade has a lot of styles of music, many of which sound nothing like Nena, but somehow that song just captures the feel of the decade better than anything else.
 
I've tried to find the same thing for other decades, particularly the 90s.  For the 90s I was focusing on the "radical" part of the decade, and so thought that things like Filter's Hey Man Nice Shot or Faith No More's Epic might fit the bill (though the latter technically came out in 89.)
 
But later I thought that if you turned on a radio in the 90s you would be more likely to hear optimistic pop music.  This largely has not been preserved on contemporary radio, since the stations that target the 90s most are "Classic Rock" stations.  But there was a hell of a lot of this stuff, like the output of Ace of Base, Amy Grant or Bryan Adams.
 
With that frame, I present this as my nominee for "most 90's sounding song ever written:"
 
 

Watch out people, I stepped out of my comfort zone and played ONE point and click game!
The power of variety is overflowing! Its... ITS...! over already, the game was like 30 minutes long. (Hiveswap Act 1)
 
Was ok, but felt like a demo. Just reminded me of the DOGSHIT ending from Homestuck.
 
Actually trying to put a dent on my backlog. So far, 29 games dealt with, either finished or played enough to make me uninstall. 2000 to go! (Not counting EGS, Ubisoft or EA)

Ah okay, I definitely frontloaded my dicking around so I never hit a respect wall for the missions. I kind of got the feeling that the gameplay loop pushed you towards doing that, though I suppose it does deflate the difficulty curve... Though I also feel like maybe there's no curve to be spoken of since basically the only thing I noticed increasing difficultywise was that some enemies started having RPGs and rarely grenades, but they died just as easily and rarely hit you with them out of nowhere. Well that and the forced melee sections which weren't really difficult but took waaaay longer on account of not letting you hold M1 on the boss's head with an LMG.
 
Another thing that may have broken the difficulty curve is that it's easy enough to aim with PC controls, ESPECIALLY while driving. I imagine some missions got way harder if you were playing on a controller, whereas a lot of "chase and kill that guy!" missions I completed within ten seconds of the chase starting since I could easily headshot them even while chasing. Funnily enough, GTA IV had several chases like that too but Rockstar cheated and just made them invincible until they got to the set piece they wanted you to see. That didn't happen nearly as often in SR2 (I think I only saw it happen once or twice?).
 
Fuck, that's terrible in so many ways.

So I finished Contract Rush DX. Damn this game was good.
Thoughts/Spoilers:
 

The other day I got a virtual bird encyclopedia from a thrift store.  It was for Windows 3.1, and was published by a company that hasn't existed for almost 30 years (and even its successor hasn't existed for almost 20 years).  Since it is a Windows 3.1 game, it's 16 bit, which means that any 64 bit windows (i.e. practically anything post-Vista) will flat out refuse to run the file.  And even in Windows XP/2000 etc. I am sure that there will be compatibility issues.  But I was able to get it running again through my Windows 3.1 install in DosBox-S.  Let me finally identify some birds that I've heard while hiking too, so I got something out of it.
 
I mention this because of all the renewed discussion of Stop Killing Games and how stupid a lot the debate is.  Of course AAA companies and their bootlickers are phrasing it as "companies will be forced to supply free content updates for all time" which is of course ridiculous.  But the annoying thing is that you have people saying that this isn't what is meant, but still going further than SKG actually does.  For example "they don't need to provided new content, but they do need to provide support for modern systems."  Or "they don't need to provide support, but they do need to release all the source code so that the community can do support."
 
My bird encyclopedia would be SKG compliant and it literally does none of that.  It's compliant because there were no artificial barriers to running the game.  The software on the CD is the exact same as the software that was there when it was released in '94.  It hasn't been supported since then, and the company responsible no longer even exists to support it, so obviously it hasn't been updated with high res videos of birds or whatever, and most people would not be able to install it on a modern computer.  But that's not the company stopping you from playing it, it's just the passage of time.  It's insane to me that people can't see the difference between that and companies requiring a server check to run a single player game that easily could have been run 100% client-side, and then pulling the plug by disabling the server.
 
I think the issue is that when it comes to anything digital, people have been too conditioned to not owning anything.  When you only watch shows and movies on streaming, do all of your music listening through Spotify, and play online gacha games, the idea of actually having something digital must be completely foreign.

EDIT: To make this more than self congratulating quoting, here's a show that Ljot got me into:
 
 

I came across this German schizochannel, I find it quite delightful:
 

Yeah I noticed that too, though it was unintentional.
 
I started the list when I was reading through some old Werewolf sourcebooks and thought "man, it just isn't W:TA without Ron Spencer."  Man is good at drawing four things:
 
1.) Fur
2.) Muscle
3.) Gore
4.) Gigeresque Monstrosities
 
All of which go perfectly for Werewolf: The Apocalypse (the last being used for banes and other Wyrmlings.)
 
Don't know about Pathfinder, as I've literally never used a Pathfinder book.
 
For Magic: The Gathering itself, I would pick Mark Tedin.  Not the most prolific M:TG artist, and probably not even the most talented M:TG artist, but man did he define the aesthetic of the early sets which helped to set M:TG apart from being simply "generic fantasy cardgame."  Juzam Djinn, Necropotence, Mana Vault, Larry Niven's Disk, Fireball, Lord of the Pit; it's a definite vibe.  The only real competition is Anson Maddocks, and that's 80% due to his art for Hurloon Minotaur being so overused in early marketing.  (I remember when comments were still active on Gatherer the top comment for that card was "Truly, this is the face of Magic: the Gathering.")

Yeah, I've been getting that recommended non-stop too.  This is my favorite so far:
 
 
 
Pretty perfectly encapsulates my experience on playing that when I found it on some random Abadonware site.  This is how the game begins by the way; there is no context.
 
You can now get a legit copy again easily.  Game is Weird Dreams