A 1970 Corvette

4 hours ago, Kraszu said:

4chan is dead.

Where the fuck am I gonna shitpost about guns now?

This but with anime. Perhaps what I should do is just put my jp practice to the test and go to 2ch for currently airing anime discussion

It's actually staying down for far longer than I'd have expected. If it keeps going like this, the habit for a lot of people will break and not many will come back

 I looked into a game solely because I saw Silent recently bought it (nubby's number factory) and it turned out to be something I've been wanting for a while. It actually started a while ago when I saw some random peggle video and thought how it'd be kinda fun to have a game like that to screw around with but it came back to the forefront when I was checking the steam activity feed (something I remember exists every couple of weeks during fits of boredom) and saw the most WordArt-looking-ass store banner ever.

It's funny how immediately an aesthetic is conveyed through the most basic graphic design (or lack thereof?). Even before I saw the game I knew exactly what it would look like

I just watched the Project Sekai movie (aka Colorful Stage! A Miku Who Can't Sing or something like that). 

I don't really think there's anything to say that would sell anyone here on it, but it was interesting in how much it expected the viewer to know. I know most anime movies would confuse people if they just walked into it, but this completely skipped explaining the main group stories or even how the musical pocket dimensions work. I haven't really seen a series' first movie ever just full-dive assume that the viewer has played the game to a pretty decent degree (five different main story arcs basically) like that. Like if you were just a vocaloid fan you might wonder who all these 20 people are or how they all have their own Mikus lying around.

Having played through the intros of every group I was luckily able to enjoy it and I found it a lot of fun. Kind of crazy that it didn't have terrible pacing issues since the entire movie is kind of happening to five different groups at once who don't ever directly interact, but hey maybe that's why they didn't establish anything at the start and just assumed you knew what the status quo was. The after show was cute. Someone brought a pen light for it and if I was more courageous I'd have done the same.

16 hours ago, Razputin said:

I do wish the writer put a bit more effort into their naming convention than grabbing a Japanese-to-German dictionary and calling it a day though.

Names in anime/manga in general can get pretty wack even if they're not just stolen words from other languages. Though I guess I might have a lot of bad examples due to the stuff that I like tending more towards lighthearted stuff where characters having weirdly prophetic/joke names happens pretty often

Speaking of being late to a party, having the steam deck kind of has made me want to get some games that are more consoley or just stuff I've not given a try before so I've been looking at the Yakuza games. Not sure if I'd actually like them but I was thinking to keep an eye out for sales if I ever wanted to try something new.

Of all the Yakuza games (and perhaps also including the spiritual successors that I think exist?) which would you recommend to someone new to the series? A friend of mine said Yakuza Zero but I'm interested in second opinions in case he's off base.

If you're a big streamer like vinny how much of it even would be that fresh to play? He's probably picked up half the game through osmosis at this point, it's been out for so long that its kind of touched so many random things out there.

Though I'm a contrarian about it too (or rather I just didn't get it) so maybe that's just my bias. If I didn't have an interest in something and people kept telling me that I'd love it, I'd get dismissive as fuck about it really quick too (not that I know much about Vinny's preferences n stuff)

Probably like those "warhammer lore" videos where people summarize books in a format that's only somewhat shorter than just listening to the original material as an audiobook, just for anime. Kind of less defensible considering anime is a visual medium but at this point I don't even know. The internet housing an infinite long tail niche makes me really wonder about what people will seek out for entertainment (countless people would think the same about what I do and watch for fun)

That being said it would explain some takes that I've seen that you could only arrive to if you didn't watch the show and only half-listened to someone dryly explaining the events to you

And on the opposite side of the intellectual spectrum, I've been having a good time with EDF recently. My brothers and I sort of had a rediscovery of it and I forgot how weirdly in depth some of the kit combos can be, especially for Fencer what with having 4 weapon slots each with their own primary and secondary abilities. Fencer's movement tech is really cool in general actually and I like Wing Diver's energy mechanic making you choose between mobility and damage.

It also has some baffling bugs (pardon the pun) like the menus for the game lagging to frames-per-minute levels due to memory leaks and/or Windows black magic, but only when the quick communication menu is on screen, or a status message appears, and also the lag disappears once the game actually starts. So as long as you don't accidentally press the chat button while in a lobby you're probably fine, but if you do, then it might take fifteen seconds for you to wrestle control back to do anything.

Card pools has always been kind of an issue with Magic (I suppose trading card games in general) especially at the casual level. Every EDH group has that issue where people start buying expensive staples and they have to make a choice on how to handle that. I honestly think this is why block constructed formats were a thing in the past which strikes a balance between a limited format and a larger constructed format, but those have gone away now that blocks and non-EDH formats have stopped existing.

For a lot of people limited is a good compromise where there's variety in cards but ostensibly some kind of attempt at making a coherent powerlevel, but like you said ain't nobody cracking packs of Future Sight for a nice afternoon draft when a box costs $1500. There are some draft simulators out there so you can play your ten thousand dollar draft formats but they're not the same experience either.

For that physical card desire, honestly counterfeits have gotten pretty nice especially if you're not putting them under a loupe (sometimes they're better than wotc's pringles). Using printed out cards to test out a cube and then getting the list made into actual card stock proxies is probably the best option but that's still more work than most people would want to handle, especially if you want a pool of cards that is constantly changing. Plus you're still spending money even if it's a lot less.

A common TCG youtube video format is the idea of cracking simulated packs and then putting them together as this kind of limited-ish card pool that the player can use to build decks and compete against other players doing the same (lots of other small rules too but that's the gist). I think this format is probably the closest way you can emulate the idea of locking the game down to a specific era while still having asymmetric card pools. It's something I've always thought about and I've seen friends do it for YGO but I never was sure how fun it actually ends up being in the end. I think it's important to make sure the pools don't get too big at the very least

I spent some time today compiling the super mario 64 native linux port and moving it to my steam deck because I thought it'd be neat to have and I wanted to mess with adding non steam games to the Deck anyway.

So after setting up all the stuff and transferring the files in desktop mode I run it and it works great. Fullscreen support is even perfect without needing any tweaks. So I add it to steam and then move to the game mode and it just doesn't work at all (I get like half a second of sound then black nothingness) when I launch it from that shortcut. I try some launch options but nothing really works. It turns out that there's something up with the differences in X11 and Wayland and with the linux executable I have it won't launch correctly in game mode despite working perfectly in desktop mode.

It's funny to me that, against all logic, if I had compiled the game for WINDOWS, then passed the windows executable to my Steam Deck and ran THAT through Proton for compatibility, it would likely work more easily than the native linux version due to these wonky display shenanigans. I can't really find anything about this particular issue, probably because I assume not many people bothered compiling the linux executable and either just threw their windows version over or are just emulating the game in general

My programmer friend brought it up as too far, even for him, which honestly made me more interested than I probably should have been. It's a real piece of work

If I wanted to marginally play a game at work I'd consider it as something that nobody would ever call out as a game even if they were right over my shoulder the entire time though

The bayonetted rifle was what tipped me off at first, but the red eyeliner and ever so slight trace of a halo (almost looked like more red hair streaks, but the angle wasn't following the flow of the hair) was what made me stop and question it. I actually found the art where that's from, it's an official promo art for the Wakamo event:

Wait wait wait wait. That one below the MtG Kitsune isn't Wakamo Blue Archive? And how the hell did I miss the Kamigawa (the real kamigawa mind you) kitsune too, those are pretty unique looking. It's so obvious now that I look at it, I guess my mind just glazed right over them.

I kinda went left to right line and top to bottom. There's a lot of these that I recognize but don't have enough of a thread to say one thing about them and there are probably some that I missed even though they're in the same series as others I did recognize but I wanted it to be really off the cuff and if I looked up stuff it would dilute the results.

I think I did well all things considered.

I recently beat Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. I see why it's mainly not regarded as highly as the other entries, though it's kind of in a weird way because there's some good design mixed in with kind of lame design and... strange writing. I think there are good ideas filtered through a lens of strangely written (basically retconned?) characters and it's kind of further hamstrung by being a really short "standalone DLC" length game where it doesn't really let the concept of killing the Outsider breathe enough. Honestly this would have been a really good premise for a full length game (hey let's kill Satan isn't really what you'd pick for a side story in my eyes) but hey that's probably what it started as. 

Most of the levels are pretty good Dishonored fare but they also suffer in the sense of the MC's powerset being the weakest of all the player characters which sort of constricts what you will be able to do but it does let them have certain areas that require certain powers always be available which is kind of cool. The contracts system is a little gamey but I liked the extra side quests. I found a fun way to clear one without actually doing what they wanted by clipping through a wall in the most obvious way possible (spam lean while against a thin wall) how did they not catch that one lmao.

I actually found several parallels to Stalker in that the last level has a shit ton of cultist enemies hell bent on firing every single bullet that exists in the world at you in a very dark and hard to read area and they like teleporting exoskeleton enemies around you all the time. 

The funniest thing is that no matter what ending you get there's a little thing at the end where the MC basically just turns to the camera and says "don't worry we can still make sequels even after everything the plot of this game does!!"

39 minutes ago, Moby said:

When I get old and decrypt, I will get a 3D printer just to print figures of my OCs and other random characters I never find figurines of.

I have been so tempted to ask my friends to print some PlanetSide 2 weapon replicas that an avid community 3d printer had already made files ready-to-print for. But it would take a lot of batches and material even if it went perfectly so I always held off.

That, and I'd have to paint them even after it was all printed and assembled which might be a giant pain in the ass

1 hour ago, FreshHalibut said:

I've entered the world of 3D printing this week and it's a lot of fun, but everything takes like 5 hours to print and I'm impatient.

So far I've printed some test boats and a mini metal gear rex.

Having a few different friends in the 3D printing space it seems like it's a thing where you have to work out little streamlining things until it gets fast. But I'm not sure if that's them using relatively old equipment or not.

They're currently doing micro battlebots which involves a lot of 3d printing and I watched in on them designing parts. It's funny in a dumb way how I saw the 3D designing software and thought "hmm this looks a lot like map editors"

I mean that looks like Osaka but she clearly says Ayumu. You must be mistaken?

43 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

One of the first recommended trailers that the fest gave me was a hentai game, with the trailer immediately going into explicit sexual intercourse.  I thought I already had an option to hide adult content from the store page precisely to avoid getting blindsided by that crap.  Looking in my preferences "frequent sexual content" and "adult only sexual games" are disabled on community pages but not store pages, which makes me think that they separated out the two at some point and auto-enrolled everyone in the mature content side of things (or maybe anyone who had passed an age verification page in the past.)

Yep, happened to my friend when we were all looking at games on the couch together (funny, but awkward)

I had a similar experience when they were having that couch co-op fest a few weeks ago (the front page being very questionable apart from like three obvious picks). Though I feel like open world survival crafting is less likely overall to yield quality and more likely to have shovelware so I wouldn't be surprised if it was worse.

My couch gaming group did get helldivers 1 on sale though during that time and that game is pretty dece so I can't talk too much shit about that couch coop fest

Just now, Moby said:

Heavy update is dead

"fuck it, just do the heavy update yourself we can't make this class interesting"

Why do TF2 HUD makers have to tear out every single fucking menu in the game for some flat ugly interface instead of just making a damn HUD? It'd be one thing if you could just turn it off and use the normal main menu and backpack but due to resource file shenanigans it's never a true option

for the tiny amount of extra features I want (last damage dealt, bigger targetID) it seems like my only recourse is to accept way too many extra unnecessary tweaks, OR go to the lengths to add the few features I actually want on my own

I wonder how fucked up the field of linguistics has become with the advent of the internet. Maybe it's gotten easier since the internet has collapsed into like five sites that anyone uses though

21 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

The most recent iteration of a thing can't be retro.

But I mean, is there any chance of a dedicated handheld console ever coming around again, especially by a big company like Sony or Nintendo? It seems like the entire market dried up in the late 2010s and now it's just a void and/or more dedicated people have settled for "portable but not handheld" options like the Switch or even Steam Deck. Phones have sucked up the casual players that in the 2000 or early 2010s may have picked up a DS in order to play bejeweled or brain age or whatever too.

At this point it's looking like handhelds aren't going to get any meaningful developments ever again unless there's some strange shift in the industry and I don't know if it's likely it will even see indie development due to hardware being quite a hurdle to cross

2 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

 

damn that's a banger

I feel really dumb for not including Bandit Radio from Stalker: Clear Sky as an honorable music mention. That music is forever burned into my brain. I'm glad that if you murder defend yourself from all the bandits in the base the music keeps playing.

On 1/13/2025 at 10:03 PM, Huff said:

 

  Hide contents

10. Flipwitch: Forbidden Sex Hex

UH OH.

 

Yeah, like I said last year with The Coffin of Andy and Lely, I have no qualms with listing games that made the list for explicit content. It's pretty good quality, which is all I'll say on that front. But the rest of the game really suprised me with how competent it is. The base gameplay isn't too much to write home about, but the level design is varied and interesting, the sidequests are pretty fun, and the art (not sexy) and music are honestly phenominal. Like. I don't really know, but the devs made a fetishized hub city full of animal girls who want to fuck the protagonist feel really REALLY comfy and kind of lived in. There's a good amount of collectibles to keep one playing for a while and the bosses are pretty good (masochist boss gains HP from being hit which is a good touch). It's just a competent metroidvania all around, a genre with which I am generally unfamiliar so I may have low standards and/or be easily swayed by tits.

 

honestly might give this a look, I enjoy R-18 metroidvania games a lot (there are simultaneously more than you'd think and also not enough tbh) and the pixel art is waaay higher quality than most of the random indie games I've picked up in the past. If I included explicit games in my list I'd probably just be severely judged (and it's hard to track for me) so maybe it's for the best it didn't occur to me to include them 

On 1/13/2025 at 10:03 PM, Huff said:

Cyberpunk 2077

Man... I'm sure I'll play this game all the way through eventually. But as it stands I played for like three hours and got bored. I just need to get into the headspace, but it didn't grip me. Also it feels like Jackie was wasted as a character. I loved him :(

 

Fallout New Vegas

YEAH I KNOW. Dude I just hate fallout. It's not fun!! I have tried to play this game four times and I have hated the early game so much every time. I think the only hope left for me is slapping true god mode on, but fuck, I don't think I'd have fun even then. I will just watch retrospectives and let's plays instead.

Cyberpunk is hamstrung by an incredibly long intro sequence that, gameplay-wise, is barely passable the first playthrough and insultingly boring any time after that (though I'd say the game has issues with replay value in general). And yeah Jackie does feel wasted, and I feel like after act 1 there's a bit of a void where a companion like that would have been good to have (I know Johnny is there but his writing feels really inconsistent, especially if you traipse off doing side missions since he might go from wisecracking doofus to depressed old man in the span of a minute). Honestly I kind of feel like the game does you a disservice by having act 1 have stronger characters than everything afterwards, at least if you're sticking to the critical story path.

I love new vegas but yeah I get where you're coming from too. It's rough as fuck in annoying places, especially the early game

On 1/12/2025 at 8:19 PM, FreshHalibut said:

Sulfur

Early Access and needs more time in the oven, but had a lot of fun with this one. FPS Roguelike where you have to make the best of your starting gun. Mod it out, enchant it, and try to make it through 4 biomes of cultists, gun wizards, and goblins. Not much in the way of meta progression, when you die you lose it all. Also has a surprisingly robust and involved cooking system with some absurd number of recipes you can cook up to make better healing items from raw ingredients often found as loot.

This game intrigued me when the demo dropped and I found the sprite graphics really damn nice in a way that I hadn't really seen in games that use that style. For an early access demo it definitely piqued my interest, I just hope it comes out and doesn't stay early access ad infinitum. Though I distinctly remember the music annoying me.

I actually played a few demos this year but I didn't want to put them in since most of them weren't really full game experiences or anything and some also haven't even come out yet. Echo Point Nova had the distinction of being a demo I tried early in the year then months later I bought the game outright knowing I'd be down for it though so that's a nice success story.

On 1/8/2025 at 9:58 PM, Gyokuyoutama said:

I guess I also played this:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Was okay.  Didn't like how due to leveling you'd always either plow through the main story or side stories, depending the order in which you did them.  But works as a discount dynasty warriors.

The one I played (Shinovi Versus) was so weird in that it was somewhere between Dynasty Warriors and a more traditional beat-em-up with the enemy density. It had a serious problem with just being able to stunlock enemies depending on your character which was funny once and boring after that.

I seriously hate that musou games tend to have leveling systems, it feels so terrible to play a character and realize they don't have all their moves or all their meter bars after you just got off your favorite character that has everything leveled. What's dumber is that in DW8 they have a system that XP shares to alleviate the grind and not lock you into a single character... but why not just NOT have the levelling at all so every single character is just playable from the start? It also has an issue where the harder difficulties are both harder in game skill requirements but also just full of stat-checks which feel really cheap.

On 1/6/2025 at 3:45 PM, Silent said:

FF14

This might be the last time I ever try to play an MMO. I have heard so many good things about this game, and the intention was that I would be able to play it with Huff at some point into the story – the idea that we would be able to progress through quests together seemed very chill but apparently we couldn't. So I got to level 15-20 with my catboy pugilist and stopped.

 

lol I had the exact same experience when I first picked up FF14 where my friends wanted to all start in the same place (so I picked a class I didn't even WANT) and do the quests "together" but it immediately became clear that it's basically just you doing things solo until you reach a dungeon, and that's literally the only time you can party up and do something together, then it's back to essentially walking around in singleplayer to do everything. I want to say it gets better once you get out of ARR but that's what they say about everything in FF14 and you'll still never really party up through the story.

There's a lot of social stuff in FFXIV that as a non-MMO player (planetside doesn't count) seemed really well made for letting people do stuff together but the story and MSQ is just so locked into you being the only one to the point where you can't even sit in a party because you'll have to leave in order to do any instanced content. I know that MMOs have a shitton of moving parts and making the possible players go from "exactly 1" to "1-4" drastically explodes out the complexity, but it really seems like a system they should have at least tried to put in considering that pretty much everyone I've talked to that has played FFXIV has started in the exact same way of "four of us wanted to play the story together"