A 1970 Corvette

Last weekend there were so many playtests going on. Is this middle of August weekend a known time for testing or something? Is it just games shooting for the Q3/Q4 release schedule? I didn't really have enough time and I was only in two. There were other playtests going on I didn't even know existed and also just actual game launches too. 

DZR2's playtest was what I expected from the trailer, which is basically just DZR1+. Can't fault them since the formula works but there's not much I can say. For better or for worse it feels like the kind of game that makes its predecessor obsolete. Pretty sizeable amount of content for the playtest, I kind of expected like one main path run only but it had side missions (with voice acting and story even)

Wardogs was kind of fascinating. There's so many weird game design shenanigans going on that I can't tell how much of it is overlapping systems intentionally designed or just what happens when you slam together things from different games. The money system being only for the match except there's some persistent cash but the persistent cash is just rolled over to the next game, and the unlocks requiring large cash lump sums from the non-persistent match cash but are account-wide unlocks once you've paid them... There's so much that's a bit weird but it's all functional enough to not say it's outright terrible. Wish it was a little more arcadey than it is tactical, but that's definitely not the vibe they're going for. I'm more interested in the game than I was before, but I also am still not sure if I will actually enjoy the game with how pixel hunting-instakilley it can be. I've been trying to give those kinds of FPS games more of a try as of late out of desperation for something new so maybe.

On 8/16/2026 at 7:39 AM, Razputin said:

the GitS movies are some of my favourite movies of all time but it's the super dreadful atmosphere of them that made them so good. I remember being disappointed when I tried to read the manga a bit and it was more lighthearted and just not as interesting. Funnily enough I learned about the new adaptation from tumblr discourse, where someone was excited that the new show seems to be closer to the original tone and how much they hated the movies.

I thought about this a bit because I like both, and I especially agree that the atmosphere the previous (good) works create is so damn good and kind of unparalleled in the field. I guess to me the interesting part about the new colorful more wacky adaption is seeing how different the same 'material' can be adapted, seeing the shared DNA yet seeing how wildly divergent they are at the same time.

I also totally get why the decision to cut the goofy shit and hone in on the other aspects was made, and it's pretty clear to see how well it worked for the movies since they kind of defined the public view of the entire series at this point.  You can get fucking whiplash from the tone switches in the more faithful adaption, I'm sure the manga is the same way (the anime's pace is kind of breakneck which might make it worse admittedly). I find it kind of interesting and fun so far but it's also pretty fair to prefer the originals

I am knee deep in a project myself that still feels an eternity from being finished so I can relate, keep at it and hopefully we'll all get it done

I need to play the Amazon roulette more often, I've always just got whatever I ordered

I'm enjoying the new Ghost in the Shell adaption. I feel like people are unreasonably harsh on it, as if they're mad that it's not something that already exists / more of the same (SAC and the movie). And a lot of other criticisms that are just too dumb to even bother addressing such as "I can't believe they didn't show full frontal fingering in this TV show"

As someone who often watches lower budget seasonal crap it's a pretty nice change of pace, I really like the style and colorful palette the show uses and the soundtrack is pretty good

20 hours ago, Moby said:

Did you ever finish something and think the thing it was "good", but a random amount of time later, you look at it again and think "Jesus fucking Christ this sucks, what the hell I was thinking?"

I think I annoy some people I know with how unwilling I am to look back on anything I draw, so definitely yes. I also know it's mainly all in my head, but it's a hard aversion to overcome.

Man I can't even remember what was going on when I stopped paying attention to homestuck. I guess it was when they summoned a giant space battleship to escape the universe exploding... or something like that. Homestuck touched upon growing up I guess but to say the themes were "deep" is crazy. What even was a "deep" theme of homestuck, looking back? UI/UX confusion? It's been so long I can't really recall anything other than broad strokes.

I do consider that creative spark to be the main thing I look fondly back upon, where there's just all this vague info that you can spend time trying to piece together into rules and potential plotlines. And of course that's all ripe for fanfiction that will turn out to be invalidated by a single line in the story that says "Wait no, that's not how it works in this situation."

A certain musical franchise that I never shut up about's mobile game (now EoS, very sad [not really the game part actually fucking sucked lmao it was everything else that was good]) which featured this constant, weekly drop of story and character content along with musical releases that tied into it all kind of hit a similar note, though the story was much more grounded obviously. It was so fun seeing just the most random fanart about something that happened in the story that just dropped, speculating about what was going to happen each chapter, etc. A lot of random fan works were spawned from the tiniest things that happened in a stream or even just a card art and there were a lot of theories that came and went and came back again as background developments occurred (justice for the Kosuzu back injury theory!!). It was like getting an anime episode or more of stuff to talk about for years on end. I don't know if anything's going to hit such a long span of continuing development again; the closest is maybe the bandori vtuber project but it's nowhere near the same in terms of sticking to a continuing story and never breaking kayfabe. For that though I guess we haven't really reached that point where 'the end' shows up, more of a long lurch before the tv anime. Maybe it'll hurt even more once that's done.

Did some unboxing after scoring some hard-earned drawing money

now I can never ever unbox again woo!!

Hoyo and Vtubers both occupy this space of 'designs I see and then groan when I learn where they're from' which has definitely kinda blended together in my mind, but I know there's several lookalikes between the two. I'd also generalize and say their fans have a ton of overlap as well which only further muddies the waters.

On the bright side, because of this you can pull an XY and say "I don't know who kroni is because i haven't played star rail" because of that so there's some value in it

You know I've definitely watched a few slice of life shows with superball shenanigans but I don't know if I watched one from that era with two guys playing with one.

1 hour ago, Moby said:

Second was the chat client that group used. The most I used back then was MSN Messenger, but I was required to download this ANCIENT (even for the time) that required the constant use of hastags and/or slashes to enter rooms and now that I think about it, kinda reminds me of Discord if it lacked buttons.

Isn't that just IRC? Sounds extremely on theme for an online fansubbing group, especially during that era

I have never seen that and now I'm scared I will start seeing it.

There's a character in Love Live who is half-foreigner and has an absurdly long name as a result. So long, in fact, that they have to shorten it pretty often to fit on merch correctly. e.g.

The only saving grace is that her Y. name is Yanagida which actually does have kanji, and I assume was intentionally styled that way so it wouldn't be too long in both romaji and japanese text.

18 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

One nice thing is that by having so many character sets and so many different readings, you can make very subtle changes to give the feel of something without explicitly saying it.  For example, once I started picking up the Senko-san manga I found out that Senko never uses katakana for them.  But she still does use wasei-eigo terms.  So for example when cosplay (a word that we even restole from Japan) appears in her dialogue it is always こすぷれ whereas everyone else (even Shiro) says コスプレ.  Similarly for most people a microwave is a 電子レンジ but for her it's a 電子れんじ、and so on. Now the reason for this is not explained at all in the manga, and I may be misinterpreting it not even being close to fluent.  But the feel I get from this is that Senko says these words slightly incorrectly, as if they were native Japanese words that she is unfamiliar with and not foreign loan words.  So that, together with generally antiquated speaking style, gives the impression that she is much older than she appears and out of touch with the modern world, all without saying anything.  Though note that she does use katakana for other purposes.  Most frequently if she is shocked she might say something in all katakana (even when it would normally be written in hiragana) which is a device I've seen used elsewhere to show a stilted or unnatural way of speaking.  Again, this is done more subtly than could be done in English, and is very cool.

One of the first shows I watched (I won't say it for risk of repeating myself) without english subs showed me this quirk, because I downloaded the Japanese subtitles and quickly noticed that several characters used kana differently - one of them was from Shanghai and almost all of her particles were written with katakana. I remember being confused enough to ask a friend about it at the time. I was surprised that the TV subtitles were that intricate, but maybe it depends on the station or something.

18 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

When people say that an effect is "untranslatable" this is what they should mean

Every single time an underpaid translator (AI nowadays probably) has to try and translate a conversation about personal pronouns in Japanese you can hear the frustration through the text. This happened just recently with Bang Dream! Yumemita where Arale slips back into using boku during a moment of stress and a childhood friend of hers comments on it.

They say that it's great that you can find games being given out for free on Steam.

But are they really free when they are forced to your "Recent games" tab just for redeeming them, even if you have no intention on playing them immediately? I'll let you be the judge.

I still never got to play that idol themed TTRPG. 

Also SPUF which Terraforming Mars expansion should I start with? I really love the game but have only been playing the base + corporate one (which came with the base game) so far.

18 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

Love Live staff are fucking trolling me because BOTH events I went to have had supply issues with the live shirts.

Okay not to just needlessly double post but they re-opened sales online afterwards, and I had my friend who is still in Japan WATCHING for a re-open sale, and they sold out in MINUTES of online orders opening. How is it so hard to stock a bunch of shirts??? They've been having these shirt supply issues for MONTHS now, since it's been a problem since the first leg of the tour. It's not like they should be surprised at this point that the shirts are in high demand.

Whatever. Unlike the shirt for the previous one I went to, I don't reaaaally care for the design of this tour's shirt, so I'll just deal with it.

I went on another trip to Japan to see a Love Live concert again. This time, I only spent a small amount of time worrying instead of like a whole month, so this was a marked improvement. Love Live staff are fucking trolling me because BOTH events I went to have had supply issues with the live shirts. I only have last time's shirt because of a generous donation from a friend, and my only hope for this one is they open up sales again (which those fuckers should since you literally had no chance to get any if you just went to this leg of the tour like wtf)

I also did the usual circuit of weaboo merch buying which was as fun as always. There was a Railgun collab at a nearby Round 1 and I literally only had enough coins to pull the gachapon for it once and got best girl Kuroko on the first try. Baller as hell.

Overall, I am going to say that I'll take Tokyo Winter over Tokyo Summer any time now that I've experienced both. To be fair, this event was at an open air dome venue that is normally a baseball field, so it was probably almost as bad as it could get for an event in the summer, but still. I am used to rough summertime conditions so I managed well enough, but I'd rather not do it again.

I also got to go to a big after-party primarily made of overseas Love Live fans and it was crazy seeing the meeting of all these different cultures culminating in chugging a giant sake bottle while a drunk otaku behind them holds up gravure magazine photos of actresses singing about how big their chests are. It's actually kind of prime people watching material even for an introvert non-party-goer like me

Take color grading tools away from TF2 map makers

they have proven they are not responsible enough to use them for good

That Midna is great, daaaamn

I managed three. someone else finish the rest out

Happy "anime girl in American Flag bikini fanart" day!

I noticed more multiplayer games in the Next Fes lineup than usual, but that may have been Steam's profile of me seeing that I've been constantly doomscrolling Multiplayer FPS game tags whenever I go through my weekly bout of "man I really want a new game to no-life." Also saw a shitton of "extraction shooters" but I chalked that up to recently having played the Marathon free weekend a little bit. But it is also all the rage, so wouldn't surprise me.

Bang Shoot looked pretty fun and I liked the feel of it, but I couldn't find any games when I booted it up so I mainly just dicked around in the shooting range map. The simple gimmick of dual wielding weapons appealed to me, it seems like a competent little arena shooter.

Maybe I should try American Revolution Smuggler. I have no idea why, normally those types of games don't appeal to me.

Somehow I didn't see Virtue and a Sledgehammer whenever I checked the next fes page. Also interested in that, but I guess due to tag shenanigans Steam didn't think I'd be interested.

14 hours ago, Moby said:

Aside the million AI generated games (including a lot of porn ones that use the same image generator)

On one hand it's annoying to see, but on the other hand it's an easily spotted red flag that something is utter trash, so I am conflicted on that. Perhaps the most pragmatic outlook on it is "nobody churning out garbage like this would suddenly start making quality without AI."

Honestly most of the good R-18 games I've seen on Steam are just "localisation" re-releases of games that have been out for years already but only recently been kosher on Steam. It's kind of fascinating to me that there's a fairly large amount of games like that which have had a language/locale/payment barrier for ages due to Japanese DLSite's restrictions and are only just now able to be sold on a western storefront that anyone actually uses. I bet the original devs are happy to see another potential bout of sales for a game they already put out, at least.

2 hours ago, Moby said:

I've tried Delta and I couldn't handle it. I don't have the required level of autism to make the movement system flow.

Air strafing, boost jumping, jump chaining, surfing, circle jumping, rocket jumping with chain jump boost to get more height then wall rocket jumping to AAAAAAA-

Nah I totally get it. It goes way too deep, like expecting someone to know this stuff just to clear a level (let alone do it fast) is kind of crazy. But in this case the crazy worked for me

1 hour ago, Silent said:

Maybe Baba nullified this because of the music and the colours and the cute lil rabbit guy.

Baba's music did have a life-extending effect even for me, a person who kind of hates puzzle games.

While playing Delta I actually thought, "Man I wish I could play puzzle games and just run them back iteratively until I solve them like I can do with these stupid jump maps" somewhere around the 100th try on a specific part

So, next fes is ongoing. I've been trying out some demos. Most of them have been disappointing, but this game Delta is crazy. Definitely made by a fan of source and quake movement what with the surfing and rocket jumps and whatnot.

It kind of addresses something I thought about when playing Neon White where a lot of the speedrunner schmoovement games I've played don't require mechanics in the way something like a TF2 jump map does, even though they may appear on the surface to be the same kind of flashy quick movement (not saying that's a bad thing, either, since fucking hell a lot of jump maps are psychotic). Well this game actually does have this level of mechanics just to gain/maintain/transfer speed and man is it way interesting to me as a result. I think this game is going to have a crazy cult following and (sadly) bounce off of a more general audience. For what it's worth, the tutorial even in the demo is very tight, it has recordings of every demo mechanic with input displays and you can even slow down the timescale to work on execution. There's one advanced mechanic in the tutorial with the plasma gun that I spent like an hour practicing for just one tutorial jump though, so they don't pull punches with the advanced stuff even in the demo.

I've never just grabbed a random demo on a whim without any expectations and been so blown away. What's sadder is that I've been checking the Next Fest page every day since it started, and only JUST now saw this gem of a demo. I know that the first few days were not "curated" so it was just shovelware mainly, but this game has tags that I'm sure Steam knows I'm interested in even before any Next Fest-specific data came in. I'm just glad I found it at all amongst the utter crap out there.

54 minutes ago, Moby said:

I tested checking my posts and I read how much of an annoying jackass I was 14 years ago.

It's okay I feel exactly the same whenever I read my own posts

27 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

The "terrible guitar form" after the rest of that is what makes me crack up the most.

It does fit the cadence of a lot of actual threads pretty well. Those posts that ignore where the thread discussion went towards just make some banal comment about the starting post really hit my sense of humor

I was shocked to find that in this 90s aerobics video I found there was a girl wearing shiny blue pants. Just right in the frame! The video wasn't even rated for sexual content but a girl was wearing blue pants. I can't believe they got away with that back then. I just hope no kids saw that video.

Classifying when something becomes sexual content is always a very funny line even amongst humans, especially in the field of fanart/cartoons/drawings. I probably draw my line a lot earlier than others, and it might be due to drawing some R-18 content myself and knowing that certain details don't just magically appear. If AI is trying to mimic human thought processes then it just has to be as unhinged as a normal human would be and we're good