was out on the bay and stumbled into a lit pier at 10:30 at night with maybe 25 people fishing. very beautiful scene... bloody scissors jammed into the wooden railing above a 5 gallon bucket full of shrimp bait and scraps, kids running around and casting lines, lawn chairs and windbreakers

I get why people are doing the "well actually sh2/3 weren't subtle either" wrt shf criticism but also like... we don't need to debate at that level lol these things don't operate on a single axis of how "subtle" the themes are. one of those things where if you need to clap back, mute and move on

was looking through old discord arguments and found one where I was saying that mario has an "ontological basis in wealth" because he gets more lives from collecting coins aka he's literally made of money

finally picked up silent hill f but who knows when I'm gonna start lol

DISASTER ARMS IS OUT 30 BOSSES 2 ARMS 1 SOLDIER 0 TURNING BACK

we need some sort of biopic or w/e about the modern 49ers so we can see jeremy strong play kyle shanahan

didn't know if I'd ever return to this game but I've come away with a new appreciation for it as a jaw-dropping technical feat in the early days of ps2 and a fascinating combat system pre-DMC. link below!

third course's heavy focus on bunkers (beach setting, so sand everywhere) and dangerous sea winds had me sweating. can't put it down... and I'm playing the vita one alongside it now

settled on calling Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner "ZoE 2nd" as an abbreviation in my article... but I'm still calling that shit Anubis casually

got the stuff together to hack my vita and then looked through the available roms and now I don't want to

it's not just games anymore

finished zoe replay over the weekend so I s2g review soon...

watched the most recent razbuten video on time limits (not sure I've watched his stuff before), I think it's relatively common in the wider design discourse space to latch onto mechanics that feed a particular "theme" as laudable but it's really worth interrogating whether it's always useful

probably should finish EoD to cash in on the hype... played the first three worlds earlier this year

New blog post, this one's about the adorable WonderSwan puzzler Tane Wo Maku Tori monochrome-disposition.neocities.org/posts/Tane%2...

finally got to the second course in everybody's golf like six years after initially buying it and already it's starting to turn the screws. nothing major but playing with bigger elevation gaps, strategic standalone tree and bunker placement, notable bends in the fairway, etc. is nice

completely split between going back to yakuza 3 og to come up with some defense of its combat against whatever the remake one is or just saying "eh, as they as they get all of the sidestories from the last remaster in there, it's fine"

re: difficulty article, the effect of certain articles like these seems to be entirely discourse-driven, to the extent that the literal substance of the article is sort of secondary, and it morphs into a reflection of what the reader wants to discuss

something special about Reel Fishing... that first one where you're casting the rod into a rich FMV of a river, where it transitions into a side view of a thrashing pre-rendered fish when it's time to set the hook

a quick revision/extension of my napple tale review is now on my site! it pairs well with me recently going back to super magnetic neo as well... gotta cover all of the more obscure platformers for the dreamcast. link below!

trying everybody's golf (ps4) again and the grind is fucking ridiculous. the driving mechanics break these early holes in half, so replaying the same starter course over and over and over again is really egregious

my next article... "Resident Evil 4: Cool Shooter, Bad Beat 'Em Up"

Boosting Enemy Stats is not “Artificial Difficulty” Hollow Knight: Silksong has revived an annoying line of discourse about "Artificial Difficulty". Artificial Difficulty is ostensibly things that make a game appear more difficult, without actually engaging player skill. However in practice, most…

finally getting this review out after getting walled on it for a bit... I thought our podcast episode on it (coming soon!) captured the essence and texture of this game so well that condensing it didn't feel right. still, I'm glad I was able to massage it into something I'm happy with. link below!

did not bowl or see baseball lol just went to my friend's place to watch the awful eagles chiefs game in silence

suddenly in one weekend snapped back to last summer where I was spending every day out of the house and wasn't really doing game/writing stuff lol

We need more 7/10 games where I beat the shit out of people for every 7 games they play out of 10

rolling my eyes at a tired "we need more 7/10 games" take and then spit take at the examples being crazy taxi and monkey ball

finally talking about the only good game... the greatest game of all time on beach gen... TAP in... www.youtube.com/watch?v=faGe...

NEW BEACH GEN.... YOU MAY WANNA "TAP" IN 🤓

The Uncontained Exhilaration of Wii Fit Plus

beach gen is gonna be crazy coming back from our summer break... three great episodes in the tank, and more to come

nothing to say about video games today, which is a good thing

One of the greats. RIP youtu.be/jltSKg6omoU?...

puts the cart a bit before the horse here; for anything that independent game crit has done, it has not figured out a sustainable, pro-critic corporate model

football is back! and if I'm gonna spend my spare time watching it instead of playing other games, I'm definitely gonna be thinking about its complexity and the high points of its design. today I wanted to hone in on timer management in the NFL and how it relates to video game timers, link below!

discussing difficulty is useful as shorthand but it's hard for me to take the "hard games good" crowd seriously when it begins being treated as a formal element of a game and not just a perceptive element

shivering after hearing "I'm not a disney adult... I'm a twin peaks adult" from a 40+ y/o man in a video essay

9/10 is the most anonymous rating

it's the end of summer... so I've shared some thoughts about boku no natsuyasumi 2, a game that touched me deeply this last month. link below

I'm so happy that miku and I have the same birthday

got tricked into watching college football again

going to see panchiko again next month and was looking at their metrics, crazy that we got not one but two edge-of-mainstream superstar bands off of /mu/ hype (the other being car seat headrest)

Sounds and stuff (Thread maybe?)

boku no natsuyasumi 2 is a genius feat of metroidvania world design

catrap is absolutely fucking me in these last 15 levels. feel like I can only do one at a time

engineering a "announcing the silksong release with just two weeks notice was irresponsible and damaging to other indie devs" controversy so we can ride the wave of ill-will into a 70 metacritic score

someone on ziad's stream today recommended me the backloggd user glunch while I was on today. is that one of y'all out there in ziad's sphere? read through the reviews and there's some good stuff there

next annoying video essay clickbait: "Phantasy Star Online: The Original Dark Souls Narrative????"