ruined my evening lol I shouldn't still be up

I'm so shocked, thought it was supposed to come next month

"oratorio tangram" is such an incredible subtitle

no I will not go to your diy house show venue if you use the yakuza font on your flyers

we've seen a lot of mechanics get "sanded down" in the last 15 years aka meaningful possibility space shrinking, so it's more wild in hindsight that we had a full transition from contextual/automatic/lock-on based shooting systems in 5th gen console games to proper free aim in 6th gen

putting asterisks in s*nl from now on so 45 year olds don't find my posts

watching snl on hotel cable... they need to put paul mccartney in the ground why tf is he the musical guest on the season finale

Playing Outtrigger for the Sega Dreamcast online with a full 6 player lobby (full recording of the whole session for later, but hey its cool I could finally try this with max players)

for some reason the wii section of my site is barren despite cursed mountain being the very first post on there, so I'm rectifying that now with an overview of boom blox! the game is daunting in its breadth, and it's built on a very solid physics system and set of interactables. link below!

cold war about to start between me and my gf over whether she and I both try ff11 or if I'll just rejoin her on ff14

reading a nyt article and noticing that most of the outgoing links/citations have "utm_source=chatgpt.com" tacked on the end lol

tricked by a video game esoterica video title... new psx "recomp" tool is actually a psy-q api drop-in, so not an actual static automatic decomp tool like we've seen for n64/360 (although still a necessary step)

finally dipping my toe into the endless discourse about remakes except it's about the sudden teens of denial rerecording

just uploaded a "version 2" of this. really just some little typos and factual errors. so I guess more than anything it's an excuse to post about it again. I think I'm going to print a few physical copies soon. please check out "JAX's DEEP JAMS" if you want to play/learn about some rare vgm tunes!

starting every rpg review I write with "a role-playing game is, fundamentally, a game where you play a role"

submitted a tall twins tower easy mode speedrun for kicks bcs the category was wide open but I don't think the moderator has been active in like a year 😭

slowly adjusting my site to fix things that were bugging me... tags don't eat into the space allotted for date/reading time anymore, articles in a series have a normal next/back navigator now as well, and article pictures show up on the main index

not a shonen head but as I was watching some naruto this year I will say I enjoyed the yakumo kurama filler over the awful elongated battle of the sannin adaptation lol

is there a music video more incredibly '90s than this www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OEv...

"What started as me being enchanted by the look and atmosphere, ended up with me being glued to my Steam Deck as the addictive gameplay wouldn’t let me stop." Check out my writing on the brilliant Forbidden Solitaire by @greyalien.bsky.social freakingindie.com/indie-week-1...

since I missed last week, boom blox review on friday, then deus ex next week, and hopefully blue giant the week after that (unless I decide to switch it out for tall twins tower)

while picross 3d has its issues with a difficulty curve that quickly plateaus, it's also a more physically satisfying nonagram experience than virtually any of its peers. I had a very pleasant time finishing off the optional puzzles recently! link to my review below!

If you've been enjoying the puzzle megathread, I've decided to move some of my thoughts and ideas to a longer form location, starting with this primer about the genre more broadly: what defines it, (some of) how it's made, and its history ratttzone.bearblog.dev/what-are-puz...

New blog post time! This week's game is Lost in Shadow, one of Hudson Soft's last games before they were absorbed by Konami. It's very unusual compared to what they were known for and it's artistically gorgeous, but it struggles massively under the weight of its lofty ambitions: #blog #gaming

was letting the neighbors tour our house and one of them started jumping up and down when they found out I had The Munchables on wii

the tall twins tower agenda is spreading...

I think I'm slowly trending towards psx>ps2. psx library has just a different level of creativity and originality by comparison, even though the ps2 is incredible in its own right

thanks everyone for all of the support over the last year and a half 🙏

@jaxcheese.bsky.social I saw you were credited for bgm in the new lsupersonicq video, that's so fire 😂 I wasn't expecting that at all lol

heya. I wrote a piece on the original SaGa: what makes it's dungeon-crawling so dynamic and interesting, what made playing the WSC version such an interesting curio, and a few broader (and hopefully not discourse-y) thoughts on remakes. read here: faearie.neocities.org/posts/saga-wsc

something more material in relation to my arcade thoughts from the other night... totally get the pushback on console shmups/bmups/run&gun bcs of overcentralizing on games that didn't deserve it (or misreading a game based on a shitty home port) but that advice should def not extend to action-puzzle

going back to the late '90s and complaining about lock-onslop (panzer dragoon, star fox 64, omega boost, s&p to a very minor extent)

ko-fi.com/maddisonb829... Okay, I opened the Ko-Fi page with the proper commission board. Rules and directions will be clearer than before, so I hope it can clean up some confusion. Also, considering my target audiences, I decided to price them a bit cheaper in general. Let's see how it goes.

sorta relates to the "what does arcade-y mean" article I talked about being on the backburner but I worry this post-cag "arcade purist" wave is distorting much of the actual experience and culture surrounding arcades

I sorta like the new sf64 art but like... why do we need another remake of this game?

is this another sf64 remake? I'm so confused

impressed by how thorough this relationship drop-down is while adding emergency contacts for my new job

superstation parcel data submitted to carrier 😳 so I'm in the home stretch

one of the most bizarre xitter things in a while is this competitive splatoon 3 relationship drama spilling out into everyone's timelines bcs NBA fan accounts were pretending the google doc accusations were actually targeted at Anthony Edwards after the timberwolves beat the spurs Monday night

comparing pragmata to a ps2 game seems like a major insult to ps2 games tbh

new sunforger is incredible, simultaneously more immediate than their s/t while also moving in a heavier direction sunforger.bandcamp.com/album/weight

the streets - weak become heroes perfect shirt - habit ovlov - half way fine cay - nature creates freaks autolux - plantlife ween - tried and true built to spill - car cq - strummer electric wizard - we hate you state faults - wildfires

can't tell where I'm at with oracle of seasons. wish I had a more recent playthrough of awakening under my belt to compare and contrast

ngl I'm a little shocked by how little naruto part II actually features the title character. I wonder if watching the anime with the filler makes it more naruto-centric

finally scraped together some time to get this out the door... while bit generations and art style are mainly known for their puzzle games, they also managed to get this oddball racing game out the door. dotstream is a game where racing lines are literal... take a look in the link below!

playing oracle of seasons as it was intended by developers (during my five-minute pomodoro breaks as I feverishly write my dissertation)

was just reminded of it hearing her complain to her friend in vc about this but the way that gundam tcg players treat my gf is horrible 😭 this game attracts both socially maladapted men and people who think they're tcg experts after solely playing a relatively simple anime tie-in tcg for a year

how did I not know takaki horigome of KIRINJI worked on klonoa and we <3 katamari? I remember being pleasantly surprised to see him cover Houston on the katamari forever ost but I was like "they already sound like a band in the katamari mold..." had no idea that he actually was a namco composer lol

trying to have a thought that's not "dissertation" "dissertation" "dissertation"

New blog post time! This week's game is Chameleon, a puzzle game featuring chameleon girls that's all about changing colors to claim as much territory as possible. It's a good concept and you can see the vision, but a lack of options make appreciating it trickier than it should be: #blog #gaming