I prefer the manga for the most part just cause I like the scribbly sketch like style of the adt

first show since devilman crybaby to make me consider reading the source material
still probably won't, since i got some anime-only friends and i don't wanna be in a position where i have to hold my tongue on shit

As far as my gamering goes, 2022 was a year of extremes for me—I discovered some of the best games I've ever played, some of the worst games I've ever played, and some of the hardest games I've ever beaten (SO many, actually—I was really testing my limits on that front). I tried to match the number of games I beat last year (75), and I basically succeeded—but I still haven't gotten around to playing even half the stuff I really wanted to dive into. The backlog truly never dies, I guess.

One thing I tried to do in 2022 was beat at least one RPG per month—which wound up being a failure. I only managed to finish seven (or eight, if you count Pokémon Legends: Arceus, which I personally don't). My ongoing playthrough of EarthBound has been on hold for months—I want to love it, but it's honestly just not really grabbing me. Turns out, it's just a genre that burns me out pretty easily. The fact that I was even able to finish the amount that I did is kind of insane.

I'm happy to say I've become invested in several franchises I had never fully dipped my toes in before until last year, including Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Darkstalkers, and Persona (to an extent). Even Banjo-Kazooie wound up surprising me a lot this year—I really expected to loathe that game.

On top of all this, I've finally acquired a PS5, as well, so that should give me a great excuse to catch up on some modern titles, as well—I'm looking at you, Elden Ring.

Oh, and a word on my rating system—I think I've gone over all this before, but just in case anyone was wondering:

1. The number out of 10 itself is simply a reflection of how fun the game is for me to play—but a "bad" video game can still possess some redeeming qualities that transcend the rating I can personally justify giving it as a video game alone. For example, I wouldn't consider either game in the Persona 2 duology to be very fun to play—hence, I gave them a 4/10 and a 3/10, respectively, as games. However, the fact that they have such cool music, such lovable characters, and such an awesome storyline (albeit an extremely over-the-top and anime-esque one), I feel comfortable ranking these games above some other games that I gave higher scores, simply because they happen to excel in areas beyond their capacity to be fun video games. Hopefully that makes sense?

This also works the other way around—where I'll rank a good game that I've given a 7/10, like Rayman, under some games that I've given a 6/10, simply because Rayman, while in many ways a great game, was also one of the most torturously difficult experiences I've ever had in my life. It's a way for me to knock the game down a peg or two without actually giving it a lower rating, because I feel like it's important for me to acknowledge just how miserable the game made me, in spite of how well-made it is. If I just dropped it to a 6/10 because it's a hard game, that would make me feel like a salty bitch—which I am, but I don't necessarily need that to be reflected in my ratings, which I try to make as fair as possible while still expressing my genuine feelings.

2. I choose to rate sufficiently old games for primitive systems, like the NES or Game Boy, on a different scale than I do for games released after 1990, when the Super Nintendo came out (because that's the point where, for my money, the "book" of game design had officially been written). Since these games are so simple, I prefer to rate them out of 5, rather than 10, to reflect the debatable notion that it's fundamentally unfair to rate games made on these platforms against the standards of today—even if I do believe some of them can still hold their own (Castlevania I and III come to mind). To put it another way, it's harder for me to justify giving a game like Kirby's Block Ball a 6/10, 7/10, or 8/10 rating when a 4/5 seems more fitting. It's a small game for a small system, and it knows it. It doesn't try to accomplish much or bite off more than it can chew, because there's a hard limit on what it's able to accomplish in the first place. Therefore, it gets the simpler rating system. I hope that seems fair.

leaks are cringe, will not look

Alcoholism is pathetic.

here we go

mfw verb is about to shit up yet another perfectly good thread

What would one recommend to in terms of a ladder or rung for moving on to some of the harder stuff?

a 6-foot aluminum or fiberglass A-frame stepladder should do about 95% of what you need, assuming you're a 1-story homeowner (i also recommend getting a step stool, as they are very handy)

you want ladders that aren’t too tall or heavy so they're easier to move through the house. werner is a good brand you can pick up at lowe’s or home depot

well, two years later, i finally found Pro Skater 3 out in the wild—along with three other random sports games

that brings me to 80% completion with precisely 60 games to go

STILL NO BANJO-TOOIE

has it really been over a year since i've updated this thread? wow
well, i'm down to the last 33 N64 games now. less than 1 percent away from 90% of the library—and yep, i did end up finding banjo-tooie

19 of them are sports/racing
16 of them go for $10-60
5 of them are worth $200+ (so i'll probably never get those)
realistically, 285/296 will end up being my grand total unless i win some kind of lottery

like most of bnet's more well-known and popular posters, i thought she was incredibly obnoxious
that said, she's probably a totally different person now

Currently dealing with kidney stones so let's just say I'm not doing the greatest.

you've no doubt heard this from your doctor, but you should really drink nothing but water and lemonade for the rest of your days, on top of reducing your sodium intake (assuming it's that kind of stone). you'll never get another

"scarlet and violet will be an open world rpg, a first in the pokemon series" what was legends arceus then? i didnt play that game

Legends was only semi-open, in the sense that you have a big world to explore, but it's still divided up into individual (albeit decently large) sections. Basically, you can't go from one area to the other without checking in at the game's hub town first. Traveling in S/V will be completely freeform and seamless.

that new gimmick seems a bit confusing, does it mean any pokemon can be ANY type? if so then it might lead to some interesting setups and the like

I was thinking maybe that each Pokémon would have a pool of possible Tera Types that they could have, just because certain type combinations would be very overpowered (an Electric-type Shedinja, for example, would only be able to get hit by moves of a single type, barring residual damage from weather, Leech Seed, etc).

But we'll have to see, because they haven't given out too many more details.

the scarlet legendary having wheels but running on its legs looks so silly

Yeah, that part basically confirmed that I'll be getting Violet, just because Miraidon looks way less stupid when it's driving around. I'm not huge on the idea of getting a legendary so early—could make the game way too easy, depending on how powerful it is—but maybe they'll make it so you can't actually battle with it until the end, or something.

going off yesterday's presentation, the games are looking a bit more promising now

being able to do gyms in any order sounds great, and the new battle gimmick seems mechanically interesting, even if i don't really care for it visually

Traps lives in his head rent free and that's really funny

or i just saw solonoid log on and decided to annoy her with something that we used to argue about for old time's sake

but also that, yeah sure

Quote from: Verbatim on July 30, 2022, 09:57:14 PM

have you accepted the cold hard truth that traps are not gay yet

The traps themselves are not gay, you are gay for liking them.

well, i'm not trying to say that i'm not gay, here—because i definitely am—but it's not because i like traps, because the whole point of being gay, as a man, is that you have an attraction to the physical male form

this is why you masturbate to anime girls, despite the fact that drawings are not real women. sexual attraction works on a "close enough" basis, it's never black-and-white. as long as it LOOKS like a sexy lady, you're going to be sexually interested. that's just how it works

why would a strictly gay man be attracted to someone with a distinctly feminine appearance? that makes zero sense

Didjew post it to the leaderboards?

yep, there's a link to it in the OP

nice! im looking at those leaderboards and i see only you and a handful of others have photo proof of your score, while 2nd, 3rd and many others dont have proof

doesnt seem very fair to not have to include proof

yeah, i agree. there IS a moderation process before they'll let you upload a score, though, where i assume you'd get rejected/asked for more proof if your score seemed particularly fishy (took them 2 days to check mine)

a score like 5650 is pretty tough to get, but it isn't particularly insane or unheard of, so they probably didn't think it was questionable

also, some people just upload scores to be on the leaderboard, even if they're in 19th place or something, so there's not much point in verifying when no one's gonna brag about that anyway

but i agree, as a matter of principle, proof should just be required and it's kinda strange that it isn't.
could be game dependent

didn't get around to playing all the games i wanted to last month, but here's what i did play:

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Inscryption (2021) - 8/10
: Creepy roguelike deckbuilding game. Hard game to talk about without ruining what makes it interesting beneath the surface, so I'm not going to bother. Just look it up on Steam, and it looks remotely interesting to you, play it. I enjoyed myself with it.

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Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors (1994) - 7/10
Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge (1995) - 8/10
Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire (1997) - 8/10
: Consider me a newfound Darkstalkers guy, I suppose. This is the entire trilogy, which I was able to check out thanks to this brand new collection that just came out. They're all amazing, but Vampire Savior is obviously the best. These games are well-known for having some of the most fluid and cracked out sprite animations of all time, but they're also extremely fun to play on top of that—a perfect marriage of style and substance. Some of the more "extra" character designs do kinda make me roll my eyes (Felicia), and you could certainly argue that the games offer very little in terms of unique mechanics to help it stand out from its peers in the genre, but it's impossible for me not to recognize just how hard Capcom popped off with these titles.

I'd say I'd kill for a new installment, but part of me is okay that the series has laid dormant for 25 years. Capcom is a different studio now; it's hard to know if the newer generation of developers could do the series justice in any way. It would be sick, though.

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Star Fox 64 (1997) - 8/10
: What an all-time classic. I don't know anyone who doesn't have this in their top 10 N64 games. I'm terrible at it, hence why it's taken me this long to actually sit down and finish it, but I always seem to forget just how thrilling it is when I haven't picked it up in a while. It's such a rush when you're able to clear a whole level without losing a single copilot; getting to hear all the silly banter traded between characters through communications is always a treat. I haven't been able to get one of the better endings yet, but I will some day.

I'm not terribly interested in the rest of the series, but I can see myself trying the GameCube game some day, just because I know they tried something completely different with that one. It's just hard for me to imagine them topping 64, especially when nobody ever really talks about the other games in the series. Like, at all.

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Cave Story (2004) - 7/10
: The ur-indie game. It's neat, has good music, and tells a nice little story. I have a friend who insists that I play it once more to get the true ending, which I haven't gotten around to yet. Given that the game was entirely designed by one dude on-and-off over five years (who proceeded to release the game for free when he was finished—what a chad king), it's safe to say that my respect for the game towers over how much I actually enjoyed it, which happens sometimes. It's a little quaint how a game originally intended to pay homage to 8-bit classics like Metroid and Kid Icarus has essentially become a retro classic in and of itself, but the layers of modernity it provides does help it "hold up" a little better than those games, at least by contemporary standards and gameplay sensibilities.

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Mega Man Legends (1997) - 6/10
: Representing Mega Man's first step into the third dimension, the Legends series of Mega Man titles also represents a complete departure from the firmly established formula set up by basically every other game in the series until then. The game is a third person shooter adventure game with some dungeon crawling thrown in. A greater emphasis on story is placed than there ever had been before, although it ultimately plays out like a silly kodomomuke anime show, with lots of colorfully designed and highly expressive characters with BIG personalities who find themselves in increasingly absurd situations. Beneath its happy-go-lucky surface, though, is a surprisingly moody and atmospheric game with a whisper here and there of something darker and more serious to be found within its seemingly endless underground hallways. I wanted to like this game more, but it kind of has a whole lot of things going against it—mainly how clunky the controls are. I eventually got the hang of them, but the game overall just doesn't FEEL good to play, which is a bit of a problem. I also found the OST generally disappointing, especially given that you can normally expect a Mega Man game's soundtrack to be filled with bangers—but there really weren't any here, because they wanted to focus on creating ambient moods, which didn't really work for me. It succeeded in making the dungeons feel a little scarier to explore, but I dunno. I'd much rather be rocking out to some sick jams while spelunking for better robot gear, personally.

That said, I'm excited to play Legends 2 because I've heard that it makes some major improvements. I'm also interested in playing The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, a side-game starring who was easily my favorite supporting character from the first game.

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Red Earth (1996) - 6/10
: One of the bonus games featured on the Darkstalkers collection, this is a pseudo-fighting game designed to be a single player experience where you level up your character avatar by slaying a series of monsters. It's like an RPG where all you do is fight monsters, but instead of the combat being turn-based, it's done in the style of a one-on-one fighting game with health bars and special moves and shit. It's very strange, and I've never played anything like it. The closest thing I could compare it to would be the boss rush mode in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I give it points for the fun concept, but the execution could've been better. There's only four playable characters, and they're all pretty uninspired. Gameplay is slow and rather clunky, but it does feel good smacking those giant monsters around. If they ever made a sequel to this, I'm sure it would've been much better, but they never did. This game faded into obscurity and was never re-released until just last month.

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Dear Esther (2012) - 6/10
: Part of the old guard of "walking sims" that people used to bellyache over, this game did essentially nothing for me. The man reading the letters in the background has a nice voice and gave a good performance, I suppose. The game itself, by design, is pregnant with emptiness, yet successfully manages not to overstay its welcome, on top of offering me pleasant scenery, and an interesting question as to the boundaries of what can be considered a "game." It's a work of art that I consider worthy of existing, the same way I wouldn't balk at the sight of a photorealistic painting of a table—it's nice for what it is, but not especially riveting or impactful. It's just kinda there, and I don't necessarily mind that.

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EarthBound Beginnings (1989) - 2/5
: It's an NES-era RPG, so of course it's not good, but it does possess three qualities that are worth appreciating—its music, its setting, and its sense of humor. Sadly, these elements are not nearly enough to carry the experience or make it any less of a waste of time. And the game wastes a LOT of your time—it's one of the grindiest JRPGs I've ever played, on top of feeling like a shitty ROM hack of Dragon Warrior. It's a wonder how people used to tolerate RPGs this slow back in the day.

But now that I'm finished with it, I can finally move on to the SNES game that everyone loves so goddamn much. I'm gonna make it the very next game that I play. Keeping my expectations on the lower end, because I'm not sure how much I believe the hype.

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i started an account on Backloggd, so i'm thinking about starting to post my thoughts on games over there for now
(i'm also trying to slow down on the video games in general for the time being as i get some life things in order)

do you need to know the exact ratio of fetters to unfetters to know that the ratio is off
does the ratio need to be 99:1 before you can make generalizations about its proportions
if it turned out that the ratio is 60:40 in favor of fetters after all, does that mean america doesn't actually have any issues with social mobility that could possibly be tied to its socioeconomic structure

ready to engage in some high level economic discourse on the backwater seven-sided polygon app