surskitty

Oh, I tried Baba is You recently, which has a fun concept, but the devs fell into the standard failure mode of puzzle game designers, which is: every map is supposed to have only one solution. They patch the game when they find out someone has an alternate. And when I found that out, it completely destroyed my interest in playing.

Look, when you make a concept game like this, most people want to wallow around in the puzzle concept. They don't want to try reading your mind for the correct answer. Having multiple solutions is GOOD. Untitled Goose Game understands this; you're given vague instructions for what to do and it's up to you how you accomplish it. This is not something like sudoku where you need to have every possible solution programmed in and it's undesirable to have two correct answers, because it makes the game harder.

There's no reason for Baba is You to be strict about how you accomplish your goal and I hate it.

They're not bad at designing puzzles, though.

Hey, trickortreatex participants! I'm surskitty, and feel free to look through my past letters for likes/dislikes. In general? Don't write setting-change AUs and I'm probably thrilled.

( TWEWY )

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( Neon Genesis Evangelion )

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( Disgaea 5 )

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( SMTIII )

One of the things about watching Evangelion for the first time as an adult is that ... I'm a little hung up on why Gendo is employed. He doesn't appear to do work. He just shows up in a crisis and does the Gendo pose. That's all he does. Fuyutsuki appears to do things, but what does Gendo do? Is he just really good at shaking down people for the budget? Is it simply that he's banging all the people who would have otherwise gotten him fired?

I have questions here.

FYI, never, ever, ever use OpenSUSE.

Unrelatedly my laptop got bricked and I reinstalled the OS without taking a backup first. Clever, I know.

I got Spyro Reignited, and as glorious as the art direction is, this is not a very good game and I would strongly suggest you all save your money and just pick up the original trilogy on PSN.

First thing we have right off is the apparently-standard PS4 thing of 'you bought a game on disc; now spend six literal hours downloading updates because fuck you, that's why.' I have fiberoptic. My internet connection is pretty solid. It's still a six hour download.

But okay, okay, we live in the future and the future is loading screens and eternal downloads. Long gone are the days of video games that fit within 2 MB. Instead you have 20 GB downloads in order to start playing.

I've been switching between each of the three games for the lulz, and when I'm trying to finish up Summer Forest, off I go to Sunny Shores and ... immediately make the level unwinnable when I try charging twice to move the big tortoise and knock it into the water. Apparently it doesn't have scripting to get back OUT of the water. Sure. Fine. Exit level, restart.

Game plays approximately smoothly, plus or minus having to loop around multiple times to trigger cutscenes, and then I'm doing Wizard Peak and a gem won't load. Straight-up won't load; Sparx says there are no gems remaining, and my count says 399/400. I exit the level and come back again and it works fine.

Dream Weavers introduces me to how the shrinking/growing magic cannon apparently has fucked up aim, because it won't let me shrink one of the metal guys blocking the stairs. It's cool; you don't need those to access anything. Oh, wait. It cleared up after exiting the level and coming back, but really?

Enchanted Ridge! Helping out the fairies who hate the cat wizards, off Sgt Byrd goes to meet his fairy girlfriend and the game straight-up blue-screens. Loudly. Thanks!

Let's not even talk about how many times I had to retry fighting Gulp because this gloriously put-together remake either didn't count when I scored a hit or decided that I actually did damage to myself instead of to Gulp. In its defense, it also had Gulp randomly damage itself. This was not very reassuring in a boss battle with 10 HP where Gulp is capable of healing.

Look at the pretty pictures, but do not bother.

I just picked up a PS4 entirely so I could replay KH3D on a big screen. I only buy consoles when there's RPGs with monster petting sims. The monster petting is obligatory.

It occurs to me I can also get the Spyro remake ....

What other good PS4 games do you all know of? Or Switch games. I liked Unraveled a lot.

They rolled out the update that lets you review your flagged images, and I apparently had two flagged posts! One was a drawing of a dragonite being fished up, and the other was this cat pic:



I'm still not sure how Sasha was comfortable like that, but she's a good cat all the same. Even if she is designated by Tumblr as NSFW.

I have an eternal hateboner for TWEWY fic and meta that talks about 'the Long Game'. 8( It's never called that in canon, most of the cast has no idea what was up with Joshua and Kitaniji, and the world is big enough I don't think composers from other areas would have a Term for it beyond 'that stuff they did in Shibuya'. It's just ... it's that time they held three Games in a row. Joshua, Megumi, Sanae, and Neku are the only ones who know there was a single overarching Game involved.

I get annoyed every time I see it, because I don't think most of these authors know it's not canon, and it feels lazy. It's Kariya's month with no breaks, or that time Uzuki got a promotion because everyone died, or The Shibuya Thing, or the Red Skull pin thing, or Joshua's bet or Joshua's month off. That time the headphones kid got screwed over specifically. Pick something that makes sense in context!!! Most of the cast doesn't know much about what happened specifically, and outside of the main cast, there's no reason to expect it to be sufficiently unusual that people would recognise the Shibuya debacle as 'the Long Game'.

I picked up two non-Pokémon Switch games -- Disgaea 5 and BotW -- and I suspect I might be hitting the point of BotW where I should probably return it.

It's incredibly fun as a rugged survivalist taming horses and cooking food and running over animals with your horse in order to cook them game, and some of the platforming bits are solid, but I honestly feel they should have ditched trying to have this be a mainline Zelda game. I'll get to somewhere new, and then oh look there's a Guardian or Lynel or just a bunch of monsters I suck too much ass in order to kill and I game over once again.

And then it spends 15 seconds loading every time I want to teleport somewhere in order to get back to somewhere new-ish.

Or maybe I want to try doing some shrines to get my stats boosted. Well, hope you like spending 10 seconds in unnecessary cutscenes and 15 seconds loading and then another 5 seconds loading in order to figure out what each shrine's about, because you skipped checking it earlier because you didn't want to waste a bunch of time on cutscenes and loading screens.

It's completely gorgeous and I enjoy doing sidequests, but the whole thing where your stats go up primarily after doing dungeons ends up actively detrimental to my experience, because I just ... I keep dying! I am dying repeatedly with the best armor I can find! I've found around 30 shrines and completed 11 of them, and I've found the towers for over half the map, and most of my explorations do absolutely nothing for helping me get better at exploring, because there's no clear progression of what thing you do in order to get better at doing the next thing.

I completely adored Majora's Mask and I liked large swathes of Wind Waker (except when I got stuck in Tower of the Gods, which sucked ass all around), and BotW is certainly addictive, but damn, I want some more numbers to go up. I want to be allowed to suck at this game without spending forever in goddamn loading screens.

Since I got Let's Go, every time I've met up with the local PokéGo players for a raid, I've ended up giving everyone there a box full of Meltan. Meltan everywhere. I am the Meltan Fairy.

It's very emotionally satisfying to give strangers something really cool they wouldn't have had otherwise. Here's a Meltan, there's a Meltan, everywhere a Meltan Meltan ~~~~