I’m sorry someone is currently writing an essay in my @s about a difference between “pay for convenience” and “pay to win” and I am here to tell you, no, they are the same thing. The EXACT same thing. It’s merely a cover for scummy F2P monetization Also, no, I should not have to take history lessons to enjoy a game on its own merits, nor should I have to play the Japanese original for comparison. I enjoy FGO English a lot not being a mega-Fate lore nerd or playing on JP server.

Need to stop the VF5US room for now, long sets are still really hard on me physically (hence my low rank). May start another later or tomorrow a bit earlier for the eastern/central crowd @domaug @DaddyMulk @vidstudent

Hi folks, since you might be intimidated when starting #VF5US, here are some reminders!

- You are absolutely going to get bopped at first and that’s fine
- Finding a character you like and growing into them is more important than winning immediately
- Win rate don’t mean shit Also, just play whoever the hell you like, I wouldn’t be a Vanessa main for 20-some years if I was going for sheer tier advantage

I loved @poondonkus's Guilty Gear thread so much that I had to steal the idea

Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown characters, ranked by how much I trust them to drive me to the airport Akira would drive you to the airport, but the moment you stepped out of the car, he would scold you for your lack of planning and say he won't do it next time.

Availability:
Driving: Efficient
Music: Podcasts about martial arts
Conversation: Sparse
Rank: B

Hi I will answer your extremely weird VF related questions that you’re afraid to ask “They say VF has good character balance but I still worry about my character getting nerfed in the future”

Just pick Jacky, Akira, Lau, or Kage, they are the four God-Emperors of VF and will never be bad, ever

Acquired this today: Cancelled Famicom Games Guide. Lots of details on games announced and canned for the FC (including some that got NES releases), along with a really nice section showing early versions of releases games showcased in magazines and promo materials Thing I learned today: Aruden Raruden, the version of obscure Famicom platforms Robocco Wars set to have been published by Taito, was supposed to have a bunch of Taito references before it was cancelled and reskinned. Basically “Megablast but better”

Pictures, design documents, and anecdotes for obscure, unported arcade single-screen platformer Penguin Brothers at the link

https://twitter.com/area51_zek/status/1373574155300343810

A lot of folks seem to think this game was Taiwanese, but I believe only the publisher was based in Taiwan

My review of Cyber Shadow is up at @GameSpot: gamespot.com/reviews/cyber-…
In summary: I liked this game a lot, except for the parts where I hated it, which were mostly towards the end The later portions of the game I really disliked can be basically described as "Kaizo trials," as in "do exactly as the designers intended to the letter or die"

So I’m going to not give direct attention to today’s terrible Cyberpunk take (this is a daily thing now) and instead talk about something related: the death of mainstream games criticism in Japan You ever see a tweet showing an old Famitsu review from the 80s or 90s and say, “whoa, I can’t believe how harsh these reviewers were to these classic games?” That’s because, at the time, Famitsu had lots of competition and what set them apart was brutal, nitpicky criticism.

(Thread) I feel like the Discourse around a certain Repub organization that ran numerous pro-Biden ads ties into my tweet a few days prior about holdings folks accountable. People are like “don’t be mean they helped :(“ but it really looks like they weren’t *that* effective A lot of the biggest gains came from the thankless work of local canvassing and organizing, which is less glamorous than big, well-shot ads but definitely does seem more effective. So why shouldn’t we say “this is the much better approach?”

(Mini-thread) Vice Games has an interesting old piece about how common arachnophobia is and why games should take note: google.com/amp/s/www.vice…

I was thinking about this quite a bit playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon, where you can collect insects for various purposes — In YLAD, you can see an image of each item while looking through your inventory. Interestingly, while spiders are displayed with no issues, the image of the cockroach is heavily mosaic’ed. So I did a little research...

So Treasure Festa, a big resin kit convention in Japan (not Wonder Festival-sized, but still well-known), shifted to online events this year. Or perhaps I should say "attempted" to shift to online events, because they opened the first Treasure Festa Online to a massive shitstorm! Treasure Festa and other events operate on the "one-day license" system, where amateur hobbyists can sell figures of copyrighted characters for reduced licensing fees thanks to contracts that stipulate the kits can be sold only on a certain day at a certain venue...

@GhaleonQ @oniongames There are technical annoyances that, were this more of a remaster than a re-release, could make the experience more inviting and intuitive. Easier menu navigation and organization, less-pixel-hunting, options for fast travel (the beta vid OG just tweeted shows a run ability!) @GhaleonQ @oniongames I can see a lot of folks used to modern conveniences turned off by some of this, and I don’t think changing them would impact the game’s feel significantly. As it is, moon is hard to recommend to folks who lack patience and dislike repetition.

Hey, I reviewed @oniongames’ cult classic moon now that it’s available in English! If you need some positivity in your life right now, this is just the game for you!

https://twitter.com/gamespot/status/1304457206356738049

I really enjoyed moon, but there is one small bit that bothered me: (CW domestic violence)
One sequence has you listening to a husband and wife argue, and it’s implied that he hits her, but apologizes and promises to be better afterwards.

An interesting piece by @dash_director: with doujin events cancelled across Japan, artists should be making more sales through mail order. But they aren’t. Why is that? note.com/director_d/n/n… In a survey, many recipients responded that “mail order is too expensive”, which, as the author points out doesn’t entirely make sense - travel, lodging, etc. to events like Comiket costs a lot.

Thinking about a thing that happened to me during college that I still find surreal and hilarious...

I lived in the dorms during my sophomore year. It was pretty fun, the community was very tight-knit. But 9/11 happened shortly into that term and shook a lot of folks up. A few weeks after everything happened, I came back to the dorms after spending a weekend with my parents, as I usually did since they were only a half-hour drive away. Everything seemed pretty normal...

Opa-opa is a good boy

https://twitter.com/wounkun/status/1270740671448653826

The list for those curious (from a Famitsu survey):
1. Sonic
2. Opa-opa
3. Shinguji Sakura
4. (Tie) Kazuma Kiryu/Alex Kidd
6. (Tie) NiGHTS/Ulala
8. Oogami Ichiro
9. Nei 2nd
10. (Tie) Akira Yuuki/Tails

GameStop deserves scorn for all of this BS and a lot of folks want them to shutter but let’s be 100% honest: GS dying would TREMENDOUSLY damage game retail, especially for small/niche publishers. It sucks all around “But people should just get their niche releases through Amazon,” someone will say, as though Amazon’s any better

I feel like the “this game/movie/comic/media is the sole vision of an artist” push we’ve seen over the past two decades is spoiling The Discourse in a lot of ways, particularly when it comes to revising/editing content So much media is a product of multiple people, all of whom have a say in some element. Even authors/directors/producers rarely have the last say with so much corporate involvement and so much money at stake.

EXAMU being awful:

a thread based on hearsay from many years ago that may be inaccurate (so take it with a grain of salt)

But seriously, EXAMU had problems... 12 years ago, EXAMU launched the eX-board arcade hardware. It came and went pretty fast, and its most notable games were a few Arcana Heart titles and Daemon Bride. But there was another game for it that went unreleased, a port of a doujin fighting game called Monster.

There’s a section of GBFes where you can buy straps through a gacha machine, and right next to it is a trading/selling section where an intense strap-based economy is booming

I made some fella’s day by trading him a Nier strap Still looking for Societte though. The guy who had one was insisting on getting a Belial I didn’t have :(