Synnah

Ah, fuck... That's shit. Fuck cancer indeed.

So I finished my second playthrough, a full pacifist run. Major spoilers ahead: I was planning on doing a genocide run, but now I probably won't. And certainly the game does its best to make you not want to, after completing a pacifist run. So maybe I'll just YouTube it. All that said, Undertale is still a good contender for my Game of the Year.

Peach's Revenge: B9E9-0000-009A-8949 Take revenge on Bowser for repeatedly using you as a lazy plot device! A fairly straightforward castle level that I thought was pretty easy. So far two people have played it, neither of them completing it, with 30 deaths between them, though! I don't know what to say.

I want to second this, and insist that everyone play Undertale! I love it so much.

I'm most of the way through my second playthrough of this, and it's pretty much my GOTY so far. I'm going full pacifist this time, having killed most of the bosses first time. If never even occurred to me to look for ways to not kill them! I'm also being a lot more thorough this time; Papyrus has dialogue for pretty much every room in the game if you phone him so I'm taking those in. This game is full of wonderful incidental details.

I've uploaded two levels so far! Aquatic Caves: 6420-0000-0076-C452 This level is short and easy, and doesn't really do anything interesting. Bowser's Puzzling Airfleet: 1E16-0000-0094-8C5B Most of my effort went into this level. I wanted to make an airship level where you have to solve puzzle rooms in order to progress. No one's completed it yet, though, so I'm guessing it's too hard and too long! I need to reign it in a bit in future. I'll play through some of the levels on here tonight! EDIT: I re-uploaded the second level, to fix an issue where entering a secret area could prevent you from completing the level. Also made it a little less unfair.

This is one of my favourite Breckon episodes! More recently, though, I'll always have a soft spot for Nick's story about Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blaster in episode 144, Gimme Some More.

I'm with Chris regarding Alphabear. I really wanted to like it, because the core loop is really smart and fun, but it's got an actual genuine paywall in there that turned me off the game really hard. Twice! The first time it happened I complained about it on Twitter, and ended up exchanging a couple of emails with the designer. I mentioned that I would have bought the Infinite Honey in order to remove the main stamina bar, but it quickly became apparent that there were multiple other stamina bars that you can't do anything about, in the form of the bear cooldowns. He responded by saying that the cooldowns were put in as a way of encouraging players to use experiment with different bears (And I've seen him saying the same to people on Twitter), but the way they're balanced (Most cooldowns are 4 hours or longer) means they have the complete opposite effect. I decided to give the game another shot after his emails, and bought Infinite Honey, because it did generally seem like they were listening to people's feedback and improving the game. I hit a wall again however, in almost exactly the same place. The boss of Chapter 3 is balanced in such a way that you need your best bears to score highly enough, but the time limit is so tight that getting bad letters can make it impossible even then. I threw myself against it until all my most useful bears were on 8-24 hour cooldowns; it felt to me exactly like Candy Crush's paywall level, so I immediately uninstalled it. Their intent might have been different, but if it feels crass and exploitative, then I'm not going to play it. It was so frustrating to me, because the mechanical design was solid.

Top comment is Sargon of Akkad accusing him of bias. That's all the recommendation I need!

I'm someone who does actually care about framerates, and I think the difference between 30fps and 60fps, in terms of your ability to react and make decisions on the fly, can be huge (And I feel like playing Audiosurf at 144fps gives me an advantage over playing it at 60fps). But obviously context is important, and saying 60fps is 'objectively better' is nonsense! Fighting games and first-person shooters both benefit greatly from 60fps+, whereas an RPG or anything turn-based doesn't. Even with reaction-based games that are locked to 30fps, the only real downside is that they might be a little bit harder. But you generally assume that they were designed around that fact! When I played VVVVVV, for example, I remember thinking a few of the screens would have been easier if the game were running at 60fps, but I beat them anyway, because I got better. TotalBiscuit claims that his list is completely objective and passes no judgement, but that's entirely the problem, because there's so much stuff on there where the framerate is essentially meaningless, and his followers are using it as a weapon. And that's the trouble with Bain; he never takes responsibility for the fact that he has a large number of toxic followers that clearly don't get whatever small nuance his actions have, and when he does things like this he's unleashing them on people. The fact that Guild of Dungeoneering is the game that they took issue with, of all games, is telling; it's a card game where figures move around a map, who the fuck cares if it runs at 30fps? But TotalBiscuit posting this big list of games 'without comment or judgement' is like the GamerGaters who went around frantically investigating people for corruption, saying 'If you haven't done anything wrong, you've got nothing to worry about'; Just the fact that that information is being presented means that someone is going to use it in a shitty way, and TotalBiscuit is making no attempt to educate people in order to stop that from happening.

I keep reading this as '33-75% off TotalBiscuit's Prick'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6AibgptNxc Aurini put a rough draft of The Sarkeesian Effect on YouTube! It's as terrible and poorly made as everyone expected it would be! Its audio levels and dialogue quality are all over the place! The Jack Thompson interview is in there! Thompson trots out the party line about Anita using her death threats as a form of self-promotion. It's... it's really weird to hear Jack Thompson parroting GamerGate talking points. RE: Mark Kern, every time I see something he's said, he tops the last thing in terms of pure stupidity. It's kind of infuriating, you guys.

I've had an interesting journey with this game! Overall I really enjoyed the game, both the experience of playing it, and of reading theories about it afterwards. It has its flaws, obviously (Not amazingly well-written in places, and there are some odd contrivances), but in all it really worked for me.

Pretty much all of Mum's cats are rescues; she tends to find them abandoned by the sides of roads, and takes them home with her. I think Sweep turned up in someone's garden, and they brought her to my Mum, assuming she'd take her in. Correct! Ahhh, everyone's cats are cute! I LOVE CATS TOO!

After a fashion, I think so. There's a children's show in the UK about a mute glove-puppet bear called Sooty, and a fellow glove-puppet dog called Sweep, who is grey (Sooty, confusingly, is yellow). Mum has a black cat called Sooty, so it made sense. Sweep is a lovely cat though! I think she's a purebred Russian Blue, or at least close. She has a similar build and facial features.

Some of my Mum's cats! Tommy: Sweep: Smudge:

Stuck a bunch of stuff on here! Electronica mostly, but a bunch of rock/metal and hip-hop too. Tried to stick to around 125-140bpm, but a lot of the hip-hop tends to come in around 90-100bpm, which is probably a bit awkward. I dunno! See how it works, and prune it if it doesn't.

Despite the restaurant's apparent classiness, Gary Danko's website looks cheaper than the website of the falafel van I get my lunch from. An early-'00s style Flash intro, resolution locked to 640x480 in the top left corner, and inexplicable header images that scroll when you mouseover them. I love it. EDIT: On the subject of possessive restaurant names, basically everyone in the UK refers to Wagamama, the chain of Japanese-style noodle restaurants, as Wagamama's. Presumably because 'mama' at the end sounds like Mamma, and Waga Mamma sounds like a person.

It's incredibly sinister. I thought Cameron had at least an ounce of moderation in him, but he's going full-on fascist state now. Everyone thought the Lib Dems were useless in the coalition, but it seems like they were somehow preventing Cameron from revealing his Ultimate Final Boss form.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is a thing someone actually said?!

Jesus' fucking ballsack.

Ah! So obvious. Yeah, I felt this as well. It's often mixed quietly and hard to make out over the music, or it's mumbled. There's also a specific line of Dallas' dialogue that I listened to over and over, and I can't for the life of me figure out what it is! It's at 50:50 in the Director's Cut, when he and Ash and Ripley are examining the dead facehugger, and Ash asks him to let him take it back with them. I'm pretty sure it starts with 'Well I'd assume it's not...' and ends with 'but you're the science officer and it's your decision Ash', but I can't make out the words in the middle.

While I can see where you're coming from now, I didn't read Ripley this way at all while I was watching the film. The scene where Parker and Brett ignore her requests over the noise of steam came across as someone who often had to deal with not being respected, and dealt with it by being slightly abrasive back to them. But yeah, I think I was slightly off-base with this reading. I still find Ripley a sympathetic character, though, as she clearly has the best interests of the crew at heart, and her fastidiousness is borne out to be warranted, as things start to turn to shit. She comes across as more competent and level-headed than her male counterparts throughout, too, in a way that doesn't feel like an overt attempt at a 'strong female character', but as someone who is just good at her job, and wants to hold things together as they start to fall apart. One thing that I wanted to discuss was the scene on the shuttle, after she puts Jonesy in a pod and strips to her underwear, before discovering the alien is on-board with her. At first it felt a little gratuitous to me, although not particularly leery (Though I feel like her knickers could have been a bit more substantial), but when the alien appears, this feels like the point at which the rape analogy is the most direct. So I guess it's justified? Or maybe it's just narratively more convenient that she's in her underwear, as she has to don the space-suit while she's in the closet. I had a question about something that wasn't really clear to me as I was watching it; after Ripley starts the self-destruct countdown, and is being chased by the alien, she at one point decides she needs to cancel the self-destruct sequence, just before the cut-off point. Maybe it's just because I was quite tired, but I couldn't figure out why she changed her mind about this. As a side-note, I really love the production design. The '80s futurism stuff, all green CRT displays and lights and cold angles, is so STRONG. There are shades of 2001's space station in the Nostromo's design, but less sterile in places. And man, there are a couple of shots of the Nostromo's exterior that clearly influenced Red Dwarf's credits sequence and interstitial shots.