Today’s game is some more Alan Wake II. I already made it through the hotel today. I always forget how fast this game goes by. It definitely is a good length, but damn does it leave me wanting more.

Speaking of the Hotel, while in room 666 I had noticed the furniture in there (as in the stuff in the shadows) is all Pitch Black. With how much detail the game has I have to imagine this is intentional, but intentional or not this is still really cool to get a glimpse at.

Final thing I noticed, but Max Payne dies with his right side facing Alan and the light, while the right faces the shadow. I think it’s intentional camera work. And I think it’s a cool detail, since Alan is meant to represent the light.

That’s really all though. I could talk more about the Art pieces in the hotel. But I’ve done that in the past. I did noticed they’re all kind of surface level, referring to water, dreaming, or writing. Which I thought lent to a dream like quality to them. The kind of random shallow shit your brain might come up with while dreaming.

Anyways, thats the last thing I’m gonna touch on. I swear. I have some cool ideas for photos with the theater so I’m excited to do those next time I play.

Napple Tale was a game on the Dreamcast, now pretty much only playable via emulator.

It has a cutesy, robo-candy aesthetic, filled with bright, cheery colors, and dancy animation.

It is also a game for which the primary theme is 'coming to terms with the fact that time takes everything from us: family, friends, joyful times, and eventually even life itself.'

It is also soundtracked by Yoko Kanno (the woman behind the soundtracks for Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Wolf's Rain) and is voiced by Maaya Sakamoto. (If you are an old anime fan, you've pretty much definitely heard her voice, even if you don't know the name. She's the original and later Motoko Kusanagi.)

It's like it was written by Mary Shelley and then handed off to someone who had only worked on megaman and barbie games to do the visuals. Wild stuff.

Well I stumbled over an interesting story, that naturally ended up in an article to write.

This one's pretty odd, but the tl;dr version is that Pixar sued DMA Design. They'd created a game on the SNES which featured a unicycle. That's it. That's the extent of the copyright infringement Pixar claimed.

Back in 1987 Pixar had made a CG short which featured a unicycle, and so all those years later...they got weirdly litigious.

If you're curious, I found this a super interesting story to cover!

https://gardinerbryant.com/the-wheel-that-went-to-court/

I'm all for it, absolutely strike, but...

I think it's too late. The time to strike was years ago against the obvious bad decisions of upper management. Stock price is less than a dollar, the company IPs are worthless

Better late than never I guess

(DCSS = Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup)

I had a great summoner turned shapeshifter run (morgue file for those who can read it) with storm form and summoning spells up to Summon Horrible Things reliably castable (<5% failure rate), absolutely destroying the last floors of Elf, Vaults, Crypt and even Zot (tesseracts are soo cool~)!

Zot 5 is cleared and I step up to the Orb of Zot. Here it is, I only need to bring it to the surface. Why not doing in a fancy way? I have Apportation after all. Why not yoink it right in my electrified hands, and then jump onto a tele trap? Why shouldn't I?

Well, I yoinked the Orb a few times (it resists the spell sometimes), then noticed that the Orb run had started so without a proper thought jumped onto the trap and started ascending to the surface. Enemies aren't scary, I have my blinks and haste potions and wands of digging, all goes smooth. Until...

"Are you sure you want to leave without the Orb of Zot? That will be a game over."

w h a t ?
I looked at my status panel - no "Orb" status indeed (this status persists in the entire Realm of Zot, so I couldn't notice it until I left it, btw). Apportation started the Orb run but did NOT pick up the damned Orb. FUCK

I descended all the way back, spending my last remaining scrolls of blinking as the danger of the enemies increased. I took the fucking Ball of Flawed Design and went to Yet Another Stupid Dash to the surface.

And, just like the game knew that my patience was running low, it brought to me a panlord with three tormenting demons (torment cuts your health in half, with no way to avoid that), one of which could also hurl damnation (irresistible damage).

I misplayed. I should have, the moment I saw this hellish circus, bring my eyes to the sky and yell "Dithmenos, turn off the lights, I don't want to see this shit anymore!!!" (Dithmenos' most expensive ability literally makes you see nothing, deactivating all enemies for a while), and go in darkness until my teleport scroll activates or I reach an upstairs.

Instead, I summoned my own demons, hoping that they will distract demons for long enough for me to teleport. Stupid move, caused by my frustration at the whole Orb situation.

My health evaporated in a few turns, and then damnation killed me off. Game over. Hello my first Orb run death. Fuck torment. Rant is over.

Today’s game is Project Zomboid. I got me and some friends back on the Build 42 Multiplayer and we had some fun. We ended up chilling this session, and I figured out how to get on the roof of the house I made my home and just chilled. It was nice.

The game changed the lamps to Sodium Lamps (or at least I believe it’s a change) which I’m a huge fan of. Not going to go on any sort of tangent about old sodium lamps being better or anything like that, but having the orange light definitely helps place it in the time period and lend to the aesthetic of the game.

When day broke I went ahead and headed to find food. I’ve been cooking and smithing for everyone In the little colony we set up. It’s nice. Honestly I like multiplayer because you get to setup these pockets of civilization and rebuild. It’s really cool. I like being the black smith and making people weapons.

We ended off our session after me and my friend got separated by a horde near the bridge in Echo Creek. We thought a cliffhanger would be a fun personal moment to end off on. He got safe and hunkered down in town, but besides that, that’s all I know. I need to remember that I want to add the amputation mod too in case one of us gets bit. It’ll add a degree of realism I feel like, and I like having a “cure” option even if it’s far from ideal.

I had previously stopped playing this game as, simply put, my level of English wasn't high enough to understand the story and the language, but now that I've resumed playing this game and gotten past A Realm Reborn... I'm having so much fun ✨

So yeah, here you find my adventures as well as my analysis of Heavensward and why A Realm Reborn wasn't as amazing as it could have been.

Also, please, no spoilers in comments, I'm still playing the lv 60 quests in Heavensward!

This isn't counting battle.net users and people on console

I argee with the article's author that there's reason to have some concerns about this.

I'm a developer working on a game similar to Geoguessr (street view location guessing game), but using images sourced from Wikimedia. The aim is to make it more fun by removing the meta clues in Geoguessr that people use to find locations, for example some players have memorized what street view cars or picture quality was used in certain places. For me, this ruins the fun of the game as it becomes less about knowledge of geography and more about memorizing useless information. So that's why I made Where.

You can try it out at: https://where.hurn.dev/

You can guess locations in single player, or play a duel with others. All images and hand-picked, and there are currently around 5000. I'm constantly adding new images every day, the goal is to have at least 100 thousand images for replayability. Occasionally some images that aren't good for guessing slip through the net, so please press the report button and i'll remove them.

Still very early stages so please let me know if you encounter any bugs!

I apologize if this post comes across as self-promotion. This game is completely free, just a side project that I would love to get people's opinions on. I gain nothing other than valuable feedback from people playing it.

If you do check it out, please let me know if you like it have have any feedback. Cheers!

Today’s game is some more Alan Wake II. Now that I’ve had proper time I’ve noticed a few interesting details I wanted to point out. Like for example, Alan when he uses the health kit will actually pull a bandage out of the health pack. Which I think is a really cool detail.

The graffiti also just straight up looks cool. Which I like.

The game also makes Alan descend into water a lot. Which I’m pretty sure is an intentional nod to him “diving deeper” to escape the dark place. It’s a really cool attention to detail I really like.

And finally, I just wanted to show off how pretty this game is. Nothing special about this piece, I just wanted to show off the sort of eerie beauty the dark place has. I just want to wander the streets at night wrapped in a nice rain jacket.

I forgot how fast Alan’s section goes. Honestly, this game goes fast, which is both good and disappointing. It really left me wanting more after my first playthrough, and still to this day sometimes I feel like my heart kind of never left this game. Kind of poetic in a way. It’s like I traded places with Alan. Maybe in a way that was intentional in the writing. Probably just me being weird though