Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Neat

Restore his former glory.

I always hated this antagonist till I first cleared Sonic 3 & Knuckles

Also, I kinda giggled once when I heard that Sonic & Knuckles was a DLC of Sonic 3.

Never been a fan of the games until All Stars Racing Transformed, which I think is still the best Kart racing game ever made. The movies are pretty good, too.

Im not sure whats happening, but Ive been running out of memory in my browser

Hmm all the south korean coomer streamers came back

Sonic 3 & Knuckles was my first "favourite" game of all time. I was really young, so having the ability to save my progress and not have to start over from scratch meant it was one of the first games I was able to beat completely, getting Hyper Sonic is etched into my memory forever.

Coming back to it, I really appreciate how much story it got across without a single line of dialogue. Knuckles even ends up redeeming himself after you knock some sense into him. Having spent the entire game messing with you, he helps you out.

This sounded like someone saying: “you are my first only love of my life”

It's like, up until that point in my life if someone had asked me what my favourite game was, I wouldn't have had an answer. But at that point, and for years down the line, that would be the answer. And even to this day, it's like... top 3 or so.

To be honest, I haven't really reassessed my favourite games for a while. Not since probably around 2010, when I completely soured on the hobby. While I have picked up a few decent games since then, none have completely taken my breath away.

"Visual ASMR", is that what we're calling it now? >_>

Boomer moment, but I really feel like games have lost their soul since the 90s and early-mid 2000s. I know some will think it's due to pandering and that may be true in part, I think a lot of it is being victims of their own success. Years ago I listened to a long playthrough of System Shock 1 by the original developers, I also listened to a bunch of interviews on the original Ultima Underworld, and it made me think that as games became a bigger production, it left little room for individuals to drive specific development efforts because they were passionate about them. Some of the mechanics and things that made those games so unique for their era were driven by individuals on a small team, something that's harder to replicate in bigger titles today.

It also feels to me a lot of the stories and gameplay are "been there, done that too many times". Others (e.g. DD2) have clear potential but fell just short of being truly great or memorable.

Even long running IPs like Diablo, I was a huge fan of D1 and D2, even D3 at times, but I barely could bring myself to put time into D4. It just felt....meh. Not worth the effort.

Baldur's Gate 3, technical issues aside, is probably the game I'd say stuck with me the most out of anything released in the last 10 years. The Witcher 3 in part, but that's also because I was a big fan of 1 & 2. There are indie titles I could say still have some of that to them, but most didn't have the longevity for me games in the 90s and early 2000s did and it's rare that is captured in modern games for me.

I think a big part of it is how modern games are designed with the intent of hundreds of hours of playtime and ongoing DLC. When you think of the amazing games from the 90s to early 2000s, they were released on a single cartridge. The game might have been 10 hours, it might have been an epic 70 hour game like FF, or it might have been something like Starfox or Contra that takes a couple hours once you can beat it but a good bit of repetition to get there.. but it was finite. There's no intentional addiction mechanism, no trying to get you to post on social media, no 8 difficulty modes and endless customization. It's just a game, everyone has the same experience, and either you like it or you don't.

This limited scope allowed for more meaningful mechanical interactions, powerups, etc. Developers didn't have to consider if adding something would make the character too powerful and ruin the next DLC, or make hardmode too easy, or make easy mode into story mode. They just had to make sure it was compatible with the challenge required for the rest of the game. Playtesters actually experienced the entire game as players would, because of limited variation, and gave feedback on that so it could be smoothed out. There was no financial incentive to do anything besides create the best game possible; once the cartridge is purchased you have received your maximum income from that customer. All of these factors contribute to a much higher standard of gameplay, IMO.

I think that's one of the reasons why I hold a lot of admiration for FromSoftware. Even the ones that I don't necessarily like to play due to personal taste, I recognize as being confidently self-contained. Their games are a metre wide, but a mile deep, meaning you can spend as much or as little time in them as you want, and replay them over and over again with different results every time.

You can have a game that's 400 hours long, but it's important to make sure that your game can be entertaining for that long. And I think that's why the majority of the games I buy now are single-player indie games, because they more oftentimes know a good cut-off point for their worth.

More recently, I've learned that I appreciate games that don't stretch gameplay that's only fun for 2 hours into an 80-hour experience by padding it out with arbitrary achievements and collectibles, egregious crafting systems, or overwhelming numbers of shallow quests.

100% agree, it's the main reason why I still play 80-90s retro arcade game these days. Those games are short and delivers the core experience in just a few min.


That is what happens when you are old and experienced a lot of entertainment products.

If you erase your memory and experience gameplay and story first time again then you will probably feel amazing about them again. Once you experienced something then anything similar won't trigger the same feel again.


Although it's true that small teams can experiment more, I think we already past the golden age that experiment has great returns...

If you look at recent indie games, most games are just mixing pre-existing popular indie genre with different ratio. This game is 50% deck building 50% roguelike, that game is 70% metroidvania 30% roguelike. The other game is 40% vampire survivor 30% roguelike 30% narrative etc.....

tl;dr: after 40 years of video game history, it is very hard to create never-before-seen mechanics that also sell well anymore. People already explored most of the game mechanics that works in the past 40 years.

Luna Rossa launches their AC75.




Another team has their "big boat" for 2024 in the water now. The Italians follow The Kiwis and Americans by having their actual race platform for the America's Cup proper built and into testing, and with the way rules are set when you compete with billionaires, there are strict limits on the number of these platforms allowed to exist at one time, so what we see is what we get.

Soon following with their final platforms will be the Brits, French and Swiss, and while I don't have much faith in INEOS/Britannia's Camp, the new teams for this campaign of France and Switzerland are insanely experienced in the general field of Competitive Yachting even without direct America's Cup experience with this exact platform....they've got the right folks doing the right things for them, and will catch up fast. But the experts all do seem to agree that until we see them directly in Villanova with these big boats, its a 3 team race between New Zealand, The United States, and Italy. Not saying it can't make room for more- just that the 3 remaining teams fighting for respect are going to have to earn it.

I giggled cuz the first thing I noticed was "Hey, a boat sponsored by a tire company"

yeah.....but them be the SEXIEST radials you'll find on the planet!

I just watched an amusing video of a funny guy (i guess, funny for my standards) that usually posts edits of his lives on Twitch.

In that live, he decided to make a profile of his face changed to woman.

Then, he tried to fool middle aged men on Facebook, by interacting and teasing those guys.

Funny how he spent most of the video like he had the upperhand over the middle aged perv men. Basically he was always in the control of the conversation, and contents of it.

But to everyones surprise, one of the middle aged man turned the table on the guy. And in grand style.

The middle aged man simply sent... a pic of his d*ck!

Hilarious how that guy that was so confidant, so secure of himself quickly turned to despair and started to yell like crazy. He wasnt faking a yell. That was what a true despair yelling.

Idk how Twitch works, but apparently the mere image of genitals made the guy receive a third strike and ban from the platform.

I suppose its understandable why he was so desperate with a simple small image.

But super funny regardless

Does anyone remember this movie?





The SUV we got on the trade in has controls on the key to move the car around remotely like this, (but safely of course lol)

So here I am feeling like james bond and if someone *** parks 1 inch from me and cant get in the door? just drive the car back out of the tight parking spot by itself! lol

15 year old Josiah is sold.

How could anyone forget 007 Goldeneye


We all are about the same age range

I think

If its not Goldeneye, its the next one after that

Tomorrow Never Dies.

Yeah, i suppose 9.5/10 to me

Makes as much sense as a boat sponsored by a beverage company.

You will NEVER get that thing to fit in a can....

Lol someone left me ebay feedback after I purchase something saying "man EBAY robbed me on this! I swear to God took almost half the profit. Sad..."

Can't blame him cuz it's true but why leave that as feedback lol. The last thing I sold was a broly figure for 80 dollars, and after fees and promotion fees, they gave me 36 dollars. Not even worth selling, I wish there was some place better to sell stuff

Every where steals a chunk. It's pissing me off too.

Just ***outta luck. Fees fees fees. It's not even worth it to bother between shipping, fees and tax. And it's definitely not worth the anuerism from selling local.

The bots are hitting the FFXI players on Twitch really bad today. I saw like 6 waves of lewd ASCII art in the 2 hours I was watching.

No idea what that's all about either. It only seems to be FFXI streams. Sometimes they'll be accompanied by something like "lol this is what you get for playing on shitty private servers", even though all the channels I watch are retail. Not even the Japanese are safe from it. And I feel especially bad for them because they probably don't even know what the hell is going on.

lol that's awesome, instead of DMCA copyright strikes they get ASCII ***

The copywrite was a false flag. I'm still waiting for someone to post the admission. Someone said someone did admit it but not who where or when.

Just more of the eternal blueballs of zero resolution.