sekhithefops

[sekhithefops]

Rusty Rabbit: Story of a Scrappy lil' Hare.

Just one of those little 'huh' moments you get sometimes. Both were by Asian developers too. F.I.S.T. by China based dev studio TiGames, Rusty Rabbit by Japan based developer Nitroplus.

Not complaining at all, I love bunnies. Just... huh.

Rusty Rabbit is one of those fun little stories thats right up my alley. For one, humans are extinct and its hinted to have been our own godsdamn fault which affirms some opinions I have on the species lately.

A second ice age swept the Earth, mankind is no more, and the noble bun has inherited the planet.

You play as Stamp, a rabbit who makes their living as a Junker. They explore a ruined building left by the 'giants' (read: humans) for useable tools and materials, then sell them back home or use them to refurbish vehicles for their neighbors.

Stamp is a protagonist I find very endearing. he's cute and fluffy with small paws and a twitchy nose... but also a total cynic and hardbitten survivor, a contrast I find delightful.

He talks in the gruff voice of a middle-aged man who has seen a lot of dumb shit and watches the younger generation make the same screw ups he did with a feeling of exhaustion... and a very familiar one.

I googled it out of curiosity and his voice actor is none other than Yong Yea of Youtube fame and current English voice actor of Yakuza protagonist Kazuma Kiryu!

So of course I said that aloud the moment I realized it.

Stamp's forays into the ruins of our species' folly bring him into contact with a group of lapine explorers known as the BBs, which stands for Blitz Bullets... or is it Beautiful Babies... or perhaps Bouncing Binglybeeps... they seem unable to make up their minds.

Gameplay is split between exploring Scrap Mountain and going back to the surface to sell your scrap, turn in quests at the bar, visit friends at the local diner, and refurbish vehicles in your shop. The vehicles are an interesting one as each piece you return has Stamp monologue about his thoughts on his work. It can be a bit long-winded, but its skippable and if you like that sort of thing it adds some depth to his character.

One thing I found especially amusing about the game is, apparently, the story of Peter Rabbit is a religious text for his people.

"Saint Peter," as he is known, fought "The Reaper" single handedly and defeated him to save their people. "Saint Benjamin" is also considered the progenitor of bunkind, having had so many children that they spread across the world.

Also, I do find it especially hilarious that they use "McGregor" in the same way we'd use "motherfucker."

The game is very engaging so far, with a steady trickle of upgrades to unlock new areas encouraging exploration of older ones as well. So far I've gotten a grappling hook, a speed-dash, a shotgun, a sword, and the starting drill but there's still more to be found it seems.

Overall I'm having a lot of fun. Stuck at the moment on a particularly tricky puzzle in a zone called the "Wind Power Plant" but I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. A great title with a very fun protagonist.

[sekhithefops]

South of Midnight (East of Texas)

As I recently said in a post regarding New World Aeternum, I'm almost 40 years old and have been a gamer for the majority of those. I'm old enough to remember when "16 bit graphics" was considered a massive leap forward in technology.

But I'm also old enough to spot patterns in games. I'm old enough to see the repetitions. Sometimes its charming like how Final Fantasy always finds rooms for it's mascots; the moogles, the chocobo birds, the tonberries, and the cactaurs.

Sometimes... less so, like when you realize every single mainline Pokemon game is basically the same game with very little deviation until Scarlet/Violet (and even then it had a lot of things that irked me.)

As I said in that last post, anything new in the gaming sphere is more valuable than gold to me. A new story, a new sort of gameplay, a new concept, anything.

Enter South of Midnight.

South of Midnight is set in Mississippi in the modern day and follows the story of a young woman named Hazel Flood. As the game opens she and her mother are preparing to take shelter during a hurricane when disaster strikes.

The trailer they live in is broken free from it's mooring and swept off into the river, flowing downstream as Hazel, who was checking on her neighbors at the time, races off in pursuit as she realizes her mother was still inside the house.

Unable to reach it in time she goes for help from her only other relative, her paternal grandmother Bunny Flood.

From there she discovers a pair of magical needles in her grandmother's attic and becomes a Weaver, someone who is able to fix the threads of the 'tapestry' that binds all of creation.

Grief, pain, suffering, and loss cause the tapestry to become knotted, giving rise to haints, shadowy monsters who attack anything they see.

The story is basically a massive deep dive into the lore of the deep south of the United States, borrowing from legends of the area such as Hugging Molly, a monster who steals away children and leaves only red yarn behind.

As well as other folktales like a gigantic alligator named Two Toed Tom...

... and a talking catfish the size of a small whale, who simply goes by "Catfish."

The gameplay is very straightforward, an action platformer with some RPG elements where you can collect floof (I'm serious) to unlock new abilities, and the game itself is only about 9-10 hours long if you play straight through... but godsdammit I adored every second.

Like I said before, as a gamer something new is greater than gold to me, and while the gameplay wasn't the story absolutely was. The setting is one that almost never gets utilized in video games. I mean its Mississippi, most Americans just dismiss the state as "well things are rough, but we could live in Mississippi." I did myself before playing this, but now... I kinda feel like I was being overly critical of them.

The ending was also something I never really expected either. I went in figuring it'd be a huge climactic boss fight but what actually happened... well... I won't say, but it really stuck with me even now.

This is one of those games I really hope gets a sequel or DLC. Even if it doesn't I'm absolutely going to grab anything else the studio produces. Gameplay wasn't anything fancy, but the story and the music had me hooked from beginning to end.

[sekhithefops]

Game Review Masterpost

Best of 2024

New World Aeternum in Hindsight

South of Midnight

Rusty Rabbit

(More to come.)

[sekhithefops]

For the record, yes thats where I keep my Kingdom Hearts games. >w>

And yes, the other one is my Sonic the Hedgehog collection.

[sekhithefops]

New World Aeternum in Hindsight

I consider myself a connoisseur of MMORPG games, the huge boom of them in the early 2000s having hit just as I was preparing to graduate High School. I had a frontrow seat for all their success stories (Everquest, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI,) their massive flops (The Matrix Online, Age of Conan, Hellgate: London,) and their biggest tragedies (Wildstar, Star Wars Galaxies.)

I even have a section of my Steam account dedicated solely to the genre, but thats really not saying much as I organize the hell out of that stuff anyways.

Point being, I've seen the genre become downright generic so anything that has a unique and unusual feel will draw me to it like a sitting vice president to a Furniture Faire store.

I'm almost 40 years old now. I've been a gamer since before some of you were even born. Something genuinely new is more valuable than gold to me!

After years of the standard western fantasy swords and sorcery anything that breaks that mold has my attention almost immediately.

"Whats this you say? An MMO set in the modern day that centers around conspiracy theories and the supernatural and is likely the closest we'll ever get to a World of Darkness MMO?! Sign me the fuck up Secret World!"

"You play in outer space and you have a suit of armor that gives you superpowers and lets you flip out like a Raiden from Metal Gear went off his meds? Sounds like a blast Warframe!"

"Its like Breath of the Wilds but you can have a whole team of cute anime characters and there's a ton of exploration and crafting to be enjoyed? Lets check out this Genshin Impact thing!"

Sadly, they were not to last. Secret World was revamped as Secret World Legends and after a laughably horrible content drop the game has entered maintenance mode and never seen a single scrap of updates again.

Warframe is still riding high, as is Genshin Impact, but unfortunately I had to stop playing those for one specific reason: Microtransactions are to me what a kryptonite claw hammer is to Superman's face.

After playing Genshin Impact for several months I decided to bring up my credit card account and did the math and now the only Wish I'll be making is for a time machine to go back to when I first installed the game and do a diving tackle at my past-self while screaming "nooooooooo!"

If they're just cosmetics I tend to be okay, I can handle the battle.net store and the Mogshop easily because its straightforward.

Anything with microtransactions beyond that for things like crafting materials or 'time savers' I have to avoid, and gatcha mechanics are RIGHT out. I will never touch a Hyoverse game again. Nothing against them, but its the same reason I won't go into a real world casino. I know myself too damn well.

But thats not what we're here. We're here for New World: Aeternum. So lets set sail!

One of the Most Unique Settings I've Seen in an MMO.

Show of hands, how many of you can think of a game set during the Colonial Era AND STRATEGY GAMES DON'T COUNT!

Not many of you I'd wager. Mostly those are regulated to the genre of games like Civilization and RTS titles. The only one I can think of that breaks that was Banishers: Ghosts of new Eden.

Well, that and New World.

New World takes place during the Age of Exploration, when France, England, and Spain were making serious expeditions and colonizing the Americas.

Understandably this is not an easy time period to portray in video games because of the feelings surrounding that era and what it did to the natives of that time.

On the one hand you'll get many descendants of those countries' native peoples and others raising hell for even the slightest error in how its portrayed.

On the other hand you'll have the usual cabal of incels, edgy teenage boys, and assorted miserable fuckers who raise hell about "DEI" and "wokeism" because nobody is close enough to give them a well deserved punch in the face.

New World gets around this by setting itself on the fictional island of Aeternum.

Aeternum Island is essentially Avalon, Atlantis, Mag Mel, and every legendary lost land rolled into one. I think they even hinted that it could actually be what became remembered in the world as the biblical Garden of Eden.

Aeternum fascinated me as a setting. A mixture of older style colonial era buildings alongside ancient ruins, all of it displayed gorgeously with some beautiful imagery that I think about even now.

I could really lose myself in this game, sometimes I'd just stop and spend a while fishing. No reason, just because I could. Other times I'd just go on what I called 'walkabout' and just do a big circuit around a zone just to see what treasures I could find (and I found many.) It was a fun game just to hop into and see what would happen and what I'd discover.

It also actually took some themes of MMOs into it's narrative.

On Aeternum Island, you can't permanently die. Something about the island will bring people back to life within hours of their death. The whole thing where your character can come back again and again to try to take down that raid boss who's giving them so much grief in a game? That actually happens in the narrative.

This is because of Azoth, a resource native to the island that infuses everyone and everything on it. Everyone there is effectively immortal, though they also cannot become pregnant or impregnate others (otherwise the island would be so full by now it'd be frankly absurd.)

At the start of the story your character sails to Aeternum Island with an expedition to try to find this fabled land. When you arrive however your ship falls under attack and is blasted to the bottom of the ocean, but you wake up on the island soaked but alive.

From there the gameplay loop begins. You go off and do story quests to find out the secrets of the island and why this corruptive force is driving people mad, fight back against the force and it's avatar, and explore the various buildings and civilizations left by the previous settlers. People landed on Aeternum since time immemorial so you find not just European buildings but also one zone is entirely Chinese settlers, another was settled by the people of ancient Egypt, and so on. Its quite the sightseeing tour.

Also, the combat is fun as hells.

Its action oriented. Each character wields two weapons at once and you can choose from melee combat, ranged combat, and spellcasting... but rather than just the usual ranged options you also have the blunderbusses and flintlock rifles of the time period which I would often have a hard time turning down. Normally I go for magic user in these games, but damn if it wasn't fun as hell being a musketeer with a rapier in one hand and a rifle on my back like Errol Flynn.

So... for all that, what went wrong? Right now it has mixed at best reviews on Steam, the game's playerbase is drifting away, and the servers are about to be merged again.

Well... the sad truth is this...

Its an MMO, Thats the Problem!

The sad truth is that New World is learning what all the others did... there ain't enough room in this games library for all of us and Blizzard, Square, and Bethesda already called dibs.

The reason so many MMORPGs die off as they do anymore is simple really... to succeed they have to beat those three, quite literally, at their own game. They can't just be as good as Warcraft, Final Fantasy, and Elder Scrolls. They have to be better, or else THEY WILL FAIL!

MMORPGs are a massive time investment. I've been playing World of Warcraft for nigh on 20 years now and FFXIV since Heavensward which came out... (insert googling sounds here) ... ten years ago now. Shit time does fly.

The big three have established fanbases. They have a history to them. They have a ton of options and quality of life features that got added over their lifespan, and they damn well know it!

World of Warcraft is slowly recovering after the mess that Shadowlands was and lately is in a very good place with it's revamped flight and crafting systems, the return of the talent trees, and a greater focus on narrative (though good luck to those poor writers and yes I am speaking from experience here.)

Final Fantasy XIV is hard to get into, but like a cult once you're in YOU ARE IN. The fanbase is among the most dedicated out there and its a very very rare day that I don't see some fanart or a funny screenshot or a Wuk Lamat meme on my Bluesky feed.

Elder Scrolls Online, while one I haven't played in a long time, is one of the places Bethesda is still doing pretty well. It gets regular content updates and the fanbase is pretty happy or so I've heard. I stay away from this one due to the heavy push for microtransactions as I've mentioned above, but its definitely the third of the "Big Three" last I looked.

... and thats why New World is starting to fail. Because thats what it's up against. The same thing that all the others were up against.

As I said above an MMO is a massive investment of time and effort that can take years off your life. Azeroth feels like a second home to me as much as any video game world can anymore.

New World had to compete with that... but they couldn't. I'm beginning to feel like nobody can to the point where it genuinely worries me when I hear someone who's making a game I'm interested in saying they want it to be an MMO.

Most recently that would be Dune Awakening, of which Funcom has stated they want it to be a big MMO world with a heavy emphasis on PvP and such, to which I reply "have you been snorting the spice you lunatics?! Blizzard is already sharpening the butcher's knife and Square is setting the table!"

I'm not saying they can't succeed as an MMO, as in I'm saying the odds aren't zero... but they ain't great.

Just look at poor New World... and Wildstar... and all the rest who tried to find a playerbase in a market that simply has no room left. You can't dedicate all your free time times two after all, and most anyone who is an MMO fan already has an MMO they stick with.

Just like me, I'll dabble in other ones just like I did New World... but all those MMOs on my Steam library? Last time I touched any of them besides FFXIV was so long ago I can't remember when it was.

Being as good as the established titles isn't enough. They need to be BETTER to get their players away from characters they may have invested years into... and thats a tall order for any developer studio to say the least.

Sadly, it would appear that New World's time may be coming sooner rather than later. Personally I wish it had been a single player RPG. I think there's some real mileage in the setting and concept, but an MMO is tied to it's playerbase. If the players leave the game is doomed.

Thanks for reading.

[sekhithefops]

it's giving princess celestia

[sekhithefops]

"I want to be a dragon."

[sekhithefops]

"You're telling me you sat here and wrote a 600 word essay by yourself..."

I WRITE NOVELS FOR FUNSIES!

These ChatGPT users are like aliens to me. I cannot comprehend how their minds work. o_O

[sekhithefops]

[sekhithefops]

Yes Steve, it was Facebook. You are 100% right.

For today’s Nazi Punch of the Day, we have OG Nazi-puncher Captain America making his stance clear. This is from @textsfromsuperheroes.

[sekhithefops]

[sekhithefops]

🍻Comm: Beerbender!🍻

🍻Comm for @sekhithefops.bsky.social & @sekhithefops :D🍻

[sekhithefops]

Mad about politics again

[sekhithefops]

computer, I need to feel something again, show me Yakuza 3 Kazuma Kiryu Transgender Ally Substory

[sekhithefops]

[sekhithefops]

Okay, we all know about the usual warlock-patron dynamics. Creature with god-like powers tries to do their bidding or further their plans through a mortal, who is often going to be troubled by the pact. But, I'm here to propose some alternatives, specially for warlock deals that aren't inherently very harmful to the warlock themself:

This one is pretty typical, but the patron is a family member. If sorcerers can get cool powers from having a dragon grandpa, your fire genasi can have an auntie who is a big fire elemental who is trying VERY hard to connect with her family now, so she gives her nephew an allowance in the form of a Genie Pact

Your patron is undead (and your pact is Undying), but this person is not some power-hungry lich. This is someone you knew in life: A friend, or perhaps a partner. You had fought for a common cause, and they met their death trying to see the end of it, but they refused to leave you alone. Now, within you, their stubbornness has kept them from moving on, and they lend their newfound powers to help you in your common cause.

It's an eldritch entity, a creature beyond your comprehension. Your pact is that of a Great Old One. However, this creature doesn't quite have very concise plans to bring the end of the world- You're actually pretty sure it isn't even from your world. As time goes on, and as you realize their whims seem erratic, you realize that this thing you get powers from is... Probably the cosmic equivalent of a child. Maybe it's still cocooning in the depths of a distant dying planet. And it's incredibly bored. Someday, maybe, they'll terrorize the universe, but right now, they just really want you to be their eyes on another world. Call it enrichment.

Okay, this one is a fiend. Unequivocally so. But truthfully, they couldn't care less about your world, and you're not particularly concerned about what is going down in theirs. They kinda need few things done in your plane, few resources gathered, some people talked to, and between the lines, you realize that your newfound... ally is actually trying to oppose their boss or whatever. This one is a deeply legal-minded fiend, as far as you know: The hellish equivalent to a bureaucrat, after really digging around. Your party is convinced they will turn on you sometime, but eventually you realize you're just helping something that, for a lack of a better word, has to be an infernal-equivalent of an union effort.

That sword you picked was definitely cursed, and the voice within it has been calling to you. Eventually, you lend them your ear, and now you have an Hexblade pact. But this creature isn't bloodthirsty, nor talking to you about soaking their blade with your foes' guts. Truthfully, they hate being a sword. Trapped there as part of a vengeance, perhaps, this thing longs for freedom. And it has been used for evil in the past- Maybe the overabundance of skull motifs in their physical vessel didn't help. But this creature just wants to be able to experience a life that has been robbed from them. Your party may raise an eyebrow at you getting friendly with the possibly-malignant sword, but y'all are just making plans to get them to your favourite restaurant once they're freed.

This Archfey is the descendant of a powerful entity in Feywild side of things. The heir of some great lineage, or whatever is going on within their realm. You frankly don't know, because they're a bit of a... brat. One that kinda longs to escape their situation and get to live something more normal. You only find out this over time, when you realize you're kinda that friend their parents frown about. This entity, powerful beyond comprehension, just really wants to hang out with you and have a board game night with you. They'd love to meet your besties-- I mean, your world-saving allies. And you'd love to give them the opportunity someday, truth be told, but pissing off a fey court seems to be a high price.

You got stranded far into the ocean as a kid, and the rest of the people involved in the shipwreck did not make it out. But you attracted the attention of a group of merfolk, who had barely ever had the chance to meet someone like you. People had told you tales of how they'd drown and eat anyone coming into their territory, but these creatures were instead cooing about you. You're now grown up, and you can call them for power. Your party frowns at the idea of "I kinda got adopted by a sea polycule and I got a cantrip and few other boons about it", but you know they'll have to eat their words when you bring them for dinner- If you can find a way to table them in the middle of the ocean, that is.

the celestial patron is still a dick tho

Feel free to add onto these if you'd like, I'd love to hear concepts >:3

[sekhithefops]

🐲Comm: At attention!🐲

C0mm for @sekhithefops.bsky.social/@sekhithefops :D