#i need to get the dlc eventually

[leonleonhart]

my favorite part of Final Fantasy 16 is when Clive said "The only fantasy here is yours. And we shall be it's final witness."

[nokstella-old]

i'm gonna make an elden ring character that is so devoted to miquella and no one can stop me

[wildflowercryptid]

i need to talk about about how flori's dynamic / interactions with drayton differ from canon bc it makes me wanna yell. xe speedran getting the nicest dude on the planet to hate xyrs fucking guts.

[vonlipvig]

if i had a nickel for everytime someone gifted me a game on steam for christmas out of the kindness of their heart i'd have two nickels. which isn't a lot but it's incredible and touching that it happened twice.

but yeah, you guys have no idea how much that means to me, thank you so much. to my friend anna, a million thanks for that (and if you're seeing this, anna, i have a GREAT idea for that thing i told you about, you stay tuned ;3). and if anyone here is birdman/swablu/jon from canada from steam, please tell me who you are because you're so kind (and please go look at your messages on steam, i need to thank you properly!).

but yeah, wow. merry christmas, guys.

[thesugarhole]

reinstalled and opened dd2 to get my yearly achievement and i got two more from old updates and this one is killing me

how many times much we teach you this lesson old man

[claitea]

finished the dlc! enjoyed it a lot :D

[sol-flo]

soo impatient for my packidges today.... i wanna see what 20gb ram can do..... the year of the gamer.......

[hobgobbin]

I'm not sure if you're still into GOW but I wanted to ask, have you played or watch a let's play on GOW: Ragnarök Valhalla??? Because Týr is in the DLC and I wanted to know your thoughts.

I've actually looped back around to GOW hyperfixation recently and have been playing 2018 !!! And I got Ragnarok for after :)

I HAVE seen a LP goin thru Valhalla and I love it story AND gameplay concept wise !! throwing a roguelite mode feels like SUCH a good match for the game tbh I'm surprised they didn't do it before.

Huge fan of Tyr therapizing Kratos by them kicking the shit out of each other HSDGFHK men bonding activities :) I also looove that you get to fight him and he has a bunch of different weapons from all the places he's visited. Very sexy and cool of him to show how adaptive he is with combat styles

ALSO huge fan of them bringing Helios back actually those sections were rly cool. And seeing the melding of the greek stuff with the norse !!!!!!!!!!!

[arolesbianism]

Just wanted to drop in and say thank you for finding and posting the ONI logs that you do! As someone who loves the story of the game but absolutely would not have the energy to find all of the logs that aren’t on the wiki legitimately its nice to be able to see some of them. The one w/ nails in it is especially interesting! Nails was already one of my favorite dupes but that log made me like them even more tbh. Everyone say thank you to Human Nails™️ for making dupes like actually cognizant.

Also, saw your ONI stuff on artfight! I am absolutely not plotting and scheming anything at all i swear :]

Oghhhh tysm :')!!!! I've been feeling a bit self conscious abt my oni obsession lately so this means a lot! I still need to get around to making my oni story catalogue actually readable, I started a while back but ran out of steam after the like 50th incident with said one with Nails in it lol. And I actually recognized you from artfight! Saw your oni guys a few days ago and I'm honestly obsessed with them, it would be a shame if I had my hand forced and had to draw them :3c

[husband-steve-cortez]

The fun thing about thinking up Miles and Kaidan smut is that everything I think would be sexy for one of them to do would also be sexy for the other to do and they'd both like doing random sexy stuff at least once if it'll get a rise out of the other.

[doyoulikethis-videogame-song]

Hello,

I'd just like to clarify a few things going forward, because I think a few people might be upset or confused, and this is a silly gimmick blog, so I don't think there's any need for that.

I post submissions exclusively in the order I receive them. I have only added or inserted songs in three cases:

The first two songs posted on this blog.

#69, where I inserted 'Weight of the World' from NieR:Automata.

The song would not upload to tumblr, and I have typically replaced it with a random fromsoftware song off the top of my head, because I already have the OSTs on my computer.

When I receive multiple songs from the same game in a row, I try my best to space them out between multiple songs. This has typically been every 4-6 songs in the past. I am going to extend this number further as it appears to be a source of frustration for some. When I space out songs, I do not consider DLCS/Extras as new games, so they will be spaced out. I DO consider new entries in a series as new games, so they will not be spaced out. This means you may get a song from Dark Souls I and Dark Souls II right next to one another, but never two songs from Dark Souls I.

I also understand that many are upset that their submission has not been posted yet. At the time of creating the google form, I already had the first 1000 slots of this blog lined up. I now have 4581 additional submissions from the google form, so please understand that it will probably take me a while to reach your submission.

As for how I should remedy this:

Posting more songs each day. I am planning to increase the number of songs I post each day soon. However, I would strongly prefer to not exceed more than five songs a day. This is entirely a personal preference: I often found myself annoyed when my feed was filled with nothing but polls from the same blog, that would post 7, 10, 15 polls a day or even within the same time slot. I love poll blogs, but I also wanted to be able to enjoy taking the time to listen to the music on each one. I created this blog primarily because I wanted to hear new music and find out about new games I've never heard about before, and I wanted others to share that experience. In my opinion, if you don't have the time to listen to each song posted, then it sort of defeats the gimmick of the blog itself. That being said, I will increase the number of songs posted sometime within the next two weeks.

Closing Submissions. I did not want to ever have to close submissions (because I didn't really see a reason to if I was going to post all the submissions eventually), but I now understand it may now be necessary. Starting on 9/7/2024, I am going to close the submissions box, and I am going to reopen it for the first week of each month, every month, only. The google form will remain the only way to submit requests. Hopefully, this will allow individuals who are especially excited to see their request posted gain a bit of an upper hand.

In the end, there is only so much I can do. I am only one person and I do have a life of my own. I am very happy so many people are enjoying this blog, and I will continue posting for as long as I can. If you are not enjoying this blog for any reason, feel free to unfollow it, block it, and make your own. It's nothing personal.

[ohcorny]

i've noticed a trend of games that are essentially just legos and let you build something pretty, like SUMMERHOUSE, Townscaper, or now Tiny Glade which just came out, but... like.... i wish they were actually games? they're such gorgeous, interesting demonstrations of procedural generation and tools and aesthetic sensibility, but they're not games! and it's so strange how all of them advertise themselves on their lack of gameplay.

no wrong answers, no rules, no winning, no losing--no game!

and i'm just like... why not game? why put in so much work to make something like this and not put in the effort of goals or challenges? you can still have your freeform jazz play with blocks game, but like... can't you give me something to do? something to unlock? something to work toward? soon as the novelty wears off and you're familiar with all the pieces, you're left with a bucket of legos and no idea what to do with them, and for some people (like me) that happens really quick.

why not include basic challenges? build a castle that can house 10 people, build a town that features these three items, build a house that this character with these preferences would like. just something.

you know what game about free form designing did that? animal crossing happy homes dlc. and we all went crazy for it. and it still gave you a ton of freedom to just play around! as long as you met some requirements, you could do whatever you wanted--and eventually you didn't even need the requirements (though coincidentally, that's when i stop playing)

i want to like these games, because they're gorgeous and do look fun! but i just know i'd boot them up and get bored in fifteen minutes because i'd have nothing to do

[0hmanit]

One of my favorite types of Rain World rooms are rooms that supposedly have additional cameras/room connections, but they don't.

What do I mean by this? here is an example:

LF_J01 is one of the rooms that bugged me the most, especially when when I notice it during my countless rain deer rides. It's eye catching and makes you wonder if you can bring a grappling worm all the way from the Underhang just to test your dumb theory, only to realize it's not true and be so disappointed.

Fun fact, Rain World Drought is perfectly using this room's potential: by using it as a connection between your starting region and Farm Arrays.

The tutorial room also gets it's own secret, where eventually you find out about it at the start of the Spearmaster campaign. Downpour in fact have a lot of these, and it's one of my favorite additions in this DLC.

Not a secret, just a whole huge region connected through this singular room connection.

Unfortunately SI_C09 didn't receive any additional room connections from the DLC. I remember the first and only time this room tricked me like the fool that I am, into thinking there is a continuation, and got me to jump cluelessly to the left and fall to my death. I guess it's had to do with how open seems this part of Sky Islands look. Gameplay wise I can understand why it stops there, from that point you guided to go up into the heart of the region. And expanding the room from that point, kind of adds too much to the region and makes it more chaotic and confusing to navigate than it needs to be.

Last but not least, this room always seemed odd to me.

Considering that you climb up towers many times in Rain World, it's not very visually appealing when you can't climb up to a place that looks like it has an upper part.

But in all of the presented rooms, you can quite understand why continuing on the region from there would be weird. You have to create a weird fork in the map that distract the player from actually progressing through the game's entire map. And often it makes them get lost and frustrated. this is one of the common causes that makes new players lose their interest in Rain World.

Although you could also go against that point by claiming that Rain World's core gameplay is exploring and getting lost in the world, or at least is what makes the game so appealing. And expanding the region would help increase that feeling of being lost in a complex simulated ecosystem.

I can still understand that for vanilla Rain World, this game is not for everyone. but I mean if you chose to play Downpour as your first experience, that is kind of your problem. Because the whole point of the DLC is to expand significantly the map of the known world.

uh, um. I think got a little bit carried away, lol. This post is still about silly rooms, but I feel like I can't really talk about cool rooms and regions without talking about their important role in the core gameplay.

[mdpthatsme]

Two announcements today. I'm going to ignore the movie news because I honestly have the lowest of low expectations for it.

Project Rene scrapped? Unclear.

They've decided to restore the Sims 4 foundation, Project Olympus, to its original purpose, a multi-player MMO chat room whatever.

The excuse of "we don't want to end 10 years worth of TS4" is total BS and only wants to invoke sentimentality of players as if us older players haven't lived through 4 iterations of the game.

What they really mean is they found out how much money it will cost to run Sims 4 servers and Sims 5 servers and don't want to pay for it. Because the-totally-doesn't-need-the-internet-to-play TS4 shutting down and not giving access to players would have major backlash. Over $1000 for a game you can't play? People would be furious.

So they are sticking with the shaky foundation of TS4 as their generational game with all the horrible brokenness that console players can't get around, that modders have tried to fix, and that they themselves ignore and sweep under the rug because some people are holding onto hope they'll eventually fix it. Meanwhile, they'll distract everyone with new shiny DLCs, that will continue to have no real impact or consequences on gameplay and bring in creators to collaborate with in showmanship that they're "for the players."

TS4 will have multi-player. Big whoop. Majority of players aren't interested as they have said through countless polls and surveys.

TS4 doesn't have:

Open world

The ability to create your own world

Color wheel for all options

Cars

Robbers, real plant sims, zombies

Memories

Consequences

Astrology

Real personalities

And many other things that I don't feel like typing on a phone, but you can add yourself.

Point is, TS4's foundation is very limited. They won't be able to update the real things players want because it's just not possible with Olympus.

But hey, grim reaper expansion pack that will intrigue people for a few weeks before it releases with a ton of bugs that will continue to crumble the foundation and create more issues for the devs to slap a bandaid on.

But that's all I have to say about that.

Edit:

[mac-tirs]

Marika, Morgott, Mohg, and the Cycle of Trauma

Marika's hatred of Omens and rejection of Morgott and Mohg makes so much more sense in the context of Shadows of the Erdtree. It completely tracks that she would hate them; she spent her entire life before the Order persecuted and having her people killed and mutilated at the whims of the Hornsent, brutalised into jars for some unknown purpose. The many flesh-jar people that you fight in the dlc are probably all that's left of Marika's people, since it's said that the shamans were completely wiped out around the time Marika ascended to godhood and planted the minor erdtree near her old village. With this in mind, it makes sense that she hates the Hornsent in the Shadow Lands and the Omens in the Lands Between, even though it doesn't justify her scorn towards Morgott and Mohg, and likely why the death of Godwyn led her to finally abandoning her Order.

I feel like Godwyn's assassination was the catalyst for Marika finally acting on her doubts of her Order; Godwyn, her perfect son that was completely curseless (unlike Morgott, Mohg, Miquella, Malenia, Messmer, and possibly Melina) and of her own flesh rather than technically Radagon's (unlike Radahn, Ranni, and Rykard), being murdered probably caused her to finally see how her Golden Order failed– that her Order had become as despotic and cruel and ruthless as the Hornsent's regime in the Shadow Lands, and how rife with corruption her kingdom had become due to the divide between those with grace and the graceless. She likely shattered the Elden Ring because she knew the only way to rebuild the world her Order ruined was through destroying it first to build it better again, and she knew that the best people to accomplish this would be the ones whom her grace had spurned so long ago: the Tarnished.

I also think that she was leading the Tarnished to the Erdtree not for the Age of Fracture, the ending you get if you just reattach Marika's head to her body and become Elden Lord. I think she was gambling on the possibility of a Tarnished meeting others outside of the Order that could lead the world on a better path; I don't think she anticipated that it'd be the path of the Seedbed Curse or the Duskborn or the Frenzied Flame, but I think she was desperate enough for radical change that she was prepared to pay any cost.

Going back to her treatment of Morgott and Mohg, this realisation that her Order failed is probably why they both received their Great Runes. I don't actually think the demigods cannibalised the Elden Ring, like how the game makes you think. Like, I don't think that Radahn strolled in there and took a piece of the Elden Ring, or anyone else like Rykard and Godrick for that matter, but I do think that Marika bestowed it upon them knowing that she set in motion a plan to have all of her demigod children slain, as they're the only people that can truly stand as the final defence against her Tarnished champions. It would make sense that this was her intention, because it would also explain a bit why Ranni and Miquella eventually got rid of their own great runes: Ranni because she wanted nothing to do with the Order, and Miquella because he needed to cleanse himself of all of the previous Order to welcome his new Age of Compassion.

With this in mind, I think that her giving Morgott and Mohg their own Great Runes was both an admission and an execution. It's an admission that she was wrong and that she shouldn't have shunned them, in the form of her finally acknowledging them as her trueborn children (as well as the Erdtree's favour for Morgott as a final mercy at the end of his life, as the one who wanted it the most out of all of them). But it's also an execution in the sense that she is putting them in the line of fire to die at the hands of the Tarnished to be sure that the Tarnished will remain unchallenged as they introduce this new order and this new age as Elden Lord.

It's simultaneously gracious and ruthless, which I think is the perfect depiction of Marika's dual nature. Not even as Marika-Radagon, but as Marika herself: she can be as gracious as she is ruthless and vice versa, which is one of the most compelling aspects of Marika to me. Her grace and favour comes at a steep cost, and out of all of the demigod children, Morgott and Mohg probably paid it the most.

[comixandco]

The four Sages were called back into the past by Terrako and they remember it happening

Tulin got to meet his hero, Revali, and decided to be just like him, adopting his idol’s brash personality and drive. He practises Revali’s Gale and eventually comes up with his own way to show off his mastery of wind, and when trouble hits his home he rushes to fix it on his own to prove how strong he has become and because, like Revali, he can’t stand idly by while he knows there’s still things he can do.

For Yunobo, when he goes back and meets his ancestor Daruk, he is a very timid and reactive Goron. He needs a push from others to come up with ideas and carry plans through, and when bad things happen to him his first instinct is to use his fire magic as a shield, to wait until the threat has passed by or somebody else has come to save him. But when he is sent back in time to Divine Beast vah Rudania, for the first time he has to be the one doing the saving. Daruk encourages Yunobo and is proud of him from the moment they meet, and it’s this support that gives Yunobo the confidence to help fight against Calamity Ganon, and to start YunoboCo when he gets home.

For Sidon, meeting his family from 100 years ago is bittersweet. He is proud that he was able to protect his sister, and it’s a comfort to know there is a version of him who will grow up alongside Mipha because of his bravery and fighting prowess. But as much joy as he got from seeing her, hugging her, and hearing her voice again, it just reminds him of how unfair her death was, of just how young she was when she died and how he is now older even though he’s the younger sibling. And at the end of the war, when he’s returned to their original time, he has to readjust to her absence all over again, and in light of that is it really a shock he’d have her statue moved further away from his home? And it also explains why he’s so desperate to protect Yona from the sludge.

Riju in AoC still a new ruler to her people, despite her accomplishments in BotW, she still feels guilty over the temporary loss of the Thunder Helm and isn’t sure if she can lead the Gerudo. She has a lot of confidence but is quick to falter when things go wrong. Urbosa treats Riju as a capable fighter despite her young age, and teaches her that she should never give up, to keep trying even when her resolve falters. There is always something you can do, even when it’s just stalling for time until help can arrive. Urbosa guides her in mastering the Thunderhelm, and possibly begins teaching her to summon lightning herself after Kohga attempts to steal it, and at the end of their time together Urbosa tells Riju she’s certain she’ll lead the Gerudo well. Riju treasured her time being mentored by Urbosa so much that she considers what Urbosa would do during the Upheaval in her diary in TotK.

I think the entire reason Tulin was added to the DLC was because the TotK team had already decided that Tulin was going to be the Sage of Wind, and that since the other sages were going to meet their Champions Tulin had to as well.

At some point in the years between Botw and TotK Teba, Tulin, Sidon, Yunobo, Riju and Patricia were summoned back in time by Terrako to aid the Champions during the Calamity, and even though those events took place in a parallel timeline and had no bearing on the world they returned to, the Sages’ personalities at the beginning of TotK are because of their experiences during the Calamity and the bonds they made with the Champions.