#monthly blog

[catonator]

Funny heading to a blogpost on videogames that’s some sort of reference

Look, I already used the ctrl+alt+delete quote in a blogpost title. It’s February 2024, and it’s already a very wild year for gaming. We’ve had more layoffs than with the entirety of 2023, games shown off at events seem to be stagnating, interest in the art is waning. Youtube is filled with “modern gaming sucks” doomer blackpill videos. It’s a miserable time.

Is gaming just over?

Well, no. Of course not. The Sonic franchise has lingered for decades despite consistent failure. Games are more resilient than that.

Humanity’s relation to computing is still pretty fresh, and I’d say that despite the size and scale of a lot of it, we’re still going through major growing pains. Concepts like video games, the internet and special effects are still pretty new, despite being around for twice or thrice as long as most of the people reading this have been alive. Internal combustion engine -powered cars were invented in 1808, made mass produced in the 1910s, and even then it took until the 1950s for them to be common enough for the US government to bother designing cities around them. In the present day, many have come to resent the car-centric design mentality, even though the driving (no pun intended) factor behind them was mainly the same as with technology today: scientific and technological progression is unquestionably good, and therefore new and successful ideas should be pushed and relied upon as hard as possible. What could possibly go wrong?!

Video games are far from the only medium which is seeing similar problems. Movies have suffered greatly from a capeshit infestation, in which the abuse of VFX artists is valued over, you know, basics of good filmmaking, and the general public is clearly sick of it. On the internet, we’ve decided that megastructures like Twitter are better than forms of communication we’re good at, and it’s gone horribly wrong. We’re still learning the “do”s, “don’t”s and “who the fuck thought this was a good idea”s of tech.

Games as an artform are as alive as they ever were, but the sheer scale of the operations has grown to a point where nobody can really understand it. The numbers behind playerbases and the money traffic have so many zeroes that you can’t even fathom the number. Even if I used some metaphorical figure, like 20 000 cars. Shockingly, despite how console sales haven’t really increased in numbers (the top selling console of all time is still the PS2), most of the top-grossing games of all time are relatively recent. This implies that the behaviour of consumers has shifted from purchasing a variety of different kinds of games into purchasing fewer games of fewer different kinds. And I don’t think it’s a case of customers deciding to shift over naturally.

In the past decade or so, the gaming industry has decided sensible experiences are a way of the past, and the future is making games for debt and making back the money with horse armour and other garbage the general public doesn’t really want.

But we’ve seen this shit before. In the 90s, 3D was “the future”, and 2D pixel art or hand-drawn art in general seemed to go the way of the dodo for polygons and ““realism””. About a decade later, 2D art would see a resurgence and in some cases overtake the big lads in lasting impact. In the end, people crave personal stories, varying ideas, and interesting ways to tell them. Not much has changed since ancient Greeks, besides that the medium of storytelling has largely shifted from some guy standing on a stage, trying to explain another world, to electronic devices actually showing us the other worlds.

I think as we play out the Icarus stories in real time, we’ll also learn when boundaries are pushed too far, and the scale of the bullshit simply collapses in on itself. When that happens, the public is forced to step back and reevaluate the ways we thought were the future, and what really is better for all of us.

When a storm flattens a forest of dead, decrepit trees, the sun and rain can now reach the ground and cultivate a new generation of different plant life. Once hidden beneath the dead corpses, now able to grow and bloom in a way the old generation never could. You should just keep doing what you think is right. Now’s the time more than ever to be the backbone of a better industry, for many applications of tech, from games to communication. And it’s better, if the backbone comes from the grassroots, and isn’t defined by the megacorporations. Because those cunts will never learn from their failures.

[authorracheljoy]

The June Blogpost is HERE!

[enya-writes98]

March Blog 2024

Happy March everyone! Here's where you can find my March Blog and get one big update for how things are going and what you can expect coming up!

Happy March!Hoo, boy. What a time. My podcast posting schedule has not been going to plan, as I’m sure you may have noticed. I promised two episodes in February and those did not go as planned. HOWEVER, I have a plan to make it up to my listeners. The January and February episodes for Rose Petal Musings are BOTH going to have different guests!January is going to feature someone I’ve had episodes…

[gingerdrift]

october

movies and tv Demon Slayer I need to retract my earlier statement about demon slayer being ‘good, but I’m not super invested’… I am now SUPER invested and obsessed and I need more!! The animation is stunning, the story is stunning, the sound design is stunning… I am now reading the manga to get caught up Loki Season two of Loki started this month and I’m enjoying it just as much as the first.…

[lunaeasque]

Hello

[crispydinosaurstrawberry]

Our Month | August 2022

Our Month | August 2022

[fixing-bad-comic-art]

(original found on @bad-comic-art )

[bookaddict24-7]

January was a stressful reading month for me because Libby + the holidays had me with a ridiculous amount of library loans. ✨

• I read 41 books

• 22 of those were books I owned.

• Fave book: Lotus by Jennifer Hartmann

• Least Fave: Suddenly by Isabelle Autissier

• I DNF'ed II books

• 1 Unhauled 9 books

[clownsuu]

yall i think jack died

Nah I'm fine dawg, iv been busy these past two-three days

[sophaeros]

arctic monkeys for observer music monthly, july 2009 (x) [text version]

[livelaughloveluobinghe]

svsss is actually bad rep because it perpetuates the idea that tummy aches can be cured by gay sex. do u know how devastated i am that it is not true????

[catonator]

Games Beaten In 2024: Penny’s Big Breakaway

Call me a games journalist, ‘cus I’m giving attention to an indie game made by (some) people I know.

AAA gaming nowadays is a little like being chased by a giant machete-wielding monster clown, but the clown is in too poor health to actually sprint after you, and doesn’t really wield any interesting exclusive machetes, and most of the time can’t be bothered to show up and instead opts to virtually pretend to chase you in a Monster Clown Direct. And never even whips its cock out.

Anyway, in one of those aforementioned Monster Clown Directs, Penny’s Big Breakaway got a release date, which was right then and there. Probably the only 2024 game I was really looking forward to, since it was made by Evening Star, the studio that consists of a good chunk of the Sonic Mania team and a bunch of fans and modders surrounding it, and it was not a monster clown, instead being a cute little B-grade experience. It seemed to get a relatively muted amount of attention over the end of last year, but was slowly building up interest as more and more people learned about it and began to understand who was behind it. And then the game was shadow dropped out of nowhere. Always a great sign, the babies that flush out of uptown drain pipes into the city river are definitely not mistreated.

I got a little worried the game might’ve gotten shafted by the publisher. It doesn’t seem to be getting the greatest care for the marketing, compared to a more involved hype cycle over a month or so after a release date announcement. Hi-Fi Rush got the same treatment and I feel like as a result it didn’t make as many waves as it should’ve. It also really pissed me off since I had about a dozen other things I was working on at the same time, including another FINISHED blogpost that I pushed back indefinitely because I wanted this one to be more timely. Yeah, fuck you video games for breaking my schedule of misery and frustration to be all fun and shit.

So, Penny is a 3D platformer, as seems to be an increasing amount of indie games nowadays. 

The story is quite simple. Penny, in a freak teleporter accident, ends up merging with a 1970s plastic vacuum cleaner and materialises in a place called Vanillatown. She immediately loses her train of thought and ends up applying to a talent contest for no particular reason after also forgetting how queues work. After she fucks up her audition by stripping the nation’s wannabe- benevolent dictator in front of a live audience, she ends up chased out of the auditorium and around the world with no real sense of goal. That’s about it. But it’s a 3D platformer, granddad, 3D platformers are cool and don’t need story and stories are for Star Trek nerds anyway. Let’s get to the gameplay.

The game’s core mechanic is an animate yo-yo Penny just has for no explained reason (remember: story is for lamerz). The yo-yo acts as both an offence method as well as a platforming assistance. You can use the yo-yo to pull on stuff and hang from the air in a rather satisfying manner. Penny herself can only walk, jump and double jump, and together with the yo-yo you have around 6 different moves to execute, which doesn’t sound like much, but ends up coming together fairly well. Penny on foot controls a bit like a maglev brick, being both floaty and heavy, but this really encourages you to stay in the air as much as possible and chaining various moves to rack up combos that boost your points count.

The control scheme is somewhat unique, in that the game emphasises using the right analog stick to aim the yo-yo while attacking or swinging. Thus you’ll have to jump using the shoulder buttons on the controller. The style is rather experimental and reminiscent of Grabbed by the Ghoulies on the original Xbox… which may be an insult now that I think about it. Regardless, the control scheme works surprisingly well when you get used to it. All in all, learning the feel for the game ends up making it incredibly fun to fly through the stages pretending the floor is some sort of molten rock trap for poor people and shouldn’t be touched. It’s satisfying in a way that’s hard to understand through written word, sort of like reading about sex in a middle school biology book.

So it’s really a shame that the game’s buggier than the annual cockroach dune buggy race in Bugscuffle, Tennessee, bugging you because of the noise levels. Penny seems to have the same roughness around the edges as something like the first Ratchet & Jank. It’s disconcertingly easy to go through a wall, so much so that I ended up doing it more times than I can count on my fingers during a single playthrough and died to it twice. Most slopes can end up softlocking you if there’s any kind of object underneath it since you don’t seem to have any kind of control in them so you end up sliding against an errant potted plant or tranquillised squirrel, and there’s a specific kind of rolling tube object that I think is supposed to have you stick to it like the spinning wheels in Sonic CD’s Metallic Madness. I say I think, since standing on them always plays Penny’s “about to slide off” animation, and you get chucked to oblivion about a third of the time when rotating around them.

Additionally, the camera seems to have started some sort of revolution against the tyrannical rule of The Player. Penny’s central design is that the camera is always on a fixed track, which is nifty since most modern platformers have opted for a camera design philosophy called “whuzzat? we were supposed to do something?” where the camera aimlessly hovers around the player like a rubber spider on invisible string and has no designer-specified guiding at all. The kicker comes from the fact that Penny’s camera is under psychotic levels of micromanagement, but also doesn’t always have a clear idea where it should be pointed. So sometimes you get the camera staring at a really well decorated wall and leaving you confused since there’s no clear idea where you should be going next, and sometimes it’s staring at the admittedly really pretty skybox and daydreaming about greek philosophers when you want to look down and see a platform you want to land on. Any backtracking always creates a fun Crash Bandicoot-style “guess where the bottomless pit is that’s right it’s under you right now” challenge, since there’s no programmed zoom out when running towards it and you can’t see where the fuck you’re going.

And these issues frustrate me all the more since I do genuinely like the game. I did almost throw my controller a few times, but despite the annoyance I always kept coming back to the game and ended up finishing it with a smile on my face. The worlds, while being fairly well-trodden themes, still have enough unique character in them through visual design and denizen dialogue so that they don’t end up feeling generic. The bosses have fun designs and the soundtrack’s really good. When the game does work out, it really works out and it’s one of the most fun platformers out there.

So I guess what I’m saying is, maybe wait a month or so for the most egregious issues to be patched out, or just be wary that you may end up being consumed by a really hungry wall at some point. These issues are the kinds of problems that you’d expect from a first time studio making their first big 3D release, and with the heart and fun present in the game I really hope Penny ends up being successful enough for Evening Star to refine their stuff in future sequels or games otherwise.

Ah, but it’s march, which means that the monster clowns are starting to wake up from their Q1 slumber and the really interesting machetes are being sharpened, so by next month I may even have figured out what the fuck I’m on about. Toodles!

[authorracheljoy]

The December Blogpost is (FINALLY) HERE!

[enya-writes98]

January Blog 2024

Happy January! I've begun a new monthly blog post for those curious to be up to date on the happenings that are Rose Petal Writings! Check it out and let me know what you think!

Happy January y’all! This might seem a little strange with the title, but I wanted to give a bit of a new spin on my usual posts. They’ve been really infrequent this past year so for 2024, I’m sprucing things up by doing a monthly blog post! This will be a bigger deal than my regular, smaller posts and be kind of a summary of what’s been happening and what will be coming up as a whole. This way,…

[cupidzrock-net]

bugs when u lift up a rock

[bridgeportbritt]

BridgeportBritt's Reading List - March

Okay as I mentioned yesterday, I've had this idea of posting what stories I'm reading. One to help keep me accountable because I really want to catch up on all my stories eventually (Currently caught up on 17/45 omg lol) and also to shine a light on other amazing storytellers. We'll see how this goes!

Recently Caught Up (In the last few weeks)

@the-lancasters (just finished this one!)

@warwickroyals (took me a minute to catch up but it's green!)

@nexility-sims (beautiful story!)

@cinamun (stay stressing me out but I'm caught up again!)

@trentonsimblr (thanks also to @ardeney-sims for making the collab easy to catch up on!)

@ladybugsimblr (caught up finally after I went back to posts I missed!)

@storiesbyjes2g (one of the few stories I try to keep up with daily but eventually end up spamming lol)

@trumpets0ng (a pace I can keep up with! lol)

@armoricaroyalty (just had a few posts to read up on)

@covingtons (just a few posts here as well!)

In Progress This Week

@rebouks - 13/54 pages of Somnium (So Good! Can't wait to catch up because I have so many comments to spam lol)

@xldkx 31/55 pages of Papercuts (These characters are keeping me hooked lol)

@digital-deluxe - Started Erudition and Public Enemies this week finally! I've been wanting to read this one for a while and I'm caught up on @atreanroyals!

What's Next

In Progress - @ellemant, @theroyalthornoliachronicles, @simgerale (So behind on all of these but I know I'm somewhere in the middle lol)

Not started - @shesthespinstersimmer, @aristocraticvision, @theroyalthrones, @renaldiroyals, @mysimsloveaffair, @sirianasims, @lynzishell, @madebysimblr (Excited to start all of these soon!)

This is not the full list of stories I'm reading, but the ones I've recently read or have up on my list next. For reference, I keep a spreadsheet and its color-coded green for caught up, yellow for in progress, and red for not started yet. Let's see how much progress you girl can make in a week, shall we?