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keysmashingfantasies · 2 years

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Heyo! Could you maybe do a story about Chishiya and reader. Something about the both of them getting into a huge fight over something and they start avoiding each other. After a bit both come to realise they really miss each other but are to stubborn to do anything. Chishiya finally cracks and decides to tell reader but before he could they go into a game and reader avoids him until they end up getting hurt nearly dying. So he tells them how he feels but reader ends up surviving and the go back to the roof and talk and they confess and he asks her out and lots of fluff. Sorry my English is terrible.

i sure can! thank you for asking (⁠´⁠∩⁠｡⁠•⁠ ⁠ᵕ⁠ ⁠•⁠｡⁠∩⁠`⁠). and your english is fine, don't worry!

ps: it's a bit different from the request but i hope that's ok with you.

ps2: this is so fucking long im sorry.

potential tw: mentions overdose and lethal dosages, several medications and substances, syringes, medical inaccuracy in general. anon, if this is triggering for you please contact me again so i can write something different for you.

The thing in the new world is that there was no way of telling the time accurately. Unless you were in a timed game, there were only sunrises and sunsets to rely on. So you went by feeling. The thumping of the bass music by the pool, for instance, even when people were just starting to come back from the games, felt like it had been going on for days. It felt like you and Chishiya were stuck on a fight for about the same amount of time, his smug attitude combined with the music was enough to make your head hurt and you wanted to strangle him.

"You have to realize you can't sacrifice yourself for strangers like that", he said. You sighed for the nth time since the conversation started.

"It wasn't a sacrifice! I'm right here, am I not?", you said. Chishiya's anxiety was on an all time high, which on the outside translated to him being furious. He couldn't believe he almost lost you.

"You could not be! What, you decided to be a hero now?", his face looked calm for now, but he had red splotches on his chest and going up his neck, the vein on the side of it bulging under the hot skin, he started to move his hands around inside his pockets.

"It was a calculated risk! I knew there were no chance of me dying, Chishiya!", you were exasperated. You knew Chishiya had a habit and a hobby of treating beach residents like children but you thought you and Kuina were an exception, that you got an ounce of respect. Apparently, you were wrong.

"There's always chance of death here. If that was a calculated risk then you sure are stupid". His face slightly fell. He immediately regretted it. If your anger felt like a boiling pot on the verge of overflowing before, now it felt like a heavy block of ice on your chest. You wanted to hurt him. Chishiya was indifferent and nonchalant about a lot of things. But he despised stupidity.

"What did you just called me?", you said, your voice low. And if it wasn't for the mind numbing song being done, only to be quickly replaced with another, Chishiya was sure he wouldn't have heard you.

"You're not thinking straight. I guess I was mistaken about you and how useful you can be", he regained composure very quickly. He didn't repeat the word again, though.

"Is that what I'm good for? Being useful to you?", you voice was pure venom. Chishiya gave the fakest smirk in his life but it worked. He refused to let you win. You were fuming beneath all that ice.

"I don't know if that's all you're good for. But it's true", he shrugged his shoulders. It was your time to smile, but it did not reach your eyes, the light inside of them dimming.

"Then good luck for you and Kuina to get out of here without me. I hope you don't throw her under a bus too", you spat, leaving him behind on the roof.

You had to pull some strings and kiss some ass but you managed to go to a game on a whole different district than Chishiya, rather than stay close to him. If you happened to land on the same game and saw his face, you were certain that given the chance you'd kill him. That's what you told yourself when you started to avoid him after the fight a few days prior.

Honestly, as much as you were furious, you know seeing him would hurt more than refresh your anger. And you didn't want to give him the satisfaction.

You landed on a game of clubs with four Beach girls and two strangers. You all entered a white room, unsettlingly bright and clean with one table and one monitor on one of the walls of what used to be a hospital. You knew Chishiya would know what to do and the thought of him made your face twist in disgust. You stood around a circular table with what looked like all sorts of medical containers. Droppers, syringes, beakers, flasks of medication arranged in a circle around a roulette. You accessed the strangers again. For the looks of it, father and son, that landed on this new world by accident. Good luck with that, you thought. At least they're in a clubs game for now.

Registration closed. Game: Pharmacy. Difficulty: 7 of clubs. In the table there are dosages of different substances in various degrees of toxicity, from harmless to lethal. The players will take turns spinning the roulette to decide what they should consume. Then, the remaining six will decide the course of action. The game objective is to finish the whole 7 containers one way or another, but they all must be consumed. If you try to empty the containers in any other way, is game over. You can lose players in this game, but only unanimous decisions will count. You will have one hour.

First, the blonde girl on the right is selected first to spin the roulette. The robotic voiced ringed again: Player one: 3500mg of cough syrup.

Then the boy. He looked about 18. Player two: 100mg of cyanide. His father started sobbing immediately, a sound you tried your best to drawn out. You understood though. The boy weighed 60kg at best.

Then one of the other girls that came with you, one with pastel blue hair, that was standing across from you in the circular table was next. Player three: 700mg of pure mercury.

Then the father was next, he sniffled and turned the roulette with a weak arm, absolutely devastated. The kid looked more concerned for his life then him. Player four: 800mg of sugar. He gave a humorless laugh and banged his fist on the table, but the boy visibly relaxed. Only in the borderlands. But you understood. If it came down to it, you'd rather see Chishiya safe than be safe yourself.

Then another girl was next. You didn't know how she wasn't cold with her sleeveless pink top. She was shaking when she turned the wheel but it most definitely looked like nerves rather than the chilly room. Player five: 60mg of tigersnake venom.

Then it was your turn. You felt like you were about to throw up, spinning the the roulette with as much force as you could, as if that'd help with anything. Player six: 24mg of tetrodotoxin. Shit, you thought.

Then the last girl, with stripey blonde highlights on her hair. She had shed a few tears. Player seven: 20mg of ricin.

You have one hour.

The father immediately panicked.

"My son is not taking anything. If the rest of you don't take it all, I'll kill you all myself", he spat.

"It's in the rules that the decisiond must be unanimous. If you kill us without taking our votes into consideration, you'll die as well", you deadpanned, only to make an expression of distaste next. You spoke like Chishiya.

"What will we do then? Just do it and then what? Wait to see if it kills us?", blue haired girl broke down, hugging herself.

"No, maybe there's another way...", the pink top girl said.

"YEAH? LIKE WHAT?", the older man yelled, promptly initiating a ruckus. They were all screaming, crying, talking over each other in the small space, the pounding headache you had on the beach was returning. If that was a calculated risk then you sure are stupid.

"EVERYONE QUIET!", you yelled. "Please, okay? Maybe... maybe there's something we're missing", you said, resting your trembling hands on the cool glass of the table.

"Like what? You know what poison you got? Tetrodotoxin. People die every year from eating that. Just a few grams and BAM!", the father was cackling. "If I'm going to lose my son then I'll make sure to kick you while you're dying".

"Dad!", the son looked horrified. This world really takes the worst of people. The father calmed down while being reprimanded by his son and the other girls.

"What did you say?", you asked. You were so angry to be asking yourself what would Chishiya do. But even with him being an absolute asshole, he was smart. You shook your head again. "...then you sure are stupid".

"I said I'll kick-"

"No, you moron. Before that", you asked.

"A few grams?", he looked genuinely confused.

"Yeah... That. It's poison but... to kill us, it needs a certain amount, right?", you said. "What if we share?"

Everyone agreed immediately, except for the father, who needed maybe 15 more minutes of persuasion. Even if by the end of it, just his son had enough patience to deal with him.

"Everything is measured", the boy said. "Maybe this is what we are supposed to do after all!", the boy was so optimistic it made you sad.

"Okay. Let's start". You took the small dropper from the table.

"We'll start with yours?", the pink girl asked.

"You're right. Let's start with the less lethal first. If we get out quick enough we can-", you took a glance at the boy and his father. "We can make ourselves puke as quick as possible. And find a pharmacy". You didn't have the heart to say you had access to a doctor in front of the two non Beach members. "Sugar first. You, are you good at math?", you asked the boy. After everything was calculated, each one of you ate the dosage of sugar as quick as possible, the overwhelming sweetness making you clench your jaw.

"Next-", you started.

"Cough syrup?", asked the ricin girl.

"Yeah, I think so", you took turns passing the beaker around, taking tentative sips to make sure the liquid was evenly distributed. If you weren't overwhelmed with the sweetness before, you sure was now.

"What now?", asked blue haired girl, her eyes going glassy and big.

"Mercury next", you said.

"100 milligrams for each?", asked the girl. "Are you sure?"

"No. But it's better than only you taking 700mg all by yourself, no?", you said, and she nodded decidedly.

After it was consumed, you looked around. "Everyone ok?", besides uneasy looks, no one had collapsed yet which you took as success for the time being. "We have to be quick now, before our body starts processing it".

"Take her inside! Take her inside now!", pleaded the girls, while Tatta carried your limp body on his arms to Ann's autopsy room, followed by a small mob of curious people.

Chishiya, that was on the lobby worried sick at your game taking so long blanched immediately seeing your limp body. You and the four desperate girls following Tatta covered from what it seemed splotches of your own puke. Fortunately, the militants decided to be useful for once and disperse the crowd. Chishiya, an executive member, was let in.

Up close it was even scarier. He was used to seeing people in these conditions at the hospital but never someone he cared about. He went in and out of consciousness it seemed, his body frozen and eyes zeroed in on your closed ones while the blue haired girl sterically tried to explain to Ann what had happened, her latex gloved fingers down your throat to make you puke more.

"This man... Poison... Convincing him... Unanimous... The son...Really sick... Two minutes... Took what was left... Saved our lives".

If Chishiya wasn't already absolutely destroyed, he definitely would be now. This was the final blow to his conscience. He insulted you, pushed you away, let you go on to a game without him or Kuina. So you strayed from his sight and now you were passed out on a table, covered in puke. Just because he was too much of a coward to just tell you he was worried because he loved you.

"She's not puking anymore. Now we just have to take care of her and wait. Tatta, take her out of here. Girls, I'll take care of you next".

"I'll take her. Tatta, I'll take her to my room", With each one of your limp arms around the neck of each man, they slowly managed to take you into the elevator until Chishiya's room's floor. He put you on the bed on your side carefully and forced himself to not even blink as much, waiting for any reaction out of you, checking your heartbeat every 10 seconds. After an hour and some crying he decided to gingerly clean you up with a moist towel, taking off your dirty clothes and rinsing your mouth delicately with water, sitting next your naked body on the bed and taking one of your hands in his, placing it on his lap and playing with your fingers, one of his thumbs pressed firmly into your pulse.

"I'm so sorry. You're not dumb. You're not dumb at all. You're just brave. Braver than me. I shouldn't have said that, I'm a coward, I should've admitted to you and myself that I loved you and spared you from this. Please wake up so I can look you in the eyes when I apologize", he looked at your naked body in the moonlight, your face looked serene despite everything. You looked like an angel. For a moment he tried to pretend you had just made love. That you were asleep dreaming of the life you'd start together out of that world. He rested his elbows on his knees, dropping his head and pressing your hand sandwiched between his on his sweaty forehead.

"...shiya", you groaned.

Everything hurt. Your head, your joints, your throat. Your limbs felt like they were made of lead and you had to make a conscious effort to move even a pinky. Then everything came rushing back.

"Y/N? Y/N, open your eyes. Open. Please. It's me, Chishiya", a voice you knew all too well spoke.

To the dismay of your pounding head, you opened your eyes, but even with the lights off you still felt awful.

"What are you doing here?", you slurred, coughing a bit from your raw throat. Your mouth tasted like something crawled inside it and died.

Instantly a bottle of cold water was pressed to your lips, and you tried your best to glare at Chishiya through your drowsy state while he helped you drink. He looked rough, like he hadn't slept days and had been crying a lot.

"You been crying?", you asked, voice to weak to go above a whisper.

"I was worried about you", he said, placing the bottle back on the bedside table without looking you in the eyes.

"You worried about me? Why? Thought you said I was dumb and not useful for your scheming and whatnot. What changed?", he could tell you were angry, even if your voice was monotone.

"I changed. I loved you before all the same. I just...", he paused for a moment. You opened a weak smile and Chishiya was suddenly on the verge of tears again. "I'm sorry. This was all my fault. I just-", he cupped your face.

"How is what happened to me your fault?", you asked.

"I should've been there. With you. But even when I wasn't, you made me proud. I love you", he said.

"It's not your fault. I had to go be a hero again. Not smart", you closed your eyes, the weak lighting finally getting the best of you.

"Very smart. The smartest in this whole place", he said softly.

"Besides you?", you chuckled before coughing again.

"Yeah, that", he gave you a wobbly smile you didn't see.

"Chishiya... I love you. And I'm sorry too, I shouldn't have avoided you", you said. "Come hold me please? I owe you a kiss, promise I'll pay as soon as I can brush my teeth".

Chishiya held you to his chest gingerly, kissing the top of your head. He'd never leave you out of sight again.

#chishiya #imawa no kuni no alice #alice in borderland imagine #alice in borderland fic #alice in borderland chishiya #shuntaro chishiya #aib chishiya #shuntaro chishiya x reader #chishiya x reader

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lizardsfromspace · 8 months

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So the NFL's been doing special broadcasts for kids, since a lot of kids aren't playing or liking football these days for some unstated reason. In the past these involved a Nick broadcast with slime, and a broadcast with live color commentary from Patrick Star

Their new one is a special Toy Story broadcast that takes all the player tracking data from the game, and uses it to create animated doppelgangers of all the players as toys in Andy's Room. It looks like this

This looks like a lost PS2 game called Disney(TM)-Pixar(TM) Monday Night Football (TM) Cartoon Slam. What is this

This is the weirdest way anyone's ever broadcast a Jags London game, and Yahoo! once livestreamed one on Tumblr

Also Andy is incredibly into football now I guess. Since Toy Story 3 came out in 2010 and Andy was off to college then Andy Toystory would be, like, thirty now. Did he drop out and move home and get back his old toys from that little girl and also buy a lot of little football players and he stays in his room all day making them play and telling them "it's all okay you're back now, it's time to play, like when I was a kid" and Woody's just kind of sad about the whole thing, and then Andy stalks off to the corner to cry and all the toys have to lay there and watch his breakdown bc they daren't move while he's looking at them, not just to keep the masquerade but because revealing the truth may break his already fragile psyche, which is warped by his mom pointing out to him that Sid, the garbage man, is happy and has a nice house with his husband and kids, isn't it funny, and Andy laughed but in private he was so enraged he tore apart his toys and now he's angrier that he can't put them back together, and he just has Woody and Buzz and he's telling them he fucked up, he always fucks up, WHY CAN'T ANYTHING GO RIGHT ANYMORE? and then he runs off to the attic and none of the toys know if he's more of a danger to himself or others, and the torn up ones are still alive and conscious of their splintered being and can, for the first time in their plastic existence, suffer?

Anyway, the first down chains are Slinky Dog and players phase into him sometimes. Whoa!

This is a 1:1 replication of a real-life game happening in London and it has people running into Slinky Dog and merging with him. Past broadcasts just had AR elements, this one is full-on CGI models stiffly miming real-world movements. If any kid gets into football from this they have to be told that it actually isn't CGI toys playing most weeks. Though it will be for the Jags bc they have a second London game this year

#nfl #sports #long post

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prinnamon · 4 months

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[Start ID. Tags that read: #one of them is confirmed dead btw #shephard saw colettes body in xen #who knows what gina is doing #i think abt them sometimes #raging lesbians. End ID.]

Hi, Hello, and Welcome To My Twisted Mind! i don't mean to correct you @freeshephoun but i noticed your tags on my other silly half-wife post and i wanted to let you know hahahaheehoo it's worse than that :) i hope you don't mind me using you as an excuse to talk at length about cross and green and their ambiguous fate

(low-poly blood/corpse screenshots from the game and lots of text under the read more!)

[Start ID. A screenshot of what appears to be Gina Cross in a red HEV suit dead in one of the Displacement Cannon locations in Xen. End ID.]

in Opposing Force, a corpse bearing a striking resemblance to Gina Cross but wearing a red HEV suit can be found in one of the Displacement Cannon locations.

[ID in alt text.]

according to a tweet by Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford in 2018, it is indeed Gina Cross. Colette Green's fate is unspecified, but he suggests maybe G-Man found her useful enough/had enough compassion for her to put her in stasis like Shephard.

Opposing Force did come out before Decay, so considering that changes were still being made to Decay's story during development, far enough along that there are some voice lines and animations for the scrapped missions, it's likely they had no thoughts about anything that would happen in Decay's story when they decided to include Dr. Cross's dead body as an easter egg in OpFor. so, despite the confirmation by one of the people most likely to be considered An Authority on what happened in the expansions, the canon-icity of this is... slightly debatable? especially considering that (iirc) "Gina Cross's" body can actually be spotted in multiple Displacement Cannon locations in OpFor. so unless there was a wild teleporter accident that created multiple instances of her who all died in different spots... okay, wait, i said that as a hypothetical and a joke but now i like that a lot as a narrative device, fuck.

but you get what i'm saying. whether or not this is "canon" is dubious because you'd have to reconcile a lot of contradictory story elements in order to explain how one can accept this as true.

...

CHAPTER 7: RECONCILING A LOT OF CONTRADICTORY STORY ELEMENTS IN ORDER TO EXPLAIN HOW ONE CAN ACCEPT THIS AS TRUE

[PT: Chapter 7: Reconciling a Lot of Contradictory Story Elements In Order to Explain How One Can Accept This as True /end PT]

if you choose to take Pitchford's tweet as canon, what's especially strange (and tragic, i'll explain) is that Gina has never been shown wearing a red HEV suit anywhere else as far as i'm aware. she wears an orange suit when you see her hologram in the training program in Half-Life and Opposing Force, and she wears a tan/ivory suit in Decay.

[Start ID. A scan of a posed render of Colette Green (left, standing) and Gina Cross (right, crouched) from the Half-Life PS2 manual. Colette Green wears a red HEV suit and Gina Cross wears a tan one. End ID.]

red is Colette's color, which i imagine is probably the source of the initial confusion. which could lead you to conclude that, although this is gina, she's wearing colette's HEV suit. it would explain why she's alone. her suit may have been damaged beyond repair, and it wasn't enough to protect her, so she had to take Colette's as she went off on her own for one last desperate mission that required Gina to enter the Xen even after they and Dr. Keller thought they had successfully sealed the dimensional rift.

so, yeah, picture that. they only had one working suit left. so only one of them could go. and it had to be Cross because of her experience. and even despite their best efforts, despite Green giving up her hazard suit to give Cross the best odds, she still failed.

we know based on the ending of OpFor that the detonation of the nuclear bomb in the car park would have killed anyone still stuck at Black Mesa after a certain point, as Green and Keller almost definitely were if things went back to shit after the end of Decay, which they would have had to if Cross managed to end up dead in Xen. it doesn't make sense to say that they'd then just go "acceptable losses!" and book it, since they took so much responsibility upon themselves throughout Decay's story, so i feel they probably stayed and continued to dedicate themselves to damage control up until the very end. and, like, how would they have known about the bomb? communications were out. probably nobody except Shephard, the black ops team, and that one security guard would have been aware, realistically. so, even if Green and Keller would have wanted to escape and save themselves, there's virtually no way they'd have had enough advance notice to get out of there.

but since Colette's effort was admirable enough for her to deserve a reward in the G-Man's eyes (or maybe just to be kept in reserve in case she's needed later, depending on how you read G's motivations), she, like Shephard, was placed in stasis. and if she ever wakes up again, she'll presumably be without Keller since Pitchford makes no mention of him, and she'll definitely be without Gina.

OR if you don't want to engage with the tragedy of any of this, you can just say that the dead Ginas found in OpFor are uh. y;know. copies of her that were created somehow when she and Colette got caught up in the harmonic reflux after sealing the dimensional rift! which is sad for the clones—and oooky spooky because (mario voice) who REALLY died that day? and who came back??—but otherwise, all three of them got out of Black Mesa together.

I think about them. i think about them a lot. whyyyyy why why why WHY can't dr keller and the half-wifes be from an expansion people have easy access to like blue shit and opposing fart. screams and cries and throws up!!! no actual hate towards Blue Shift or OpFor; i love them, i just wish Decay was also two dollar and on PC

Gina Cross's page on Combine OverWiki was the main source for all my information. i also sourced the screenshot of Cross dead and the scan of Cross and Green's posed render from there. hopefully this post makes people realize that there is interesting shit going on with these characters that is worth exploring.

my final message: dear entire world, include colette green in your drawings of the freezer crew chilling in stasis (nonthreatening suggestion)

#i look forward to the release of the unofficial half-life decay: solo mission on steam so i can finally play it #let me know if i typo'd or misspoke in this. i proofread it before posting #worked on this for longer than i meant to. it was originally going to be a short reblog LOL #it turned into essay-length Decay propaganda and deserved its own post #prinna's posts #half-life #half life #half-life: decay #half life: decay #half-life decay #half life decay #gina cross #colette green #half-wife #half wife #hm. unsure if it's fair to tag opposing force. well Yeah because gina's corpse is an OpFor easter egg and i talked about it at length #opposing force #hlop4 #op4 #opfor #half-life opposing force #half life opposing force #half-life: opposing force #half life: opposing force #however i will NOT be tagging keller because i barely talked about him and did not show any pictures of him #and that would feel unfair to the 2 keller fans i know have got to be out there somewhere

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toyota-supra · 4 months

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My Top 10 Favorite Games I Played In 2023

In chronological order. It's a long one.

Titanfall 2

I've been told to play this for years now, though for most of those I did not really know why, as it never seemed like my kind of game. But, ever since I started really getting into mecha sometime in 2022, I decided to finally give it a try. I'm very glad I did. Titanfall 2 is a criminally short First Person Shooter with a very fun mech/pilot dynamic, really good mechanics of movement and combat for both, and some of my favorite level design of any game I've played in a long while. The platforming is crazy good! The mechanics are tight as hell! The mech is awesome! I recommend Titanfall 2 for literally anyone reading this.

Mega Man Zero

The Zero series is the one that most called to me in the Mega Man franchise every time I looked these games over, and I was right in that judgement. While I couldn't say if I was going to appreciate most of the GBA era action platformer difficulty or not, it was clear from Zero's more agile movement and bite-sized missions with very memorization-heavy bosses that I would enjoy it. And I did enjoy it a lot! Most of the bosses kicked my ass but it was an absolute blast to finally learn their patterns enough to defeat them. The problem is, I went out of my way to not get any of the game's health upgrades or energy tanks, making the final boss so hard for me that after days and days of attempts I gave up. Not beating Mega Man Zero is probably my biggest regret of the year lmao

Fate/Stay Night

Honestly, what do I even say? You can see my Saber icon, right? Fate is a franchise I never bothered to get close to, knowing of its name only through vague images and names of more popular characters (not even from FGO, just in general), and from later on getting to know that Fate/Grand Order was the game it is I felt like it wasn't for me at all and who cares. So when I learned what the original VN was actually about I felt stupid. How could something so fitting to my tastes have gone under my radar for so long...? Despite not being much of a reader in general, F/SN is a very long game that feels like it's just as short as you need it to be. The prose flows so well, every single character is lovable in many ways, and there's so much passion written into them and the situations they're in that it's one of the most smooth-flowing VNs I've read (which granted are not many) even though it's around the high 6 digit wordcounts. I love this game dearly.

Stranger of Paradise - Final Fantasy Origin

I wanted to play this game since the first few trailers! How cruel was it that, not only did I not have a powerful enough machine at the time, but the game wasn't even on Steam until the year after release? Final Fantasy Origin is the game it presents itself to be. There's something about it that's so special to a certain kind of person (which I happen to be one of) and that falls flat for everyone else. The combat and its many Weapons, Jobs and Skills to use are just fantastic in how nice they feel, and I really do like the type of story Stranger tells. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm close to it. I like to describe Stranger of Paradise as everything good about PS2 and PS3 games in a modern title.

Pseudoregalia

An old feeling from a new friend. Pseudoregalia is everything I like in 3D Platforming, and a little bit of what I don't. If you've ever looked at a single gif or video of Super Mario 64 and thought, "this looks pretty fun to play," you should be playing Pseudoregalia. If you like goat ladies with big butts, I can't say I understand if that would sell you on a game or not, but it is a feature everyone mentions. I wrote on this game already, so please do check that out and get it. It's one of the three titles of this list that came out this year, and I have not heard enough people talk about it.

Armored Core VI - Fires of Rubicon

My favorite in this list, which is funny because I don't know what to say about it at all. Armored Core is a series I've been studying up on from the outside for a while, and the announcement for this title was my reason to finally dive in. Unfortunately, I did not get past playing the first mission of AC1 a few times and booting up AC3 once. But I will get to it eventually! Fires of Rubicon is one hell of an action game, that I adored for every single one of my (currently) 67 hours of play. Going through the campaign with builds a little too busted for the AI most of the time was my dishonorable focus of the experience, but there's a lot else to do for every kind of person. The amount of freedom you have for messing with your builds for either single or multiplayer is not to be underestimated. Though it could be better. Here's hoping there will be a game that is.

Midnight Club 3 DUB Edition Remix

I played this game as a kid so much that the main menu and its theme are scarred into my mind, yet this whole time I had no idea what the game was actually like due to the fact that most of my playtime was doing a few races and just cruising around. Once you dive into trying to finish the story, MC3 is a much different experience. One that frustrated me so much, I got actually ill from the stress. Please take breaks, gamers! Your health is more important than finishing an 18 year old game! Still, I did eventually do it. Midnight Club 3's handling model and gameplay structure are really impressive in comparison to the much more popular Need for Speed series, and I have to admit I did enjoy the game a lot. It's just a lot harder than it ever needed to be. I'll probably never forget this game, and that's not really a good or bad thing. Just, advice from me, if it gets too hard, maybe switch to sports bikes. Buy that Ducati.

Test Drive Unlimited

Another car game, but this one I have the least to say about of any on this list. I had played TDU on PS2 multiple times before and thought it was awesome. The atmosphere and immersion of this game are unrivaled by any racing game to this day. But playing the PC version with a steering wheel and pedals made everything so much more incredible. I played the Platinum mod, which adds hundreds more cars and fixes a lot of issues with the original game (but not all of them; the game was still really rough and I hate how much the resolution is a pain to change). Overall, one of my favorite experiences with a steering wheel controller so far. Otherwise, a pretty good game if you like driving.

Super Mario Sunshine

An old friend, and a new feeling. I don't play 3D platformers as much as I wish I did, because they're really not part of my main priorities looking for games lately, but every time I play a Mario game, it's like I found love again. It was not the first time I played Super Mario Sunshine, as I had collected a dozen or so Sprites years before, but playing the whole game in I think two weeks during the latter half of the year was such an incredible experience. Unless for some reason you play it on the Switch, Sunshine is a game that loves you as much as you love it. And you do love it, right? I know I do. I'd love to play this game many other times in the future. Granted, that applies to every game here, I just wanted to say it out loud for this one.

Lethal Company

A fairly recent release! Having played it with many groups of people by now, both modded and vanilla, I think Lethal Company is probably one of my favorite multiplayer experiences ever. It is scary and hilarious, but also just really really good, to a level that surprised me for my quality standards of co-op (horror) games. Lethal Company turns friends into improvised horror movie actors and it's incredible. I'm almost at 30 hours played and will likely get to 40 at minimum. It's also pretty cheap and likely runs well on all sorts of machines, so consider checking this one out too.

Honorable Mentions

Witch on the Holy Night and Story of Seasons - Friends of Mineral Town are games I am adoring and could definitely go on this list, hadn't I started them both quite late into December. Maybe next year I'll give them a shoutout!

#video games

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starry-blue-echoes · 7 months

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Legally Stars: I just. Had. The craziest idea. Based on the release date of a certain game.

So it's 2002, a good amount of time after the mess in Italy. Jotaro wants to help the kids take a breather, but he isn't sure how. Then he sees an ad for a video game and he pauses.

Right there near the bottom of the poster is, of all characters, Donald Duck. He looks at it more closely and... yep, that's the Disney logo, along with some company called Squaresoft.

He isn't the biggest fan of video games, but Joseph did get the kids a PS2 last Christmas, and Ungalo is a huge fan of Disney. Jolyne less so, but she still likes the company and their movies.

He buys the game, but he's still doubtful. How good can this 'Kingdom Hearts' be?

(9 years later, Pucci is beaten into unconsciousness by a Bohemian Rhapsody-summoned, spiky-haired kid wielding a giant key.)

I'll admit I don't know a whole lot about Kingdom Hearts but the fucking snort I let out reading this holy shit-

I regret nothing about making Ungalo a Disney fan because it opens up avenues of sheer insane bullshit like this and makes everything extrodinarily funnier, and it also just hit me that growing up........ Ungalo and the other kids are probably going to use their Stands a TON, especially given the fact they're in an environment where they can freely do so and explore things, and now I rotating ideas of how that would affect them

Ungalo would of course occasionally use Bohemian Rahpsody on his favorites, but after that gets a TON of attention, he also probably begins to get an appreciation for more niche, unknown media. He learns to control his Stand on a much smaller scale but spends time wondering what would happen if he fully cut loose

Rikiel likes to practice with finer controls and while his Stand can't be played with as safely as his siblings, that doesn't stop them from trying to come up with games so he won't feel left out. One of their favorites is a sort of sight based hide and seek where Rikiel Stands in a single spot and has to try and spot their hiding places and direct the rods to them

and Donatello LOVES walking around places and seeing what the ground can tell him. He knows a ridiculous amount of random, untimately meaningless gossip and loves to regale his siblings with stories of what he's heard. He usually doesn't do anything more recent than the last few years to save himself the awkwardness of knowing the people Under World shows him, but it's still very entertaining nontheless

Naturally when Jolyne obtains her Stand, they IMMEDIATELY jump as the oppurtinity. They'd of course always done their best to include her before, but now that she can actually see their Stands and has one of her own the possibilities are endless

I like to imagine the brothers all make sure to be very calm and un-serious about Stone Free. They little sister had to go through enough stress and fear getting her Stand in the first place, she doesn't need to be treated like she was something dangerous just because she had a powerful Stand. In there eyes, she's still their Jolyne, only now she can turn into string

Jolyne takes a shine to cats cradles and embroidery, but she is also unfairley hard to catch in her brother's opinion. She becomes crazily flexible and anytime when they wrestle or play tag, she'll simply slip out of any holds she's put in and wrap around her opponent so they're the one caught instead

but shifting gears a bit, this ALSO got me thinking of everything Post-Golden Wind and also just Jotaro being a Cool Dad/Uncle. After Jotaro very violently curbstomps Diavolo, I'd imagine there's a moment of hesitancy from the Bucci Gang because yeah this man came out of nowhere and just beat the shit out of the BOSS who's been giving us a lot of trouble like it was nothing, but all their worries abate when all four of the kids tackle him with a hug

it's only later they realize No, Mr.Jotaro Is That Scary, He's Just Got A Soft Spot For The Kids And Maybe Giorno

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imustbenuts · 1 month

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(same anon from yesterday) when i got into rgg i assumed kiryu/majima was a ship that didn't have much basis beyond "two guys who know each other" and boy was i wrong about that. even in the original 2005 version of the game without the majima everywhere system there comes a point where you're like oh.... oh this is real

hi again kazumaji veteran shipper i really appreciate u coming back with another ask bc the ship is? ??? its delicious. but also surprisingly layered with chemistry

like you said i too was similarly leaning towards that idea, but more 'okay maybe theres a lot of circumstantial stuff bringing them together and strengthening thier bond as they get to really know each other' and not like. this level of layered inherent thirst, craving, yearning and fuckery, all unconcious or not mostly from majima's side.

it sure is. real. something is really up in there. not familiar with the ps2 version yet but. im pretty sure majima being the only one going gaga whenever he and kiryu fight as opposed to everyone else doing it as a job or an annoyance it. it sure says something!! for sure!!

theres also the DoD abilities in y1k that sure has unusual phrasing happening from kiryu's (menu) end. the connection between them is what will awaken kiryu's abilities? okay sure. the hint art splash given for where to find majima giving off vague JAV cover vibes? ...hello?

also the other thought i have right now is that i dont think kiryu knows majima on a deeper personal level. sure he reads the eyepatch guy well enough to know that he can trust him, but i sense that majima wears that mask and never goes in too deep spilling his heart out to kiryu due to him possibly reading kiryu as. not as interested? or busy? unable to recipocrate? lack of strong interest? ofc im missing the bigger context of 1-6 so and im slowly chewing through y1k, it'll be some time before i arrive at a proper full reading at whats going on between these 2 :v

also another thing i just realized is makoto recognizing people by voice thing... theres a chance kiryu also recognized ichiban having a similar voice to nishiki.

all this really makes me think being majima is suffering...

this is too fucking real it's やばい

#yakuza #ryu ga gotoku #kazumaji #anon #ask

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skrunksthatwunk · 11 months

Text

ok so. kiwami 2. rooftop scene. the ending. it's a bit of a clusterfuck but i wanna talk about one detail, a problem they bring to your attention by Fucking. Talking About Her.

haruka is watching all of this unfold.

[this post is like 4.5k words long + pretty critical + has spoilers for kiwami and kiwami 2, and really minor/vague ones for a couple others. they're not that bad though, trust me (and i added a warning in the one place it is major)]

ALSO CONTENT WARNING i'm gonna talk about kiryu's passive suicidality a good amount in this one, so stay away from this if you think that might affect you negatively/you'd be better off skipping it. i'll also make a tl;dr (which i will highlight in red) at the very end if you really wanna know what my point is that will exclude those elements <3. i am also going to use a lot of choice-based language in regards to kiryu's contemplation of suicide because i think it's the lens through which the games treat the topic, but i personally don't find it a productive or realistic way to look at suicide or suicidal ideation at all. someone dying by suicide absolutely does not mean they don't care about their loved ones enough to fight on or whatever. i love you, and proceed with caution on this one.

(also i'm using the kiwamis as my point of reference because i uh. don't have a ps2? those are the games that i played, and though the differences are likely slight, i wanna be clear about that. also,, ignore the watermark on these screenshots,, i didn't notice them and i'm not retaking them. we're all gonna have to settle for youtube cutscene comps for now xoxo)

first, we have to talk about the ending of the first game.

[note: i am Really Really Confident kiryu has a conversation earlier in the game about his going to jail in nishiki's stead being him running away and choosing not to resist his two options (go to jail or let nishiki go to jail) and define his own path, fighting his way against fate to make it happen. part of why i'm so confident it exists is because it made such an impression on me at the time. it's pretty important to my interpretation of things but i also can't find it for the life of me, so uh. sorry ✌️ i really tried. this post's takes/analysis will be dependent on this scene existing, so keep that in mind. if anyone knows where to find the scene/screenshots of it, lmk and i'll add a follow-up with it]

kiwami stuff

so as she's dying, yumi tells haruka this:

that she may be dying (painfully, and right as she's getting everything she wanted), but she doesn't regret it, because at least she did something rather than running away from it all. that you shouldn't run away, ever.

shortly thereafter, when the police find kiryu and haruka, this exchange happens between him and date. here's the play by play:

date tells kiryu he can get him out of trouble with this, and that if he doesn't, he'll get life in prison; kiryu declines his help:

kiryu is so devastated (understandably) by the back to back losses of the three people closest to him that he resigns himself to life in prison, and the death-in-effect that would be. he would prefer to waste away rather than struggle through a life without them. prison was monotonous and isolating, but coming back after a decade was overwhelming, and coming back to everything being so warped and twisted, and then losing the corrupted scraps he had anyway, well. he wants to go back to sleep. he doesn't want to be in a world where everything's the same except he's on his own. better to return to safety, to die slowly in a hell he knows well than weather a new one where he has control and agency, and thus one where he has the ability to fail and to lose anything at any time. he explains to date that that loss is why he can accept his death:

date shakes him and asks him if there's really nothing left for him, no reason to keep living at all:

then echoes yumi's advice to haruka:

which makes an impression on kiryu:

date gives him a reason to live in the form of haruka, saying she'll be on her own again if he goes to jail. he hijacks kiryu's tragic protector complex to keep him alive, because she needs him, and because she's someone precious to him:

after the dust has cleared,

kiryu and date also have this exchange, where date tells him to stay away from the cops (and presumably arrest and a return to prison, the aforementioned fate akin to death), and kiryu cites haruka as his reason to stay away, one he holds to with no uncertainty (showing again that he's accepted date's logic, that his reason to keep living even when it's incredibly difficult is to care for the more vulnerable haruka). given the weight of the consequences, to me, it feels like date's telling him not to be alone with his thoughts or something. it's almost frightening:

so, what's our takeaway from kiwami?

kiryu lost everything and hit rock bottom, but he chose to fight, and to live life on his own terms, even when it got difficult. that's the narrative life lesson he had to learn to avoid repeating the events of 1995. he made that choice for haruka's sake. it's seen as growth.

and without him, haruka would've just returned to the orphanage (assuming she could make it back to sunflower at all) with no one who knew or understood what she had been through, no one to mourn with her, and no one to give her the attention, care, and protection she needs. kiryu knows what it's like to be an orphan with a limited parental figure who only checks in every so often (kazama, "aunt" yumi), and what someone will do for attention/affection from that person (via both himself and nishiki swearing up, climbing the ranks, etc. arguably haruka coming to kamurocho by herself to find "mizuki" is similar), and what it's like to lose them anyway (again, kazama, yumi). their situations parallel each others' somewhat, and that binds them further. and after losing everyone (which he blames himself for to some extent, as one can probably assume from this and 2, and something key to his arc in later games), he chooses to protect her. and this time, he won't fail. at least partially because failing would hurt him, too. he'd have nothing left again.

okay. now we get to kiwami 2.

if you forgot, the context is basically:

everybody's fighting on the roof of a building which i'm sure will not be a running theme or anything as the series goes on

there's a bomb that's about to go off and they don't know how to/can't defuse it

ryuji shot the twist villain to death, but took fatal hits to do so

sayama's like hey!! let's get out of here!!! and kiryu and ryuji are like nooo we have to settle this oughh it's punchin time and they stick her on an elevator and send her down so she doesn't have to watch

ryuji loses. sayama returns, they have a cute sibling heart to heart, and ryuji dies in her arms. sad

kiryu is in rough shape as well, and there's like 2 minutes left on the bomb's timer

here's the scene itself:

sayama tells kiryu they have to run, and kiryu says he can't. the gist is "let's run!" "you go without me" "i'm not leaving you!" "i'm in no condition to run" "i'll carry you then!!" sayama: *sees how fucked up kiryu is, realizes he's Going To Die Anyway* "ok, then i'm staying with you!" and then further bickering about that, before they give up and make out (as one does i guess)

date (he's here now) yells this at them from a helicopter:

before someone else in the helicopter tells date this:

we get this shot of haruka calling out to kiryu as the helicopter swerves away:

and kiryu and sayama have this exchange about haruka where they say they let her down, but that she'll understand:

then they hug and the bomb ticks to zero right when the credits hit. in post credits it's revealed that the twist villain defused the bomb when they weren't looking, betraying his co-villain for reasons i truthfully do not remember and am unwilling to look up. it's not about that right now.

so, how does this scene interact with the ending of the previous game?

the short answer is "badly <3" but here's the long answer:

it's about choices.

the thing about fiction is that anything you want to have happen, as a writer, can happen. it may not be effective, internally consistent, or logical, but you can write it regardless. audiences suspend their disbelief for the sake of engaging fully with your fiction, but everyone has a threshold past which they will stop being engaged in a story and either become uninvested or annoyed. writers usually have lines they're unwilling to cross as well. but in almost every story, there's at least a couple of places where they stretch reality a little to make the narrative they want happen. this is not a bad thing at all. that's how stories get told.

now, i'm gonna be real with you. i don't care about how feasible plots are like 95% of the time. it's not something i think about much, nor is it something i prioritize. i am a very character-centric media consumer, so if world building and/or plot are a bit stale or contrived, that doesn't really bother me much so long as i'm invested in the characters involved. some people can't stand plot holes or the ways musicals burst into song or whatever, and that's fine for them. but it's not something i tend to find that all that important.

this is all to say that i have a sorta affection for rgg's flavor of bullshit pulling. and it is a powerful flavor, maybe even an acquired taste, but i can and do rock with it so long as it doesn't damage the characters too much. this is why i'm not making a lengthy post howling into the void about joji kazama or the second joon-gi han or how many secret relatives there are. those things are silly and endearing and a clumsy yet heartfelt part of a series i care about very deeply. i'll joke about it, but i don't consider it much of a flaw. it's more like personality. flaws are texture, and they help a piece's identity. point is i am very, very willing and able to suspend my disbelief for these games in exchange for a good time, particularly via good characters.

(if you want another example of where i draw the line from within rgg, the answer's the YAKUZA 4 SPOILERS INCOMING rubber bullets twist, because i think 1) it's actively horrifically stupid (especially retconning a scene we SAW HAPPEN. WE SAW BLOOD ON EACH IMPACT, AND RUBBER BULLETS DON'T OFTEN BREAK SKIN THAT DEEPLY (THEIR DAMAGE IS MORE PERCUSSIVE THAN PENETRATIVE). THESE EVENTS HAPPEN IN THE SAME GAME YOU DON'T HAVE TO RETCON IT JUST REWRITE IT. OR DON'T SHOW THE HIT AT ALL SO THERE'S MORE PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY. DON'T DO THIS JUST TO HYPE UP YOUR SHITTY VILLAIN NO ONE CARES ABOUT. and 2) (a bit more importantly) i think it actively removes saejima's primary internal conflict for that game, that being his intense guilt over the 18 murders he thinks he committed, one i was invested and interested in. but this isn't a rubber bullets post.)

characters in this series walk off a lot of life threatening injuries. they survive miraculously, they escape in the nick of time, and they pull through in the end. kiryu still somehow hasn't killed anyone. almost every game in his saga ends with an "is kiryu gonna make it out this time?!?" shortly followed by a "yeah lol. lmao" postcredits reveal. kiryu fucking punches a marble statue into dust in the first game. having a story that asks you to suspend your disbelief so much and so often means that when a decision is made, it's not the writers saying, "well, this would have to happen so we are obligated/forced to write it happening" so much as "we wanted this to happen for some reason(s)," because you already know that they're not guided solely by logic. again, this is true of all writers, it's just amplified in stories like these because they've already given you so many hard mode suspension of disbelief moments (they've broken you in like leather, yeah? or like how obvious internet scams allow for self selection by being so obvious that only the most vulnerable people would fall for them. they curate an audience willing to play along with their bullshit flavor so they can tell a story that's more likely to satisfy that audience. in a good way, in a fun way! mass appeal is overrated). there is not much limit to what this series is willing to try and sell you.

so when ryuji takes lethal damage taking out the big bad, that's a choice. when he doesn't die immediately, that's a choice. when ryuji and kiryu send sayama away in the soon-to-be-forgotten elevator so they can settle this like men or whatever despite the literal actual bomb about to go off, that's a choice. when sayama comes back, that's a choice. when ryuji does die, that's a choice. when kiryu determines that he can't escape in time, that's a choice. when sayama is unwilling to leave him, that's a choice. when she says she'll carry him out and there's an elevator right fucking there and then she's like never mind i guess i won't anymore we're dying together right now kiryu like they're not gonna even try?? wouldn't distancing themselves from the blast give themselves a better shot, something that's super possible given the 2 minutes they have with that elevator??? sayama you met him like a week and a half ago why are you ready to die with him that's not a plot hole i just think that's kinda strange whatever anyway, that's a choice. when kiryu stops arguing with her so they can kiss (next to her brother's corpse), that's a choice. when date shows up, that's a choice. when the helicopter can't save them because the bomb was going to go off too soon, that's a choice. when they put haruka in that helicopter and take her away, let her only impact be reminding kiryu and sayama that they can't help her, that's a choice. when they spend their last moments talking as if they're already dead, then simply waiting, that's a choice.

they're all choices that the writers made for the characters, and we are asked to believe them for the sake of achieving the writers' vision, as with any story. the only problem is that the writers' vision here fucking blows.

i'm not saying it would be realistic for kiryu and sayama (and even ryuji) to make it out alive, but it wouldn't be out of character for the series in the slightest. kiryu is suddenly unable to power through here, and that's a choice. so, what is their vision?

put simply, i think they wanted a romantic last stand for kiryu and sayama, a tragic scene of doomed, devoted lovers. and i think they wanted an edge-of-your-seat fake out death. they wanted spectacle.

here's how some specific choices they made undermine all that shit we talked about earlier from the first game.

once again, kiryu is called by date to live, to pick himself up and keep going, no matter how impossible the odds are. he's even reminded by haruka's presence, his one anchor in keeping himself going. the growth he had in the parallel scene in the previous game is challenged, and he fails.

it's not enough this time. and that's a choice.

it's also one i can't think of a good reason for, and that's the real kicker.

characters can have developmental backslide just like people do, and if they're given good reason for it, it can be just as, if not far more compelling that purely linear growth (i am a chimera ant arc enjoyer, and that's all i'll say. sorry if you haven't seen hunter x hunter. uhh. i am also a zuko avatar enjoyer if that helps). but i can't think of anything that happened in that game that would cause this from a character perspective. if anything, kiryu should be less likely to do this intentionally. he's spent around a year raising haruka, and a year has passed since he lost his loved ones. at the very least, the pain should be more dull, though it is established through an early nightmare sequence that his ass is (justifiably) not over it yet. given that their deaths were the initial motivation for his willingness to rot forever, theoretically, he should be more motivated to stay alive than before now that he's got more investment and stability in his life outside of them, particularly when it comes to haruka, his reason for surviving. and if the ongoing nature of the trauma was the motivator for this, then they should've had it affect him more past that nightmare scene (it really serves more as a recap of the last game than anything else) so it didn't come out of nowhere. so the reminder of the lesson that saved his life and then guided it for at least a year afterwards, one that the whole resolution of the previous game relied on heavily falls flat for... some reason.

i think this is a good time to mention that, generally speaking, you don't write arbitrary choices into characters. sure, people in real life are often sporadic, but when analyzing fictional characters, every choice is filed into a portfolio of characterization that can and should be analyzed. going for pure realism can obfuscate their development, motivations, themes, etc. their choices and reactions may be unorthodox, but they must be internally consistent. this is very related to how i view plot contrivance as well. characters drive the plot, not the other way around. stories are about the ways characters affect their worlds/lives and vice versa, and they're the human face to the themes and ideas the writers are trying to explore and express. maybe my stance on this seems hypocritical. i don't know if it is. but to me, plot issues are usually a matter of engagement and investment, while character issues are a matter of substance.

i hope this doesn't feel patronizing explaining all of this, but i want you guys to know where i'm coming from in my analysis. starting at my base philosophy on writing is the easiest way to do that, i feel. defining the terms of the debate, and all that. anyway

and i mean, look. they survive because "it was defused the whole time we just didn't see it happen", so it's not like narrative tension or realism or whatever was THAT big of a priority overall. if it was gonna be a cop-out anyway, they should'nt have ruined kiryu's development too, yeah?. and sayama fucks off to america after this game anyway, so it's not like the doomed lovers thing had much payoff or meaning after this one (though you could argue that's more an issue with yakuza 3 than yk2, which has some merit to it). which means that they chose to sacrifice kiryu's prior development and internal logic for the sake of cheap tension for their finale that was both kinda illogical in and of itself (the elevator!! the elevator!!!) and a romantic climax that neither required nor really benefitted from this staging. (like. you coulda had them make out and then get saved by date, or kiss on the elevator in a "it's moving, but will we make it in time??" way or whatever. look i'm not saying those are great options either but they're SOMETHING okay. it would remove/reduce the amount of time wasted on characters sitting around with their thumbs up their asses for no reason in this finale).

instead the message of this finale is that, actually, sometimes it is impossible to change your circumstances and fight for your own way out of an awful situation. and what should you do about this unfortunate truth? uh. die! i guess. it's the exact opposite of the encouraging, optimistic message of the last game. zetsubou chou pride my ass.

note: i feel i should mention that when suicidality is brought up within the series (particularly in substories), it is always something someone has to overcome themselves through wanting it badly enough. they simply need the inspiration and the motivation to keep going. it's arguably treated as a moral obligation. frankly, the series is broadly very meritocratic (<- bad) when it comes to this topic (and others, but that's a Whole Other Thing. see akiyama's weird loan shark tests as well). sheer will and resolve is enough to conquer any problem, be it physical or mental/emotional, and it's irresponsible to act/feel otherwise. this is the logic the games operating under, and kiryu is often the mouthpiece for this bootstrap-pulling "tough love" sentiment. so when kiryu "chooses" to die, yet faces no emotional fallout from date, haruka, or anyone else, it feels very out of place. it's not just an odd choice; it's specifically, once again, an odd choice to make in context of the game/series/character it appears in.

kiryu's just like eh, haruka'll watch her only family die right as she gets some sense of tentative stability and lets her guard down after a devastating month the year prior (and a relatively dismal upbringing before that) that we trauma bonded over. sure, she likely came to view me as the one who would stay no matter what, who was too strong to be taken out, who she could always rely on, and so i know that dying would hurt her immensely, but she's smart enough to know it'd happen eventually. her eventual recovery means it's okay for me to do this (somehow, in a way it wasn't in the first game). it's an excuse within the narrative's logic, and one it is uncritical of simply because it's kiryu. he gets a pass.

and i think with the previously mentioned passive suicidality and general series-long mental health issues kiryu displays (i mean. yakuza 5's literally his depression arc), this could be retroactively seen as an interesting choice, like a piece in that particular narrative. i don't even dislike that viewing, especially in terms of fan approach. but (assuming this went down the same in yakuza 2), they likely didn't have that in mind. all they had then was the first game and the movie. and they took the first game's Entire Message and contradicted it for nothing but a scene they wanted to have happen because it'd be suspenseful and/or emotional (without actually doing the work to earn it). and they're not fans trying to analyze his character, they're the ones making choices for him. and they chose to massacre my boy. and if the subject of kiryu's mental health was a priority of theirs, why didn't they explore that? haruka and date's feelings on him not resisting and their words not being enough (whether that blame is justified by the narrative or not (it shouldn't be btw)), the uncomfortable drifting that resigning yourself to death and living afterwards anyway often brings, literally any conversation about it besides the minimal shit we get post credits of date being like "did you know about the bomb not having a fuse?" which like. bad answer either way (which is why they weren't straightforward about it, the cowards). you can't just be like "oh uh. idk he just gave up this time. yeah he was gonna die on purpose for some reason. good thing the bomb was fake lol" and then pack up and go home!! that's stupid!! any merit the idea of kiryu dying by suicide in this scene and in this way could have had from a character-based perspective loses its weight because 1. it didn't happen (for kinda stupid reasons), which makes it fall flat and 2. no one is really affected by the fact that it almost did, including him. they sacrificed his ass and replaced it with nothing, even when there could have been interesting outcomes to it.

so the narrative effectively chose to kill him by making the situation impossible, and this impossibility is ultimately arbitrary, given the series' usual approach to miraculous, illogical escapes. that, or the choice to stay was up to kiryu and sayama, one that 1. doesn't make sense and is actively regressive in context of kiryu's arc in the only other game in the series (as well as his whole saga in retrospect) and 2. one that contradicts how the series sees/treats resignation to death/death by suicide in all other contexts without being addressed, challenged, or condemned in ways it would in all other contexts. because they don't want you to think about it like that. they want you to think he (and the narrative) had no choice, that it made sense to do that. but it didn't. it doesn't.

and look, honestly? if i was bleeding out and had like 2 minutes to live, there's a non zero chance i'd say fuck it and kiss a girl too. i get it. but i am (and this is crucial) not a fucking yakuza character. and i'm certainly not kiryu kazuma.

tl;dr (basically just rephrasing the second to last main paragraph)

there are not sufficient character reasons for kiryu and sayama not trying to escape. additionally, because the narrative regularly facilitates even less likely escapes, it's not so constrained to logic and reality that it couldn't pull this one off. the choice to let their situation be impossible this one time was a cheap and arbitrary way of forcing a scene they thought would be cool and dramatic, and in doing so they chose to cannibalize a key emotional note of the previous finale (namely kiryu's mission to dedicate his life to protecting haruka) for hollow last minute stakes-upping in this one. it is then completely disregarded anyway. god damn.

#got so into this post that i used tumblr on my laptop for the first time to surpass mobile's image limit #i also added transcriptions in the alt text (which i should do more often)#actually thinking about it in the movie kiryu teaches haruka that lesson about stumbling on.. and she's the one to ask to follow him... hm.#just interesting given that the movie came out before 2. i don't think it makes much of a difference to the post it's just neat to me #one of my favorite parts of writing this was skimming through a bunch of yk1/yk2 cutscenes and noticing how often kiryu pats haruka's head #it happens a lot more than i remembered and it's very sweet to me. get bonked little one <3 #another good thing was realizing you can edit tags when you're not on mobile.... fucking life changing. i have lost hours to mobile tag #editing and i'm not even kidding about that #speaking of editing this one took like 6 hours.. my brother used “yakuza autism” (verb) for me earlier and it's so true. source: this post #i did have a short break to get food bc i hadn't eaten all day but that's mostly because i woke up at 3pm. anyway #also if you like kiwami 2's ending you're not even remotely alone. i looked at the comment sections of the scene comps and ppl love it #and more power to you!! i like it when people enjoy things. and tbh i DO have feelings that i'm supposed to about that ending #i just also have feelings you're not supposed to. like. anger. i guess.#rgg #ryu ga gotoku #skrunk meta #aww yeah it's a new tag babeyy #yakuza kiwami 2 #kiwami 2 #yakuza #like a dragon #yk2 #kiryu kazuma #sawamura haruka #sayama kaoru #maybe my thoughts'll change after replaying the games...? it's been like a year and a half since i beat yk2 so i am a bit fuzzy on it #yakuza kiwami spoilers #yakuza kiwami 2 spoilers

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blazehedgehog · 3 months

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Since they are 17 years old, are the Wii, PS3, and the 18 year old 360 now retro consoles?

If you're trying to make me feel old, I am slowly becoming immune to this feeling.

Actually, I find it comforting! There was a guy at work like five years ago who caught me emulating the SNES version of Final Fantasy 5 on my Android tablet. He was like, at least ten years younger than me, but he's like "Wow, you're a gamer???" and asked what games I was currently playing.

The list I gave him happened to be, at the time, mostly, like, SNES, Dreamcast, and maybe some PS2 games. I don't remember which. I may have even just rattled off a list of my favorite games of all time rather than simply saying what I was currently playing.

But he kind of smiled and went "Ah, so you're a retro gamer. That's pretty cool."

And there was a part of my brain SCREAMING like "No! I have a somewhat modern PC! I own new games from THIS YEAR! I play a little bit of everything!!!! I'm just playing a lot of older games right now!!!!!!"

But then another part of my brain was like "Dude shut up, what if this borderline-teenager like, wants to know your Steam account name so he can send you a friend request? That could get awkward."

So I just kind of nodded and went "yeah I guess"

Nothing anyone says to me about old games can make me feel more awkward than having to swallow that

The Xbox 360 being retro is cool because there were a lot of good games on the Xbox 360, imo.

#questions #anonymous #retro #playstation 2 #xbox 360 #wii

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judgeanon · 8 months

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Plastic Skies - Model 13: F-15E Strike Eagle "Garuda 1"

Near the end of last year, I bought a sheet of bootleg decals to make my Mobius-1 F-22 Raptor (as seen here!). The sheet had a lot more decals than just the Mobius ones. Some were for planes I had no interest in doing, some ended up in my old decal-less Berkut model, and some inspired the model I'd end up building right after the Area 88 Tiger. After all, I knew sooner or later I'd end up making an F-15. Even if I'm not its biggest fan.

Yeah, yeah, I dunno, I just don't like the F-15 Eagle. I know it's the backbone of the USAF and a fantastic plane and it does everything and the story of how it was conceived is super funny, but there's something about it that just doesn't spark anything in me. It's just... a fighter plane. Much like the Flanker platform, it always felt like the most standard example of Fighter Jet to me, without the cool swing wings of the Tomcat or the sleek small shape of the F-16. There's no such thing as a boring fighter jet, but the F-15 is close.

That's not to say we don't have some history. One of the last models my brother built back when we were kids was an absolutely massive (for us) 1/48 scale Eagle. As with all our models, it was glued together and not much else, and I distinctively remember it losing one of its tail fins somewhere underneath a bed. Still, the thing was huge to us, and I always remember it as the biggest model we ever had. But that's about as much fondness as I have for the Eagle.

Or at least, as much as I had until Ace Combat happened.

Although the Eagle is very prominent in several AC games, the important one for this model is Ace Combat 6: Fires of Rubi--I mean Fires of Liberation, for the Xbox 360. This was one of the very last Ace Combat games I tried during my "I want to play all of them phase", since although PS1, PS2, PSP and 3DS emulation are all pretty good right now, Xbox 360 emulation is not quite there, and has apparently been not quite there for years now. I should know, I tried. But earlier this year, a very generous and dear friend of mine offered me an old Xbox 360 which he'd come into possession and was using to try some cool hacker stuff. And soon, I was finally getting to play AC6.

The game itself is great, as are all Ace Combats. It has a really interesting "large-scale battle" system, where different units are doing their own thing and you can choose which ones to support. It has the first appearance of high-g turns, which I love. It has a killer soundtrack, but that's no surprise. It has a really frustrating boss fight followed by a really amazing final level. And it has one of the most gloriously OP fictional jets in the series. Its story isn't quite as engaging as the PS2 games but I'm very glad I played it. And as seen above, the game's cover star is the F-15E, a plane for which I already had the decals to make.

So as I was finishing up the Tiger, I knew what the next project would be.

This was also going to be my first Academy model kit. Academy is a Korean model kit company that as far as I can tell sits quite comfortably in the middle ground of model kit quality. They make decent stuff for a good price with solid plastic quality, although some reviewers note a few glaring accuracy issues. I don't really care about accuracy when it comes to models, especially not at the price I found this, so I got to work pretty quickly.

The cockpit was the first step. Emboldened by my work on the Tiger, I tried to really make it shine this time, adding those little extra dabs of red to the flightsticks and other touches. Unfortunately, the decal sheets were a bit too wide for the panels, so they ended up getting warped and stretched. It looks pretty bad, but once inside the plane, I figured it wouldn't be visible. And I was right! Althouh what is visible are some of the corners where I skimped or forgot to paint, something which I'm definitely trying to work on in my latest kits.

The main fuselage was a much easier fit than the Raptor, although not quite as easy as the Tiger. The Eagle is a big motherfucker, after all, so putting it together requires a lot of pressure in different spots. Unfortunately, it also resulted in some plastic melting around a few corners, but only in the underside, and only on one wing. It was still a good lesson that made me want to invest in better cement, but it'd take a while for me to actually do it.

I decided the next step would be the nozzles, which is where this particular kit goes a bit fucking nuts. The F-15's thrusters feature external fairing arms for their variable geometry nozzles, which is way easier to explain with a picture:

And if you're observant, you can go back to that first picture of all the model's sprues and see how this kit handles that. But just in case:

The parts in green are the 30 (!) parts necessary to build just the two exhaust nozzles. The parts in orange are Academy offering people who aren't insane a way out, with two fully built nozzles with "turkey feather" panels instead of the arms. Which is very thoughtful of them, but after 12 models, I guess I was feeling a bit insane.

Admittedly, it wasn't rough sailing. The panels themselves didn't fit as well as I would've liked, and the faring arms required a very delicate touch. Still, I figured it'd all look at least decent once I went in with my beloved burnt iron paint, and sure enough, the end result was mostly fine.

Around this time, I started running into what's become my weak point this far into model building: indecisiveness. It's easy to think that models are "put them together first, then paint, then decals, then varnish, then panel lining, then clear coat", and some cheap kits are perfectly capable of following that order. But the more experienced I get and the bigger kits I try, the more I find myself playing with that order, doing things like painting certain parts of the plane first before gluing, or even fully detailing things like tail wings before I'm even done painting the fuselage.

Which sounds smart and is the way to do until you're staring at four different tasks and you just don't know what you should start on now. In this model's case, one of the biggest problems was armaments.

This isn't even all of it, btw. This is still missing the eight other missiles I also had to paint. Though I will say, as messy as the yellow tips on the Mk 82 bombs are, I'm still a little proud of the way I figured out to paint them roughly similar:

It's not perfect, but nothing is. However, the armaments thing was something that bothered me all the way to the end of the build.

Painting the fuselage was a way different story. One of the reasons why I chose AC6's F-15 was precisely because it's just one big color. No camo jobs, no masking tape save for the yellow bits on the tail wings, just me and my brushes and a newly bought box of Revell Greenish Grey paint. That paint is... an odd one. Looks absolutely disgusting when wet, like the insides of a toilet after eating some very unhealthy food, but once it dries out and especially once varnished it looks... kinda cool? Kinda awesome? It just has way more personality than the usual air superiority grays of most USAF fighters.

The other part of the build that was surprisingly comfortable was the landing gear, since this model only has one door for each gear. Made the whole thing go by in a breeze, and before I knew it, I was already putting in the decals. At least the big ones. Admittedly, they're not 100% game accurate, since AC6 uses low visibility versions of the emblems and such, but they were there and I wasn't not gonna use them.

Panel lining was also shockingly easy for this kit. Although I'm still pretty lousy at it, the kit's panel lines were very well defined and easy to get the paint in. Compared to other kits I've had, this one was very well behaved when it came to this step. Sooner than I'd expected, the whole thing seemed almost ready to be done. I just had to finish the armaments and we'd be all done.

So... yeah. You might notice something missing here. As it turns out, this kit doesn't actually have enough parts to put the 12 green bombs I'd painted besides the Mk 82. They're supposed to go three alongside the edges of the conformal fuel tanks (where the missiles now are) and three on the little chunks poking out of the sides. But for whatever reason, this kit only has four of those little chunks instead of six. And due to some issues with the instructions, I think I also glued the ones it did have wrong.

On top of that, I had some issues gluing the hardpoints with the Sidewinders and Mk-82 bombs to the wings, mostly because hey, protip: gluing stuff that's already painted and varnished is waaaay harder than gluing stuff when it's fresh off the box. But I just had to be a smart boy and get all the panel lining done first... Very frustrating, especially after realizing this, too, isn't game accurate. But it'd never really been my goal to make something perfectly accurate to the game. Like with the Raptor, like with every kit I make, I'll always choose what looks good to me over what looks closer to the real (or virtual) thing.

Eventually, the whole thing was done. Painting the cockpit was tricky but I've lost a lot of my old fears about it these days. And once the whole thing was varnished, I found myself really liking what I was seeing. The long nose, the beefy wings, the shiny engines... Maybe I'd been wrong about the F-15 all this time. Maybe it isn't really a boring jet. Maybe I just needed to let it back into my heart. And although it gave me a real tough time in a bunch of places, at the end it's low-key one of my favorite models so far, and a nice homage to an unsung game.

And it looks pretty cool on the Area 88 base too.

#My Stuff #Hobbies #Journals #F-15E Eagle #Ace Combat 6 #Garuda 1

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toomuchracket · 1 year

Note

what about video game night with flatmate!matty? been thinking abt it a lot heh

ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

the way i just spent 45 mins googling what consoles were a thing in 2013 for realism lol... but yes this is a cute thought! thinking this is something you guys do with the intent of it only happening once - matty usually games with the boys, but they can't make it over/he can't go to them for whatever reason - but then it becomes a regular event because it's so fun. but yeah, the games vary from night to night; i think it starts off with like fifa and stuff, which is matty's way of easing you in before he changes it to like really high levels of difficult games and giggles at how shit you are at them. and you're all grumpy (but so adorable) like "you little bitch i'm at such a disadvantage here i've never played this!", and matty pulls you into a hug (still giggling) cooing at you like "i'm sorry, baby, i really am. you wanna choose what we play next?" - you literally drag the wii out and force him to play mariokart with you, which is a considerably more well-matched game. and you both kinda like the nostalgia of the wii, so you play just dance on it too lol. matty ABSOLUTELY goes on a rant about how easy it is to cheat the system on this one by just waving your arm around instead of actually dancing, to which you call him a spoilsport and keep doing the choreo full-out while he takes the lazy option (half in protest, half so he can watch you dance, which is something he really really likes doing lol). i think this just dance argument lasts for months, and you come home on black friday that year with the biggest smug grin on your face; matty is terrified as soon as he sees your expression, and for good reason, because you've just bought a (heavily discounted) xbox one with kinect, so now he HAS to do the choreo for just dance lmao. matty goes into competitive mode and sets the console up right away so you two can dance battle - literally, it's a proper shoving the sofas out the way so you have room thing. and it's so fun, but so exhausting - the two of you end up sprawled on the sofa sweating and panting, but so entertained. matty, once he gets some breath back, turns to you and says "you know, you're pretty fucking good. maybe i should get you in a music vid" and you're like "oh god absolutely not" lol. but yeah, you guys like just dance. also think matty would be into buying like an old ps2 or something so you can play spyro and shit like that too lol - you end up with quite the collection of games and consoles in the flat (which inevitably you show to your daughters years later too) and get into a routine of playing them semi-regularly <3

#mads muses #mads answers asks #matty asks #fluff asks #flatmate!matty #bear anon

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callmearcturus · 1 year

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What made you choose the odin over other similar game boxes?

GREAT question because there are a LOT of options out there, I even did a big post about them a while ago when folks were curious.

I actually started out with a Retroid Pocket 2+ as my first device. I hugely enjoyed it, played a bunch of DS games on it as well as a lot of PSX games. I think the current iteration of it, the Retroid Pocket 3+, is an excellent pick if you want a midtier device. At this point, the RP3+ is like a Odin Lite Lite.

My issue with my RP2+ was that I really wanted the ability to stream games from my PC, because I am a pirate yo ho ho and I wanted access to that much more robust library. Also, my interest in the Dreamcast/Gamecube/PS2 console generation is at its peak right now and that's the library I want to play comfortably.

So when I got a bonus from work, I bit the fucking bullet and got the AYN Odin Lite, because it also happened to be like 50$ off at the time.

(Oooh, which it currently is right now too, go figure!)

For the curious, I loaded my RP2+ with literally as many games as I could stuff into the things and I gave it to a friend as a gift.

I was worried that I wouldn't use the Odin enough to justify the purchase..... but then I immediately put like 20 hours into Pokemon Unbound and I completed Persona 3 Portable. And then I used Parsec to play the entirety of Persona 4 Golden and I am now 80 hours into Persona 5 Royal. And now I might spin up a playthru of SMT4 or the PS2 version of SMT 3 Nocturne, unsure.

Here's the reasons I like the Odin, even though its one of the pricier devices you can get:

Yes, it costs 200USD for the Lite model. But the Lite model does pretty much everything the more expensive Base and Pro models do with minimal compromises. Also for 200USD, you get extremely good components, very comfortable professional feeling buttons and joysticks-- like, this thing feels slightly better than a Switch Lite, honest to god. Unless you wanna dual boot Windows, you don't need more than the Lite.

It has Wifi 6 so it streams like a fucking dream. If the Odin itself can't handle emulating a game but my computer can, I can play flawlessly from Parsec. As I mentioned before, a few weeks ago I was sitting in a cute coffee shop literally like 25 miles away but was playing Persona 5 via Parsec. It also works natively with Game Pass streaming perfectly.

Even without streaming, this fucker is BEEFY. I personally love it for PSP games. Playing at 4x or 5x resolution makes the games look stunning.

My biggest problem with my CFW 3DS is the battery. I tend to play games for 4ish hours at a time, and then put the thing aside for a few days. With my 3DS, the thing will HAVE to be left plugged in or it will be dead by the next time I wanna play. This also means I can't just drop it into my bag to wait around for time to play, it'll inevitably be dead. My Vita and Odin can live in my bag for over a week before I have to worry about the battery. That is HUGE for me.

The Retroid Pocket 2+ very comfortably and ably played up to the DS and most Dreamcast games, but PSP was a crapshoot and even some PSX games weirdly could only run at x1, which was disappointing to me. The Odin Lite can play everything I want to play and as a bonus it can do what seems like half the 3DS library and about 40% of the PS2 library, which I would like to revisit.

Cracked devices and emulation are becoming a hobby of mine as everyone sans Microsoft works around the clock to make their enormous back catalogs fucking inaccessible. The fact the 3DS shop is closing soon pisses me off so much I can barely express it, I think that shit should be illegal. There are so many games and frankly works of art that are going to be completely inaccessible legally! FUCK THE ESA!

Point is, this stuff is important to me. I back up games I never intend to actually play on my external hard drive just in case. But out of all the devices I have played with, my favorites are easily the Odin and my cracked Vita. Both are miraculous, and I feel like I'm literally defeating my "hmmmmm what do I wanna play" indecision thanks to them.

That said, depending on your needs, I still think the Miyoo Mini and the Retroid Pocket 3+ (current iteration of Retroid) are excellent choices. As is a Vita! My god I love my Vita! I've never been a fan of any of the Anbernic devices and would avoid them.

#Anonymous #arc plays games #whoops long post

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sapphire-weapon · 10 months

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i just wanna say thank u so much for that in detail wiki post. legit i feel so much more informed now and thank u!! as someone newly getting into re (slowly working on the first 2 games--both the remakes and the ogs bc i love seeing how different they are !) ur fr doing a favor and its honestly a shame that ppl are just straight up lying. wheres the wiki editor honor? honoring actual fact and citation on wikipedia is usually pretty serious lol

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

The wiki editor honor in survival horror fandom in general died in 2015 with a mental breakdown about circumcision in the Silent Hill wiki, which never stops being weird no matter how many times I say it.

What's frustrating about this whole thing with the RE wiki is that like... a lot of the bad info on there didn't come from nowhere, and it's not something that I necessarily want to hide from new fans. It's fun trivia to learn that, once upon a time, both RE2 and RE4 were completely different games, so there were actually several different character concepts written up for Leon, and here's what they were.

The whole saga behind RE1.5 and then the three different versions of RE4 that resulted in two of them becoming Devil May Cry and Haunting Ground is fascinating -- as is the whole drama about Shinji Mikami begging Capcom to let him develop RE4 on the PS2, and him being told repeatedly that that was never going to happen because Nintendo had an exclusivity deal, and how the betrayal of that ("If RE4 ever comes to the PS2, I'll cut my own head off with a chainsaw.") led to Mikami leaving Capcom all together, and that's why the story of RE got so fucked up starting at RE4.

Like... that's all really interesting stuff that I love sharing with new fans. But the wiki takes those old versions of those games -- those versions that never released -- and just matter-of-factly states that details about them are still canon, regardless of what the final product actually looks like.

The mafia background that people are so adamant these days as being canon for Leon was a joke to early-to-mid-aughts fandom, because it's so ridiculous and was clearly said before RE2's story was actually finalized and has nothing to do with Leon's actual character or arc. I don't hate new fans knowing about it; I love bringing new people in on old jokes.

But... that's not how it's being treated these days, and it's causing confusion and strife in the fandom, and that doesn't sit right with me.

And now, to go a step even further than that and insist that an advertisement for an airsoft gun is more canonically correct than Resident Evil 6?? I can't actually believe that people are doing this to new fans. It's not right.

Part of the fun of old fandom was always cooking up our own backstories for the main cast, because none of them have one canonically -- and now haughty weeaboos who consider themselves judge, jury, and executioner of canon are trying to take that fun away from modern fandom, and that sucks.

My inbox will always be open if you guys have any questions, and I will always be sure to explain where a detail came from and how actually applicable to the games it is. Don't be a stranger!

#resident evil #leon kennedy

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skullamity · 1 year

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TLOU finale thoughts: Seeing a lot of people arguing about whether Joel made the right decision, or that it is indesputable that he made the wrong decision, and listen, listen...

I have not played the game, I haven't had a PS since the PS2 and my computer can't handle modern games. That's fine. I'm just saying that I don't know how the game presents it, but the show did a fairly good job of convincing me specifically that there's never going to be a cure for this.

In the very first episode, a foremost expert in this field is offered literally any resource by her government to work towards a vaccine, and what does she tell them? You can't make one, that's not how cordyceps and how we interact with them (or aren't supposed to be able to interact with them) works. And when she is offered all the resources they can offer, she opts to go home and spend however long she has left with her family. The episode really fucking sold me on this point.

Fast forward, and we have Dr. NoHypocraticOath lying to a child so he can give her brain surgery that will kill her on purpose. Is he the foremost expert on this shit in North America? Well I don't fucking know--if he had a name I don't recall anyone saying it. Didn't get to see much of his face, but he didn't look Joel's age. It's been 20 years since the apocalypse, does he even have a medical degree? Did he make one up? Did he read some books and decide that he was an expert/had a degree? And even if he does have a medical degree, what does he know that that FOREMOST EXPERT IN EPISODE ONE DID NOT, EVEN WITH UNLIMITED RESOURCES OFFERED?

And let's be real, since we are talking about resources. Expert in episode one was like...the amount is NONE. NONE resources will be required because we are literally all going to die, you can't make a vaccine for this shit. Would she have changed her tune if Ellie had been alive then and available? I'm not sure the answer is yes!

But Dr. Childmurder is like yeaaah I think we can pull this off in this extremely unsanitary operating room in this burnt out pediatrics ward using equipment that may not even run properly because anyone who knew how to service it is probably dead. DOUBT!

Now, I guess you can argue that Joel doesn't know about that lady in episode one. He was on the other side of the world and never met her, probably wouldn't have even seen her on TV because she was spending her last moments with family. He's running on limited info, you could say, and I suppose you could argue that because he doesn't know this, he's in the wrong because for all he knows, maybe Dr. Stabbington McBraintheif had the right idea! He should have believe Marlene when she said it was for the best!

And to that I say...again, no. Joel's maybe not a rocket scientist, but he is a survivor before anything else. Even if he wasn't emotionally compromised and his ability to not crumble wasn't all in on Keeping This One Kid Alive, he's been built up to be competent enough to sniff out shoddy reasoning, bullshit and decisions made out of desperation rather than sense. If I can look at this shitty hospital and these garbo conditions and these desperate people who have elected not to inform someone volunteering to help that they've decided to just kill her and hope this works and think that that's super fucking suspicious, then Joel can too, and should have, and did.

Do I agree that lying to Ellie was the best way to cap that off? No. Their entire relationship has been based off of being truthful even when the truth was mean, and being real and him not treating her like an actual child. Whatever's going to happen in season 2 is probably going to be super fucked up, it's probably going to hinge on that lie, and it probably could have been completely avoided if Joel had just said, "I woke up and Marlene wouldn't take me to you. She proceeded to tell me that she'd tricked you into thinking you were having some tests done, but that they were literally just going to kill you. Maybe you would have wanted that, if they'd asked you! But that was the biggest fucking red flag, and there were A Lot of red flags, from the Doctor willing to just flat out murder you looking not old enough to have gotten his pediatric brian surgery degree before colleges stopped being a thing to the shoddy equipment to the fact that they literally tried to bribe me and when I was like absofuckinlutely not, she started to march me out to the highway and told them to shoot me if I at all deviated from that path. Isn't that completely fucked up?" Because even if Ellie was mad about that, she has generally respected Joel's opinions on people and things and probably would have forgiven him eventually for killing them.

But yeah--maybe it's different in the game and for all I know someone does manage to synthesize a vaccine form Ellie's brain at the end of the second one. But the show? Has made it pretty clear that Marlene's cure was a last ditch attempt to find a cure and there was zero guarantee it went anywhere. I see a lot of people addressing this like the cure would have definitely been able to be made, but there was like...zero evidence to suggest that this wouldn't have just been a total waste that also killed a beloved child, and making the call Joel did was objectively the right decision based on the info he had at the time, and based on literally everything else the plot has told us about cordyceps for the entire season.

If you were for some reason convinced that the cure had even a tiny chance of being synthesized form this, you're welcome to explain it to me. I just can't see it!

#tlou spoilers #ellie tlou #joel tlou #the last of us #the last of us spoilers #tlou show

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toyota-supra · 5 months

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it's funny to see how different people talk about games with many translated titles.

Dragon Quest was already a trademarked name in the US before the Famicom game was made, so when Nintendo of America brought the game to the west, it was Dragon Warrior, up until the eighth game on the PS2, when they were able to title it Dragon Quest VII. Thus, a lot of people still call the older titles Dragon Warrior II, III, so on and so forth. But I don't really care about that as I got into the series in the eleventh entry, so they're all Dragon Quest to me.

Ryu Ga Gotoku was brought to english markets as Yakuza, until (requires source) some in newer translation teams around 2015 brought up that the name doesn't really fit the series, and that as Yakuza was trying to bring its translation way closer to the original tone of the games rather than adapting it to international markets, so should the name be changed to Like A Dragon to fit this. Thus, after Ryu Ga Gotoku 7 changed protagonists and moved the series into a different territory, the English title was changed to Yakuza: Like A Dragon. (my source for this claim is in some Insert Credit episode, Brandon and Tim mentioned knowing someone responsible for that change and how they were wanting that change for years before it happened. However, I am not going to bother to look that up right now. Just look up who's responsible for the localization of Like A Dragon I'm sure you'll find it) After that, the series is called Like A Dragon. But isn't it easier to refer to all the games as that now? Like A Dragon 1, 2, 3, etc. Even though it's still Yakuza for those. Ah, idk. You get what I mean, though.

God this post is so long. I'm just bored waiting for my food to get ready.

Then you have stuff like Resident Evil, a zombie survival horror game that was called Biohazard in Japan, which makes sense because it's more about the evil fucking science behind the creatures than traditional zombie stories were at the time about dead people walking through fucked up disease or magic or whatever. Point is, after the series slowly went from survival horror to action, the 7th game wanted to change things back to survival horror. I imagine this is related though I am really not sure, but they went with the name Biohazard 7 Resident Evil and Resident Evil 7 Biohazard in Japanese and English respectively. At this point I think my blood sugar is too low to keep going, but I hope this post was able to let you reflect on localization a little.

#video games #if anything I said here is wrong feel free to call me out in the reblogs

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benis-chillin · 2 months

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Backlog Reviews 2024: Bionicle the Game

Platform: GameCube

January 12th, 2024-February 28th, 2024(incomplete)

So…This is a fucking disappointment.

Now, Bionicle is literally a franchise that has defined my life. I love the lore, my iconography when it isn't an ass is a Kanohi Hau, and I have many of the toys. Heck, I even have a storyboard from the second movie!

However, I never had a console that could run this back when it was new, I never gave the PC version a go, and even after we got our Wii with backwards compatability, it was YEARS before I got it Gamecube ready.

But I always had a curiousity with it, since it was advertised in the Bionicle: Mask of Light VHS I grew up with. It looked, frankly, amazing to kid me, and I REALLY wanted to play that level with Tahu Nuva surfing on lava. Always loved that scene in the movie, and Tahu Nuva was my first Bionicle, so makes sense.

So this year, 21 years since it was released, I finally sat down and played it, and…

Most of it is just OKAY…With a cheat.

Basically, this game's only form of attack is a sort of weird energy blast that takes forever to charge. In fact, when testing the rom, I played Tahu's stage legit, and I just felt silly jumping all over the place and shooting off a blast when the thing finally filled enough to shoot. So, for my own sanity, I grabbed a cheat that gives me infinite energy, which made everything WAY more managable.

Though this does expose the game's weak shield gimmick as not all that helpful, since most enemies barely hit you, and your health points regenerate fairly quickly after you defeat them, so why not cut the shield and just give us infinite blasts? It's way more fun that way.

Moreover, the game also has a "Nuva blast" technique that is so finicky that you'll probably not find yourself able to do it consistently even once you figure it out. It's like, hold down the shield button to charge up energy, then press another button(Y, in my case)right as you let go for a small shockwave effect. Yeah, only really useful when they force it on you.

Though another big hinderance may be that this game was not at ALL optimized for the Gamecube controller. I'm of the opinion that the Gamecube controller isn't right for ALL games, but it's the best option for all the games it works in. And the fairly simple controls of this game SHOULD work out, but literally the only good button is A as the jump button. B is shield, X is the shoot button, and Y is for special attacks and actions. L and R are used as secondary camera rotation buttons(that barely even worked for me, and I don't think that was a controller problem), and Z seems to be unused.

And this layout is a nightmare!

X in particular should be reserved only for actions that you don't need to do as much, it should not be the MAIN firing button, especially if you need to use Shield and Shoot TOGETHER, as it seems it wants you to do.

My layout would keep jump as A, but make B the Shoot Button, put Shield on the shoulder buttons(you only need the stick for the limited camera in this game), and keep Y as special. Just my opinion.

Though Idk how much it would help the sluggish movement and turning speeds of this game. It was DREADFUL getting anywhere in this game! I actually started playing my next game, Batman Arkham Asylum, in the middle of this, and the difference in control fluidity was staggering. Felt like an N64 game.

This could've been a frame rate problem, though. I noticed that the PS2 footage I occasionally checked out was a lot smoother than mine, so I think they just didn't want to optimize anything for GC. Also had a recurring glitch where the music would just cut out at random points in the level. Not sure what was up with that.

As for the story…

What story?

Things just HAPPEN in this game with no rhyme or reason! First the Bohrok attack for two levels, then we're fighting the Kal, then we're fighting Rahkshi! Sonic Mania had more of a cohesive narrative than this, and Sonic Mania doesn't have a damn narrative!

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And honestly, I could put up with all of this for most of the game! I was just happy to be experiencing a new-to-me piece of Bionicle media! I love Bionicle so much that I was willing to put up with a bit of bullshit!

But then came the Tahu Nuva level. The one I had been looking forward to for a good chunk of my life. Finally, I could experience lava surfing with Tahu like I always wanted to! I had this experience with the Toy Story 3 video game back in the day where I would just sit down in the Woody's Round-up mini-game and just ride Bullseye around town until I got tired, or the game crashed(it was on Wii). But still, the experience of getting to embody that part of one of my heroes was unforgettable.

And this level is completely broken.

Half of the things you're meant to shoot don't let you target them, shit keeps on getting in your way with no way to avoid them, and the Rahkshi will just randomly decide to be completely out of your firing range at certain points. The shot will fire, they will seem in range, but it never hits. And naturally, the defeat cutscene is unskippable.

Yeah.

So, I finally had to just give up. My heart was broken. I'm sad about this. So long, I'd wanted to do this…Guess I'll be waiting a while longer.

3/10

Next up is the one I've already started: Batman Arkham Asylum on PC. See ya then!

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