so many sequels would've been better to include in megamix than figure fighter 2. micro-row 2. cheer readers 2. love rap 2 even if you include love rap in the main campaign. literally anything other than fucking FIGURE FIGHTER 2 would be better. it already gets so much special treatment in megamix-

Daily Blog June 29, 2023

So I had to stop my writing today because of bills. :( Paying them and being on the phone for hours with insurance companies. And then son called from SoCal (living down there for college) and wanted to FaceTime so we could search for his old DS games from years ago. We found about 1/2 but at least he got to see the kitties scampering about.

I will get back to writing after this post. The solution to my earlier problem, my Alpha helped get my unstuck. My muse perked right up! Now I'm anxious to get to that scene! LOL

What I'm reading:

I'm still reading The Ordeal of Being Known and only on Chapter 6. Usually I'd have it read and onto the sequel by now. It's not the fic, which I'm enjoying very much but its me doing my writing. :)

Tumblr Drarry Fic/Art Resource:

So I've mentioned @drarryspecificrecs and @drarryspecificrecsdaily for posting Daily Drarry completed fics on AO3 and then a monthly compilation for the longest fics and more. But there's more! So much more! On @drarryspecificrecs home page you will find much goodness. First there's a Theme link, which has some themes I usually don't see listed like Breaking the Statute of Secrecy or FrenchSpeaking!Draco!

But the most awesome thing is what comes next, a full on archive of all the fests that there is still access to since 2005. First a 2 part listing of fests is available. Part 1 is all the Drarry fests in alphabetical order (old and new) and the years that fest was held. Part 2 is the listing for all HP fests. If you click on the year next to a fest name, it will take you right to it. Or if you want to see all the fests held in a certain year, that is available too. This took some serious work to archive all of this. Just one note, that some years are covered on multiple pages so check the bottom for a next arrow!

Also you'll see 2023, listed and that link will bring you to the Drarry posts for 2023. Just scroll down a bit and you'll find the post for the Drarry Fest Calendar for 2023.

This Drarry Fest archive is a thing of beauty!

Note: We did discuss the category of Most Popular fics for the older fics. As it is listed it was done using Kudos, which is a good method but for older fics before AO3 and those that where the author didn't post their stories on AO3 but were brought over in The Hex Files transfer (2017), those fics started with Zero kudos, even though they might have been highly popular on other sites. It's unfortunate that so many HP and Drarry posting sites have disappeared so we don't have those stats. But, for now, we can only use the data we have. And we're all thankful that there is an AO3 archive and archivists like @drarryspecificrecs

So go play on @drarryspecificrecs and I'm sure you'll find many many hidden gems!

Tidbits:

It's HP canon not HP cannon

It's Ginevra not Ginerva (um....I might have made that error on my first fic. *blush*).

It's Lose if you've lost something and Loose if something like clothing is too large.

And in case anyone missed this amazing piece of artwork....Draco receiving the Dark Mark.

Okay, go forth and enjoy the last day(s) of June,

Rom

Hello! Haven't played Osu, Tatakae! Ouendan, but I have played Elite Beat Agents! Do you want to go off on Osu Tatakae Ouendan a bit, I would love to hear some things about it!

oh god .

hi ?? hello ?? this oddly feels like such an honor for you to be in my ask box - but putting that aside , sure ! playing both it and its sequel off and on for like the past two years really helps me here tbh LMAO

so . Osu ! Tatakae ! Ouendan was the first game of the series , releasing on the DS in '05 . it's what i'd call a little more ' primitive ' than EBA or the 2nd ouendan , examples being there's no unlockable songs , that you're not able to save replays of stages you've played , that you can't skip through the cutscenes that play while your stamina meter is filling up on the bottom screen ( which is persistently annoying for if you keep dying in one stage ) / outro cutscenes , that said stamina bar drains faster than in the other games , especially on higher difficulties , there's also only one ending song , unlike the other two games ( and also ! it's Ready Steady Go , which is the exact same song used in the Fullmetal Alchemist opening ) - but for this being the first game of the series that iNIS made , it's excusable .

Elite Beat Agents came out in '06 as somewhat of a localization of OTO , after seeing how many people were importing OTO to play it even without an english language option . an upgrade to the original OTO formula . you probably know the rest .

Osu ! Tatakae ! Ouendan ! 2 ( otherwise known as Moero ! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu ! Tatakae ! Ouendan 2 ) came out in '07 , which added a bit of a twist compared to the original - that being the fact there was now two teams , the Yuuhi Ouendan and the Asahi Ouendan ( also known as the Encouraging Nobility ) which rival against each other to be the top ouendan team . this game has similar features to what elite beat agents added , and even had a special distribution event / an early form of DLC where you could get a special mode where you could play as the EBA ( which put an EBA badge button on the difficulty selection screen , and was just a model swap . it can actually still be put into the game through cheats if you have it on something like an r4 card )

and sadly , that's where the curtain quietly closed on the series . they tried pitching one on the 3ds to nintendo , but they never greenlit it , and that's where it ends - i'd say , if it weren't for the pc game Osu ! existing . it at least , lives on through that .

kirby's return to dream land thoughts

didn't really go into this game planning to make a post like this, this was just a game i wanted to give a go but i ended up having a decent amount to say about this game that i can't really fit into twitter posts neatly.

modern 2d kirby games are really interesting. i think they are the most mechanically rich the series has ever been, though admittedly they do end up sacrificing some of the simplicity that it core to kirby as a result. though this also creates a contradiction where because you're given so many more options the games are now also generally easier. kirby games were always pretty easy, though i did find myself more likely to die if i was playing haphazardly in those. more options = easier yet less simple, but also allows the game to create a higher skill ceiling for its most difficult challenges in the postgame. i didn't really try any of these so i won't speak on them, but the main campaign of this game is relatively breezy. i had 80 lives by the end of the game and i'd imagine a kid could make it through with a fraction of those lives.

return to dream land is also the first console kirby game in a while, and in a lot of way it's really really safe. mechnically speaking the only thing they push outta the game that would've been unreasonably for the poor feeble DS was the addition of 4 player multiplayer. graphically though? this game takes full advantage of being on much beefier hardware. kirby character designs have, to me, always translated extremely well to 3d designs. some series do struggle graphically when making the transition to 3d, meanwhile with kirby? kirby 64 is by far the best looking game on the N64 in no small part to the simple character designs lending themselves well to a lowplay style. but i digress. i played the switch port for this playthrough and damn, i gotta be real, the thick outlines of the characters contrasting the levels really does look nice. it gives the game a nice bit of pop and does account for the fact that a lot of people are likely gonna be playing this as a handheld game. the wii original is no slouch in the graphics department, but the switch version is, in my opinion, the best that kirby has ever looked in 3d!

while it is a very nice looking game, in terms of theming... it's nothing that kirby hasn't done before. you got your beach levels, your volcano levels, industrial levels, grass levels, etc etc it's all very safe. i guess it makes sense given kirby hadn't been on a console in over a decade, but it does make this very odd to me, in terms of comparing it to the game that would follow it. the theming of the sequel games is STRONG. triple deluxe takes a more naturalistic approach, while planet robobot contrasts this with an industrialist approach. star allies ties together what is otherwise mostly a game for fanservice with a kid friendly cult. forgotten land takes you to an apocalyptic world, a world now overgrown but still containing many manmade structures that create a dark undertone that forces you to ask "What happened here". return to dream land, again, does not in my mind have this sort of distinct theming. we're just in dream land again. we're gonna see the same kind of levels we've come to expect, without much of a twist on them. perhaps this is being unfair to the game, and i would at the very least place it higher than star allies, but i can't pretend like this game left all that strong of an impression on me in this regard.

i cannot say the same for the game's villain, magolor. holy shit does this guy steal the show. if there's anything to remember about this game, it's him. in a similar vein to marx, he feigns being kirby's friend by laying a problem in his lap. magolor's ship has crashed on popstar, and he needs help repairing his ship to make it back home. of course, we're never given a reason as to why he came out of a big ass black hole far away from home, but kirby's just a nice guy and is willing to help out. we've no reason to be overtly suspicious about magolor, other than he's rather secretive about how he even ended up here. this, in my opinion, helps with the twist later. his true nature is revealed when, upon defeating the dragon that doomed his ship prior, it is revealed that magolor is another power-hungry maniac trying to conquer the universe. he is so nice to you up until this point, it is easy to get attached and therefore easier to feel the betrayal. marx doesn't really have this? he shows up once before deciding, actually, i want to take over the world. magolor is a constant presence, he IS the driving force of the game. he is the one you meet at the end of each world, and he is the one who drives you to slay the only beast keeping him from obtaining ultimate power.

i had a lot to say about the set dressing of the game, but how about the levels themselves? they're about as good as they've always been, i reckon. they also come with some of my kirby gripes. i've always felt a bit odd about how kirby games did puzzle solving for its optional areas. it makes sense that they'd want you to engage with a specific copy ability, but i always found this hard to come to grips with. kirby games are so easy, it would be most fun just to blast through the game with your favorite copy ability. this is actually how i often play through kirby 64! but it's also not practical if you wanna get the most out of the game. i'm not really sure what the solution is, it's not like i want the puzzles to be less interesting, but i can't pretend like it isn't a problem for me personally.

in general, the level design is pretty solid. they're nothing you haven't seen before, but then again, that's a reoccurring theme. i do think the expanded movepools give you more to do when you're going from level to level, as well as giving more depth to the bosses.

i will say also, the central gimmick of this game is... underwhelming. i think this is the BIGGEST issue with modern kirby games. often times the gimmick of the game is an uninteresting one. i think the only games where i'm fully on board with them is the robots in robobot and mouthful mode in forgotten land. the stronger copy abilities are... fine. i do think that they kind of make my problem of "Having to constantly switch copy abilities isn't the most fun" worse. i also think that a lot of them don't create the most fun puzzle solving. pretty much all of them just boil down to hitting the attack button in the right spot, which i suppose you could argue is how a lot of kirby puzzles go, but it feels more egregious when you have to watch a longer than normal animation every time. you're also just practically invincible during these segments. sure, you CAN get hit, but also, the second you see an enemy, it's as easy as hitting the attack button every time. shout out to the snow roll though, that one was genuinely fun pretty much every time i came across it.

seems like this game got me to bitch a LOT. but it's really much easier to nitpick a game like this than say "it's cute and i like it :)" over and over. this is a great game! it's just a game that IMO lives in the shadow of better games that have followed it since. more than worth playing, but don't expect this to be a big shakeup for the kirby series or anything.

I think its more a case of amount of media/entries

I don't think I'd phrase it as one is more "real" than the other, and more so different pacing

Theres 10 or 11 mg/s games, and only one for death stranding (with DS2 upcoming) so far

Mgs covers well over roughly 50 years, and much of characters' relationships and interior thoughts are off screen/left unsaid

The relationships in mgs tend to be more "fast burn", character catch feeling/relationships develop far more quickly/ have room to breath off screen, vs ds "slow burn", its plot happens at a much slower pace than any game individually, but there isnt any room for relationships to develop on or off screen in the same way ig?

And mgs do quite a bit of jumping around in the timeline after mgs2, tbf

We definitely saw a bit of lisa, cliff, diehardman and briget's complicated realtionships towards the end of the game, but it doesnt help how far in the past/how closed off and distant most of those characters are

(How reciprocal cliff and diehardmans relationship was isnt clear)

We also saw the slow movement and development of higgs' infatuation/obsession with sam, and really only saw much acknowledged by sam near the end of the game, with the boss fight and final pizza.

But, if sam and higgs are loosely paralleling naked snake and ocelot, it took the later 2 playstation games before actually having them interacting on screen together finally in mgs3 (after 2 games of barely subtext that ocelot was gay/queer, and was infatuated with naked snake/possibly other male characters) And we only see them begin to reach an equal understanding (maybe) at the end of the game, because of the layers of trauma and cold war espionage/spy bs obfuscating it

They have several violent fights/soldier meet cutes where they beat the crap out of each other, ocelot falls hard and fast for an enemy, with classic movie troupes like gaussian blur being used to suggest a dreamy quality, and snake spares a a young upstart who causes many a problem like higgs, and he should by all intents and purposes just kill him, and not just be pleasantly impressed by this weird 20 something

WOW!!!! There's a lot in MG, really.

You're right, DS is much slower and has a lot of things in the past, we couldn't have the same amount of games that MG had, I don't think we'll ever reach that number.

But I'm surprised again at how crazy MG is haha

And I didn't mean exactly that one would be more real than the other, but in a sense that as the MG sequels arrived and more of this kind of information was put into the game, the more weight there was in Kojima's intention to talk about it. He wants to talk about how these characters relate and connect and also the way these characters find to love each other within their own complexities. I see him doing that in DS as well and so that's why it expands.

Picross 3D and Round 2

HAL Laboratory - DS, 3DS - 2010-2016

[images from nintendolife and worldofgames]

nonograms, Japanese crossword, "picross," Pic-a-Pix, the only number puzzle I actually like. I couldn't get my head around kakuro and sudoku felt like a waste of time. picross, though, makes a nice picture at the end and it's easier to tell when you've made a mistake, especially on digital picross that usually tells you outright. I think I prefer picross because you feel like you've made actually completed something once you complete the puzzle instead of just putting some numbers on a page in an array that's "correct" according to an arbitrary set of rules.

Picross 3D is one of the small handful of games I remember trying a demo of from the Nintendo Channel on the Wii when I was little. the Nintendo Channel was a wonderful thing and I'd never played any puzzle like the ones in Picross 3D, so I was hooked, but I'd never played the full game until more recently. honestly, I still don't think there are any puzzle games that offer puzzles that have to be handmade like picross, 3D or otherwise. a computer can't make a picross puzzle on its own because of the picture part. Picross 3D, adapts these age-old deduction-based color-by-number puzzles into glorious 3D on the DS of all things. it was appropriate because of the touch screen, it's just that the DS wasn't exactly known for its 3D capabilities. not that it's especially visually complex anyway. it's also a late DS game that's quite good and not really talked about. seems like those things go together.

the main ideas and strategies of plain 2D picross adapt to 3D beautifully despite the extra dimension. both kinds of puzzle ask the player to use limited information to figure which cells are and aren't filled in. you don't need to know 2D picross to play Picross 3D, but it helps a little. in Picross 3D, each puzzle is a grid of cubes where any side of a cube can have a number on it, and that number shows how many cubes on that line of cubes are painted instead of broken. sometimes there will be a circle or a square around the number. a circle means the painted cubes are in two groups separated by at least one broken cube, and a square means it's three or more groups each separated by at least one broken cube. some lines of cubes don't have a number, which just means you don't know how many cubes in that line are painted or broken, and you have to use the available numbers to figure that line out.

somehow Picross 3D got a 3DS sequel, simply called Picross 3D: Round 2, that improves on the original in practically every way. the biggest difference is that there are two colors of paint instead of just one, which adds an extra layer of depth to the puzzles. (for those curious, there are multicolored 2D picross puzzles too.) in the original Picross 3D, you linearly progress through puzzles that ramp up in difficulty, but in Round 2, the puzzles are sorted into books with themes like birds, sports, or trucks, and each book has different unlock conditions. every puzzle can be played on easy, normal, or hard, unlike the first game's strict difficulty curve. Round 2 is really nonlinear and you don't need to do every puzzle to progress, so if you don't want to do the time limit or one strike puzzles, you don't have to. it also allows as many hints as you want with no penalty. the less punishing rules and library theming make Round 2 feel really cozy and sort of zen, while the original has the distinct feeling of a late DS game. I personally love both. the only thing the original has over its sequel is the ability to create, upload, and download user made puzzles over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, but Nintendo WFC is dead now anyway so that doesn't matter.

usually I feel like I need something important to say about all the games I write about. I don't have anything like that for this one, I just really like this pair of games and think the puzzle systems are really interesting and fun, and of course, most people don't know about them. you do now, though, and I hope you'll enjoy these games if you're into puzzles.

the lack of enjoyment i get from playing rhythm heaven just makes me want a new one even more tbh-