Earthbound, Mother 3, and Undertale are all the RPG equivalent of being wrapped in a warm blanket and handed a puppy. The latter two dwell on sorrow for a fair while (M3 much moreso) which may or may not be helpful, but it's hard to find many games that are more sweet, hopeful, and ultimately uplifting on the whole.

Really reinforces how important it is these days to maintain a solid hold on your branding.

A New Life! So good. My favorite bit is that if you approach the not-at-all-subtle surveillance van, the FBI guys manning it shoo you away harmlessly. But if you approach it while holding donuts, they draw their weapons and threaten you until you set the donuts down and walk away. Nobody gets between them and a…

I haven't gotten to any MGS games myself, but I kind of love Jake Solomon's take on 5.

I kinda want one of these series entries to be about House of the Dead just so that we can talk about The Typing of the Dead. Guys. GUYS.

Yeah, they did a great job of building mechanics, levels, and AI around the idea that you're on an escort mission. It's really strange to see more recent games like The Last of Us or Bioshock: Infinite making liberal use of escort sections but just making your companion an invincible, invisible dispenser of items. If…

To be fair, that's pretty weird. I think it fits the theme.

Yeah, but what do you do about Super Mario 2 or Final Fantasy Legends? Both weird, but both are rebrands created in localization. Does that disqualify them or make them shoo-ins for "weird"?

I… but… how… I was sure that was hyperbole. And yet it links. O_o

Yeah, that's 100% true and fair, and even if I were grumpy about it (which I am not) it'd be hard to say that turnabout wasn't fair play. Frankly I'm getting a little worried at the [X] other people are typing notes because I get the impression folks think I am finding this way more unjust and offensive than I am.…

Right, it's just used approximately nowhere outside of this context, so I don't think it's unreasonable to chafe briefly when you're learning the term in the same breath that somebody is affixing it as a label to you. Like I said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, it's just a little linguistic oddity…

I mean, it doesn't seem at least a little odd that the trans movement (not the right word but the best I've got) is significantly built on the idea that a person should be able to define what labels are applied to them, but in doing so created a new label that they insisted on applying to everybody else?

Re: ESP, I'm definitely finding it weird to think back on Dune as an adult and realize that spice is as much an allegory for LSD as it is for oil. And yeah, you take a book from the 60s about a character with the superpower of tripping harder than man had ever tripped before, I have to imagine Frank believed in some…

The most amusing reports I've heard of the Dark Zone have been of people griefing by running into teammates' line of fire. They eat a bullet you never intended to put in them, you get automatically flagged as having gone rogue, everybody teams up on you and scores loot out of the deal. It's not clear to me how common…

The Tarot is not a game, Joe. It's a way of life.

Hold on, making a dozen more accounts to give this all the upvotes it deserves.

Keyboard Geniuses Leaderboard, HD Remix [Link]

Thanks! I'm celebrating today with a game of Go to the DMV before you let your driver's license expire like a total dingdong.

I'm still giving the occasional nod to Invisible, Inc., though I expect to set it aside for good as soon as I complete a run on Experienced. It's not trivially easy like Novice was, but it's showing off all kinds of other issues in the process. I was very impressed with how Klei put a new spin on stealth with Mark of…

I'm now about 11 hours on the wrong side of 30, so I think I speak with a certain aged wisdom when I say: get off my lawn