Blizzard is brave and awesome with this ish

it’s impressive how much horror mileage “sloppily made unexplained mask” gets. i’m not being salty. this is scary.

-ded-

no but then Gaia would not be in balance and there’d be a whole rabbit-based-pocalypse and— just, trust us. this’s better. sadder, but better.

I’m not anti-bunnies. I am PRO-bunny, virtual or otherwise. But am I the only one who finds this kind of...beautiful? In a sad way, but beautiful?

Thank you for this “news you can use.” It seems like folks in the survey _are_ using it portable; Patricia — if you liked the Joy-Con, do you think would, too?

I know you’ve been doing non-platform-based “The Best”s for a bit, but I want to register strong support for this recent thing (this one; the Star Wars one) for specifically thematic “The Best”s. I hope you keep at ‘em.

“find u a man who looks @ u the way Black Iron Tarkus...” um...

I’ve had no problems connecting to a race, though I have encountered problems winning one.

aw man. I didn’t play much F1 (never bought it for my SNES), but I remember both Contra (like we’ve been saying) and Top Gun as _hard_.

Jason can we get some kind of anthology of your “[THING], [tongue-in-cheek explication of THING], [ongoing sentence...]”?

Yeah you nailed it, PM. The _whole point_ of localization is translate the game/setting/language into a new cultural idiom; the fact that these letters are freighted with powerful meaning for many Americans, a meaning that is totally unintended in the original, dictates the alteration. It’s totally straightforward.

that’s cool, MDM. My dad never played, but he’d sometimes watch me play. And he’d be like “wow!” and occasionally ask questions (“so you’re...trying to get all these coins?”). It was a nice thing; almost like I deserved some kind of credit for the fact of the game.

I know what you mean about muscle memory—I remember that in my thumbs, thinking about the game’s music and graphis. It’s possible I’m misremembering how _impossible_ it seemed without the code; but as 3rd-graders playing when the game came out, my memory is we wouldn’ta stood a chance.

I know that there are pros who can beat _Contra_ blindfolded backwards using a hacked Apple Newton as a controller while simultaneously speedrunning _Battletoads_, but I honestly don’t get how anyone in its target demo back-in-the-day was expected to beat _Contra_ without the code! My friends and I were _very good_!…

I can’t believe this took so long

has anyone done 1 horse-sized duck vs. 100 duck-sized horses yet?

kids: HUGE addition. Thank you.

True story: I read this and had a salty reflex like “aw c’mon: non-committal, anodyne lede” and then I saw who wrote the article and swung immediately to: “ah, Fahey-voice: light touch, jokin’ around.”

I thought this (link, below) was useful for context; I always find it hard to know what to make of these #s because they’re presented in a vacuum of comparables and (especially) industry growth over time.