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Sony announced the sequel to samurai open-world game Ghost of Tsushima, Ghost of Yotei. Its main feature seems to be that you get to play as an ugly woman. This is precisely what the market has been waiting for:
Made for the modern audience (going to sell horribly)
Look at the voice actor lol: https://www.reddit.com/r/pacificDrive/comments/1fqs6v3/erika_ishii_voice_actor_in_the_upcoming_ghost_of/?rdt=58304
Horizon: Zero Dawn is also getting a remastered version. This is hardly what people were asking for, but Sony keeps doubling down on their ugly female main protagonists:
Awesome! Playing Ghost of Tsushima as a badass samurai ninja warrior was so boring. The whole time I was thinking “Man, I wish I could play as a woman!”
…
On a more positive note, Team Ninja is working on a new waifu simulator, Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation Prism:
Might be a good time to get into the series.
The developers for MGSD:SE recently fixed some of their character designs for the better: https://youtu.be/0rYYq7kN8pc
Konami likes money too much to ignore displeased fans. However, I find the character design of “The Boss” from the PS2 version visually more striking than the updated version in the remake. There is also the problem of suspending disbelief because it is easier to accept a woman physically dominating a much stronger man if the graphics are not overly realistic.
Well, there’s hardly anything realistic about what goes on in this game haha. It has some whacky boss encounters.
The slut simulator Stellar Blade recently got a patch that enables the interaction between wind and clothing physics. Thus, the gameplay gets immensely enriched by the valuable feature of winds blowing up skirts, thus exposing grade-A buttocks. Perhaps this was done in preparation for the upcoming 2B skin:
https://x.com/wapdahca/status/1839390131998077289
Sweet Baby Inc. finally admits that their goal is to “burn the games industry to the ground”:
https://archive.ph/hfitA
Ew, that fucking thing in the picture looks gross.
Autism at its finest: close to 20 years after its release, Gran Turismo 4 gets a patch that overhauls the original game. Among others, you get “enhanced engine sounds for 400+ cars with 130+ new recordings”. I find this most impressive. This is the level of dedication/autism that all the top game studios used to exhibit in the past whereas nowadays they focus a lot more on putting out yet another heap of slop for the masses.
https://www.theadmiester.co.uk/specii/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NYHWty265Y
I really should play Fallout New Vegas again sometime. This game probably has one of the best modding communities which gives the game such massive replay value.
I wonder if Fallout 3 enjoys a similar benefit in mods. I never quite enjoyed it as much as New Vegas, but I’ll put looking into it somewhere down on my to-do list I suppose.
I recently came across the documentary 100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience (2012). It is perhaps a bit shallow but it provides a good introduction to the Japanese arcade scene, covering the various phases it went through (inception, shooting games, fighting game boom, music games, dedicated cabinets). The focus is heavily on the customer experience. Instead of a few of these interviews, it would perhaps have been better to briefly cover the impact of changes in Japanese laws on arcades, e.g. games became shorter as arcades could no longer be operated 24/7, which fundamentally changed game design principles as it was no longer economical to have games that people could play for hours like Dig Dug, Pacman or Donkey Kong. Another important aspect missing is the enormous evolutionary pressure on arcade games, which led to a proliferation of genres and fine-tuning of mechanics within a very short amount of time. Nonetheless, it is a pretty good documentary and worth watching if you want to learn more about he Japanese arcade scene.
Nice, going on my list. Did you ever get a chance to check out that “my house” Doom mod video? Wow. What an insane mod.
I watched part of it. The longevity of Doom via mods is quite astounding. The only other game I can think of that had a somewhat comparable impact and longevity is Super Mario World, which has had countless hacks, and some of these seem to have heavily influenced the “masocore” style of platforming, for instance Super Meat Boy. In particular, I am thinking of the hack Kaizo Mario World.
Speaking of “masocore”, every now and then I’ll see a short of some guy running a near impossible level build in Mario Maker. It really something how the fundamentals of Super Mario World have bred such fierce levels of platforming.
Nintendo suing Palworld seems a bit overboard to me. That’s almost like Ubisoft suing Nintendo for using the “snychonization” feature atop the towers in BotW to uncover parts of the map. Or like Fromsoft suing because Link uses a sneak attack mechanic similar to Dark Souls. Maybe there’s more to this that I’m not realizing, but I’m not a fan of the move. I don’t even care about Palworld.
PS4 emulation is developing quite well, at least when it comes to one of the handful of exclusives worth playing. Bloodborne is looking pretty good already and can even be played through already, assuming you have a beefy PC. There are still random crashes, though.
Two of the most high-profile figures in Japanese manga and video games, Kazuhiko Torishima and Yuji Horii , talk candidly about their views of US meddling with their products. The former refers to the US as a “ridiculous country”:
https://streamable.com/fn1spb
“Which way western man?” for computer games:
https://x.com/EndymionYT/status/1837620805418864774
Decent SH2R trailer: https://youtu.be/0JHD_vb4jxE
This game will certainly be polarizing. At some point around a month or two ago, it became fashionable suddenly to praise Bloober after two years of constant hate.
This could have ended up looking a lot worse, but the character models are in dire need of a remake, no pun intended. The female characters look horrible, though. Modders may not be able to fix it, but if they replace the ugly women with Ada Wong and 2B we would be a lot better off already, despite the loss of suspense of disbelief.
I just got a 1CC in the original Street Fighter II (SNES) with Ryu on default settings, with some perfect rounds. I only lost one round in the entire playthrough as the Dictator (Vega (JP)/ M. Bison (US)) used an attack pattern I cannot handle yet. Apart from that it was a run I am pretty happy with.
Hey, congrats on your progress with SFII. You seem to have really become invested in this timeless classic. It’s great to be able to really appreciate a single game and dig in deep. Is there a competition scene around these days by chance?
There is a competitive scene on Fightcade, but it centers around the various arcade releases. The last time I checked, there were a few hundred people online to play the various SFII variants, the most popular being SFII: Champion Edition.
“Is there a competition scene around these days by chance?”
I’ve been to a Fighting Game Discord before for Melty Blood. They did run special competition events if I remember right. They might even have had prizes for winners but I’m not too sure as I never participated in those. I just decided to play a casual match with one of the regulars, and I got my ass kicked real quick. I was good enough to consistently handle Melty Blood Actress Again’s hardest CPU settings (but not to the extent of handicapping myself like Aaron is doing here) and I thought that should have decently prepared me for the scene, but boy was I in for a surprise.
I could probably get into the scene and get decently good with practice, but wasn’t willing to dedicate that kind of time to this.
Street Fighter is much more popular and bigger scene than Melty Blood. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have a competition scene. You’ll probably have to go on discord though to check.
The monetization director of Ubisoft is begging people to not be critical of his company and rooting for its demise, after spitting in the face of the main audience for years:
https://archive.ph/8N9nK
Of course, I am staunch supporter of Ubisoft and I hope to see them double-down on the path they have chosen for themselves, which is why I have recently replaced the banner of this blog with a screenshot showing the black samurai Yasuke, the main protagonist of the upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.