Lurker > MegamanXfan21xx

https://youtu.be/_CJ0UNq4Zhc?si=CD9CFzE-iSQuxnFl

Pokemon Resort was great. The whole thing is amazingly wholesome, and the art style is just gorgeous to look at! Disappointingly, it's only four 15-minute episodes long. I absolutely want another, longer season. It's just too good to only be an hour.

You don't need to be super familiar with Pokemon to enjoy it. They say the names of every Pokemon that appear, and their behavior generally gives an idea of what they're like.

Started up Dying Light 2. It's got everything that made the first great, with more of an emphasis on story branches. But I just don't really have much of an appetite for sprawling open-world games that take 40+ hours to explore anymore. Maybe I'm burnt out on them, maybe it's the ever-lingering depression from how awful the 2020s have been, or maybe I don't wanna completely waste my life going through one juggernaut time-sink after another. Much like the One Piece manga/anime, I'll sink my teeth into those in the afterlife.

Since I have the physical PS4 disc, I'm required to keep it in when playing, despite getting the free PS5 upgrade, likely so I couldn't essentially hand out free copies to other PS5 owners. Unfortunately, this also means it tries to install the PS4 version every time I start the system up, which would eat up a chunk of hard drive space. Wish I knew how to stop that.

There's been a bunch of limited-time events that have come and gone by the time I got around to playing. I hope there'll be an option to toggle between these at some point. Borderlands 3 added the ability to activate any of its three main events at will, and that was a great option. For now though, there's an event where there are zombies in Santa outfits who can drop presents with good weapons in them.

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https://youtu.be/HboLRjtT-sw?si=1FGIKQZb0YdwvXX8

Found this channel that does these RPs of Trump, Biden, and Obama with AI voices as they get into various shenanigans in GTAV. They're pretty funny, and everyone gets made fun of equally.

My mom says that Christmas 2016 was 72 degrees. She has a picture of the female cat sitting on our open windowsill on that day.

https://youtu.be/jZ75iwWbIIU?si=XMvf0YIpXtPT9mzm

While I'm waiting, I decided to open a present from a more distant family member who decided to be a bit more involved with us after we reunited at my uncle's funeral. They got me a lockbox that's disguised as a dictionary, so it could be hidden on a bookshelf among the other books.

Merry Christmas! It's a nice and festive 60 degrees here, with no snow until probably some time in January.

I'm not gonna open any gifts until my mom and brother show up, but I did open my stocking. A bunch of Lindor truffles, a packet of Land O Lakes cocoa (bring the Native American girl back, you morons), and a Little Debbie Christmas Tree cake. I always hated Little Debbie and Hostess as a kid since I thought their stuff tasted too artificial. Did like their fruit pies though. Let's see if they improved their formula since I was a kid.

...hmm, the inside tastes alright, but it's a little too sweet. The outside chocolate frosting is the real issue. It feels like I'm biting into a really soft plastic. Yeah, this isn't winning me over. The chocolate chip cookies we made from store-bought dough are infinitely better.

https://youtu.be/EPN5J31_QJc?si=_EOUaX9NmP0REmdG

It's been a day, and I'm doing fine. I've got a couple bruises forming; one on my knee and one on my hand. I've had a very small headache that comes and goes, and some very faint tinnitus. My aunt has a small bruise and some aches, but she's otherwise fine.

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A little bit of good news: I found the decorations with the pictures of our cats in them. Naturally, I put our late male cat on the top of the tree. Lord knows I could do with one of his cuddles right now...

Cartridge88 posted...

sheesh, how rude.

Well, we were broken down in the middle of an intersection during one of the most traffic-heavy days of the year. We couldn't exactly settle in.

My shoulders are faintly sore now from the seatbelt, which is to be expected. And a couple of my teeth are slightly sore, but they're the same ones that got achy from bad posture in the past, so not worried about those.

The other car could simply be pushed away by hand with the engine running, but my aunt's car had to basically be rammed out of the way by a police car, since the wheel was fucked.

Cartridge88 posted...

will insurance be able to pay for that?

I think so. I don't own any car, so I'm not knowledgeable about that, but I think she said they'd pay for it.

Cartridge88 posted...

I'd also think the cars weren't too banged up either then.

The other car hit us head on and was an SUV, so they're fine. But my aunt's normal size car got hit on the front right passenger corner, so that part was smashed. The wheel was completely out of alignment and the door was jammed, so I couldn't get out on my own. Had to have some responders wrench it open.

Guess where I've just been. If you guessed "in a car accident", you'd be right!

I was on my way home from Christmas shopping with my aunt, she tried turning left at an intersection while a straight-moving driver had the right of way and was trying to beat a yellow light. Bam!

I was in the passenger seat and they hit where I was. I was wearing a seatbelt and jerked away from them, so all I got was a bruised knee from hitting the dashboard. That's definitely gonna smart for a while.

I've taken a couple aspirin and am finally taking it easy. Got some ringing in my right ear from the side air bags deploying. The other people are okay.

Well... shit. There's this youtuber named Mitten Squad who made these great Fallout/Skyrim challenge videos and had some funny deadpan commentary. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic. It sunk its claws into him badly enough to hospitalize him multiple times. I just found out he passed away a little over a week ago. Cause of death isn't confirmed, but it's a safe bet the demon drink had something to do with it. Guy was only 27.

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Every time I hear Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree and hear the part where they say "Later we'll have some pumpkin pie", I always hear it as "we'll have some fucking pie".

It's unfortunate that Spirittea is janky, because I think it could have been spectacular. It's held back by bugs and bad design decisions. There's no item stacking so everything takes up an inventory slot, no ability to organize stored items in any efficient way, and you can only buy one item at a time. I saw one person on Reddit who just dropped ingredients on the floor because that was a far more efficient method of sorting them.

The general bugginess of some quests, combined with them having kind of obscure steps, led to me regularly hopping back and forth between the wiki and subreddit. Like I like to say, if the game won't play fair, neither will I.

However, it's worth it, because the spirit bathhouse management is quite good. The spirits all have their own different sizes and seasonal type, and you have to make sure you don't seat them next to their opposing season (so, no Spring spirits next to Autumn, and no Summer Spirits next to Winter). Their appearances don't always have any characteristics that make their seasonal type obvious, so you have to try and memorize which is which. They also have different behaviors to take into account. Some spawn extra objects in a tub that can block others from entering, some swim around and can possibly stop next to someone they don't like, and some temporarily pollute the water, which pisses off the others, but raises the mood of themselves and other polluters, so reserving a tub for them is wise. You can craft an elixir to instantly cleanse the water, but once you get extra tubs opened so the polluters can have their own, it becomes better for selling.

You can recruit the townsfolk as free helpers at max friendship to keep the towel supply going and the furnace running, and some of them have activity types you can do to very quickly max their friendship. They each have their own movement speeds, so it takes some experimenting to find the fastest ones.

I'd recommend unlocking the bathhouse kitchen first. While the janky item system and store carrying randomized ingredients every days means that cooking is impractical, the bathhouse kitchen will actually produce three elixir bottles instead of the single one your home kitchen makes (which is a bug that'll be fixed in a patch). Since it sells for 1,000 gold, you'll want that unlocked ASAP. A few thousand extra gold goes a long way in the early game.

Did our yearly December tradition of watching Home Alone, a favorite since I was a kid. As I get older, I notice more holes in it, like how all these crazy coincidences had to happen to get Kevin alone and unable to call the police. How nobody ever watched that gangster movie and recognized the audio from it. How that little kitchen TV from the late 80s apparently had good enough speakers that it could fool people into thinking that a real gun was firing. Why Harry kept trying to climb the front steps when it was obvious they were covered in slippery ice instead of going around them.

Also reminds me of these two pieces of art:

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Oh no... James McAffrey passed away. He was best known for voicing Max Payne. He had such a deep and smooth, yet gritty voice perfect for a hardboiled detective like Max.

https://youtu.be/oGtH8v0qVBc?si=rj6YCWWsFcW-tXY8

I like listening to some soothing background music videos every now and then, but combining them with Animal Crossing's Happy Home Designer to make these cozy little cafe scenes with villagers as the staff and customers was a really brilliant idea that makes them even more welcoming!

We got our tree set up and decorated, but we seem to be missing some stuff, including the decorations that had pictures of the cats on them. Damn...

https://youtu.be/opCvBzYXyd0?si=gGr6AewgLMHTJspM

Only Let's Game It Out could wreak such utter havoc in a game that's meant to be about running a parking lot.

I don't do name-drop posts for 2lewd art anymore, but there's two that simply must be pointed out. A hella thicc anthro Twilight by @longinius1 and an anthro dragon Luna by @amethyst_dust !

Seeing the Ed, Edd & Eddy Christmas episode reminds me that I thought Ed's basement room was pretty cozy looking... if it were clean, I mean. Having a window and bathroom already makes it a major upgrade over mine.

Cartoon Network is running a livestream of their Christmas specials right now. Like their last livestream, there's classics and modern stuff mixed together, so you could catch something unfamiliar.

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Well, looks like that Gold Points scheme I thought up won't work. My brother's copy of Mario Wonder I claimed points from didn't give him any, saying it was used. I was only able to get them because he didn't even know about getting GP from physical carts. Getting a decent little chunk of GP would have been a nice little mutually beneficial thing for us.

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Never mind, thought Kung Fu Panda was owned by Disney. After hearing how Pixar is making a bunch of sequels because of how their originals flopped, I thought KFP4 might have been one of them. But DreamWorks has actually made some damn good stuff like Bad Guys, and I've heard nothing but praise for Puss In Boots: The Last Wish.

https://youtu.be/av3K-PEEF1c

An FPS styled after a black-and-white Disney cartoon from the '30s? Definitely wanna give that a try.

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Been watching these videos where it's the PoV of either a train driving along its route, or a person walking through a snowy night in Finland. They're pretty relaxing. Got me the first half-decent night of sleep in a while.

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Decided to look up the Game Awards announcements. I'm glad to see that God of War: Ragnarok is getting a free roguelite mode. More games should have these, because sometimes they have great combat, but not many places to really stretch your muscles.

I would absolutely not recommend getting your hopes up for the Blade game by Arkane. They made a game a year or so ago called Redfall, and that was such an utter disaster that many of the veteran staff quit.

The crossover between Dredge and Dave the Diver was interesting, because those are precisely the last two demos on my Switch I have yet to play. They're both games about fishing, but Dredge is a creepy and oppressive Lovecraftian affair, while Dave is a bright and cheerful game with pixel art absolutely packed with personality, so seeing them clash should be amusing.

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There should be a GTA-like game with a six-star wanted system, but surviving a six-star wanted rating long enough should make the stars turn red, flip upside-down, and make all the cops demon possessed and aggressive enough so that a quick death is certain. But the climax of the game would give you a huge power boost so you can actually hold off a six-star demon cop assault.

Huh, was the queer stuff in FiM that obvious? Every prominent relationship I recall was straight, and the only gay ones (Scootaloo's aunts, Lyra and Bon Bon, AppleDash) were either implied or in the background. Maybe G5 has more obvious ones?

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Spirittea is good, but a bit obtuse. Quests are kinda sloppily designed to the point where I often wondered if they were bugged. Only one actually was, and I could just quit and reload to fix it. But they're worth doing since they unlock new customers for the bathhouse management game. The first quest you're likely to complete gets you one who takes up a whopping 3x3 grid in an already fairly small starter tub, so you'll really be wanting to add smaller customers to your pool.

I really don't like the inventory system. Items don't stack, it doesn't pause the game, and there's no hotbar, so you'll have to open it every time you wanna grab an item, though you thankfully won't be needing to use them constantly.

Still, for all its faults, I'm still playing, and I can't say that about the other Stardew-likes I've tried.

Finally, that glorified buzzer is gone! Our new fridge, however, is just the tiniest smidge taller, so it won't fit under the cabinets above it, but my brother's gonna get rid of them since we never used them anyway.

Now begins the long wait to see if this thing doesn't start the same crap.

Unbelievable... so we're getting a new fridge delivered today, and I unloaded some stuff ahead of time. Freezer stuff went into our backup freezer, and meats and dairy went into our mini fridge. Woke up to see that our mini fridge's door was wide open all night because I guess something wasn't placed properly, so that's all our meat and dairy wrecked. Guess the damn freezer just had to get one last laugh in before it got taken for good.

Edit: And I also just found out that save data from the Spirittea demo doesn't transfer to the full version. Greeeeeat.

Hmm... so physical Switch games give you these things called Gold Points whenever you insert a cartridge for the first time, and every Gold Point can be used to take one cent off a purchase in the store (so 253 GP means $2.53 off). I wonder, if I still lived near my library, could I borrow every Switch game they have and pop the cartridges in for a bunch of free GP?

I've got some demos I downloaded onto my Switch, but never got around to playing. Let's see what they're like...

-Silt: It's essentially Limbo, but underwater and with a possession mechanic. The colors are all greyscale and characters are mostly black silhouettes with white eyes. If a fish you're possessing gets eaten by another non-boss fish, then you possess that one instead. There's a little exploration, then a boss fight. The boss was a pain to figure out. Getting the first two hits on it was easy enough, but for the third one, I was stuck for a bit. Turns out you're supposed to possess a hammerhead and ram the ceiling above it to make another boulder drop down, but because of the art style, it was hard to see the breakable wall, so it was kinda just guesswork.

-Klonoa: Phantasy Reverie Series: A remake of the first two games. They're 2.5D platformers with some decently expansive levels that encourage exploration. I don't like how collecting all the little common collectibles is an optional objective. Stuff like that shouldn't even be considered one. Like, Mario doesn't expect you to grab every coin in every level. Unfortunately, I'm definitely no longer in the mindset to enjoy platformers like this anymore.

-Please, Touch The Artwork: A puzzle game with abstract art as the backdrop. Interesting concept, but some of these puzzles make no sense and practically seem to rely on random chance for you to ace them. I'm not a fan of having to master near-incomprehensible logic, so this is a pass for me.

-Spirittea: Something I've had my eye on. It's got some great pixellated graphics, looking like a Japanese-style Earthbound with more detailed sprites. There's a lot of creativity in it. Buildings and trees on the map dance to a little tune, the pause menu is a big bonsai tree with various things in its branches representing your options, your various collections are kept track of in photo albums, and I've only just started. I'm already fairly hooked and cheered up by the amount of personality I've seen. Since the game involves spirits, I named my town Spoopsville.

The soundtrack is very nice, consisting of the stuff you'd hear in one of those lo-fi music videos to have as background music.

The story is that you've moved to this little village that's had some odd activity, which turns out to be from upset spirits. To calm them, you have to get this bathhouse running again so they can relax in it. As someone whose favorite supernatural creature is ghosts, I approve. Running the bathhouse consists of getting clean towels ready, seating spirits next to others who won't displease them, cutting wood for the central furnace that heats the baths and towel dryer, and cleaning the place up between that. Failing to do your best will merely reduce the amount of money you'll get from their visit. You can open and close the baths whenever you wish, so you're not forced into anything. I know from articles that you'll also get visits from powerful spirits from time to time that you'll definitely wanna please.

I still have a couple demos to get through, but I just might get Spirittea. It's given me a very good first impression, and it's only $20.