I got it as a kid because Donald Duck was in it (and also Sephiroth)
As a fan of the comic versions of the duck characters kid me came away sorely disappointed
I got it as a kid because Donald Duck was in it (and also Sephiroth)
As a fan of the comic versions of the duck characters kid me came away sorely disappointed
I saw someone say “young ” so that’s an improvement
Are you sure your ex wasn’t just one of Brace’s characters
OUT THERE: Crimes of the Paranormal
It’s the episode about the lizard people. I think I already found the ep on a VERY OFFICIAL streaming site
Didn’t they do this in the UK with some leaked document about how the Tories were planning to sell off the NHS to American health insurance companies or something? Corbyn talked about it but he just got told off for playing into Russian hands
*when a single mom on benefits owns a fridge or a microwave
How about transportation vs cisportation? Would that just be staying in place
10 million more reality shows incoming
I think it’s also just residual Tolkien influence where they want their worlds to feel immersive and realistic
I think in the West game devs just treat monsters like large, aggressive animals and try to have them make sense as biological organisms
i am even less interested in the problematic age gap relationship with the trenchcoat beanie guy and pink hair protagonists little sister in ff13
lmao, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who thought that was weird. I’m sure they’re supposed to be the same age if you look up their character profiles but it just looked like a 25-year-old dudebro dating engaged to be married to a middle schooler. So much of that game’s emotional thrust is placed on that relationship and it just made most of the drama land with a wet thud.
Amusingly, both of that game’s sequels focus entirely on the bond between Lightning and Serah and ditch Snow almost completely. You play as Serah in FFXIII-2 and the guy barely makes an appearance
It’s such a different take on the concept of a “monster.” I feel like most Western devs try to stay within fairly tight genre trappings or approach things from a lore/ecological/biological perspective
Yeah it’s crazy how some very very early PS1 games look so similar to 16bit outings.
Worse, many of them look like 3DO games. Actually, 2D games on the PS1 do typically look a lot better than SNES and Genesis games. Pretty sure Rayman would look and sound much worse on either
The intro animation is easily the most memorable and well-made part of the entire game but it does set up expectations that the actual game just can’t live up to. The game’s beady-eyed chubby-looking little chibi sprites and the cutesy world they inhabit just don’t match the atmosphere and mood of the intro.
The studio behind the game, Media.Vision, had only made two games prior to Wild Arms, Crime Crackers and Gunners Heaven/Rapid Reload, both of which were early PS1 games. When I say early PS1, I mean early. Crime Crackers came out in 1994 and looked like this:
(It’s incredible how different stuff from the early years of the PS1 is from the later games I grew up with. It barely feels like it’s the same console- I recently flipped through a PS1 mag from 1996 and recognised basically none of the games being shown)
With that pedigree it makes sense Wild Arms didn’t quite measure up to RPGs from Square. I looked up what Media.Vision is up to these days and discovered they’ve been active ever since and actually worked on the Valkyria Chronicles series which I recently made a post about. Not the VC game I played but still, small world
I’ve been playing through Wild Arms lately. It feels pretty antiquated compared to basically any of SquareSoft’s PS1 JRPG output, being essentially a standard tile-based top-down 16-bit RPG with 3D only being made use of in battles. It predated FF7 and playing it helps appreciate just how huge of a technical milestone that game was. Compared to games that looked like this
FF7’s cinematic camera angles, 3D character models and FMV cutscenes FF7 must’ve felt like it was from another universe. Even the 3D battles aren’t that impressive looking:
Though I will say that the battles do at least feature models with fully texture-mapped polygons as opposed to the flat shading FF7 mostly used.
Wild Arms feels and looks kind of basic and the storytelling and characterisation fall short even when compared to Square games from the previous generation, but the game has a quick, breezy pace to it that’s kept me weirdly hooked. You move from town to dungeon to boss and back again very quickly and there’s basically no annoying minigames or cryptic side content to slow you down. I actually played Wild Arms as a kid but I remember it much less clearly than Square’s PS1 JRPGs. Playing it now I realise I must’ve made it at least a decent ways in but I have no memories of specific plot beats, boss fights and events, which can probably be blamed on the basic presentation.
My main memory of the game was of its FMV intro animation and the incredible song that accompanies it
The vibe of the intro might make you think the game has a heavy spaghetti Western influence but aside from a few Western flourishes in the soundtrack, there being guns and one character wearing a duster and another being named Calamity Jane that’s not really the case- everything is fairly standard JRPG fantasy fare which feels like a missed opportunity.
I might check out Wild Arms 2 when I’m done with this
Halo 3 did have an XP system but it barely did anything. XP gained you rank that went from Private to Grand Marshal or whatever and it basically just showed how much you’d been playing the game. That was separate from the playlist-specific skill ranks that went from 1-50 IIRC. Halo 3’s customisation unlocks were almost entirely tied to achievements
Reach took those systems and made them much more involved and grindy while also adding way more cosmetic unlockables. I played Halo 3 purely because I thought it was fun but in Reach I spent hours in that stupid Gruntpocalypse Firefight playlist to grind for credits and XP for a specific helmet I wanted
I remember playing Halo 3 online for the first time and just having my mind blown by the fact that you could gain XP in a multiplayer shooter. But that’s an RPG thing!!!
Chinese Call of Duty
Chinese Wolfenstein
The IA loaned digital copies of books they’d scanned. Only a certain amount of copies could be loaned at one time due to stupid copyright bullshit
During the pandemic they allowed unlimited copies to be loaned out at any time which made the copyright mafia big mad
On my phone, I installed Podcast Addict (there might be better alternative apps) and found that the search function would bring up both the official and bootleg pirate feeds when I searched for the podcasts I listen to (Chapo, QAA, TrueAnon)
Edit: I just checked and noticed that “TrueAnon” will give you the official feed while “True Anon” will give you the bootleg one