Kovukono

KH3 is bad. If I wanted to rank the main games, it’d be KH2, KH1 Remastered, KH1 with the original terrible camera and platforming, and then KH3. It’s not functionally broken, but it’s such a disappointment.

The story is a hot mess because you need to play Birth By Sleep to know who Aqua is, and KH 0.2 to figure out how she got to KH3, Dream Drop Distance to know how Sora and Riku got there (which also builds off KH:coded) and to understand why you’re fighting Organization XIII again after you defeated them entirely in 2 and why there’s multiple versions of the big bad, and KH X (the Greek letter pronounced “key”) to know what the hell a random thing that shows up toward the end of the game is. And I’m probably forgetting stuff. I hadn’t played everything, and by the end, I was just sitting back and saying “Yeah, that’s another thing that didn’t make any sense” for about every story point.

The attractions have no place in combat. They make it insanely easy, and I decided to turn them off entirely after I beat a boss just by juggling it on a pendulum ride. The Disney worlds kind of feel bare bones despite their size. It’s pretty, but it’s also empty.

I wanted to love this game so, so much, but they had to cover over a decade of lore because the creator couldn’t finish FFXV, and it’s not brought together in any really coherent or satisfying way. The combat managed to be a step down from KH2. I finished the game, and I was just frustrated because it just was not good.

All that said, for buying it, this game is supposed to tie up all the endings started in the other games. I’d just grab 1.5+2.5, and you’ll still have a good chunk of content if you’ve only played the main games. But if you also want to grab 2.8, buying the bundle is just cheaper.

I played a ton of it, and it basically consumed everything I did, but after a while I just dropped it. I technically beat the game, but I think it’s probably the worst-kept spoiler that finding the 46th room isn’t finding more than a fraction of the puzzles the game has to offer.

At this point, it’s less of a fun payoff and more of just a feeling of “finally” for the puzzles. There’s a room that allows multiples of another room whose puzzle I never managed to figure out after multiple tries, even with heavy RNG manipulation. I have another puzzle that I have to have specific rooms to place as well, which means more RNG. When it’s giving good puzzles, the game is a wonderful onion. When you’re stuck on a bad one, you’re either cursing the RNG required for it, or wondering how the hell the devs could ever have expected that to be solved (looking at you, Room 8’s predecessor).

I’ve got what feels like a ton left to find, but it kind of feels like I’m at the point where the satisfaction is outweighed by the tedium or the sheer confusion the puzzles have. All that to say that this game has totally been worth it, even if I couldn’t find myself finishing it.

I know you’re looking for people currently living there, but I left not long after Trump got elected the first time (coincidence, not cause), and I feel like it’s helped me be a bit more objective about it.

I’ve seen my dad go from a die-hard conservative who makes a couple edgy jokes to someone who isn’t even trying to hide his support for Trump. At best, he says that Trump’s statements are overblown, at worst he supports them wholeheartedly. It didn’t improve under Biden’s term, and his behavior was one of the big reasons I feared a Trump victory in 2024. He felt no need to hide what he had before (that is, if he had it then. It could have grown over time as well). There was no reform coming for him, just deeper entrenchment.

On the other hand, my sister and Mom represent some of another segment of the US. Neither one follows politics because they’re just busy. When they do have time to relax, the last thing they want to do is catch up on things they’ve missed. Unless my sister has something blasted across her social media feeds, she doesn’t know about it. My mom just doesn’t really watch anything at all, mostly because she’s dealing with her own stuff.

I got to see the US change drastically when Trump got elected, with issues that affected literally everyone, and it turned out that part of my family ignored it, and the part that did know about it supported it. I know my immediate family isn’t a representative sample of the entire US (hell, they’re not even representative of my entire family), but seeing is believing. I never would have thought that people could be like this, but if this can happen to people I know, it’s not that hard to see it happening to others.

So, yeah. Even assuming Trump peacefully leaves power in 2029 (I’ve got no hopes of removal from impeachment), that’s four years of destroying good will, soft power, government services, and legal protections, and this is happening just after we had a president who, at best, could stabilize the country a bit before building back some of what was torn down in the four years prior. This time, the administration is moving faster and with more purpose in some of these areas, too. Assuming it takes twice the amount of time to completely rebuild all that the Trump administrations have removed, that’s still 20 years down the road to be at par with where we were 8 years ago. Foreign countries don’t trust the US to not elect a lunatic. It can be a normal country, some day, but not until I’m old, and not without a lot of internal changes I don’t see happening yet.

I get that, but you’re also not quite getting the full picture with this specific instance. The community on Reddit has been waiting for Silksong so long that they have been over-analyzing every single game convention for years to see if we’re going to get a release date, and had a heated debate over whether or not a blood sacrifice of a member of the community would bring the release. They’re a little crazy over there.

It kind of felt like the game was trying to tackle language as a barrier to entry in the same way that Tunic did, but ultimately failed to properly teach. The first language is learnable, but most of the others had extremely frustrating attempts to get the last few words. It fortunately tells you when the word is correct in your pocket dictionary, but if you haven’t encountered the item it references yet, you have to assign it what you think it is, rely on it, and figure out what exactly is wrong.

I get that it’s a puzzle game, but there’s supposed to be a moment of “Oh, that’s how it works” euphoria when you finish a puzzle, not a consistent “Seriously? I got it this wrong again?” and an encouragement for random trial and error due to frustration. It’s cool that there’s different languages, based on different existing language structures, but it felt like the execution of unraveling it fell flat.

Looks like the image posted is going through Nitter. https://twitter.com/TangoGameworks/status/1874259495783981205

I think (I could be wrong about the exact location, but it seems correct) that this was taken by the BMO Museum just off Place des Armes metro. If you were four months earlier and panned the camera 90 degrees to the left, you would get shots of a few trees and a fountain in front of a huge cathedral. Going past that cathedral would show more trees by the riverside, and a couple of small parks (though the nearest one has been demolished for condos recently). Most of Montreal has a good amount of foliage (when the weather allows), though downtown doesn’t have much, especially following the recent renovations on Ste-Cat (this isn’t Ste-Cat). It’s mostly just this particular street that’s urban.

I got the first game for free and was blown away by how good it was for such a simple premise. I can’t wait for this one, I’ll probably be picking it up day one.

My dog can barely walk down stairs. Up is fine, down is terrifying. He also has a way of sitting on the couch that makes him look like a noble passing judgment on the peasants beneath him.

It’s kind of wild that I’ve seen trailers and posts for Lollipop Chainsaw’s remaster, but the first time I hear about a Shadows of the Damned remaster is buried in the last paragraph of a dev interview.

There’s a couple of odd vids that Adult Swim has put out from Alan Resnick, like May I Enter Please? and Unedited Footage of a Bear. There’s one vid that’s just as weird as them called This House Has People In It, but the notable thing is this 12-minute video has a whole ARG behind it, enough to fill a video explaining the lore for over an hour and a half.

Normally I’d expect to see this stuff on !curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works

The game didn’t really appeal to me, but I want to say that the trailer music absolutely slaps.

Even with the added costs of owning the home and upkeep, it’s only equivalent or just above rent, and that’s with the condo association fees and insurance. Even while renting I was stuck paying for utilities. And I’m highly aware that the roof needs replacing, given that we’ve got to replace ours within 5 years.

But if your point is “owning a home is more expensive than renting when you factor in all extra costs,” I want to again point out that most people are barely able to stay afloat. His point was that anyone can buy a house. Mine is that the money he thinks grows on trees literally does not exist for the majority of people.

I’m lucky enough to have been financially able to buy a home. I had help making the down payment, but we’ve now got a 30 year mortgage. My monthly payments are less than what I was paying for rent, less than the average rent in the city by almost a third. I got this place with two above-average incomes, and had the good fortune to get it during the COVID housing and interest rate dip, and I still needed extra help.

If someone is stuck with renting, they’re likely paying more than they would for a mortgage. They can’t save up the money because they’re already lagging behind, and the housing market isn’t coming down in price, and wages absolutely aren’t keeping pace. No one is saying a house would “lock them down,” they’re pointing out they can never afford it because they can’t even come up with the money to show the bank they can save because they’re already paying above the potential mortgage payments every month.

But you’re saying they won’t, not can’t, so what should they do to come up with the money? Start selling kidneys? 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and that same link shows 71% have less than $2000 in their savings. So where exactly are people supposed to shit out your hypothetical $30,000?

It’s cheating since it’s already been done, but Edgar Wright expanded Mint Royale - Blue Song into Baby Driver.

In case you didn’t know, that’s actually a sequel to their other video The Stampede.

You can get past the black screen by deleting the config file in the game’s appdata. After that, it’ll launch, you’ll apply settings, and you’ll get stuck on the “Defrosting Helldiver” screen because you can’t access a server, and be stuck with a black screen the next time you launch. I’m having so much fun.

Long Live by Atreyu, though it feels kind of like cheating. They went on hiatus after leaning toward more casual songs with the two albums before, and came back five years later with an excellent album that made people think they were back to their roots. And then they started trending towards the more popular stuff again.

I could definitely see that. I heavily disagree with you on the self-titled album just being okay, but as for a creative peak, it kind of feels like they’ve been phoning it in after Nightmare. There’s excellent songs on all the albums, but Nightmare was the last one where it felt that the majority of the tracks were ones where you really didn’t want to skip.