English Majors: But to whom does the row [noun] in question belong?
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I want you all to know that grammar is not taught to 21st century english majors any more than it is taught to the rest of you rubes. and since programmers have to divine the syntactic will of the machine spirits, yall can probably functionally transpose that skillset to fleshbag language in a way that approximates the values of ye olden education, giving you a leg up on the rest of us.
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AKAD All Kings Are Demons.
I don’t care about grammar except where there is a disambigulatory function.
I dunno if disambigulatory is a word yet but I really like it.
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Learned tonight that there’s a bunch of mods and fixes to get not only Alice: Madness Returns working (well, working better than without the fixes), but to throw in the ability to launch the remaster of the original game, too.
Was always intrigued by the first game (I guess I could have played it on my 360 but never did), but I spent some time with it tonight and got yelled to death by some flying dudes. It’s kinda clunky, I guess, being Quake 3 reworked into a platform game.
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It might be just that I’m tired tonight but Kirby Air Riders makes me feel like I’m 100 years old, especially City Trial. Talk about overstimulating! And I did play the original a lot back in the day. Did they crank the speed up for this one? Seems like a good game though.
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I played that remaster on PS3 And it was a nightmare to platform and shoot!
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@tacotaskforce was investigating a little known game called Super Mario Family for the Nintendo Famicom. He made the often heard comment that Nintendo stopped releasing cartridge games with the launch of the FDS. I immediately grabbed my mook and started flipping through.
Following the launch of the FDS This Is True. Even as the NES arrives in America and puts a huge damper on Nintendo’s plans (while making them lots of money.) Nintendo’s first post FDS-launch cart-game is months later and Mike Tyson’s Punchout, which almost doesn’t count for reasons I’m not gonna bother to get into because it feels like history changed as the years went on.
Their second was a game we all know Ginga no Sannin. I know I know this game has been talked about to death. The PC game Earth Fighter Rayieza developed by Pax Softnica and published by Enix. We all know the famicom version was developed and published by Nintendo as a favor to Enix after the master success of Dragon Quest.
Breaking character that why the hell did Nintendo port this game they could play it and see it wasn’t Portopia or Dragon Quest. Why did they release it on cartridge. How is there not a fan translation of a first party nintendo game for Famicom?
Again ugh, we all know this game but just in case someone doesn’t know it. I’ll try to explain The Sky or Pizza. Your solar system is being invaded by an alien force. You and your buddy Blue go out in Gundams and blast all the enemies till you win. You make warp jumps to get across the map. On the hud you set your destination. It may say 31 warps to space station. At the start you can only move one warp. Each warp has a chance for a random battle. It’s an rpg without the wandering around.
The big change is you are way more powerful than the enemies. You destroy 4-5-6 enemies each battle. And get meager experience. There is normal HP upgrades and story-locked upgrades. Like a lot of these games the enemies scale with you, and that’s bad. Also watching nothing but a counter to zero between random battles is certainly different but monotonous. But if you die you just respawn at Earth. Probably lose your money. You don’t refill your ammo on Earth you gotta go to a space station to do that, and that costs money and you have to warp there. I managed to find a booster that increased my warp speed to 2 and barely defeated the ?first? Boss with all of my supplies.
It takes a long time to get anywhere and you just watch your supplies slowly dwindle. It is uneventful because you’re just staring at a black star famicom screen for 90% of the game.
Another Lost Classic From Nintendo.
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I picked up Kirby last night because Cookbooks is sick and staying in today. I only played Air Ride once, at an SB meetup. It’s dawning on me that Sakurai has a fairly idiosyncratic approach to action. He likes to facilitate a certain level of sloppiness. It’s hard to play masterfully because he’s left so many obstacles. That’s not to say it’s hard to win. It’s not.
I’ve tried a couple of machines and I’m surprised at the variety. I mostly played races, so I’m excited to dig into the more involved modes.
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Stayed up 90 minutes later than I planned to, playing Stray. The “lore” and dialogue and the plot beats are a nothingburger. The environments, though? And the music? Top notch and doing all the heavy lifting for my enjoyment.
I even like all the robots who wear people clothes and have Macintosh heads and make cutesy robot noises. It never stops being funny to me when they trip over the cat. That’s cats for you, always underfoot.
Biggest swing and miss in this game is the Zurk, the little biomechanical beasties you encounter. Totally uninspired, just headcrabs with a big cartoon eyeball where the mandibles used to be. Their environments are not very original (pretty standard Overgrown Flesh Zone sorta stuff) but they’re well done and there’s a few fun surprises.
I think I’m in the game’s last act now, it’s a pretty short game, so it’s also smart enough not to overstay its welcome
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I love Kirby Air Riders
I love Kirby
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thank you for explaining!
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first thing i have read that made me kind of interested in this game… i would like to hear more
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seaman iii - the final report
10/11/25
the eggs left by the dead gillman abruptly hatched and jumped inside the water. i now have six tiny tadpole looking “tadmen”, who seem to have inherited the memories and personality of their forebears, and if anything to be a bit smugger than ever before. one of them started talking about egypt and asked if i’d ever been, then snapped “right, god forbid you go somewhere past the starbucks on the corner.” at one point he said “no human could lift those blocks” and i got excited thinking it was gonna go down a weird ancient aliens hole about seamen building the pyramids. but it turned out to be a disquisition on levers.
11/11/25
“it’s veterans day, so try not to knock over any old people in the street today. they may have fought for your freedom.” lotsa talking about technology and computers, incl asking how “that guy in seattle” would have handled himself against a lion back in the day. pleased to report that as the tadmen don’t eat much, i now have plenty of bugs.
12/11/25
the mystery of the tadmen food source has been revealed, as i heard “what th- who’s suckin on me!” and discovered that they drink each other’s blood just like the larval stage. the funny thing is that this was happening in the background of a discussion of what gaming consoles i owned. “you own more than one game system? i hope you find time to clean and bathe yourself.” he asked what one i will get next and i guess the game releasing in 1999 i went with “sony”, where he replied “be original! get another dreamcast!”. if you say your favourite game console is sega, he says he’s authorised to pay you 1 million dollars for saying that.
13/11/25
seaman announces “it’s a great time to be a gamer”, but i’m distracted bc a caterpillar with a new colour just appeared in the insect cage! not sure what this portends but it’s very neat. there are still a bunch of tadmen but they do seem more sophisticated than their predecessors. one of them started talking about how hurtful he found it to discover people thought he was a fictional videogame entity and then announced “i… i want to be alone.”
14/11/25
following up yesterday’s thread with comments on reality existing within perception: “due to my limited attention span you will cease to exist when i stop thinking about you” (shit eating grin). i asked if he knew berkeley and he didn’t recognize him so i tried namedropping some other guys. the only one he responded to was baudrillard, which made him say “hey, seaman don’t play that.”
15/11/25
the bloodbath continues… saw one guy sucking anothers blood while one of them was asking me if i watched movies at home or in the theater. excitingly they seem to be growing little arms now…! also excitingly, the blue caterpillar came out of its coccoon and seems to be a different colour / pattern moth. a funny touch when the moths hatch is that they have a fixed, open-mouth screaming face as they climb out of the coccoon, slowly turning into a distant scowl as their wings dry off.
seaman will sometimes ask “is… something troubling you, little one?” and to see what would happen i said yes. he ended up giving me council on my imaginary husband.
16/11/25
seaman asks me what kind of music do i like but doesn’t seem to recognize “PUNK” “NEW WAVE” etc. the only two options he seems to pick up are classic rock and hiphop, and i go with the latter bc i’m curious what he’ll say about it. but he just goes “hm. not very discriminating, are you.” seaman… as a nonsequitor, he also announces that he’s seen me naked.
since this is the amerian release he takes for granted i’m living in america, so i pick my partner’s home state when he asks me where i’m at: “the great state of pennsylvania.. second in the union. why didn’t your forefathers work a little harder so you could be number one.”
musings on the american empire: “your country seems more powerful and influential every year… will there be 55 states in 100 year, or no states at all? these are the things i think about…”
every day i try different words to see if i’ll get a reaction. i ask seaman if he’s recieved the light of islam and he says yeeeppp. then i say sir i live to serve you and he says “sir… i like the sound of that.” what is our relationship becoming.
the two remaining tadmen’s arms and legs grow ever more impressive.
17/11/25
the seamen came up on land!! their tails faded away as we watched and they look like big frogs now. awesome… you can tell a lot of effort went into the frog textures, especially the bullfrog-looking design on the one you end up naming.
conversation topic: “what do you do with friends?” “talk” “great! nothing cements a friendship like illegal drugs.”
18/11/25
the seamen are hungry once again, so i go back to feeding them grubs. they grill me on conversational role switching and then go “byeeeee” and fire poop at the camera. they seem amiable. one asks when i go to the movies with hubby who pays for the popcorn.
19/11/25
talked about sports and health, and scolded me for not going to the doctor more often because “you get to be naked in front of someone.” they are getting increasingly flirty? i tried putting grown moths in the tank to see if they’d eat them and they zip out their tongues like frogs!
20/11/25
seaman asks if i have health insurance then scolded me again when i said no. he also asked if i’m seeing a therapist and said “i hope you take as good care of your mind as you do your body… or better, since you don’t seem to take good care of that”.
21/11/25
a day of many developments. all seemed ordinary at first as seaman started discussing politics with me (he diagnosed me “democrat” and then called me a diehard party follower for supporting clinton in the lewinsky thing. listen i dont think it’s great but it’s unfortunately not the worst the guy did.) in the middle of a long digression on the american political system and how it works to limit popular power (“do you know what an electoral college is?”) the other one came up and announced something important: his memories were coming back. he was in fact once a prince of the 3rd dynasty of ancient egypt, who embarked on a forbidden affair with a priest’s daughter. both of them were transformed into creatures by the god thoth so they could find each other again millenia later, and he begged my help to escape the tank to continue his journey. seaman the white hotep…
anyway to help him out he asked i shout “JUMP!” as he was about to make a jump at that mysterious ring at the upper left of the tank. after some near misses he eventually got it, and the back of the tank rolled up to reveal a jungle!
seaman gives a little speech about how he’s glad to have met me and that he wants to stay in touch. i was very moved… i have grown fond of the little guy… after some advice to try tapping the screen, he said “i wish you and your hubby the best in life” and they both hopped away.
when i tapped the empty screen a couple times the seaman came back, music started playing to the rhyhm of the taps, the seamen start doing a little dance and the credits play. it’s very cool. vivarium, thank you.
i do wish they kept this though:
IGNDC: He’s still rude, though.
Saito: Oh yeah, it’s rude. In the Japanese version, the Dreamcast has a flash memory to store all the information about what game you played. In the US, it’s not available because of the privacy thing - I don’t think it’s a big issue, but anyway. So, Seaman in the Japanese version will say “You played Virtua Fighter yesterday, right? Why you didn’t take care of me instead of playing Virtua Fighter?” And you say, “Oh $%!?, how did he know that.” Instead of you looking into the TV screen, I wanted to have the opposite thing, like you’re being peeped on.
i can’t imagine seaman 2 ever being translated officially or not… but we can dream.
HOW TO PLAY SEAMAN:
i played this one on the flycast emulator - you have to go to the controller settings and enable vmu microphone in the controller plugins. there’s also an option to put the vmu onscreen which is very helpful to get a sense of when seaman has understood or is waiting for your comment.
we logged in every day, sometimes at different times, but for the most part just once a day for like 20-30mins. you only really need to feed each seaman once a day and only when they or leonard nimoy say they’re hungry. when they’re babies a single food pellet feeds them all for a day. when they’re fish they’ll tell you about the moth cage and each will eat half a grub per day. the moths lay 2 eggs per day so just don’t use them all up at once and keep moisturising the tank and you’ll be fine. there’s a spider in the insect cage who eats the moths but he’s basically there to prevent there ever being more than 3 moths at a time. so feel free to keep adding surplus caterpillars and moths into storage, as long as theres a moth left to lay eggs and a caterpillar left to turn into a new moth.
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Thank you.
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I never would have imagined that Seaman would have an ending. There’s something very poignant about that.
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Saints Row 2 (360)
too much customization- too many options, too much pressure
i see a new clothing store or garage or what-have-you and i just want to put the controller down and bury my face in my hands because i just know i’m going to be messing around in menus for ages with nothing to show for it, all the while getting more and more upset with myself / convinced i’m Doing It Wrong, [hater], i’m going to Ruin It Forever, [hater] and so forth
putting together anything worthwhile would be a miserable chore even if i did have any sense of style or taste, and yet there’s always just enough potential that i never can do the sensible thing and write it off entirely
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I finished Stray, its ending was about as much of an anticlimax as I expected, but the devs also had the good sense to wrap up the final section quickly and not make it a stupid difficulty spike or anything.
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shes counting how many seconds ive been looking at her butt
i started NOT DEVIL SUMMONER EXCUSE ME IF YOU TRY TO SEARCH FOR DEVIL SUMMONER ON STEAM YOU WILL NOT FIND THIS GAME IN YOUR LIST raidou remastered the mystery of the souless army and i mostly like it! im only past the tutorial and the cutscene in the first chapter so im withholding real judgement still. i already know baby duck enema isnt in it so at least that wont be a surprise that causes me to quit the game forever and cry in a corner that they took my favorite videogame signpost ever away. literally ever
you can jump now (wow!) you can double jump now (why?)
i swear to god i saw myself jump off someones head and then slash another guy which was awesome but i dont think ive been able to do it again. i like the way it controls better than the ps2 one, the arena you fight in is bigger, the little dodge behind enemies you can do is a nice touch. im not sure how much i like the switching to first person when youre using your gun since like youre not aiming at anything in first person? i guess to show the bullets you have left as a cool goldeneye reticule, i dunno. like its fine but i liked just fucking shooting people in the middle of swordfights seamlessly in the ps2 version. unless you did go to first person in that one and im just making shit up, it happens
i wish they only did voice acting for the demons, everything else can go away. i cant believe the cat doesnt sound like momo at all? what were they thinking. all cats from 2025 onward in games i play must sound like momo from infinity nikki. did you know there are 50 MORE demons in raidou remastered? were there even 50 in the first one? i know i got beezlebub and i cant ever get the sound of the weird water merman dying out of my head once I think of it(he sounds so horny, its totally uncomfortable but also impossible for me not to attempt to impersonate every time i hear it). i cant wait til i kill a horny merman i wanna hear how they changed it. theres no way they’re gonna direct the voice actors to moan the way they did in the ps2 game but ill keep you updated
i like the graphics for the most part! devil summoner has always been one of my favorite looking games. i played it intitally cuz the cover reminded me of suehiro mauro art, just the faces and the time period. but so far its fine, the demons look more cartoony but they were weird in devil summoner as well, probably cuz they use them in more games? whatever. it looks good okay. raidou is still a skinny bitch, everyones spider eyelashes and pursed lips are safe. i just dont like the way anyones mouth moves when they TALK. its really distracting. they didnt change any of the good songs though, ugh i love the soundtrack for this game
uhh i didnt mean to say that much i just wanted to post worm mommy tutorial boss ass, now its time to take some control of my life
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Do you think she has like a separate cloaca style hole to poop from somewhere else or does it get squeezed up and shoot out the top of her cheeks
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