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I’m up to 2049 now. Sporting Club is continuing in the slow transformation from “league contender” to “fully operational battle station”. Last year we saw a hiccup in that we were pipped to the title by Benfica on head-to-head results tiebreaker, and only managed a single domestic cup to our name. In a completely rational response, we have spent 220 million euro in the transfer market[1] and now have more South American teenagers than we know what to do with. (No seriously, a bunch of them went immediately out on loan to another club because we’re overstocked at certain positions.)
Despite four separate injury crises, including two broken ankles (on different players) and two cases of broken ribs, we are in March with a ten-point lead over Benfica, plus a match in hand. For the bad, we got absolutely dumpstered in the Taça de Portugal by Famalicão, 2-4 at home, and then after a fairly credible 2-1 win in the CL playoffs over City, completely shat the bed in the second half at the Emirates, losing 4-1. We are still active in multiple competitions and will face Porto in the Final of the Allianz Cup, for whatever that’s worth.
I always find it kind of funny that kobolds are always depicted in fantasy games as like vicious rat men when unless I’m mistaken, in actual folklore they are like household spirits that do chores when you’re sleeping?
kobolds brownies knockers etc are all basically that type of spirit in different folklores yeah. Kobolds and goblins are specifically Germanic and i think got conflated and rolled into the same bestiary cuz of DnDs magpie approach to “world building”. the idea that kobolds are rat/dog/tiny dragon people distinct from goblins is a DnD invention
i loved playing kobold berserkers in dungeon crawl stone soup, just be an angry little dogman napping after every fight and eating everything you kill regardless of how foul it is. who needs literacy when you’ve got a big knife and a bad attitude
my favorite first place to take people to die in gemstone is kobold village. ive killed veronica there, ive killed preserving worlds there, ive killed myself there, ive killed infernarl there… everyone gets to die with the kobbies
if theres two in the room one will kneel and the other will shove you over the kneeling one to make you prone if you dont stun them fast enough
the art is really colorful and dense, that bit is nice
game has a huge reference problem. you don’t really get any sense of the game when playing it, just refracted bits and pieces from other (better) games. oh, it’s a chrono trigger bit, oh it’s a mario rpg bit, ad infinitum. i was talking about this in discord but there is this critical divide that seems to doom so many of these “throwback” games - throwback might not be the term but i’m in want of a better one
did the developers want to tell an interesting story using RPG mechanics? or did they want to “make a chrono trigger”? because it really feels like the latter. everything is studiously just so, but there’s been seemingly no interrogation into what made the borrowed elements sing in their original works.
i meant to play it longer yesterday but i got a sudden visceral boredom with the game that i could not ignore and just played some rocket league instead. i’ll try again today
it’s hard to say without knowing more about the devs (beyond having played The Messenger and that they read Jordan Peterson), but i feel like this is usually just the “copy of a copy…” syndrome. these devs were inspired by all the aforementioned games in your post - the devs of those games were inspired by…things other than videogames, probably! i mean of course game devs have always bitten off of each other’s work, but you know what i mean
I don’t even think that RPG looks good, it’s like they followed a really slick TIGsource “how to do pixel art” tutorial to the letter, there’s not a single bit of quirk or character to it whatsoever, am I saying this because I could never make art like that because I lack the skills and discipline to study hard and try more than is needed? NO. I don’t make art like that cuz I think it’s boring. That’s right! NEXT!!
the game’s art turns me off in the same way Avatar’s (airbender, not blue people) turns me off
when we were watching a stream of the game last night, my wife said she could tell it was a modern game because all the portraits “look like people from Brooklyn”
