but you gotta… you gotta get the trueee endinnggg and reconcile with your familyyyyy
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dunno if youve read it but you should check out the book Beyond A Boundary by C.L.R. James. It poses the question “What is known by those who know only cricket?”
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just posted in other thread about it 
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oh I just looked it up and it turns out that each team in my career mode ‘league’ is actually one of the district cricket associations in Tamil Nadu. Erode, Coimbatore, Kancheepuram etc
Tamil Nadu Cricket Association - Home (tnca.cricket)
so it seems they did actually do their research!
also I just had a brainwave about bowling aftertouch - I thought it was just for line (left or right), but I think you can also apply aftertouch for length (pitch the ball further up or shorter). this whole time I’ve just been holding up on the stick with slight left/right input! that will come in handy for varying my bowling and maybe getting more guys out… 
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I’ve been switching around between a bunch of games the last couple weeks, gamepass works well for that
Forza Horizon 5: I was super into this and doing the weekly stuff but hadn’t unlocked the “hall of fame” (which is basically just unlocking all the non-seasonal stuff) so I couldn’t do all the weekly events. Then I finally unlocked it and… stopped giving a shit? It was like a switch flipped and I don’t feel like there’s anything for me to work towards anymore. Hmm. Fun while it lasted though, a good gamepass game
Tunic: I don’t think I have a visceral reaction to this one, it’s a pretty and decent zelda thing. The manual conceit is cool. I’m not super great at the combat and I have two bosses I’m kinda stuck at. I’m not sure if I’m on the cusp of the thing everyone says is the big twist or not. Not sure if I’ll get back to it because I’m sure my muscle memory had already atrophied making the bosses even harder
Guardians of the Galaxy: actually pretty fun? I feel like I heard absolutely nothing about this game other than @Grandpa mentioning it. It’s not a great game, but the cosmic marvel stuff has always had the coolest environments by far and the game delivers there. You can flip on raytracing at any time and while the framerate of course goes to shit it makes some of the cutscenes absolutely gorgeous. The combat is pretty mediocre, there’s stuff to collect for upgrades for no particular reason, and the “huddles” are just weird but it’s fine. The non combat wandering around is just light puzzles with clearly signposted “use team member X to overcome obstacle Y” over and over while your party lightly roasts the main character. An oddly large number of inclines to slide down for what are probably level loading reasons. Some “choice and consequences” style stuff in the story, most of which is pretty meaningless but a few are actually a little interesting. The jokes even land most of the time! Not a bad game, not a great one, interesting reuse of the deus ex engine. Good for gamepass. Maybe I’ll actually bother to finish it.
Symphony of the Night: on a whim started playing this in earnest on the mister. I went in with only vague memories of getting like 50% of the way through the normal castle and was surprised to see how well the game guides you to what you need to do, up until the point where you can fight Richter and get uh the bad end. Eventually I did use a map to get all the rooms before moving on to the inverted castle for the first time. Played that for a while but I’m getting a little bored of it - is there anything really cool in there or is it just more of the same with a map that’s more annoying to traverse? Still, I’ve enjoyed my time with it and came away with an appreciation for how nice all the sprites are and how the limited use of 3d for cool effects points to a 2d future we never had. Also the music is bangin, I think my favorites are “Crystal Teardrops” in the caverns and “Wandering Ghosts” in the colosseum
Dipped my toes into some other psx stuff on mister but nothing has quite grabbed me. Not sure what’s up next!
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i looked up the conditions for the proper ending and you gotta escape 10 times to make that happen. definitely not.
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I got Horizion 5 at Christmas and played it very regularly including the seasonal content because that’s how you get the ultra rare cars, one of which being a Chinese built minivan. It was fun to take cars that absolutely should not be racing (like volvo wagons) and then build them up into race cars. However I found the game’s cartoon physics to be really grating especially online, which rewards players who can understand the complex and nonsensical upgrade system to maximize car performance, so good driving is never really rewarded. The game’s tracks are a mix of long straighaways and high speed turns, which favor most cars with high top speed over anything else. Lastly, online has a lot of people who ram you off the road. There are countermeasures in the game to prevent a lot of ramming, but theres still contact between drivers, and often that contact is to push you into a wall or stationary object. I ended up rage uninstalling it after a long night of trying to make a single car go fast through a combination of tuning and iterating on suspension changes.
I probably played it so hard because I was in a discord where that was generally the game everyone played together, because it had generally working online modes and cross play, plus the person running the discord is a bit of a car game streamer, so it’s a nice community to hang out in.
I find the “Horizon Festival” setting to be a bit grating at first but it’s probably the closest you’ll get to a videogame representation of “Those that walk away from Omalas”
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On a whim I played some Kirby’s Adventure on Switch Online. It seems okay, I guess? The power absorption is obviously the one big idea but it’s funny how much this feels like, I dunno, a slow run-n-gun. A float-n-gun.
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my memory says “no” and it’s broadly a victory lap, but there are some fun items. that’s how i remember it anyway, most of the juice is gone from this particular fruit by the time the castle flips.
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anyway i played 19 golf games
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This is exactly me with Symphony. It’s part of why I’ve never been quite able to love it.
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I really dislike Marvel stuff but I honestly want to play Guardians when it’s up for a decent price at some point, so it’s nice to hear it’s pretty good. The tech art stuff in it is really clever and it’s great work by some really talented people at the top of their game.
The Marvel thing is… you know, whatever, but Guardians is one of their more charming things anyway. So I’ll absolutely overlook it to look at some art by some of the most talented artists in video games (just maybe not for full price haha)
So shockingly the abandoned discord wasn’t much help in the short term (may bear fruit in the medium to long term though) so I made the perfectly rational decision to make a copy of my save game, play through the other few stages available in that section, make a copy of that new save game, find an website online to compare .xml save files, use that to figure out where the “stage completed” section is and used that to edit the save to mark that likely bugged stage as complete and erase my completion for a different stage in that set (worried about not triggering the awarded pearl for completing the set otherwise) and… it worked and I am once again making forward progress in the game, stopped right before the boss of the 4th area.
…Is it normal to resort to stuff like this or am I a bit too stubborn?
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Delightfully devilish, Seymour Username
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Oh hell yeah, I was just thinking the other day how those are probably the best tracks in the game.
Starts off kinda spooky, but then! Then!! God it’s so good.
Shout out to “Abandoned Pit” and “Requiem for the Gods” for being good mood pieces. And shoutout to “Lost Painting” and “Final Toccata” for managing to be the only tracks for something like half of the upside-down castle.
Gonna recommend seeing Guardians through - drop the difficulty or whatever to make combat less of a grind (one of the last bosses throws so much shit at you that you’ve never encountered before that it really tried my patience). Wound up loving the characters in that game. A shame it has fallen prey to Not Meeting Target Expectations, the death of all Square-Enix properties.
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I played The Witch’s House and it is a very fine little rpg game, among my RPGMaker favourites. A simple, elegant little gem.
Still no match for Corpse party, imo, which has a captivating, complex story.
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update: have cracked the code and am now enjoying bowling, reliably getting wickets every match. thank you Gamer Pradosh on YouTube, a nice Tamil guy who patiently explained the game’s bowling system using ms paint and training mode…
I may explain the bowling system just so yall can see how complex this is. here is the initial fast bowling UI:
(variations, not pictured: cross seam, bouncer, leg cutter, off cutter)
At this stage you select the delivery and the length you want to pitch it at. if you hold the left stick over an option, the option changes and allows you to choose the seam direction the guy is holding the ball. This especially matters e.g. cross seam balls, but it also affects the swing of the ball for standard bowling. pressing the length button locks in the delivery.
once it’s locked in, the bowler starts running and you see this:
Basically these are two timed meters that go red/yellow/green, and you flick the right stick at the correct time. the first (“jump”) determines the pace of the ball. the second (“line”) determines how well the bowler releases the ball from their hand. the better you time it, the more precisely your player does what you intend.
what I didn’t know, is sideways deviation of the stick also matters! moving the stick sideways during the “jump” stage imparts swing to the ball, while doing the same during the “line” stage changes the angle it goes towards the batter. so to bowl a proper out swinger, you flick the stick from e.g. 7 o’clock to 1 o’clock.
you can also change the length on the fly by hitting a face button.
lastly there are two more tools for variation - with aftertouch you can change where the ball lands, while the triggers are subtle modifiers to ball pace (that also use up stamina).
basically, this is like an array of different trimming options to subtly modify every ball, thereby confusing the batter into getting out. a little experimenting with sideways movement had me picking up wickets much more easily.
I sort of belatedly realized there’s a whole tutorials menu option that’s much more in depth than the one you get when you start the game for the first time…
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…anyways! my guy is now a regular contributor to the Tamil Nadu state team. he is currently playing Hazare Trophy (Indian state cricket) as well as his local club, and he has hit his first century. The Hazare competition is unlicensed but I did download the actual rosters and team logos, so I get to play alongside the actual players like R. Ashwin, T Natarajan, etc.
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dudes rock
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I am not equipped with the vocabulary to properly describe how gorgeous this fucking game’s insane pixel art looks in motion
also I guess the game is good
those 3 crazy assholes at Tengo Project did it again
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Team Rainbow Cemetery is the best SOTN track
Demon Turf is a pretty allright 7/10 3D platformer. Right away I went to the settings menu like I always do in every game and a nerd kappa character appeared on the side of the screen saying « This menu is my favorite screen of any game! »
Owned, less than 20 seconds from starting the game
The game’s a 3D platformer with 2D characters, it teaches you from the tutorial how to do sick obscene 3D Mario tricks like Jump → Wall jump → Hover → double jump, there’s some physics engine nonsense, the auto camera is always crazy low behind the player which is cool and impractical. Most weirdly the average level seems to have one color only (like: bright red, bright orange, bright purple) and tries to go for maximum eye damage to the player, it’s almost unbearable but you’ve got to admire the dedication
The vibe is Disgaea but less lame so far. A new short sequel was just released, it looks like it adressed most of the first game’s issues which is probably both good and bad
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