got dorfromantik and crying suns on switch yesterday, both seem basically like Enhanced Mobile Games but i think that is more or less my speed these days anyway when i’m not zeldin’. they also seem like good cozy winter games. idk if anyone on here ever talked about crying suns but it kinda seems like the sort of thing people might be into? idk i always feel like such an amateur whenever i actually try to talk about games on here lol. it really wears its very normy sci fi influences on its sleeve which i cant decide if its charming or irritating
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The funny thing about all the OFK discussion for me is how Small Saga address nearly every negative point. There is even an in game band and musicians that have to practice, get rusty. And it also if briefly addresses the idea of identity in performance in a mature way. The music is also really really good.
The character wiring is great. The whole game (so far) is about growing and how identity shifts with new experiences and how people process trauma. (and there is a stote)
Im looking at the credits and somehow this is a solo dev game. (granted its been in dev since 2018) I, am flabbergasted.
Palette cleans yourself and play small saga yall.
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i feel so called out lmao.
this reminded me about it. i kinda want to make a thread about this but i decided not to simply because i’m feeling shy and naive on this lmao
i was talking to slugger and some other folks at sbcon about identity and performance and it’s a weird, alienating situation from my perspective. sure, the concept is definitely among my considerations, but i’ve always felt like i naively and earnestly, well, don’t really want to perform, have instinctually wanted to present some near-to-banal refraction of self, the translation of a genuine idea into vibrations and particles.
and maybe it’s a hopeless and useless endeavor! i still haven’t looked into the bertolt brecht stuff slugger, it’s on the list but i’ve been pre-occupied with mundanities in the twixt
brief aside to mention that we are ofk looks like dogshit lmao, i am not defending that game or the director or whatever, just riffing in a different direction off the core concept here as it reminds me of that sbcon porch conversation and unfinished work of mine
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would love a thread on performance as a concept so i can offer my homebaked, likely naive takes on it
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if no one has made one by the time i am fully emotionally recharged (energy status unrelated to SB) (recharge eta tbd), i will make it
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i met the composer of the game once years ago when they played at my space and they really gave me the ick. idk - there’s a type of creative in this world that has like, low-to-medium success and a a dedicated group of folks gassing them up, so they have this detached kind of “why are you talking to me?” affect whenever they determine you’re not worth knowing. i don’t remember much of the actual music, but my memory tells me it was “technically competent” which is not really a form of praise for music when it comes from me as the only memory.
the only other person i’ve met also gave me a similar ick, and last time i saw them they were talking about their next game, which will apparently focus on “the role of reality TV in our lives”
i guess aside from just spreading gossip, this post is meant to say, i’m not surprised this game says a lot of things without actually saying anything
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I gotta watch these ofk streams, I popped into one for a minute during the concert sequence in ep 3 (I think??) and immediately felt judgmental. real diy heads wouldn’t be texting during their friend’s set, they’d be outside smoking 
. is it actually that concerned w music though? I got the impression that that was just sort of a backdrop for soapy teen drama
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yeah the composer afaik is a hyperpop artist of some note. he appears in this youtube hyperpop documentary i watched awhile back that a friend of someone i know in NYC was in. and i had heard of the composer because a partner of one of my friends was friends with him and mentioned him being sort of pseudo-trendy/successful in a music scene sort of way.
also this behavior is what i call “protagonist syndrome” now. it’s definitely the disease of so many people who get some kind of audience and let it go to their heads, especially in music. i wonder if it’s even more intense with a certain type of internet artist who doesn’t really know how to engage with IRL spaces at all.
from skimming through the playthrough it looks like a huge percentage of the game is just the characters texting each other in some Boba shop. Teddy’s vocals were the only thing i saw happen performance-wise in the game (that isn’t just a music video) and the best i can say is they seem to have hit all the notes but are otherwise completely unremarkable and there’s basically no emotion to the delivery. i wonder if the composer didn’t even want to bother with sending them stems and only sent them complete tracks. or maybe it’s just that the writers legitimately thought people would care and be invested enough in these characters that that would carry the game. i think a lot of these people probably think “visual novels + fandoms + queers = win $$”
actually watching through the playthrough made me think of The Idol, that show with the Weeknd which was also a flop. similar self-aggrandizing people in rooms talking to each other about how much they’re going to revolutionize the world with their bland music. but even that felt more interesting/self-aware. maybe just because it was way more mean-spirited.
i do think there are many LA creative types who talk and think like this. but the difference is at least The Idol knows a lot of those people are inherently unlikable. whereas with OFK they genuinely seem to think you will like the characters in it. the characters who are mostly just spending the entire game texting themselves going “OMG awesomesauce! That’s a real bop! You always knew how to bring the fire!” that is what is crazy about it to me.
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yeah i think, at least wrt to the composer, i am willing to concede this as a possibility i.e. they are just really awkward in a way that comes off rude. but in general there’s also just something about their whole shtick that kinda turns me off aesthetically, when coupled with my one on one experience
circa 2015-17ish i was regularly booking a show with a booker who focused exclusively on hyperpop (though at the time no one ever referred to it that way to my face), so i met a lot of these folks, and most of them were very cool, generally
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feel this strange, intense kind of interest re: this time in games. there’s definitely something going on there… that ys book1+2 pcengine redbook ost, the shmup heavy early megadrive and the twilight of the famicom…
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the “acting like a protagonist stuff“ is really funny from someone who went viral for a jazz piano migos edit lmao. like you ain’t coltrane buddy cool it a little
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the thing that really sticks out to me about OFK as someone who’s a creatively unfulfilled musician with a day job in tech that the last fucking thing i’d want is to get my track into a Doordash commercial or whatever the equivalent to their faux league of legends would be. this would feel like a spiritual death to me
i’ve literally never felt more alienated by an independent artist because i baseline assume every single one of them would much rather be free of this stupid system and would not write it as an aspirational story
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it’s true but i think it’s a combo of a) just general awkwardness and b) unfortunately this attitude being so common in music that some people just adopt it because they think they need to “look successful” to be successful
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remembered that I bought Returnal at some point this year while I was awake from my phone game-induced coma
I… beat Returnal?
“no you didn’t”
look, the game cut to credits
“it literally tells you there’s more game and you went to the new content”
well, thank god, that “last” boss was sad
I hope when I die that my brain processes my final moments into a hellish, looping third person shootman, I’d be so lucky
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Hit the end of Night In The Woods. My brain tweaked that the entire cult thing was an extended version of the bargaining stage of grief, but was grateful the game didn’t explicitly mention it. Roughly a third of the concept art is still locked, but npt ure this is a game to give multiple playthroughs for completion sake. Also, is this what visual novels from the west look like? I never got any of the bass playing minigames good, felt like that video of Rush playing Rock Band and getting upset that the game doesn’t like how they perform Rush songs.
Mention of the OFK game not having body language makes me grateful that these characters are animated as heck, a good game
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the shitty rigging of only the characters heads onto static images of the rest of their bodies in those scenes PLUS them definitely not being in the room together recording lines so they’re unable to naturally emote IN their rigs made it so fucking stiff. I promise this is my last ofk post
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I know we’re talking about actual cool games, but that reminds me one time I saw a perfectly preserved “normie who lived/worked in Japan in 1989” Japanese mega drive set that was like a time capsule, being sold on American eBay. I should have taken a screenshot of it. I remember there being osumatsu-kun, Batman, and whatever baseball game came out that year among the games, everything complete in box, and not a single game from after 89. It must have had a cool story behind it
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the identity of the pre-sonic mega drive is a videogame thing i think about a lot
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I’ve never seen this but it sounds great, as a person who has at times in my life played rock music all the Rocks Band and Guitars Hero have always been enervating and borderline offensive to me.
Can we shift from hating OFK to hating plastic instrument games in here? I guess they died and are totally irrelevant now it’s sort of a waste of time…
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Dragon Buster II (Famicom) - extracted from Namco Museum Archives Volume 2 (PC/Steam) via RED-Project
Not great combat and the dungeons got super-repetitive. Pretty unique gameplay though, maybe due to the aforesaid problems. ; ) But really nifty graphics!
~ ~ ~
Medieval Madness - in Pinball FX (PC/Steam)
Good layout, great voices, darn those trolls though. : p
(Reading FAQs, you have to complete Trolls to get through the whole quest, and on the real table, at least, they are known as dangerous shots you probably don’t want to aim for directly–but you can overlap them with multiball, which would give you insurance.)
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