Clock Tower is on everything, I think even the WonderSwan. (ETA: Even the WonderSwan).
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ive wanted to play Silent Hill 2 on the original hardware for years and the fucking bonkers price on even used copies is what’s put me off
Holy fuck what the hell?
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Will never own that game again I guess lol
japanese copies are way cheaper and have an english language option iirc
japanese copies of almost everything tend to be way cheaper
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I played through it on pcs2x recently and it was good.
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Clocktower on wonderswan looks great
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Console Modding - let the lame tuning begin
It’s fairly easy to play backups on PS2 these days.
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Just noticed Condemned: Criminal Origins looks like this in my steam library. idk why tho
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TIL that in addition to being popular enough to have their own toy lines, characters from recent indie horror games like Baldi’s Basics / Hello Neighbour / a Roblox(?) game called “Escape Granny” are apparently also so ubiquitous that they’ve started occupying the slots previously reserved for elsa and spiderman in children’s youtube videos
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Oh yeah my kids were granny/piggy addicts for a while
this is definitely the stuff that makes me feel the weirdest about living in the future, honestly
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I find those kinds of videos deeply, deeply upsetting in ways that I can’t fully articulate.
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at the same time, watching a granny monster from roblox fucking murder santa is pretty amazing
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they’re really unsettling to me in a way that’s funny to imagine kids passively taking in, but at the same time i remember being obsessed with the goofy off-brand kenner Aliens toys and comics when i was a kid, along with whatever other horror stuff managed to trickle down into children’s media in some weird new form. also i gotta wonder if it’s really worse on a moral level for kids to be absorbing copyleft creepypasta monsters rather than branded disney merch.
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oh yeah i saw a lot of weird media as a kid, i don’t think it necessarily “bad for kids.” like, i was terrified by stuff essentially at random. happy to watch Nightmare on Elm Street 500 times, but the end of the Roald Dahl book Witches (where the kid remains a mouse and the grandma is like “you’ll probably have a longer life than a normal mouse, but not by much,” and the kid is like “that’s okay i didn’t wanna outlive you anyway grandma”) freaked me the fuck out for years. Kids are gonna absorb all sorts of weird garbage and be fine.
I think it’s more the, like…smashing up of brands in such an odd way, like the externalization of what kids’ imaginations were already doing? but now with extremely creepy music. and also advertisements.
I guess it’s also the extremely capitalist element that freaks me out - these self-reflecting algorithms creating new human behavior creating new algorithms etc., all in the name of holding your attention long enough to serve an ad for…i dunno, what do they advertise to kids now? probably more of these videos.
Venom giving Spiderman an actual giant spider for his birthday, then refusing to shake his hand is actually very funny though.
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yeah, they definitely feel strangely predatory and amoral - i guess what i like about them is the sense that they’re kind of at odds with the tonal branding a lot of that stuff would like to have, though. like to the extent capitalism has any kind of overlap with avant garde art it’s probably in the ways that it’s (occasionally, temporarily) amenable to stuff which produces a strong effect, regardless of what that effect is or what the moral value of it might be - which is the appeal of stuff like the early superhero comics and disney animations. but that abrupt and aimless quality has to be kind of shuffled away and disguised in order for these things to have a longer public life as brands, which i guess is why these things get progressively more anodyne over time. anything that was once creepy or unpremediated about steve ditko’s spiderman slowly gets laundered away over half a century of increasingly gloopy reboots. but that same process is what allows “spiderman” to be appropriated as a content-less image by whoever makes these videos, operating on the same kind of nakedly scammy sensibility that the likes of disney have been trying to carefully distance themselves from.
not to say they’re good or subversive or anything in their own right, there’s just something interesting about watching this kind of iconography devour itself. it’s also kind of funny to me that even with how mysterious and creepy a lot of them seem initially they also kind of regress very quickly back into tepid prop comedy in practice. watching sirenhead and freddy fazbear do the scooby doo running back and forth through a hallway of doors bit for two hundred videos
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I kinda see this stuff as the raw expressions of children’s desire to know more about the human body via a medium they can understand (pop culture) laid bare by algorithms which feed on their inquisitive minds.
Check out http://www.girlgames.com/ for more great content.
We’re all really falling behind having a comprehensive analysis of what videogames can mean by not paying more attention to Roblox. For better or worse it’s the future
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