411 - Welcome To My LiveJournal! (Patreon)

HELLO there, bros. A sudden (and surprisingly late) realization hit me recently: my Monday Posts pretty much count as blog posts. Or LiveJournal posts, even. Remember how, in the early days of the internet, completely random people had blogs, and other random people would read and comment on them? This was long before corporations figured out how to monetize everything. Good old days. Anyway, since all I do in my Monday Posts these days is talk about anything but my work, I guess I should accept the truth: my Monday Posts have become my blog posts.

THE GAME AWARDS happened recently, I think. I honestly don’t care about that circus anymore. Although, I suppose I do still care at least a little bit since I’m bringing it up here. Anyway, here’s me doing the healthy thing: accepting that I’m not the target audience anymore and quietly moving on.

NEW LARA CROFT? So a new Tomb Raider game was announced? Or is it a remake? Again, I don’t care enough to look it up. The only reason I’m writing this is because it irritated me slightly to see phrases like “gaming is healing” pop up several times in my news feed—followed by an extremely ugly new Lara. They call it a new unified design. Unified indeed: the middle ground between the supreme design of the original and the modern garbage that came after Underworld. Again, I’m not the target audience, so it’s all good.

PALATE CLEANSING time. The Witch Trainer asset library still exists. It was put together without my knowledge and contains a lot of art assets that weren’t created by me, but I’m still glad it exists. I can’t give you a direct link here in the public posts, but it should be easy enough to find if you’ve never heard of it before. (I’m talking about it because I completely forgot it existed, then somebody on my Discord brought it up, and it made me all warm and fuzzy inside to know that the page is still up and running :).

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. After complaining about this game’s visuals extensively in last week’s Monday Post, I still wasn’t able to keep it off my mind, so I decided to give it a try. I didn’t want to waste my money just to prove myself right, so I downloaded a buccaneer version, put it on my Steam Deck, and (sadly) proved myself right. Since I don’t think any of you have played this game or have any interest in it, I won’t go into the details. Instead, I’ll leave this review I grabbed from Steam (feel free to skip it):By SHADOW DARWIN "I played the Rune Factory series growing up, and it had a big impact on me... loveable characters, charrming towns, interesting world + character design. There was a veiled mystique in all that was done, there was a draw to the relationships. The subtleties of OG Rune Factory are here made profane. Character design lost all spark. The OG rune-factory aesthetic has been washed out by a Genshinesque excessiveness. Where previously one would look into the personality of a character on screen, here one sees a collection of distractions and absurdities that obscure (but fail to hide) a profound lack of soul."

WINDS OF ANTHOS. One good thing did come out of me playing Guardians of Azuma: it made me want to revisit Winds of Anthos. Last year I quit playing it after about 40 hours because I had other good games to play. I had a good time with it, but its obviously low-budget nature always bothered me. But after playing the high-budget Guardians of Azuma, my perception has changed. Despite also running on the dreaded Unreal Engine, Winds of Anthos actually looks pretty. I mean, the night sky in Guardians is a fucking JPG with a still image of a full moon, whereas in Winds of Anthos not only does the night sky look nice, the moon actually has a proper cycle and looks different every night. If you’ve never heard of Winds of Anthos, it’s basically a low-budget mix of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Harvest Moon. It’s quite an enjoyable game—especially after playing Guardians of Azuma.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE? I hear a new Starship Troopers game is dropping soon. I didn’t do much research, but from what I’ve seen it looks good. I like the whole “retro” look they’re going for. I never liked hyper-realism—that’s one of the reasons it’s so difficult for me to enjoy modern games. The trailer gave me mixed feelings, though. On one hand, it was nice to see Johnny Rico; on the other, it made me just a little bit sad for several reasons simultaneously…

SNOWBREAK! I know nobody gives two fucks about it, but I don’t care! This is my blog and I will talk about what I want! (Thank you for your support, love you!).A new update for my precious SnowPEAK is dropping in a couple of days. The trailer shows off a metric ton of new content as usual, but to be honest I only care about two things: an actual room for Mia and the new main story chapter. Since the last update, Mia has just been wandering the base like a hobo, and that is something I absolutely refuse to stand for!

THE GENIE PIN. Sometime this week (maybe tomorrow) I’ll make a patrons-only post to discuss the fate of the batch of Genie pins MrLazare currently has in his possession. Stay tuned. ^^

THE WORK. I’m finally done with all the preparatory planning and coding stages and can work on the actual content in peace. Very happy about that. I’ll continue focusing on the Skatergirl storyline for the moment. I want to finish it fully before I jump back and work on other things, because when I juggle multiple storylines I sometimes start forgetting plot points and things can get stressful quickly. If all goes as planned, Skatergirl will have two endings (like Azalea did in PT), only they won’t be called Private and Public but rather Sweet and Bitter endings.

AND THAT IS IT. I must say, this was a pretty fun post to write. I only hope I didn’t turn off too many people by gushing over games nobody has even heard about. Thank you for your patience and your support, bros. Truly, you are the best. Don’t forget to leave a like, and if you feel like it, drop a comment — I read all of them, you know that. :) Laterz!

- Aka -

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