I'm combining a few ideas here, that of a media thread, the "show & tell" project dot_lvl had on her discord, and a desire not to let my web design lay COMPLETELY dormant. I'll touch up the format over time, but mainly this is a place to hear me yap about whatever I've watched or played or listened to!
Since the prior writeup, I've been binging Jammiwitch's back catalog, and it's all good stuff! This one stands out, it's a daily word puzzle, but the answers form a kind of epistolary marrative, made up of headlines from a magical realm's newspaper. I don't know enough about word puzzles to tell you if the gameplay has been done before- a grid is formed, with columns of letters that have to be arranged into the slots below. It's pretty dang satisfying, though! And the writing is interesting enough to keep me hooked- there are little story arcs that play out with the headlines you found and very short articles that appear on solving. It's full of plot twists! And sometimes I'm just in a puzzley mood, so this game hit at a perfect time for me. (Other games I tried were My Friends the Monster Trainers and Familiar Flip, both delightful little gamejam games but not quite meriting their own entries.
Neat little game in the vein of Her Story and probably some other games I don't know about. (people were saying something about a Golden Idol?) It's set in a swords and sorcery kinda setting, strongly evoking DnD et al. Three parties adventure in the dungeon, and you're tasked with figuring out what happened to them, by scrying. You have to figure out the right set of keywords to find a particular scene, which may grant clues, more keywords, or just some character building. It's not a super long game, so it didn't get SUPER far into the characters, but I still got a bit attached- it's got a nice low-saturation pixel style to it, and most of the endings are not happy ones. I only needed a hint for the epilogue and feel very smug about it.
Fun little digital board game, citing the game Cyclades as an inspiration. Unfamiliar with that one, so I don't know if we're talking "inspiration" or "filing the serial numbers off" but it appears to be a slightly different theming at the very least. The UI leaves a smidge to be desired, it's in a tiny resolution (seems like a programming language thing, it kinda looks like DOS times) and doesn't always give you full information on what you're doing. The attached instructions help a lot though, and the game itself is pretty cool! It's 1v1 against a bot, with difficulty selection. You play an ancient Greek-adjacent civilization, doing turnbased 4X things to race to 10 VP while colonizing an archipelago. What hits my buttons, though, is the actual gameplay loop. Your turn consists of petitioning one of the Goddesses, which determines which actions are available to you. You can take all the relevant actions once each, if you're able, and they consist of things like building, recruiting, expanding to other islands, and attacking. However, every Goddess must be petitioned before they can all be petitioned again, so there's a draft-ness to the mechanic. I'm a fan of drafting mechanics, as well as "you can do multiple actions, but only in these combinations," so that's a game for me right there. Furthermore, one Goddess per game is selected as a Patron, giving you an objective related to her actions for extra points. I feel like I don't fully grasp all of this game after a couple plays, but I wanna keep trying!
If anything was my "furry awakening" it was probably the first movie. Second one followed suit just fine, introducing three new women to do fluster-inducing things. There was a heist movie in there somewhere too, probably. Few too many fart jokes for me, but kids movie gonna kids movie every now and then. And there was a lucha segment! and they brought in Hugo Savinovich for it!!! I called the big bad incorrectly twice!
I knew Doraemon only by reputation, and I was tired of that, and this was a great chance to fix it. I was super impressed by this! The animation was lovingly done, even if it was kinda funny seeing more modern one-off character designs interacting with the traditionally drawn kids. The whole movie just oozed charm, man. The cast was really likeable (I liked the sassy lost child and the jock), the slapstick was actually kinda funny, and the climax was actually pretty dang intense. I also find it amusing that Doraemon seems able to just kinda do whatever the heck he wants via hammerspace, and yet somehow it doesn't feel like he's invincible. I am seized with a curiosity of what the power scaling fans do with him. Anyway, if that's a representative sample, I need to watch/read/??? more Doraemon!
Another album that's a bit out of my usual orbit, but that's half the fun! Chai's brought this group up a few times, so I finally dove in a bit. I'm impressed with the range of styles- there's some 80s sounding stuff, some harder rock, some stuff that made me check I hadn't switched to the RoR2 soundtrack, a tiny bit of chiptune, and plenty of synths to go around. I like the singer, they've got a style I would describe as casual that I haven't come across very often. Will listen to more.
This one hurts to write. This game was grown in a lab to appeal to me- it's full of women, it's got roguelite mechanics with just enough RNG, number go up a lot, it's got fun graphics and music, it got me into horses, the writing and character work are surprisingly good, and it has lots of real life references to learn and be autistic about. I've had an absolutely delightful time with it and was hoping to play it for years to come. But, Cygames just opened an AI studio. I don't know how that's gonna play out with backlash- maybe Uma will be spared the slop. It's also likely said slop won't show up for a couple years, anyway. Maybe it'll be like Touhou for me- I engage with the old stuff and the fan stuff, leaving the genAI works alone. I could likely keep playing, and maybe I even will, but it's hard for me to get super excited about the game anymore, knowing that's looming on the horizon. And it's not like the people complaining about the general existence of gacha and the poor ethics of the horse racing industry are WRONG, per se, but I was willing to look the other way on that. I dunno, I'm pretty broken up about it, but at the very least there are still lovable characters and actual real horses.
It's hard for me to comment on rap, as it's outside my usual diet, but that won't change if I don't expand my horizons! This reminds me a bit of my other friend Lowki Sapfoot's stuff- rap, but not necessarily always fitting into a key, or a simple meter. Tough to digest, but that's not a bad thing in my book. Paid Actors is one of my standouts, perhaps predictably for a trans person. Sky's one that resonates with me where I am in life. Efficiency seems like one of the tighter musical experiences. The singing breaks in Red & Green are really cool! I can't tell if I'm just getting into the zone or if all the good stuff is on the back half, but it's definitely grown on me over the course of listening through. Part of that is just that I have some struggles and frustrations in common with Isaac, so the words resonate even if I can't always get my head around the musical aspects. All in all, I think this is really well done, it's just the kinda thing you have to actively listen to, ideally several times, before it starts hitting.