Cannot sleep to save myself so-

WHAT'S UP EVERYBODY, Wii U gang here again I put some mGBA on my Wii U so I could try Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis on it. If you haven't read my Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together post, go make a meal and spend a few hours, y'know just for context. Lmao.

Easily the single biggest disappointment with the game is the Disappearance of Wait Turn. WT is easily one of the coolest things about Ogre Tactics and the rolling turn order is super fucking awesome, hardcore as shit, it's punches you gotta roll with but you can also influence it. Knight of Lodis just kinda gives up... it has Fire Emblem style PLAYERPHASE/ENEMYPHASE alternating turns where you can move any unit in whatever order. This is lame but not a dealbreaker.

The UI and interactions/controls have also been necessarily crunched in the move from Super Famicom to GBA. Some of it is beneficial, like just A/B is easier than the original game's mix of A to select and B/X to cancel... but also movement is a little clunky now, and you cannot attack then move, only move then attack.

Surprisingly enough though basically everything else has been retained. It's still the same type of turn-based tactical, unit-positioning-critical, height-advantage-heavy, physics-inflected battles from Let Us Cling Together, with none of the ugly messy changes the remakes made. The four "freely customisable" equip slots are still there, so you can load down a unit with whatever, hawkmen are still beloved, you can still do automated Training to assuage any grinding, there are "emblems" in place of the later Classmarks, but not all classes require them so there is still some degree of free switching. There is an entirely new set of magic but it works more like LUCT than the remakes' magic. It is cast in a very similar mold to LUCT.

The game is gorgeous; it reuses some assets from (the village houses) and has similar looking sprites to the Super Famicom game, (comically the main guy's overworld/combat sprite looks like Dark Knight Lans) but the 240×160 resolution hasn't caused any damage to Quest's superb sense of visual design. All the art is beautiful, the character sprites still have exactly as much animation and expression complexity as in Let Us Cling Together, and the cutscenes are pretty much on par. It's technically very close to LUCT.

That also (I guess) means it kinda runs like shit; I think Quest Corp was not very good at coding (or bug testing? optimisation?) because it seems like most of their games have bugs or technical problems. Knight of Lodis mostly has obnoxiously long 'CPU IS THINKING...' wait hangs before enemy movement, and animations that refresh at inconsistent speeds. Not very performant.

The story also isn't up to much: it's kinda like the Korean War if Worst Korea hated the US. You play as a USMC recruit (Knight of Lodis) sent to the island of Ovis, long an imperial Lodis "protectorate", to "peace-keep" in a brewing conflict where the northern half of the island (sovereign, indepentent, ostensibly bad) seems to be agitating and skirmishing. Allegedly. I wonder how long it will take the protagonist to merc his commanding officer. The writing is a bit more obvious than LUCT but oh well honestly.

I was really incredibly buttmad at almost every gameplay change they made to Wheel of Fortune and Reborn, but that's mostly because they were mucking around with an objectively perfect and completely flawless game. When it comes to a different game though, I think it's fine to play with the mechanice somewhat. While the omission of Wait Turn sucks, I'm honestly pretty pleased with how much of LUCT is retained within The Knight of Lodis. Given the limitations of the GBA, it's a pretty darn good rendition. Kinda cute. Playing Ogre makes me happy as fuck, I was getting my ass beat by the enemy's archers and having to fight my way uphill and levelling my lil dudes up a bunch, oh man I just fuckin love Tactics Ogre so much. How wonderful of Yasumi Matsuno and the game to make two of them!!! Literal Tactics Ogre 2: The Pre-Squeakwuel!!!!!

Sorry Thracia 776, you got mogged by Ogre Tactics' little bro. Next time, promise.

Go ahead and shadowdrop this you COWARDS.

Map and stat screens down the right side of the gameplay window. Thumbstick inputs for the touchscreen gimmick stuff in Dawn of Sorrow.

There's almost nothing in this that you can't get out of just plugging these roms into MelonDS. Hell, the Definitive Edition patch for Dawn of Sorrow is better, removing the touchscreen elements and anime portraits.

Another Konami L, smh.

chef ian brutalfoods tries to survive taste-testing 15 different instant ramen noodle packages

Idk if this needs a cw but not all of the noodles are vegan. (sad tbh) no meat but bro is not vegan.

INSTANT NOODLE GANG

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3263596

Assuming it even comes out. I know there are some gender-related mods and stuff for Stardew Valley, and Stardew itself was a huge leap over the enforced disheteronormativity of Harvest Moon. I would like it if Haunted Choclatier was more "woke".

Assuming it even comes out. I know there are some gender-related mods and stuff for Stardew Valley, and Stardew itself was a huge leap over the enforced disheteronormativity of Harvest Moon. I would like it if Haunted Choclatier was more "woke".

I am no longer asking but if you were already an Ada Rook Enjoyer before this post then you're a TRUE TRANSGENDER PATRIOT

Fallow is a silly little 640×480 RPG Maker narrative adventure game by Famous Screamy Musician Ada Rook, which in ways feels like a heavily expanded version of a fruity little TWINE game, Perseids or something. It's a game of oppressive atmosphere, desolate landscapes, really good pixel art and very vague storytelling.

The purples-and-golds of the burnt-out forests and dilapidated houses strike a really awesome contrast against the Game Boy green character sprites, sometimes highlighting the contrast between Isabelline's tiny living form, the massive/rotted out husks of old, dead electronics & machinery, and the collossal, alluring biomechanical structures churning away in the Skids. This world is dying, and I wanna know what the Dynon has to do with it. What the Machine Enthusiasts are after. What's in the clearing of the forest. Why it's no longer safe to be here. What's in the dreams. Rapid eye movement.

All of Isabelline's sisters have disappeared.

I've been trying to keep track of all the narrative threads, Isabelline's sisters and the three people mentioned in the carrier pidgeon note, the scripture referring to a Mary-Ann, the suspicious faceless creatures in the bulbs powered by vacuum tubes, but there's a lot going on. Do you know what the fuck is happening? I want to talk about it with you, so you should probably play it, nerd

A rambling, treatbrained manifesto.

So let's say, purely for the sake of argument that you and I talking about a movie or manga or a novel something, and you told me a little about something you like. However, I noticed that it only seems to have cishets in it. No queers? Sorry, dropped.

These are not the thoughts of someone normal. All media has cishets in it, though, or it used to. Until I was in my teens I didn't think about it too hard, but then I read this funny orange book, Nevada by Imogen Binnie. It broke my brain in several ways, but majorly, I didn't realise before then that we were allowed to have trans people in our narratives? I don't know why I'm like this, but it was the beginning of my downward spiral. I'm a sad little gay and always have been, so I was pretty desperate to see anything more than the average, straight people kissing, thing. Representation Matters. At first I was just obsessed with yuri manga and anime, and that was okay for a little bit. Who remembers Miss Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles? Or maybe Yurucamp? Raise your hand if someone sold you these as YURI and it turned out to be BAIT and you wasted your time because nobody would be honest about the queer content of an anime back then!!! The only manga that remain in my Tachiyomi library are So, Do You Want To Go Out, Or and After Hours. From there, it was logical to move to manhua, manhwa, and donghua about women kissing. Mage and Demon Queen, or like Soulmate, Ghosts of Greywoods, so on.

When I literally ran out out of decent webcomics about women kissing though, I stumbled my way into the murican (and it seems to be a deeply amerikkkan thing, or at least a western thing) romance novel. I have no idea how I did, but this increased my pool of stuff considerably. The other thing it did was reconnect me with trans people in fiction.

Look, if you know, you know. In movies it's only ever really The Silence of the Lambs or Boys Don't Cry. TV shows, it's all dramatic reveals on crime shows, or whatever. Bad unfunny sitcom jokes. Video games, don't even fucking try. Code Veronica deserves to be bullied. Despite the absolute state of things, I was always keeping my eyes open for trans rep, and I mean you could have been reading the Wandering Son manga, or any amount of low-quality ultra-misogynist gender-essentialist "genderbender" dogshit. I long for a future where kids don't have to deal with shit like that when lookin' for queer manga.

Novels, however, have funny tagging systems. Goodreads is so trash thanks to Amazon’s enforced decay of the site that frequently books end up with the wrong tags. And so, anything with two queer women who kiss in it sometimes gets filed under “romance”, even if it really should not. As a result I ended up discovering Detransition, Baby through my adventures gathering gay stuff. And hey, as it turns out, author Torrey Peters is at least aware of Imogen Binnie. Oh, and there’s a novel by Casey Plett, too? And then there are even more novels with transfemme protagonists outside of that??? In fact, probably a few hundred????

So here’s the thing, right? There are probably less than fifty films with trans people as protagonists, or even major characters. There are definitely less than fifty video games in that category. Novels, though? I have read thirty-six and have a further sixty on my immediate watch list to read. Probably another 40 or so on my Goodreads To-Read. If you limit yourself by rep in any other medium, you’ll be running out basically instantly. There actually are enough queer and trans books to sustain yourself on.

I do not wanna be inside the mind of your cishet protagonist, go away. Cis queers are fine, but I would really prefer you write someone cisn’t, because we can do better collectively than forcing cisgender representation down people’s throats, I mean keep that in the bedroom please. My decision has been: I will simply never read another book with a cishet protagonist, usually. Last one I did was Neuromancer by William Gibson, and holy shit did that ever reinforce why I’m doing this. It’s not an irredeemable text, but I don’t want to put up with that fucking shit. /r/menwritingwomen might be a stupid subreddit but it has a point. At time of writing the last I read any book with a cishet protagonist was in 2020. Conversely I am always interested in a decent cis queer protagonist too, like I can easily enjoy a Girl Flesh or an Our Wives Under The Sea for whatever other aspects of queer existence they might poke at. I am most enthusiastic for transfemme protagonists though, (I wish I could find nb transfemme leads but tagging makes it hard) however I am amicable to many different queer protagonists, from regular cis lesbians to nonbinary transmascs to agender peeps. Anything goes as long as it’s not cishet.

Representation of trans people by way of our own voices is more or less a fresh development of the last eleven years, so I consider myself sort of a cut-rate historical observer as well. A lot of these books, especially the ones about trans women, have their little spot on an ever-growing web that extends outward from the starting point of Orange Book, and I try to keep tabs on what sort of funny developments are ongoing. I have to read Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Brainwyrms by Allison Rumfitt. It’s been enriching to see how different genres and writers interact with trans fiction, and what gets depicted and doesn’t. I am an enthusiast of trans and to a certain extent broader queer representation. It is a beautiful little blossoming flower of love and I need to touch it at least once a month or else I will die.

Down with cis, up with trans.

Take for example my banner image. On mobile you can see Isabelline standing at the opening of whatever the fuck that is, looks great. Roughly a 16:9 window, maybe 1.85:

On desktop she is cut out scope asspect ratio looks awful. Mods pls

Alternatingly, gabapentin either works great and has barely noticeable withdrawal, or a hellish acid reflux suffering tablet with the worst withdrawal in the world and I am once again a victim of the opioid crisis.

My doctor suggested gabapentin when I asked for an anxiety med, cool idea or no? It's an off-label use so I might be a victim again. My impression so far is that it feels like a very lightweight version of loprazolam, goofy and relaxed. I'm still stimming ofc but I'm also calmly vibing, and I can still feel my emotions which is nice. Pls tell me how over it is ✨

Good ol' buttcraft

I don't really mean in terms of mods, but like go off if you wanna. I'm a lifelong Minecraft enjoyer, played it basically from Alpha right up to release, and dropped off around 1.2ish. I've played it in bursts again over the years, but the more weird stuff they add the more weirded out I feel. I just wanna build houses with sloping rooves, sheesh... It does kind of make me wanna just give up and play Legacy Console on Wii U or something weird.

[Minecraft boomer alert I guess]

I don't totally hate what they've done with the game itself but it's clear that the launcher is a lost cause. Plus how does Java chug this badly on a Ryzen 2600? I have to choose between a performance mod that makes the game run, or pad support, because one of them uses Fabric and the other uses the other thing. Remember when Minecraft mods was just dumping .jar files into the game's directory?

I mean to ask, what is the way cool kids play Minecraft nowadays? Are there cool alternative launchers or modpaks or a specific version or whatever I can play that's cooler than Microsoft Occupied Minecraft and are more fun?

As preface, nobody who actually cares about games gives a shit about 240p on a cathode ray tube display, and any well-adjusted person will simply play Playstation games via Duckstation or something instead. That is the way to do it.

If you suck and you're me though, you might have found one of those 30" Toshiba TVs with the Orion tubes from like 2000 for free and decided to do something about it. Aside from CRTs being basically cooler OLEDs (deep deep contrast, bright colours, but also instant response time) 240p is actually pretty funny looking. There's nothing wrong with playing these games on a flatpanel with scanlines, some scanline settings and filters are actually very good. But look at these progressively drawn lines of phosphorescent light:

So maybe if you're as deranged as I am, you wanna play Playstation games with black inbetween every line on this radiation phosphor machine, how do? There's no way to load PS1 backups from a hard drive or SD card on a FreeMcBoot PS2 that I know of, (if possible please hmu) and while modern x86 PCs can be made to output 240p it's kind of a bear involving goofy software config and a weird component converter. You can buy a Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 or Orange Pi, which have composite video out that is pretty good and can do 240p. There are even LakkaTV builds for 240p for these things.

But to my mind, the most efficient option is Wiistation. If you're a you probably have at least one Wii sitting around. I have three, one of which I found in a literal garbage bin at my last job. Your Wii has also possibly been supplanted: not only is Dolphin a really good emulator, but also a Wii U can do absolutely anything a Wii can on a flatpanel. But for whatever reason, the Wii U does not do 240p, where the Wii does.

If you look around on useless loser spots like stormfront, the "common knowledge" is that the Wii is 'just not cut out for PS1 emulation'. This was true back when WiiSXR was the only option, akin to how Wii64 is not very good. But since 2022, some utter nerd has been patching up that PCSX fork as WiiStation and it's actually really good.

It has HID controller support, so you can hook up a Dualshock 3 for some authenticity but the Wii Classic Controller Pro stands in for a PS1 Dualshock pretty well. It has disc swapping, tons of options, and it keeps getting cool and funny updates that make it perform better. Most recent one came out in March.

I have tested WiiStation with a bunch of hard to run (for low-end systems) Playstation games, like Vagrant Story, the original Driver, Klonoa Door to Phantomile, Metal Gear Solid, Ridge Racer Type 4, Wipeout 3 SE all work great at 100% speed. So what doesn't work? Tekken 3 drops the occasional frame (down to 59.10fps) but is mostly pretty good, Neversoft's PS1 Spider-Man is a shockingly difficult game to run and tanks into the 40fps zone routinely. It's been performing better as the dev improves CDDA streaming and stuff but it's a torture test for this emulator.

WiiStation also has pretty much the same compatibility issues as PCSX: you'll remember from this essay that the Playstation version of classic alltime great Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together is a hacked together mess full of fucked up code. It runs pretty well on WiiStation, but still spits out "Failed to load save." when loading any save from memcard. Idk what is wrong with PCSX's save format, but you could use savestates exclusively to get through. I might submit an issue on the github to be hilarious about it.

Wii homebrew development is extremely sleepy at the moment and nobody really talks about it, so it's not surprising that WiiStation flew under the radar. The Wii already has a killer niche as a dirt-cheap 240p gaming machine to hook up to a CRT for NES, Master System, Mega Drive, and SNES stuff, so to me adding "it's a pretty dang good Playstation as well" to its resume is funny. I like that about it.

I was watching "...why Skyrim?" by Razbuten on sloptube this aft and it's so weird that it finally took Starfield for people to realise. Like Fallout 76 wasn't enough, only now are negative things people were first saying about Skyrim in 2012 finally bleeding into mainstream consciousness. It's so wild, like wow they ruined the magic system? The game has worse writing than a PS1 era Mega Man X game??? Skyrim is just shitty Game of Thrones?? Welcome to thirteen years ago!!

Bethesda hasn't made a really good game since 2002, but it'll probably be years before that realisation sinks in.