beard ひげ @beardalaxy@gameliberty.club

Christmas party with the family, it's been a very long time since I've gone to that on my dad's side. 8 years. but it was nice.

Kind of crazy to think this was already 10 years ago. I remember seeing Babymetal pop up when I was finishing high school and I kind of just thought it was a quick idol fad, but they've really proven to be a powerhouse now. One of my favorite bands.

Happy birthday to Su-Metal! 🥳

While it's been one of the best years for video game releases, it's also been potentially one of the worst years for video games ever. We've got stuff like Gollum, Starfield, the whole Day Before debacle. So many awful PC ports. Services shutting down. The layoffs and studio closures. The track that the larger game industry is on is not sustainable and we're seeing the cracks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvHloNp9sOo

I can't believe I'm just now thinking of this, but Kingdom Hearts actually has a really cool meta commentary.

Without going into too much detail, there are a lot of parts where what the protagonist experiences isn't exactly "real." There is a focus placed on the message that, even though it isn't real, the memories of the experience ARE very real. The characters/world that the protagonist experiences may have never tangibly existed, but they still made important memories to cherish and to learn from.

Kingdom Hearts itself, in the same vein, isn't real. No video game is. The memories we have of playing the game though ARE very real. The impact they have on us can be incredible. I don't know if this was done intentionally but it is really cool.

And dammit... Every time I think about this game I get all teary-eyed. Even though it's not real, it still had a pretty big impact on me.

surely, this is what you hear when you get to heaven

artist: nana harp

i watched some of silent hill ascension, and holy shit is it bad. i thought for some reason it was going to use actual actors but it uses 3d models with bad animation and has weird monetization. people are comparing it to something that was generated with AI because it really does feel like nothing was actually handcrafted. some of the voice performances are OK and there are some small moments here and there that are cool, but dude, it's bad. it's real bad. there are two stories going on at once each with two subplots and they all get jumped between so much that the tension gets even lower than it already was, and it makes things confusing to follow. you can obviously tell when the audience was asked to make a choice because a character will literally say all three options to choose from and it doesn't fit in with the natural flow of dialogue at all.

konami really looked at this utter shit and said "YEAH that's what we want to lead with for the revival of silent hill!" shit's fucked.

yasunori mitsuda is a legend dude, some of the best music to ever grace my ears. i can't hear it without smiling. there's something so special about his compositions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyrQa1_P-oY

okay just to balance out the video game industry doomspeak, here's some devs that are actually doing absolutely insane shit.

dusk's new hd/modding update will automatically detect any goldsrc game on your computer and let you mount it INSIDE DUSK. nobody asked for this feature but that's fucking cool.

Playing Half-Life WITHIN DUSK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyvOHC_2cjI

What's up with so many major game designers/directors ending up being more or less hacks? Lots of them seem gimmicky, pretentious, or that they otherwise don't really understand what it was that made their past work so great in the first place. Kojima, Miyamoto, Aonuma, Todd Howard, David Jaffe, Neil Druckmann, just to name a few. Even Sakurai, as much as I like him and regardless of how much he works, has been guilty of this in the past. This extends to other media as well and it's why I no longer feel any hype towards advertisement campaigns that use "we brought back the original creator!" as a selling point. It seems like often it is the fans that understand the game more than the creator did when he made it. I heavily subscribe to the "death of the author" mentality because the author will usually screw things up if you put all your stock in them.