the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

Anything can be soup if you add enough water.

A video game where you have to go back in time and assassinate the ancestor to all of humankind:

A first-person shooter

Samus must be incredibly resistant to dizziness, considering the constant spin jumps and morph ball rolling.

I was just playing Metroid Prime, and I realized something about (one aspect of) what makes a metroidvania good, and why some of the less compelling ones we've seen have felt so uncompelling.

Items that give you new moves to access new areas are at the heart of the metroidvania genre. Let's use the example of Super Metroid's red doors: you need to have missiles to open them.

At the start of the game, you can explore a decent-sized chunk of the world before you get your first missile tank (don't ask me why missiles get stored in tanks). But there are a few red doors that bar your way--you have to get missiles before you can go through them.

If these were the only red doors in the game, that would be a little annoying, wouldn't it? You just have to get missiles to get through this one door, but nowhere else are there red doors.

But that's not the case. Even in parts of the game you can't get to without missiles, there are still red doors to make it feel like getting those missiles was worth the trouble, because even if you'd somehow found a way around that first door, you still had all these other doors you need them for.

Compare this to a hypothetical (because all the examples are very forgettable) bad metroidvania where you get an item, use it once to open a door, and then forget you have it afterward. It feels like a pretty useless item, doesn't it? Little more than a key.

This sort of thing does actually exist in some good metroidvanias too, and I do feel it's a mark against them. Think of Symphony of the Night's Jewel of Open, for example. It does nothing other than allow you to open one or two blue doors--and even then, there's no special action that reminds you "hey, you can get through here now because you figured out the puzzle and got the thing!"; you just open it like any other door, as long as you have the jewel of open.

facetious is a good word. It has all five of the standard english vowels in it, in the same order as they appear in the alphabet.

learn how to pick pockets just so you can put money _into_ people's pockets without them noticing

@not_on_pizza@weirder.earth I dunno. I just know we saw something about Ristar being considered for a company mascot

I know the game boy color's last game was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which was a pretty good finale, easily one of the best licensed games ever

random thought of the evening: What was the last video game to come out on each console? which ones went out with a bang and which ones had their finale be garbage?

If you stub your toe in court, is that an in-jury injury?

How the fuck do people eat surströmming, why is this an actual product that gets sold

context: just saw a hydraulic press channel video where they crushed a can of surströmming and had to wear gas masks due to the smell

If your hyena friend is perfectly ordered, does that make them crystalyeen?

Thinking about multi-headed hyenas for some reason.... Dunno why but hyena seems like an especially good species to have extra heads--two or three heads seems perfect

Now I'm thinking about a two-headed hyena enby and vis akʔana partner(s)...

today I learned: there is a video game called "Linkle Liver Story".

What kind of name is that.

A hardware/software challenge to anyone who wants to do this utterly ridiculous challenge (whyyyyyy would you do that): A cartridge that, with minimal on-board processing power, allows you to put NES cartridges into a Sega Genesis and play them at full speed

Heat pipes are pretty fascinating things.

what if you just put some random word on your license plate, something completely meaningless, just to get people wondering what the meaning behind it is

something like "annual" or "nostril"

..."annual nostril" would be a good name for a band