karma

Infinity (GBC) thoughts, long 

Infinity's a game that released like 5 days ago after being in the works since around the year 2000. I never really knew a thing about it until a bit more recently, so I didn't really have any prior thoughts going into it other than "the combat system looks neat."

The manual says that the level cap is 30, and I'm level 13/14 with my party, so I can probably assume I'm a little under halfway in at around 5 hours spent. Might be wrong, but that's my best current estimate.

I'm not particularly fond of the cast - they have their own stories but it's really hard for me to get too invested in any of them because none of them do a great job of making me actually care about them. The entire story's felt... okay? But also pretty exhausting. I'm not the best story analyst so it's hard to exactly pinpoint and put into thoughts *why* I feel this way.

The combat system *is* indeed interesting! It also has some major shortcomings that hold it back. It's kind of a hexagonal grid system that you can move around on and do a lot of turn based tactical stuff, which is exactly my jam. However, the random encounter rate is excessively high which makes everything feel like quite a slog when just going through dungeons and the overworld.

The battles also have a few specific layouts per area on what enemies appear where and where your characters start, so the battles start to feel really stale after a while. It'd be one thing if you had control over your starting formation, and enemies had some more randomness in how they spawned, but it really hits the point where the high encounter rates and small encounter pool turns the cool combat system into more of a chore than anything.

SP (mana) management in fights is also weird - it feels like the game expects you to use a lot of it, but it also feels really rough to actually restore it outside of stopping by inns frequently or leveling up at the right times. When you wind up on a long stretch of overworld exploration (which is really easy with how weirdly the overworld is shaped) or through one of the excessively winding dungeons, it doesn't feel great. Once again throwing out the word "exhausting," rather than some other games that make resource consumption an interesting puzzle. It sucks too, because the spells and techniques that all the characters have are really fun to use - I love the tools the characters get, but I never really feel great about my decisions to use or not use them.

I've also had a lot of moments where I'd read text that a character said, but didn't quite process it fully. The game doesn't really have much of a system for reminding you what you're up to, which further adds to a bunch of aimless exploration (and further compounds with the high encounter rates to add even more to the frustration).

I think the main reason I'm even writing this in the first place is that beneath all of this, I still find the game to be really interesting and compelling. It's just really frustrating that the shortcomings are detracting from things because I want to like this game more. :P

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karma

board games, Bomb Busters 

A friend of mine found a copy of Bomb Busters for the holidays. I'd been looking for it in previous board game store outings, but couldn't quite find it (which makes sense considering it won the Spiel die Jahres and all). Turns out she got lucky and stumbled on a store that happened to be putting out a copy right as she visited, haha.

Played a few rounds with folks, and we managed to defuse the first three bombs without any explosions, and it's really fun! We had a couple of close calls, some brilliant plays, and one "I'm a genius! OH NO" moment on my part, lmao.

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karma

re: UFO 50 bingo league rambling, funny clip link 

twitch.tv/kg28_/clip/AgileGros

Speaking of, here's a clip of me playing Cyber Owls going for the "defeat hackoon after entering the boss fight with no ammo" square. I'm the upper right player (matt's opponent) so you don't get to hear me.

I get trapped by hackoon's randomly generating walls to start, and then I'm desperately looking for ammo that's supposed to spawn, only to find that it actually *did* spawn... underneath a dead soldier that was blocking the entire sprite lmao.

Show thread
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karma

UFO 50 bingo league rambling 

Matt's scheduling a 2v2 Spicy Bingo league and I'm really excited about it!

I asked someone about being my partner for the league and we're both pretty stoked about playing together, and now the analytical brain is kicking in because of *course* it is. :P

I think we're both pretty well rounded in that we've both at least pushed through all the games for the cherry and could pretty reasonably cherry them again. But I think we both also have different games in the collection that we're pretty good at and I'm hoping that we can put on a good show in the leagues.

One of my favorite aspects about spicy bingo games is that the goals take longer so you take a bit more time to strategize, and then you spend longer actually working towards things so there's just a lot of time to socialize with your partner if you're playing a 2v2. There also winds up being a lot of really fun conversation after the fact where both teams wind up having hilarious stories about weird things that happened while trying to go for the goals, so it's a really fun social setting even with your opponents.

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karma

Right. I exist here, lmao.

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karma

star garden/kirby air riders 

Brought to you by me watching a bunch of people play Kirby Air Riders and it being the "one game that would potentially make me crack and buy a switch 2" (I still don't plan on it, but now they're actually giving me a challenge :P)

I really wish Star Garden was better. Obviously it wears its inspiration of the original Air Ride's city trial mode on its sleeve, and I think that's great! We need more of that! But it really just does not feel great from the demo.

The controls feel pretty slippery - and that's even on the stars that theoretically should have great handling. You know how Air Ride has a pretty natural feeling boost that aims where you feel like it should? (You know, aside from when you're using a super slippery star and have mega powerups... but even then, you can usually wrangle things) The Star Garden stars all feel like you have to way overcorrect for every single boost to try to hit a box or grab a powerup.

There's also this baffling decision to hit you with a side camera view every time you jump up out of the water. I get that it's cinematic, but I'd *really* like to see where I'm going?? Especially when I have flying power and want to glide away after jumping out.

There's just a bunch of little things like that where it just doesn't feel great to play - I know it's just the demo so there's a chance they could improve on everything, but it all feels so core to the game that it'd kind of take reworking the game from the ground up for it to feel good for me.

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karma boosted
*
Electric Gremlin

massive longpost despairing rant about the IFPA pinball leadership and transphobia at an IFPA event 

Absolutely just fucking baffled by the Pinball world and the IFPA. I've mostly been screaming about it on my dusty unused bsky presence because the reach is more correct but gods I wanna lay this out in my head here.

So a rated tournament had the venue end up playing bathroom police. Since queer people had nowhere to fucking piss, not to mention the safety issues, a bunch of them left. IFPA policy is mega clear on this: if a group cannot participate due to exclusion based on, among other things, gender identity, the event is invalid. Period. This is black and white.

Due to a series of what the IFPA leadership are calling mistakes and miscommunications, they sent direction to the TD to proceed with the event. At the time they made this call, they had a justifiable defense of "We thought the issue was handled"; it was not and by now some of the impacted individuals had fully withdrawn and left. You can't undo that.

They found out later the issue was not handled and yes, impacted individuals had left. At this point, in my view, the event is entirely tainted and should be discarded. There is no other remedy. Stats are permanently corrupted by an incident that targeted and removed a group of people. The stats must be discarded.

Having found out after the event started that the issue was not handled and people had in fact left, IFPA leadership chose the route of "Well we sent directions to the TD already, we can't pull them back" -- unbeknownst to the rest of us, we thought they had just not ruled yet, so the event proceeded then protests were filed with IFPA.

They took a week to even indicate they received and were considering the protests. At that time they announced they would let the event stand due to the prior actions they took and the need for consistency. They also heavily indicated they did not wish to "punish" the TD by invalidating the event he ran when he was doing his best. It would not come out until later that direction was sent to the TD to continue.

The right thing to do here would be to say "Oh shit, we thought it was handled and made a bad call, we must retroactively invalidate the event". They did not. They stuck to their "consistency".

Somewhere in here, members of the women's advisory board came out and said they unanimously indicated cancelling the stats was the road to take, and this feedback was ignored unilaterally by the director and this alternate route chosen with no feedback.

Also sidebar here: the IFPA leadership laying this issue on the women's board first, then ignoring them when they ruled in a way that the singular director didn't like? Shitty. This was a co-ed event as I grok it; why did you go "Oh it was a trans person, women's work"? If you were seeking their input, why did you not take it?

The response was, as you expect, unhappy. A lot of people are hurt, feel unsafe, and no longer trust IFPA. In the ensuing arguments, insults, death threats, etc flew. When IFPA chose to step in and forcefully close the matter was when someone posted the public Facebook profile of the individual who initiated the bathroom policing. They called this doxxing and threatened anyone continuing to discuss the ruling with a ban.

Then, to make this decision real rich: The IFPA released the entirety of their internal conversation to "address concerns of bigotry" including unredacted RL info of people who filed protests of the event, next to their IFPA member numbers and aliases, effectively doxxing them.

In part of this release, two things became clear: that the decision to not invalidate the event was to "protect" the TD they told to continue (from what, I don't know. This isn't a punishment, it's fixing a screw-up everyone made), and that the cishet male director chose to proceed on this track to "Protect trans people from further drama" (how? I have no fucking clue because they/we're being blamed anyway).

It makes no sense and as a bit of maybe too much of a rationalist I'm despairing not at being thrown under the bus, again, because I expect that anymore-- but they did so much gods damned fucking EXTRA WORK to do this. They had many offramps to say "This was all a mistake, we're sorry, we have to fix the stats and punish the venue" and they haven't. They've stuck to this frankly ludicrous "consistency" route where they inflate the fuck-up until it's godzilla and then try to own the still swelling fuck-up without stopping the growth.

AND... AND... it hurts everyone. Your stats are fucked up, trust in your org is dying, and even cis people who don't care about queer issues who played on at the event should feel hurt by this because the IFPA is not sticking to their published policies.

Y'all are fucking everyone including yourselves while acknowledging you made a mistake but are refusing to do the one thing that'll fix it and aagh.

I despair at how stupid this situation is

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karma

halloween twitch stream 

twitch.tv/karma_dragoness

Playing a bunch of spooky NES games! (and one UFO 50 because night manor's really good okay)

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karma boosted
Terry Cavanagh 🎲

egg terrycavanagh.itch.io/egg

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karma

yeah I'm playing bubsy (twitch stream advert) 

twitch.tv/karma_dragoness

Bubsy 4D, then probably some Vampire's Best Friend before the UFO 50 bingo match tonight.

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