Raincloud's recent activity

  2. The next game from the developers of Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is... a Metroid Prime-like?

    ~games Ask
    Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom was one of the best metroidvanias with a retro flavour and an excellent hand-drawn art style and fantastic music of the current console generation, an entry in...

    Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom was one of the best metroidvanias with a retro flavour and an excellent hand-drawn art style and fantastic music of the current console generation, an entry in the Wonder Boy series of games. While completing the game gives you a sequel teaser, it had since been reported a long time ago that the development team at French studio Game Atelier had decided not to go forward with plans for a sequel, citing the overcrowdedness of the market for (2d?) metroidvanias.

    I remembered this recently and decided to look up what the studio is working on now. To my surprise, a new game by them has already been announced, and a demo is live on Steam. The game is called Otherskin and is... a Metroid Prime-like? My jaw dropped to the floor when I heard that - these game devs sure know their ambition!

    Otherskin is a 3D action platformer metroidvania. You play as a woman who is stranded on an alien world filled with ruins of a bygone alien civilization and are tasked on eliminating the Corruption™ (yes, that's really what it's called). You progress through the game world by absorbing and copying abilities of enemies you defeat - I'm thinking Kirby or Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Or, well, any other kind of metroidvania game. The major difference between this game and Metroid Prime is the 3rd person perspective.

    Grappling hook, wave beam, bombs, your favourites return. It's not all copy-cat though. The very first ability you acquire is a super-jump that makes you fly very high into the air. The movement in the game is great and the environments range from dark, corrupted and gloomy to bright and wonderful. The combat feels dynamic - while you're using your super-jump ability, you can briefly slow down time to shoot at enemies while falling. You can also insta-switch between different weapons with the mouse wheel.

    I'm curious to see how the final game will turn out. The demo has you lose your copy abilities after returning to the hub, for you to have to collect them again from the same enemy in the next level - although this likely doesn't apply to weapon upgrades, only copy abilities like the super-jump and grappling beam. I'm also perplexed that it is a metroidvania game without a map system. Maybe we will see one in the full game? It certainly has me intrigued and looking forward to more.

    6 votes

  3. Comment on Why do people treat friendships and relationships as two different things? in ~life

    Raincloud
    Link
    I'm in queer circles where polyamory is widespread, and I've sometimes had anxieties when people would talk about their polycule. I've seen a person on social media explicitly say that they were...

    I'm in queer circles where polyamory is widespread, and I've sometimes had anxieties when people would talk about their polycule. I've seen a person on social media explicitly say that they were delighted to get the impression from attending pride that the entire queer community of their city seemed to be a big polycule. I've also seen somebody use the connections they had in their polycule as a way to unjustly shield themselves from criticism. As an asexual person who hasn't dated for more than a decade and has no immediate desire to do so, these experiences had me worried for a future where I couldn't have meaningful friendships within my queer community that had my back through the upcoming challenges of life.

    I've done work to alleviate these fears in the past years. I've made new friendships and have taken a more active role to create the kinds of communities that I would feel at home in. I've organized meetups, invited new friends over for my first birthday party in approximately 20 years, I try to help people by sharing my experiences and explaining in which direction I'm steering my life. When I asked one time "what do you mean by STD?" (not being able to recall the abbreviation immediately in the moment) I got the answer "don't worry about it, fam, it's something you'll never get" and I felt seen and at home.

    I've come to realize that not everybody has worked on their competence to give meaning to friendships deliberately in the way I chose to do in the past years. When my buddy of 30 years got a new girlfriend, he told me he had confusing and uncomfortable discussions with her about that he'd have such a close female friend as me. A lot of people who haven't allowed themselves to think about their friendships a whole lot aren't equipped with the vocabulary they can use to describe them.

    You sometimes get the impression that people are losing the ability to hold many friendships alive, and it's not just my impression, it's something that I've seen echoed by other people - like this video by Rowan Ellis about the "catch-up friendship crisis". Don't let the video title of "female loneliness" fool you. Ellis talks a lot about gendered experiences of loneliness that also addresses male loneliness as well. While thinking about these gendered ways we experience relationships is part of Ellis's job description, I'm less keen to divide humanity in two boxes for every topic we're looking at, because a lot of the problems we're facing are the same ones. A focal point of the video is the concept of a catch-up friendship, i.e. a friendship where you meet so irregularly that you spend all the time you have together to "catch up" on the latest news in life and have no way to form other new experiences of doing stuff together. And the video also mentions solutions that are very close to my heart: If you're not offered the experiences you want to have, take a more active role. Create the friendships you want to have, create the communities you want to be a part of.

    I've heard my fair share of murmurs about people who are unable to hold close friendships with anybody other than romantic partners, and as a single person this has filled me with anxieties in the past. Now I see that that is a "them" problem, not a "me" problem. I cannot force other people to have a look in the mirror and take a more active role to work on their ability to hold close connections. But I can do my part to create the friendships that I want to have.

    6 votes

  4. Comment on Magic: The Gathering ban and restricted announcement in ~games.tabletop

    Raincloud
    Link Parent
    I mean, the RC site is always down due to overload when something like this happens. It's good to have it mirrored.

    I mean, the RC site is always down due to overload when something like this happens. It's good to have it mirrored.

    4 votes

  5. Comment on What the death of Cohost tells me about my future on the internet in ~life

    Raincloud
    Link Parent
    I've recently heard about the "trashed bathroom theory". It was an old Twitter post by a person who worked at a homeless shelter. They were told by other staffers that working at the shelter, they...

    I've recently heard about the "trashed bathroom theory". It was an old Twitter post by a person who worked at a homeless shelter. They were told by other staffers that working at the shelter, they will see the bathroom trashed a lot. They explained that this is because the tidiness of the bathroom is one of the few things that the people at the shelter actually still have control over in their lives, after having lost most other opportunities to make a difference and make their dissatisfaction of their current situation known.

    When we feel powerless, angry, disenfranchised, and want to feel in control, we tend to want to destroy things that we do have control over. That's often our own social circles. I pick a fight within my own community because that's where I will actually do any damage.

    The lack of control people feel in these algorithmic platforms with adversarial design turns around and makes those very people more likely to start fights among the people they'd consider friends. You know how the "learn Spanish" subreddit is filled to the brim with beginner questions of people who are learning Spanish on their first week, but never the really advanced stuff by long-term learners? Many online communities are utterly dominated by people who never learned their lessons. They have no examples on how to properly behave themselves. Because the people who have learned, no longer browse Twitter for twelve hours a day.

    18 votes

  6. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Raincloud
    Link Parent
    Pioneer is great because of the gameplay it allows. The financial aspect is quite frustrating as you've described. My LGS only has a Pioneer tournament every three months or so, and by that time a...

    Pioneer is great because of the gameplay it allows. The financial aspect is quite frustrating as you've described. My LGS only has a Pioneer tournament every three months or so, and by that time a new set or even two have come out and I will need to update my deck. Every set has new cards that are relevant. It's a constant goose chase.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on What the death of Cohost tells me about my future on the internet in ~life

    Raincloud
    Link Parent
    I think a personality-focused site like Cohost and a topic-focused site like Tildes serve different use cases. They allow for different kinds of valuable experiences.

    I think a personality-focused site like Cohost and a topic-focused site like Tildes serve different use cases. They allow for different kinds of valuable experiences.

    13 votes

  8. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Raincloud
    Link Parent
    About the Modern format: I've tried to play a lot of formats over the course of my Magic "career". I played Pauper, Modern, Standard, Draft, Pioneer, Premodern, and a lot of Commander. I haven't...

    About the Modern format:

    I've tried to play a lot of formats over the course of my Magic "career". I played Pauper, Modern, Standard, Draft, Pioneer, Premodern, and a lot of Commander. I haven't kept track of upgrading all my Modern decks for a while, and now with MH3, I can throw all but one of my Modern decks into the garbage. Even the Enchantress deck that was introduced as a new archetype in MH2 got no support in MH3 so it is a goner. I guess I'll continue to play Merfolk in Modern when the opportunity for a tournament arises. But I'm not getting the fix from Modern that I used to get. I am now selling my obsolete Modern decks and building a Battle Box of 2018 Modern decks with the proceeds. That way I can play the kind of Modern I enjoyed with my friends anytime. Plus, a lot of the cards that made those decks so expensive back in the day are now significantly cheaper thanks to reprints. I'm getting Burn, Mono-Green Tron, UW Control, Dredge and Jund.

    I do enjoy Pioneer but the tournament scene isn't really there in my region. The local Pauper scene died a long time ago, here too I built a Battle Box for me and my friends. Now I guess I'm all in on playing regular Premodern tournaments. My premodern deck never rotates out.

    In a way I become what Wizards wanted all along: a Commander and Standard player as long as new sets that they constantly release are concerned. I'm certainly sick and tired of following endless spoiler seasons on Reddit. I think my enjoyment of the game will improve with my new priorities of no longer trying to make 8-year old decks somehow work in Modern by buying expensive new staples that still didn't help my jank to win a lot of games.

    1 vote

  9. What the death of Cohost tells me about my future on the internet

    ~life Text 638 words
    Cohost.org, an independent social media blogging platform, will be shutting down as early as next month. A lot of users are talking about how their time on Cohost changed the way they think about...

    Cohost.org, an independent social media blogging platform, will be shutting down as early as next month. A lot of users are talking about how their time on Cohost changed the way they think about what an experience in an online community can be like in the modern age of the internet. People saying that they'd rather move forward with spending more time offline and with their hobbies than chasing the next social media site after Cohost's closure. I tend to agree.

    After checking an old forum recently that I used to frequent in the heyday of internet forums, I found it filled with racist fear-mongering that is left unmoderated after the driving force of the community passed away half a decade ago. I wonder how much of the spirit of the old web we can realistically rekindle. If you're on Tildes, you probably know everything about the faults of giant social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. Heck, the poor quality the YouTube comments section was a meme when YouTube was new. It was never good on those sites. Just tolerable and everybody was there so you kind of had no choice. Now, many of those platforms are self-imploding.

    Cohost, like Tildes, created an atmosphere where you didn't feel like you were committing a moral wrongdoing by not immediately spewing scalding hot takes about current events, drama and conflicts. You were encouraged to write text that wasn't throwaway garbage. You could have meaningful conversations about issues and find an audience. Cohost was not without its flaws. People of colour in particular recently shared experiences of racist harassment on the site that was purely handled by moderation. But overall the takes I'm reading now is that most people will be able to look back on their time on Cohost fondly. I've seen people calling it "the Dreamcast of websites".

    Cohost was a social media site that was a joy to visit for me and didn't put me on an edge by interacting with it. I could write posts, long-form posts without pressure to hit out another one-line zinger while a topic "is still relevant". I didn't see endless chains of subtweets that deliberately avoided explicitly mentioning the drama they were commenting on, lest the hate mob find their comment. I didn't get into that kind of unnerving cycle of "I don't know what this post is about, but the infrastructure of this social network suggests it's a moral failure to not chime in on the topic de jour, so I better get going and scan vile tweets for an hour to find out what's going on".

    And before you say that this is only a Twitter problem, I have had pretty much exactly the same experiences on Mastodon and especially Bluesky. I feel the same in over-crowded Discord servers where it's very difficult to keep track of what's been talked about and what the current topic of discussion is. I feel the same on the few active forums that still exist, like resetera, where there's just posts upon posts that you're kind of expected to read before you chime in into a thread.

    So where to go from here? I'm thinking about setting up my own proper blog, maybe hosted on an own website. That way I can continue to create long form posts about topics I want to. And bring back a little more of the spirit of the old internet. Cohost is dead, but there's no going back to me to doomscrolling. Today I set my phone to aggressively limit my daily usage of Reddit & Mastodon. I said the following when Twitter crashed and burned, but this time I'm not desperate, but genuine when I say: It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

    30 votes

  10. Comment on Little Big Adventure – Twinsen’s Quest | Gameplay trailer in ~games

    Raincloud
    Link Parent
    They added controller support in a 2022 update. The GOG versions run nice on Linux via Bottles.

    They added controller support in a 2022 update. The GOG versions run nice on Linux via Bottles.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Little Big Adventure – Twinsen’s Quest | Gameplay trailer in ~games

    Raincloud
    Link
    This one has been in the works for a while! Little Big Adventure (released as "Relentless - Twinsen's Adventure" in the U.S.) was an isometric action adventure game released originally for DOS in...

    This one has been in the works for a while! Little Big Adventure (released as "Relentless - Twinsen's Adventure" in the U.S.) was an isometric action adventure game released originally for DOS in 1994. The game featured a hand-crafted world where you hop between islands, discover secrets and fight the oppressive dictatorship of the planet. The graphics were first-class for the time. The controls of the original, non-updated version have aged poorly with its tank controls and "behaviour mode switching" system.

    More recent rereleases have addressed the controls while keeping the original game unchanged. The game spawned a sequel in 1997 and it also partially influenced Beyond Good & Evil, which employs a similar atmosphere of an oppressive government, which was developed by a different team that was also from France.

    A complete remake of this first game has been teased for a while, with this being the full gameplay reveal. The art-style has been changed to be more cartoony than the original, which has drawn some criticism. The story has also been updated to remove some of the overly tired sexist tropes of the original game (which the sequel had itself already removed). According to the trailer, the main character's love interest, who was a vapid damsel-in-distress in the original game, is now a fellow fighter in the resistance.

    Revisiting a relatively unknown but beloved brand 30 years later is certainly a challenge, and I've personally seen less rosy updates by this project as it was getting started trying to get it financed. Is this the first time you're hearing about this franchise? What are your impressions?

    2 votes

  13. Comment on Taylor Swift named as Time's Person of the Year - 2023 in ~music

    Raincloud
    Link Parent
    Hitler and Stalin were previous recepients of the "award".

    Hitler and Stalin were previous recepients of the "award".

    4 votes

  14. Comment on Any popular game genres you just can't get into? in ~games

    Raincloud
    Link
    I can't deal with open world games like Breath of the Wild. I just get stuck in decision paralysis, I don't know where to go so I just end up going nowhere and shutting the game off after a couple...

    I can't deal with open world games like Breath of the Wild. I just get stuck in decision paralysis, I don't know where to go so I just end up going nowhere and shutting the game off after a couple of hours.

    11 votes

  15. Comment on Why didn't Sonic Mania 2 happen? in ~games

    Raincloud
    Link
    GameInformer asks Christian Whitehead and Takashi Iizuka what happened to Sonic Mania 2. The follow-up 2D Sonic game is going to be Sonic Superstars, developed from the ground up. Meanwhile,...

    GameInformer asks Christian Whitehead and Takashi Iizuka what happened to Sonic Mania 2. The follow-up 2D Sonic game is going to be Sonic Superstars, developed from the ground up. Meanwhile, Whitehead and Evening Star announced a 3D platformer, Penny's Big Breakaway, recently.

    Whitehead dispels the rumour that Sonic Mania 2 was cancelled because of "bad blood" between the devs and Sega.

    7 votes

  17. Comment on Pokemon.com launches official forums in ~games

    Raincloud
    Link Parent
    It still exists. Previously under the Curse umbrella, now part of Mobafire, who also seem to have taken over what's left of MTGSalvation.

    It still exists. Previously under the Curse umbrella, now part of Mobafire, who also seem to have taken over what's left of MTGSalvation.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on What digital card games are you playing or excited for? in ~games

    Raincloud
    Link
    I've been playing The Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game in coop with a buddy. We sought it out specifically for coop functionality. There game is built as a campaign going through a story. The...

    I've been playing The Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game in coop with a buddy. We sought it out specifically for coop functionality. There game is built as a campaign going through a story. The story is simply presented as text with a voiceover, which is fair enough but a bit awkward in coop. The gameplay is fun, I like the equipment system and the way the game design forces you to have a variety of cards in your deck.

    The mechanics can be a bit obtuse at times. We played a card that had a bonus against hazards, but we quickly found out that not many objectives are technically classified as hazards, making the card kinda useless. We're also worrying about the longevity of the game, given that there's only a few campaigns to do.

    1 vote

  19. Comment on What's your favorite scene in Tolkien's Legendarium? (Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, etc...) in ~books

    Raincloud
    Link
    I always get the most emotional at the scene where Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas decide to hunt after the orcs that captured Merry and Pippin. It's the feeling of making a difference in the world,...

    I always get the most emotional at the scene where Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas decide to hunt after the orcs that captured Merry and Pippin. It's the feeling of making a difference in the world, even when your plans failed.

    5 votes

  20. Comment on Penny's Big Breakaway | Announcement trailer - 3D platformer by the creators of Sonic Mania in ~games

    Raincloud
    Link
    A sequel to Sonic Mania by the dev team of the original was rumoured to have been scrapped years ago, and the developer Evening Star going their own way. Of course, Sonic's new 2D adventure, Sonic...

    A sequel to Sonic Mania by the dev team of the original was rumoured to have been scrapped years ago, and the developer Evening Star going their own way. Of course, Sonic's new 2D adventure, Sonic Superstars, has recently been revealed with a graphical style that is a departure from Sonic Mania.

    Now, Evening Stars's new game, a 3D platformer named Penny's Big Breakaway has been revealed. The protagonist is equipped with a yo-yo, which allows for all kinds of silly moves, including the ball rolling movement similar to Yooka-Laylee. Our protagonist seems to be on the run from large groups of angry penguins. The art-style with a lot of oddly-colored surfaces even reminds me of the very early 3D platformers of the 90s.

    The game is set to launch on all consoles and PC in 2024. What do you make of this title reveal? Is this what you were looking for as a follow-up to such a great game as Sonic Mania? Are you interested in picking this one up?

    Personally, I love 3D platformers and have played as many of them as I could, great ones like Yooka-Laylee and average ones like New Super Lucky's Tale. But the artstyle of Penny's Big Breakaway reminds me a bit of Demon Turf, a game which I enjoyed a lot with terrific platforming gameplay and eye-straining visuals for my poor colourblind eyes, even with the included accessibility modes. Though Penny's Big Breakaway doesn't seem to go entirely down the path of artistic over functional visuals. I'm gonna keep following this game.

    2 votes