lrthreads: multi-fandom side blog

this is all I care about right now.

this is how i function in real life

Opposite of a problem

A mom helping her kids beat a hard level in Super Mario Land, 1990s.

this is a renaissance painting

elemental resistances in bio or I block

op doesn’t have the skill to scan encounters for stats

Kids these days will really be publicly posting their elemental weaknesses and what they drop when slain.

all video games should have a “I’m shit at video games but I’m curious about the story and I don’t want to watch a let’s play” mode

I am

I made this post because I am disabled and no matter how much I practice there are some games I will never be able to play because I physically cannot move my fingers the way you have to and the responses to this post from other disabled people, people who grew up unable to play video games, and people who just aren’t very good at them has been extremely enthusiastically positive, while people who apparently can’t conceive of the idea that some people will never be good at gaming condescendingly comment, tag or send me asks telling me to try easy mode or to get good despite the fact that the feature I’m describing already exists in some games and mods. if you’re part of the latter group, consider that some of us can not ever be good at video games and we still deserve to be able to participate and have fun

Ok, real talk, if you play PC games I use a program called Wemod that has settings for almost every game ever and you can change them to suit your needs Unlimited health? one hit kill? unlimited items? They can’t mod multiplayer games, but every genre of game imaginable is on Wemod so I use it for everything from stardew valley, subnautica, hades, farming sim and more! It mods the games to your level of ease without needing to mess with any files or get deep into webpages for mods yourself It is a life changer

FYI ⬆️⬆️⬆️

Only passing along as the only games I play are on my phone.

Get an older sibling and have them play the game and you watch

One, this is older siblings who watch younger siblings play erasure, two that’s not the point. People deserve to enjoy the experience of playing a game for themselves. Watching someone play is fun. Playing yourself is a different kind of fun.

There are so many reasons why someone wouldn’t want to be challenged by a game, and it’s ridiculous that people can’t fathom someone requiring a different gameplay than themselves. 

Back in the dark ages when I was a kid and we got our first computer, my dad noticed that I was sad because I wanted to play computer games like him, so he would let me play his games in god mode. Should a five year old have been playing Ultimate Doom? Absolutely not. Did I enjoy the shit out of it, particularly the part where I couldn’t die and could just wander around aimlessly machine gunning demons to death with no real goal in mind? Hell yes.

I think they should make a fighting game where all of the characters are from the public domain

WHAT'S THIS? IT'S THE GREAT GATSBY WITH THE STEEL CHAIR

Okay but I need Beth March wrecking Gatsby with the basket of food she's taking to the Hummels

(Would I settle for Amy destroying him with art supplies or heck by cracking a plaster bust over his head ... yes)

Not to sound like an old fart here but my philosophy about video games is like. A kid living out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with no internet access for miles should be able to purchase a game from walmart, take that game home, put it in their console, and play the whole game with all of its features and the only thing lack of internet affects is the inability to play online with others. Nothing else. They shouldn't be missing entire chunks of the game becuase they can't download a patch. The game shouldn't be borderline empty or unplayable without a patch.

FINALLY, some sensible dialogue in this series

Every time I see Woody in a KH3 screenshot I just get this vibe of like Hank Hill being like, now I don’t know what an anime is but you’re being an asshole

OH NO MY HEART :’)

[link to post]

Okay, here’s one that’s been bothering me for a while.

The epistolary novel is a mode of storytelling in which the story is communicated in the form of a series of fabricated documents ostensibly authored by the characters who inhabit that story. Letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles are traditional, but contemporary examples of the type may also include emails, chat logs, social media threads, and video transcripts.

If we switch from literature to cinema, one popular equivalent is the found footage film. The framing is usually a little more immediate, and the plots tend to be constrained by the need to restrict the action to situations where one or more of the characters involved would plausibly be recording video, but it’s the same basic idea.

So here’s the question: what would the video game equivalent of the epistolary novel be?

It can’t be a game where you read letters or watch videos authored by characters in the game – that’s just using the gameplay as a framing device for conventional epistolary storytelling. It’d have to be something where the gameplay itself constitutes a found document.

I’ve run into attempts at the form where the game is presented as having been coded by a fictional character, so there’s a metatextual layer where the game you’re playing is part of the fiction, but that’s not quite there, I think.

a heavily story-based game, the kind with lots of story choices that get saved and significantly affect the plot, where you start with a savefile that’s already in the postgame. you can go back and speak to old NPCs and study their reactions to the player character to determine what story choices the old player made.

You know, I think you’ve hit upon it precisely: the video game equivalent of the found document is someone else’s save file. You could even have multiple save files, each ostensibly belonging to a different person in the same social group (a family sharing a game console, perhaps?) and work in something of their relationships that way. Building a game in which the postgame is all there is and the game proper leading up to it is merely implicit in the choices whose consequences you’re now able to examine sounds like a fascinating writing challenge – and not one I’m sure I’d be up to! – but at least I’m not going to be bothered wondering how it would work.

I think the real difficulty there would be framing it so that the information you’re given tells you useful things about the hypothetical player whose save file you’re creeping, rather than the fictional character they portrayed.

Presumably you’d have to be like, a forensic analyst trying to solve some mystery through clues available in the savefiles? Like the family has disappeared, but their game console was left behind…

I was in 1st/2nd grade grade when the big Pokémon boom of the late 90s-early 00s happened. It was HUGE. Every kid was into it and we’d watch the show and play pretend and collect the cards and bring our game boys to school to trade Pokémon during recess. I was lucky to have supportive parents, but I remember how teachers and other adults would scoff and say how tired they were of Pokémon, how annoying and juvenile it was and how they couldn’t wait for us to “get over it already”. I might have been young, but I still remember how much these kinds of comments bummed me out. Why in the world are we being mean to little kids who like Fortnite

Why are you comparing pokemon to fortnite???

Because… Fortnite is very popular amongst children at the moment? And there are adults who dismiss it in the same way other adults did when Pokémon was big, calling it stupid, saying the dances are annoying, how much they can’t wait for the “fad to be over”, etc. It’s pretty much the same scenario.

Fortnite has a lootbox system that is glorified gambling, and can cause patterns of addiction in even adult minds, and that is in fact its intended goal in order for the game to make money from microtransactions. That’s how all games with lootboxes function. That’s how they draw in their customer base and squeeze more money out of them.

Like, I don’t judge kids who enjoy Fortnite. My little cousin plays Fortnite.

But last week, my little cousin also stole his mother’s credit card and spent about a month’s salary on microtransactions without his parents’ knowledge.

Modern gaming has become vile and predatory in ways that we didn’t have to deal with as children.

And we shouldn’t be mean to children about this, but we should definitely be coming down on these companies like a pile of fucking bricks.

Delicious.

Finally, some PROPER FORTNITE CRITICISM

Enemy spotted

*Boss music starts playing*

My self-indulgent mess of a second game! It’s about gay asian girls playing baseball and falling in love.

Features:

*except not really, one of them is bi

Happy National Video Game Day, a day that celebrates the games and gaming systems that have changed the way kids—and adults—play. The Game Boy may be the most iconic handheld console, but what’s your favorite?

“Game Boy (Dog),” 1999–2000, by Alex Harris 

being a healer is like bottoming for gamers

If I’m not healing, you’re healing and you fuck it up.

You’re nothing without me. Don’t waste my effort you pathetic little worm.

^^^power bottom^^^

…

@orenjikitty

Stardew Valley is on sale on Steam for $8.99 right now! It’s normally $14.99 and it’s never fuckin on sale so that’s a good deal! Also it’s an awesome farming/dating/fighting game and you can be gay, which is the most important.

This game rules!

Yesssss everyone join me in Stardew Valley hell, my love for it has recently reignited and I am spending far more time farming than is wise.