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Nothing is safe from becoming a Weird
JapaneseChinese Thing, seems like.(Originally posted by mistake in the Video thread.)
I was thinking about this when playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It's very obviously inspired by Castlevania, which takes the Dracula mythos as its source (albeit heavily modified). Bloodstained, on the other hand, keeps the gothic horror atmosphere but instead takes inspiration from the Ars Goetia -- which isn't even that obscure, but just not as famous as the usual monster movie canon.
Doesn't look more appealing than the average indiecrap, but free is an honest price.
You start out as a low-level huckster-slash-blasphemer who has somehow obtained a piece of a genuine relic of a religious figure. Instead of reselling it, you begin to rub it with various pieces of cloth and other materials, so that they may become third-class relics themselves.
(In Catholic tradition, a first-class relic is a piece of a saint's body, a second-class relic is an item which a saint used or owned, and a third-class relic is an object which merely was in contact with either.)
As you obtain cash by selling your third-class relics, you may invest it in additional, better relics of the first or second class to increase your turnoff, or in more efficient methods of producing third-class relics (ie. you hire a bunch of people to distribute the relic-making process). You may also sell off your primary relics for a large, but one-time only, boost of cash if you are in a pinch.
With time, you pick up enemies in form of Church officials (who see you as infringing on their monopoly), the faithful (who are offended by your establishment and/or your prices), the press (who - kinda rightfully to be honest - consider you a huckster), atheist skeptics (who dislike you for the inherent religiosity of your establishment), and so on. One way to defend yourself is spend money. The other is to spend relics. The relics are bestowed with a miraculous power, which you can spend on abilities such as casting curses on your enemies. You may select your pick from a wide range of options, such as an area curse to cause minor inconveniences to a large number of people, or a potent single-target hunter-seeker curse to get rid of one high-profile figure (a lighthning strike is a perennial favourite). Potency of a curse is described in terms of both the probability and duration of its sufferer ceasing to bother you.
As your establishment develops, you may choose to search for prospective candidates for sainthood and, for example, murder them to call dibs on their body parts before the beatification procedure even starts. There are two time bars: one is the ongoing process, and the other, the decay of your first-class relic-to-be. To increase your chances, you can invest in refrigeration and other preservation methods, or just smear some palms to hasten the procedure.
(I'm not sure only whether the game is supposed to just go on, or enter some sort of endgame. I imagine one could go this way: you have committed just enough blasphemy that a deity shows up in person to wreck you; you need to have gathered enough relics by that point so that you can burn through them all at once to outmatch the deity's divine power.)
Has science gone too far?
I've heard the endgame of Dwarf Fortress is running Dwarf Fortress on an in-game computer, but I didn't expect to see it (well, for a given value of "it") so soon.
https://www.gog.com/en/promo/20220927_nihon_falcom_sale
This includes basically everything developed by Falcom that's on GOG -- yes, both the earlier XSEED-published games and the more recent NISA-published games. And even Gurumin (which is at a pretty good $2.99, at 70% off), which was published by Mastiff.
(The only exception is Tokyo Xanadu (and its DLCs), because for some reason its publisher, Aksys, isn't participating.)
This sale coincides with the long-awaited official English-language release of Trails from Zero, which is the first game in the second arc of Trails games. But it also includes the Ys games and other sundry stuff (e.g. Xanadu Next and the Zwei games).
At the time, the more Japanese (and in-house developed) equivalent, We Cheer, was taking off, but I was an All Star boy through and through. As with most things, I accidentally ended up liking the more obscure (and in this case, clearly ripoff) thing.
I've been searching for the songs from this game for years (and years) and a few years ago I decided that if I couldn't find them, I'd just rip them all myself.
Unfortunately, it's not exactly easy to rip data from a Wii game I last owned 8 or so years ago, but I found some files online and after much trial and error I actually managed to find all of the songs! They were right there in the filesystem marked clearly as "Audio" and in mp3 format, unlike in other games that have more specific formats.
I'm thinking of uploading them to YouTube sometime so other people can experience the nostalgia.
Somewhat related; I also spent a lot of time playing Bratz games on the PS2 in my youth, and I really liked them all a lot. Turns out the turn on nostalgia for such things is up and so MGAE and Outright Games are releasing a whole new Bratz game for the Switch (and PS4 and so on) that follows in how the previous games operated.
Like the Bratz games of old, this one will have fashions from various Bratz lines, a plot that involves progressing from one international location to the next (including Seoul, because we're fancy now) and getting stories for Bratz magazine.
Honestly I would drop the money for a Switch just for this one game (and maybe the L.O.L. Surprise games by Outright Games too), but maybe I'll just learn to live with the FOMO.
Free stuff available until October 9th, 10 PM UTC.
Not games, but stuff related to various games.
Note that Another World may be more familiar to North Americans as Out of this World.
I haven't checked it out myself yet; I've been trying to put off an update and I want to see how long I can keep doing this.
But reportedly this is a pretty bad change.
Lots of complaints in the forum, as you might expect, and one of the criticisms is that it pre-checks a box for remembering the login, by default. (You have to uncheck it manually.) People have pointed out that this is a security flaw.
Meanwhile, I noticed one person saying that -no-browser doesn't work anymore.
Then, later I noticed someone else with a re-login prompt showing a UI thing that seems very similar to other browser-rendered UI elements in recent versions of the Steam client (e.g. game properties, or even uninstall confirmation).
It seems like Steam may have broken -no-browser launching. (I haven't confirmed this yet personally; I'll find out whenever it finally forces me to update.)
Someone else has posted about a -noreactlogin launch parameter that seems to disable whatever the new sign-in UI is (I haven't seen it yet, nor tried this), but who knows how long that'll last.
TL;DR Steam is getting worse, again
(the update to the Steam client caused all of this person's games to get deleted)
https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/y4pt5f/bayonettas_original_voice_actress_was_only/
that's "Bayonetta's original voice actress was only paid $4000 by Nintendo", though technically it's Platinum Games and not Nintendo that paid her
It's to coincide with the release of this: https://www.gog.com/news/release_a_plague_tale_requiem_new_chapter_in_de_rune_siblings_journey
aaaand there's more coming out of this wellspring of controversy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-18/bayonetta-3-voice-actor-s-pay-dispute-overshadows-nintendo-game
i have neither interest nor stake in this controversy
not a fan of bayonetta anyway, and the only person whose name i recognize is Jen Hale from her Metroid Prime work years ago
i only posted the initial thing because it seemed like enough of a curiosity given how many people were talking about it