RedShell

That ray-traced Mystical Ninja tease at the end!

Nice! I did not know that. Anyway, cheers for that very detailed explanation, I shall give it a go.

Thanks. Was a right pain to get that one working. It still isn't quite right either (the spawn locations in 4-player matches are messed up ) but I can't figure out how to solve it. On the plus side though, Jessica's arm no longer has a hole in it! Anyway, cheers for the games everyone!

These guys are great. Anyway, just finished all the unlocks for the Contra stuff. Personally, I still think the collab DLC choices they've gone with (so far) have been a bit weird/out of place, but I also can't deny that this one was good fun regardless. I used to really love the Contra series back in the day, especially Contra III on SNES so it was nice to see and hear elements from that legendary game. Have to admit that playing this DLC has also increased the temptation to perhaps get the Emergency Meeting one at some point too. Despite the fact I've never played, or have any interest in, Among Us. I hit around 30 FPS the other day, which is probably the lowest I've managed since the new engine arrived on PC. But yeah, it did make me wonder at the time, how is the Switch is coping with this? That's a shame. Do you remember your exact setup, Arcanas, stage modes, etc.? I wouldn't mind trying to recreate it, for a laugh.

Note to self: Fix hole in Jessica’s arm.

Yet another great "out of nowhere" update. Man, there is nothing else quite like Vampire Survivors when it comes to utterly warping the flow of time! I'm back at 100% completion though, which is currently 211 achievements.

Oh I'm pretty sure none of this stuff is intentional, just stage builder specific glitches that can be consistently utilised by following the right methods. Nintendo would probably be patching this stuff out if they were still updating the game. In fact, some of my earlier stages did get changed/stop working as intended back when they were.

Ok, for anyone that might be interested, let me explain (or try to explain ) the Captain Toad stage... Not sure how familiar you guys are with the more enigmatic features of stage builder, but basically there's a certain way of drawing and then scaling shapes to produce various different effects. They're often just visual, but sometimes they can modify terrain properties in a way which will then have an impact on gameplay, for example: if you draw a thin shape that covers the entire length and height of a stage, and then completely reduce its scale vertically, it becomes so thin that it deactivates collision! I use this one a lot when making the surface of "water", as the terrain remains visible but players, items and regular terrain can freely pass through it. You'll have seen this on the Nintendogs bath and Mii swimming pool stages. Other drawing/resizing techniques can cause the face of a 3D shape to disappear, with only the sides visible from specific angles, good for creating "invisible walls". Others can allow characters to pass through in one direction, but not the opposite, etc. There are seemingly many of these types of tricks within stage builder, I learnt the majority of them from this fantastic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Thoreon/videos But yeah, when creating the PaRappa stage, I unexpectedly discovered a brand new one (again by resizing a larger shape) that somehow prevented characters from being able to jump! That was when I decided to instead use it for a new stage, and the first theme that popped into my head for it was Captain Toad. At this point I had no idea about the other aspects of that gimmick though, so when testing it outside of the editor I was very surprised to see that this piece of terrain also made picking up items impossible (unless using Villager's pocket) and would cause all players to instantly fall through it on a Sudden Death! Three quirks for the price of one! Actually though, there are 4... Yep, you see when creating stages I also do some test battles with only CPU fighters, just to focus more on the stage and therefore spot anything that might need to be tweaked. Well, when I set the CPU on this particular stage, let's just say it made for some revealing insights into their AI. Unfortunately, I no longer have my capture device, otherwise I'd record some footage of it, but this collection of a post-match results screen will also paint quite a good picture of what happens: That's right, alongside not being able to jump, pick up items, and getting instantly KO'd upon Sudden Deaths, the CPU can't even attack while on this stage! They literally just walk about (mainly into the corners) occasionally dashing from side to side in the centre, for the entire match! So yeah, I was really happy with this discovery, until I started to test attacking the CPU myself and realised that once a character gets launched (or initiates a Final Smash) they regain the ability to jump and can once again interact with items. Hence the ruleset I suggested yesterday. Having said that, I reckon the stage will be OK for regular time/stock/stamina battles, because as you'll have probably noticed last night, when your character is in the no jump phase they're much more difficult to launch, plus you can use certain attacks a lot faster than normal. Once respawned you get back the ability to jump plus the advantage of items, but you'll also be easier to launch than anyone who's still grounded. It might actually be weirdly kind of balanced in a way. Anyway, that's enough rambling from me. I'm glad everyone enjoyed the stage, it's unlikely that I'll be topping that gimmick in any other creations before I hit the inevitable 100 stage limit, but I'll certainly try my best!

Thanks for the games everyone! That was a lot of fun. I shall do my best to explain how I created that custom stage tomorrow, but right now I need to keep my eyes closed! 2 hours of chaotic Smash Bros. is the limit for my old eyeballs.

That's perfect, cheers! Loving the name you gave it! I see. That could potentially mess things up. Ok, let's add Steve to the list of characters not to pick as well, just in case. But I'll keep the same stage selected for the second battle then (once we're back on the usual rule set) and someone can choose Steve, Villager, etc. if they like. See what happens.

Any chance you could set up a temporary ruleset (just for the very first match of the evening) to complement my latest custom stage? Yeah... that new stage gimmick I mentioned last week, turns out it's actually multi-purpose when it comes to wackiness. However, it also appears to stop functioning as intended under certain conditions, still not sure exactly what's going on though, or how it will behave online. So if it's not too much trouble, can we go with: 1 stock 1:00 min time limit FS Meter set to OFF Smash Ball set to OFF (fake one is ok) And can everyone please refrain from choosing Villager, Isabelle or random select. Oh, and if there's another character that has a move similar to Villager's pocket in FP2, avoid them as well. Again, this would only apply for the opening match.

So it seems there could potentially be issues with playing second-hand Switch games online now, if the information in this video is correct: Pretty messed up if true. Anyone heard about this before?

It's really great that they're putting so much effort into optimisation. Seems to have become an increasingly neglected area of game development in recent years. I have very high hopes for this game.

I have actually tried that in the past and yeah, it really isn't. Luckily, these days I use one of those small wireless keyboards that has a built-in touchpad, which works great. Admittedly, I don't really play those more traditional PC genres, like strategy or simulation type games, but for the few titles I've got that require mouse/keyboard I'll just map mouse movement to my controller's gyroscope with Steam Input.

Hehehe, cheers! Yeah, it's just missing a few aspects due to hitting the weight limit (and to keep performance decent) I also had to make the onion on the back wall a Smash logo, again for technical reasons. Stage builder really does not like it when you draw objects with too many colours/terrain parts. At least I was able to include the wood panelling on the walls though, a detail that they seemingly forgot in the Battle Royale version of Fruites Dojo.

I've been using a PC exclusively on TV for about 4 years now and can safely say that is no longer the case. The only issue I've encountered there is with much older titles that run at lower/unusual resolutions, but even then there's always a relatively simple solution to get it working. I consider it the modern-day equivalent of blowing on a cartridge. Couldn't agree more. I've not looked back since dropping Playstation and shifting all my 3rd party stuff over to PC. Cheaper games, better performance, no cost for online play, more customisation options, mods, and backwards compatibility that's truly future-proof. Sure, the initial costs with PC is very high compared to console, but in the long run I think it's well worth the extra investment. I don't expect the combo of PC + Nintendo console will change for me any time soon.

Indeed I do. You almost did an amazing comeback against Glen-i on my Epic Flail stage though (Ryu vs Ken) I was on the edge of my seat spectating that battle. Anyway, cheers for the games everyone!

Got a heads-up on the theme from Glen-i, enabling me to create an appropriate custom stage for tonight. It's a pretty simple one, yet I somehow managed to crash stage builder while making it! However, this also led to an incredible new gimmick discovery (I'm talking cannon graveyard level silliness ) but I'm going to hold it back for another build and to do some more tweaking, so you won't be seeing that tonight. If all goes to plan though... Mwahahahaaaa!!!! Anyway, see you later for some "all-star" battles.

This looks utterly bonkers. *adds to wishlist*

Cheers for the heads-up. How strange though. DR1, 3 and 4 all have full controller support. On the pcgaming wiki page it has a green check mark next to XInput compatible controllers, pretty sure the controller I use can be switched to that. Anyway, even if it doesn't work, I could always use the custom controller mapping feature in Steam, right?

Yeah, I'd heard that the games dip in quality after the sequel. I definitely plan to check out the second game at least, I'm just a bit confused about which version to get as it seems there are 2 Dead Rising 2. As far as I can tell, the "off the record" version is the one to go for, because it features Frank and all the photography stuff again. Indeed there is. And for sure, you would've done it buy driving around the maintenance tunnels, ludicrous amounts of zombies in there. Yup, unfortunately it doesn't make the cat talk, had it also included Garfield's sarcastic commentary I would have replayed the entire game! There is, however, another mod that replaces all cat meows with fart sound effects, which combines well with the Garfield skin.

Yeah, great little game. Glad to hear you also enjoyed it. Been a while since I posted an update, hmm... let's see if I can remember what I've played... Well, February got pretty much completely taken over by one game, a controversial game that a lot of people loved to hate, I am of course talking about: Palworld: While I wasn't exactly sold on it at first, I ended up getting hooked on the damn thing and then couldn't stop playing it! As an early access game (and one made by an inexperienced dev team at that) it obviously has quite a lot of issues, and it's not exactly the most original game ever made *cough* but you know what? Neither of those things stopped it from (eventually) being a lot of fun! Played it for around 100 hours in total and in that time I caught the majority of the Pokém-err... Pals, defeated all bosses and unlocked every achievement. It was the base building aspect that ended up appealing to me the most though, it's super simple to use yet pretty flexible in what it allows you to build. But me being me, I went and made a 15 storey Baby Face tower for my main base: Yep, it was just a bit big: So yeah, base building was really great, and alongside being able to make essentially any shape base you like, there's an assortment of furniture items available to craft for decoration. It's cute how your Pals also help out with constructing stuff and can be assigned to various tasks within the base itself, like planting/harvesting food, manufacturing items or weapons, etc. And depending on the type of Pal/skills, they'll be better suited to certain tasks, it makes collecting and levelling them up feel a lot more worthwhile as a result. Unlike in Pokémon, where I always focus on my team and all remaining Pokémon are just left gathering dust in the storage box, in Palworld you want to have a load of different Pals trained up and then set to your base/s. Another aspect where Palworld seems to make an improvement over Pokémon is in the online play department, although it's not something I personally tested, as far as I'm aware the entire game is playable in co-op. No doubt a contributing factor to the crazy success of this game. Despite Palworld one-upping Pokémon in some areas though, it still needs work, it's an ambitious title with a lot going on and all in a huge open world, Pals can get stuck on parts of the environment, characters will randomly T-pose, all that sort of fun stuff. There were already a few updates back while I was still playing that fixed up some bugs, including a major one where it was possible to capture bosses! That's right, not just the Pals, but their NPC trainers too! Luckily I managed to "catch 'em all" before the fix arrived, an unusual advantage of playing via Game Pass, where patches would be delayed over the Steam version. Oh, quick mention on the music before I move on. For the most part it was basically non-existent, as they were going for that BotW vibe just some light piano here and there. So I'd come to the conclusion that the game wasn't going to offer much in that regard, but then I was hit with this!: Crazy good! It's basically the only memorable track from the entire game (for me at least) but yeah, what a belter. Anyway, I stand by what I said about Palworld originally, in that I just hope its success will snap Game Freak out of their rut. It's quite frankly embarrassing how a small rookie studio (regardless of how they went about it) has been able to produce a more entertaining "Pokémon" game than any of the recent titles in that series. Game Freak needed a wake up call, and hopefully this is it. While subbed to Game Pass I noticed Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night had returned to the service, it's a game that I'd previously played through on there and really enjoyed, so I decided to download and check it out again. A couple of hours into it and I was having such a blast once more that I realised I should probably just buy it, so picked up a copy on Steam. It's rare that I replay games, but this one is so good that I simply couldn't resist. I absolutely love it! The visuals, the music, the flow of the game and huge variety of weapons and movesets all make it super replayable. There's only 1 thing wrong with Bloodstained, and that's the atrocious font they used for the dialogue text. Yuck! What were they thinking with that!? I tried searching for a mod to change it to a serif style, something a bit more... Gothic, but there was nothing. I know, that's such a trivial thing to complain about, but it still really annoys me. On the plus side, I discovered other mods that helped distract me from the horrible font at least. @Jonnas, I see this is one of your games to play this year, hope you get around to it. Very briefly revisited Stray to check out a mod that let's you play as Garfield: Game is now 11/10. No More Heroes III: This also popped up on Game Pass, having already played 1, 2 and Travis Strikes Again, I figured I should finally give 3 a go as well. But apart from the combat (which was really good) and the humour (that's so unbelievably stupid it made me laugh, a lot ) it's probably the weakest entry in the series, I just wasn't a fan of the way it's structured. You have several large areas with pretty much nothing in them that are just like hubs for mission markers, you then have to do a number of these repetitive missions to open up the boss battles, that was ok initially, but towards the later stages of the game it got pretty tiresome. I would've preferred some proper levels to explore with a greater number of enemies to progress through occasionally. Anyway, the boss battles and ridiculous story/cutscenes were enough to keep me playing through to the end, but were it not for those things I would've struggled to finish it I reckon. Dead Rising: Where the hell has this game been all my life?! So I randomly purchased this on Steam as I was in the mood for even more silliness after NMH3, and let's just say that this game did not disappoint! Playing this for the very first time in 2024 was quite the experience, a fantastic blast from the past, back when big developers were still relatively free to make highly entertaining games without needing to worry about political correctness and all the other constrictive nonsense they have to deal with now. Anyway, won't go into details on what I liked about this game, because that's basically everything! So I'll instead comment on the single aspect that I truly hated and that stops Dead Rising from being absolutely perfect, and that's its boss battles. My word, frustrating doesn't even begin to describe how awful they are. Damage sponges that can destroy you within seconds using attacks that are so damn cheap it feels like encountering a cheater in an online game. You need to either possess super human reflexes, or cheese the AI in some way to create a window of opportunity to attack. And even then they can just pull a completely unpredictable move which will be impossible to react to. Infuriating. Terrible bosses aside though, this game is gold. The setting, the freaky characters, the OTT (non-boss) gameplay ... so much fun. I was also super impressed by the amount of zombies on screen simultaneously and the multitude of ways they react to attacks too, that must've been so impressive back in 2006! It still holds up really well today. I completely lost it the first time I threw a metal pipe at one and it got stuck inside them. "Let off some steam, Bennett!" I've come to realise that apart from some indie stuff I actually have a lot more fun playing older games now than modern ones, so I'm going to try and catch up on other classics that I might have missed out on over the years, provided they can be found on PC. Hopefully I'll be able to discover some other wacky gems like Dead Rising. Well, that's my gaming diary up to now, I think. The only other thing I've been playing regularly alongside everything else is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, N-E online battles on Saturday's and creating custom stages the rest of the time I'm on it. Yep, still addicted to making those, here are some screens of my latest creations:

Ok then, note to self: Do not throw Beetle into Piranha Plant's Poison Cloud: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2119049352?t=0h47m20s Yeah, it took me way too long to realise that though.

Thanks. Had a feeling you'd like that one. Great games tonight (as always) cheers everyone. Will have to wait for @S.C.G's vid to confirm, but I think I somehow hit myself (when playing as "Bomberman" Mii Brawler) with the Beetle!

At this rate, by the time they get around to the final DLC (if they ever do ) most people probably won’t even remember that joke. Anyway, will be interesting to see just how many content updates the game does eventually end up with, I get the feeling it’ll be quite a lot though.