Jonnas

2022 was the year I met the best girlfriend I've ever had, so I'm very grateful for that. Life has been lovely with her nearby, and most new things in my social life were due to meeting her. It was also the year my family finally fixed several problems at home, so I'm relieved. Also, my workplace saw a shake-up after almost a year of stagnation. I'd say that's a positive. All things considered, this felt like a normal year, but there was massive improvement in several areas of my life. Thinking about it, this is basically what an ideal year is supposed to look like, and it's kind of wild that I hadn't quite noticed up until now.

I used the term undead, but the town has vampires, werewolves, sirens, a Gorgon, a shapeshifter, a 'monster', witches and a disembodied hand wandering around. But ghosts?! Preposterous! Ah, so it's fantasy monsters. Ghosts aren't species with biology, I suppose. A mermaid ghost can be a thing. But neither are mummies or zombies. As you say, there's a disembodied zombie hand crawling around (and I know the Addams butler is a Frankensteiner), so clearly there's precedent for afterlife creatures. Without having watched an episode, I'm inclined to agree with your righteous indignation.

These breakdowns are getting simpler and simpler Having a hard time sharing the picture right now, so I'll say that the most relevant part of the review was declaring Three Hopes and Bloodstained 2 my favourite games of 2022 (behind SSBU), with Katamari Damacy coming in fourth. It's almost right.

Been a bit of time since my last post... I was actually pissed to see Croatia beat Brazil. Definitely Brazil's blunder, of course, but Croatia didn't play particularly well, either. Denied us of a South American derby in the semis. At least Argentina went through today. Regarding Morocco/Portugal, I'm a bit more at peace. Sure, it sucks that we were eliminated this early, and lost our shot at meeting Argentina in the finals, but Morocco were legitimately the better team. They weren't squandering passes left and right like we were, and they also didn't blatantly dive 3 times within the same minute, fishing for a pity penalty (pitynalty?). So yeah, after a painful repeat of Alcácer-Quibir, I can now throw my full support for Morocco conquering the World Cup, one former colonizer at a time. Go ahead and prove that you should've been the first Muslim nation to host this tourney.

To be fair, I haven't seen the show... But zombies and ghosts are entirely different beasts. Like, if someone from Walking Dead believed in ghosts, that'd be weird too.

It's great to see you again, Julius! Good to know that things are improving on your end. This part in particular is very uplifting. It's so important to be able to enter that mindspace of "not caring" about anything, especially nothing that worries you. Personally, it's the times that I forget about time and schedules entirely that I feel most liberated. When at some point I realise "Oh, time passed. Right, that's a thing that exists." That's fine too. Take it easy, and find a rhythm that's healthy.

The trailers insist on having Mario almost never talk! I'm actually wondering if he barely talks in the film itself, too. The one line he gets in the most recent clip was actually pretty decent.

Uh, all the 3H Lords in one emblem? That's neat. Plus, with Tiki there, that means potential characters who aren't lords. I'm hoping we get one with Hector & Eliwood, at least. And if I'm allowed to dream big, one with Tibarn & Elincia.

Holy shit, what is this? I knew C.Ronaldo was holding us down, but I didn't expect to be proven right so thoroughly! Feeling optimistic about our chances. I'm happy with the result, but not because of Spain (I'd be more than happy to see this Portuguese squad wreck Spain the way we just saw), I'm actually really happy for Morocco, who have beaten the odds to make it farther than they ever have. Shame they're going against us now, that only one of Morocco or Portugal can make the Final 4. Anyway, good luck against France, that's going to be a tough match.

Vote: Bob Before the day ends

Man, this was quite the matchday! It's almost impossible to make a joke about Germany boycotting Qatar.

I'm afraid I'm not in the UK, so I can't even watch it. But I do have very fond memories of our mafia days It's a shame I no longer have the availability to run them (nor anybody else, I wager), because they were always so incredibly fun, to both play and host.

Compared to Temper+Haste+Monk, Flare is downright meek. It's hilarious how whack this game's sense of balance is.

And the first one is... Final Fantasy "I, Garland, shall knock one of you down!" As I mentioned a month or so ago, I decided to play the first game, GBA version. About time I crossed this one off my list. The first Final Fantasy needs to introduction, so I'll just say... I enjoyed it. There's a semi-openness to the world that's inviting, as well as unpredictable, because it doesn't follow a generic industry formula (for example, I like how half of the game is fetch quests in random places, and you don't really know where each will lead you). The closest thing to a predictable formula is the dungeons leading to the four fiends, and even with that they play a bit. The combat system is super basic, but serviceable for the time, and the freedom to build your own party gives it a decent amount of depth... But it's so simple, it's actually incredibly, obnoxiously, easy to abuse. At some point, I was one-shotting most bosses I met. Compared to its contemporaries, I felt like the combat in DQ3 (or even DQ1) was more interesting. I will say that the final boss fight was such a ramp up in difficulty, I actually felt properly challenged, and it was very satisfying. The worst part of the game is the random encounters. The frequent random encounters. The utterly obnoxious random encounters. They bogged the game down considerably, they stunted any kind of exploration, and the combat isn't deep enough to save this. Another flaw, one that came with this rerelease, is how the bonus dungeons are handled, unlocking in the middle of the game like that. They're filled with tremendous amounts of EXP, and those extra levels trivialise the rest of the game even more than usual. Furthermore, they're filled with cool extra bosses, but they're only difficult at the point of the game that you unlocked them. And assuming you didn't clear one of the other dungeons first. Except for Omega and Shinryu, which are difficult at all points in the game. It's a huge, timey-wimey mess, and a waste of some very cool extra bosses and callbacks. The extra wind dungeon (as well as Omega and Shinryu) are the only challenges appropriate for the endgame. Anyway, I did beat all 4 dungeons. Earth and Fire immediately after the class change, Water and Wind after I had already beat the game. Fire was great for that point of the playthrough (and I ended up defeating the hardest boss in that dungeon, awesome challenge), Wind was excellent for the endgame, and Water was only worth it for Omega and Shinryu (which would be massive difficulty spikes for the dungeon otherwise). Finally, music was great. Plenty of charming memorable tunes, and the excellent battle theme is the only thing keeping those random encounters bearable. Nobuo Uematsu showing his value very early on. So yeah, I'm glad I finally tackled this one properly, but it is pretty flawed (the original Dragon Quest trilogy aged better than this, I feel). Still has just enough charm to make a splash, and it's no wonder that the designs for White Mage, Black Mage, and Red Mage survive to this day. It did work, and I beat every superboss in the game without a White Mage. Quann turned out to be a sentient fragment of pure Chaos, and Farise turned out to be an ancient Lufenian, which was wild. Not sure if that counts as "payoff", but there you go.

Huh, we... actually made it out of the group? On our second game? No tiebreaker shenanigans or nailbiters? We're actually getting the results of a high tier team? I am legitimately surprised. Also, we're likely not playing this particularly motivated Brazil in the Round of 16, so that's great too. Dang, this relaxation is such a new feeling as a Portuguese fan. Incidentally, there's another reason I don't want us to face Brazil: out of all the tourney favourites, I'm rooting for them the most. As such, better if Portugal faces them in the final or not at all.

I tried the demo last week. I had fun with it, but after a few levels, I started to feel dizzy from all the camera shifts. Now granted, I was playing handheld mode in a dark room, but I was wondering if you felt anything similar during your playthrough.

This was one of the few games I watched. Very glad to see Morocco come out victorious.

I hear Portugal's game was great. I was also happy to hear about Iran's success (no offence to the Welsh), and I'm now rooting for them to make it out of the group. Eng-USA was the one I caught a glimpse of, and the Americans looked in better shape. To be fair, their stakes were higher than England's, but still.

It's more a reference to the witches, I feel. They be warping all over the place. FE Fates did the same with one of its DLC Witch class, which could rewarp to nearby allies at will. You mean Corrin's ability? That's something she (as well as a handful of other units) could already do in Fates.

This was the most unenthused I've ever been for a World Cup since childhood, probably. This is the most cynical host in memory, and I can't feel excited by any potential match (except maybe for the prospect of Argentina and Portugal maybe meeting at some point, finally). And yet, as soon as it started, some exciting matches and stories have already come about, as they always do. Damn this event. But I must admit, the out-of-field drama has caught my eye, regardless. First we had Qatar outplaying FIFA in the beer department (and I'm actually glad they did so in this one particular instance), then we had grandstanding European players chicken out of supporting LGBT causes when an actual consequence was on the line (England's getting some flak for this, but the same happened with Belgium, Germany, and a few others), immediately followed by Iranian players actually pulling off a real, dangerous protest. Meanwhile, Portuguese media is pretending that C.Ronaldo is somehow more newsworthy than all of this. As for actual football, I hear the Arabians legitimately outplayed the Argentinians, so I'm happy for them. I only really watched the France-Australia from today, as far as matches go, and France seem to be in better shape than the majority of national teams I've watched in the past 10 years. Good for them.

I never liked Twitter. The character limit has always rubbed me the wrong way, it has always looked like a way to limit the kind of speech and discussions one can have on the platform. As time went on, I disliked it more and more. Suddenly, any and all celebrities were using it to launch soundbytes (well, textbytes), catchphrases, and drama into the atmosphere. In the same environment that companies were putting out public announcements, and other serious matters. Wouldn't be so bad per se, but Twitter gave equal recognition to the comments in each and every one of these publications. The most visible public forum of our times had the same quality as an average IRC channel. I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump's account encapsulated everything I disliked about Twitter, leading to several years of moronic public discourse regarding the politics of the biggest economy on earth. At the same time, I recognize it lead to independent artists and freelance workers to better build a contact/professional network. I figure a more specialized network would be better for that, but what works, works. It ultimately doesn't do much to mitigate my negative feelings on Twitter, though. Regarding Elon Musk, I always figured he was an eager, ambitious forward-thinker, investing in promising technological projects all around, but... I always found it weird that he never seemed to spend too much time in a single project. SpaceX, Tesla, the infrastucture he was investing in São Tomé (I figure this last one wasn't that well known, he was doing a lot of shit). At one point, I realised he wasn't an engineer, he was businessman, so that made more sense, he was there to allocate money, not actually run or develop the cutting-edge technology on display. Seeing Twitter crashing down a cliff, alongside exposing Elon Musk for the blowhard that he is, has been one of the most fascinating and satisfying events from the last several years. I am glad Twitter is finally receding from public discourse, and I am glad at least one of the modern Rockefeller-wannabes is being taken down a notch. It's also, you know, a bit of a historic event. This is huge! One of the biggest and most relevant institutions on earth is spontaneously combusting, likely to die in less than 6 months (or even less than one Liz Truss term). How often does something like this happen, ever?

Sakurai's out there paying an editor and a translator (8-4, at that) just to show off his cute cat playing with a Kirby plushie. He truly is the best of us.

Jesus, Naka. Are you trying to outdo the Sonic franchise in the crazy department? Incidentally, I'm sure Yuji Naka's story could be told as one of those surreal Balan Wonderworld CGI cutscenes, and it would fit the game just fine.

The Wii U, for me personally, had the misfortune of landing at a time in my life where I was growing vastly disinterested in home console gaming. Most of my gaming in the 2010s was done on my laptop or 3DS. As such, I never got it, having to instead admire it from afar. "Admire it" is the right term. There were a lot of things happening in the Wii U that I thought were brilliant. Miiverse, Mario Maker, the buzz around Smash 4, Mario 3D World, Kirby's Rainbow Curse, Tropical Freeze, Pikmin 3, the Virtual Console now including GBA and DS games... So much cool stuff coming out. By comparison, nothing on the rival consoles came close to capturing my interest in the same way. I did try it briefly during its launch period. Played a bit of Rayman Legends and Tekken Tag 2. I liked the Pad well enough at the time, but with the hindsight of some Switch experience, I now fear it would've made my hands sore during somewhat longer gaming periods. To end this on a better note, I really like the white&light blue colour scheme. The Wii's pure white never sat right with me, but the Wii U managed to fix that niggle I had.

I heard a lot of this game's failings, but I didn't know this. Dear God, that's actually hilarious.