pang
@birthbydrip.bsky.social
200 followers 120 following 1.1K posts
game crit https://birthbydrip.neocities.org/ https://www.backloggd.com/u/Pangburn https://youtube.com/@vgbookclub
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birthbydrip.bsky.social
it doesn't seem like curiouscat or askfm or anything are around anymore, so I'm gonna pose the question here: what are some questions you have for me or topics you'd like to see me cover on my blog? I'd like some material for shorter essays, since my own always balloon out of proportion lol
birthbydrip.bsky.social
finally back.... and finally gathered my thoughts on catrap, a elegant skeleton of a puzzle game. I think long-term this game could be very useful as an ur example of these kind of anti-failure puzzle games with strict solutions. link below!
birthbydrip.bsky.social
don't want to say any unplayably bad indies I've tried or anything, zack and wili is probably it though. such a strange application of arcade/action ideas to an extremely ticky-tacky point and click adventure
lexluddy.xyz
What's the worst game you finished/rolled credits on?

(games media folks, it can't be something you were assigned to review; this has to be something you subjected yourself to of your own free will)
birthbydrip.bsky.social
was reading back on some of my recent stuff and I've been sloppy 😭 I really love my boku 2 review but some of the sentences are borderline illegible or missing words... pushed some fixes that should hopefully clean that up
birthbydrip.bsky.social
was getting feedback on my academic resume (multi-thousand word essays on research/teaching interests) and got dinged pretty heavily on how much I spam "can" in front of other verbs... sort of embarrassing how often I fall back on it even in my games writing
birthbydrip.bsky.social
agreed, and not trying to litigate the mechanic here (since like I said, we all agree), but moreso pointing out a particular framing of that argument that struggles due to output/input RNG being difficult to nail down (should've been specific: it was matthewmatosis who made that argument)
birthbydrip.bsky.social
I used to call it magnetism until I got exposed to other mechanical crit... STT is such a bad name lol
birthbydrip.bsky.social
obv we would all agree that there's extremely strong design arguments against STT (at least as a global principle for a combat system) but it's so hard to nail down the language for the exact reason that input and output RNG continually fold into each other over the course of a play session
birthbydrip.bsky.social
it's interesting that, abstractly, in the Suck-To-Target vs no-STT analysis, that the former was pegged as output RNG when it was built to solve output RNG wrt contact (make positioning contextual in order to guarantee a hit). no-STT is the opposite: hit is contextual based on dynamic game state
birthbydrip.bsky.social
imo this is where the context sensitivity discussion was trying to add clarity + useful language, but that term is also so overloaded (for good reason) that it never quite landed
birthbydrip.bsky.social
will regret this in another five years when the pendulum swings the other way and every dlc custom outfit in gaming is chasing semi-ironic camo trend way too late

(also *stats weren't awful)
birthbydrip.bsky.social
wish this guy's stars weren't awful bcs this custom outfit goes crazy in 2025
birthbydrip.bsky.social
nothing has killed my productivity more today than running into minor LaTeX issues. constantly killing my flow lol
birthbydrip.bsky.social
incredible how coaltar would just let it rip sometimes instead of doing shoegaze or metal or dnb or something and it came out this good youtu.be/-bmNBBK3S-Q?...
Coaltar of the Deepes / c/o/t/d
YouTube video by musicmineinc
youtu.be
birthbydrip.bsky.social
it's def worth it bcs the design chops are so on-point in terms of enemy composition. shirley's assist gives you a genei jin-style afterimage that breaks the game open if you need it
birthbydrip.bsky.social
the real goat... buster's bad dream...
birthbydrip.bsky.social
this year was a slow onset for me too, since it didn't really feel like fall until this week... I got some time in with clock tower on wednesday tho so I'm covered
birthbydrip.bsky.social
16-4 across four fantasy leagues 😤 and I'm about to get rashee rice and/or ceedee active in three of them...
birthbydrip.bsky.social
and yet when I said this about poor things I was crucified...
birthbydrip.bsky.social
was thinking through arcade collections on pc that would be feasible to buy for ~20 students and I'm crying that there isn't a good one for pc that isn't all NES games or just like, three games
birthbydrip.bsky.social
basically a way for game design teachers to distribute these retro games to students for educational purposes (maybe even with built-in features like model viewers, code benchmark toggles, ram watch) without violating copyright, which is such a big issue with academic game analysis
birthbydrip.bsky.social
spamming my resume rn and thinking through the kind of games-related research I'd like to do with undergrads... would be so cool to have a cannonball rewrite against a creative commons art/audio set for educational use. other reverse engineered games would be great for this too
birthbydrip.bsky.social
it got overshadowed by the memes but keanu absolutely kills it as a stupid, shallow, faux-nihilist narcissist
birthbydrip.bsky.social
walked into my gf's office and starting talking to her in the dwerk king suave style and she just stared at me until I realized she had no idea what I was referencing