Honeymoon period goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Thoughts forthcoming,, some day

i like my personal evolution. I'm trying to phrase this without it sounding like a projection of my life here, but there's something to personally mull over how I ended up going backwards and forwards after Undertale opened my life up to more than I can mentally jot down as examples. Forwards in that I got further queer, found peers I'll die for, made a server I love dearly, grew to find new experiences forevermore. Backwards in that I combed through the game's influences, felt a sense of maturity as I slowly understood the appeal of more things I never could've comprehended. Learned to open that door wide open, and can go back forwards with this game in the back of my head at all times.

helped me redefine my fucking life!!!!!!!

Biggest game of affirmation I'll ever know, can you name many games that psychologically understand, get you, and give you more tools to help you turn that into proper form? Struck me to my core, and I'll remain a complete lover for this even though the selection of people I can bring this up to is dwindling.

:)

I thank Rex a ton for getting me into this. This is what I play off work now to unwind. Finding the character that really suited my disgusting rushdown/rng pull mindset with dumb options was almost orgasmic mentally. Simply the best fighter, and I don't need a replacement for the world because there'll always be more to bring out of this.

There are a lot of genuine reasons to love this one i feel, more than i think it even gets credit for, as bizarre as that sounds! It has a fervent love from the FF community but like there's really more to appreciate here I think, just a powerful soulful understanding of FF7 and it lends itself to a great mythical level of intrigue and has such easy to spot inspirational threads since the OG came out.

Also everybody here is fucking HOTTTT

i don't have a lot to talk about here because what i did was already functionally hard for me. I recommend just skipping this entry because this is about to get stupidly introspective on things that are moderately toxic.

I think I have the worst habit of parasocially following people that open my eyes a bit, chased down and probably pushed away people who saw me for what I was doing, looking at their culture and pushing to understand it while they wanted to be left alone. Maybe I'm looking at this through the wrong lens though, but I know that the few people I wish could talk to me more about things probably want nothing to do with me anymore. I closed doors through my own rampant fervor, and I'm paying the price in the corner of my room sometimes thinking about it.

Treat people you meet with respect, and don't push yourself into a friend circle that doesn't know you, ok?

queueing up path of goddess claire, falling down the rabbit hole and re-emerging in dreamland. I couldn't ever have put the world and whole art here into the right words, there's like millions of little things that make me feel welcomed and pull on tiny little anxieties that I put onto the game in return. Just know that it was truly special ^^

To think, years ago i thought i would hate this game. What a loser, fuck non-trans me

humming the great deduction theme in my head rn thinking about it

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

There's that song that plays in my head when I think about this game, Shelter? The porter robinson song. The one that got a really huge breakout due to its anime video and the discourse surrounding it.

It really doesn't have much to do with it. But I have similar sentiments to the first time I listened to shelter. I unabashedly love that song, its energy, the music video's sincere forceful gripping of your emotions, etc. Tetris Effect is like that in a way, only pushed back from being the best simply by the fact that I suck really really really bad at tetris. So i would be brought out simply cuz i fucked up terribly.

Getting a PS5 was maybe a mistake. Still feels like one.
That doesn't change that this was a very profuse set of happy moments, the likes of which I haven't had at this consistent level for a while.

Shmups, or at least this kind (I still need to try the horizontal scrollers which look much better to me, weirdly), are a genre I doubt i'll entertain for its hardcore area. This game in particular is just everything I childishly love as a shmup aesthetic, this grand dark sci-fi set to uplifting rock beats that jam along with you as you take back what feels like a rebellious spirit. It SLAPS.

repetition aside, it's simply the most beautiful painting in all of life i've seen. The frame might not be perfect, but I just do nottttt care

I hate that i'm more distant from all the friends that were playing this one with me ;-; i miss them. Can we do more duels? Rediscovering yugioh was great you can't just leave me hereeeee

https://youtu.be/1gpbwXH1Avo

god it's so adorable ;-; i love everything about kirby's crew here. This was the best incarnation of kirby and i will not be made to think otherwise

Love this game. It's funny how much I cared about playing out of spite, because the malaise review calling this "revenge story done better than TLoU2" was partly for my feelings on playing this?

Really should've judged it for what it is at its time. It's such a solidly earnest late 00s flash-style indie game. Music is still a bop on my phone that I went through Apple's annoying iOS download system to keep it on.

Not as personal a high for me as Child of Eden, but nonetheless a staple and a great reminder that vibes/aesthetic games can paint prettier pictures than the best specialized set of game design goals for me now. god i've gotten so weird and up my own ass, but i want to keep moving towards it

the lesson to take away here is that killing your lover and winging it with the guy who had the same functional chains as you is valid.

I'm in a great relationship please don't dm me i just wanted to make that joke

my most brain turned off enjoyment of the year. This is not to say it sucks more than I let on in any capacity, I do defend this game from the level I experienced it. It's almost distasteful to me to give it such a bad rap when it has an honest understanding of its roots. But there is really just not much to it to chew on is there lol. Great time tho :3

Gosh what a lovely time <3
Will probably appreciate more, because it's in the "I'm bored and don't want to play anything particularly complex" camp and I can just go for 1cc. Good stuff!

I have a bad habit of killing my own interest by other people's. What does that mean? If someone I have moderate distaste for is playing and shilling something I'm liking and trying to have fun with, it's kind of like a weird damper. That's a rude extremely disgusting feeling of mine, that sort of proxy disinterest.

Anyway I managed to finish this enjoying myself even with that, and it was pretty good ^^

decreasingly fun to think about honestly? I do feel confident ranking this high, because my time with it was lovely, but I feel my thoughts turning around on it. There's something missing in it, maybe I just need to give it another month or two of thought over time, but it's like when you knock on your feelings of something, the sound reverberates like it's hollow.

first touhou i fuck with and gosh it doesn't disappoint. Best OST of the series maybe? I still prefer scarlet devil's tracks by a hair but this game is a very screaming ball of vibes in such a out-there unique aesthetic.

what a roller coaster lmao

I'm never going to fully mesh with yakuza due to my biases and poisons, but I am glad that I found a way to look past them in this instance to find something this inherently special. I still elect to burn twitter for it though.

destroying the planet feels so gooood girl i'm rocking it

good fun and vibes

Good inconsequential fun. I missed a lot of XBLA, rectifying that step by step.

loses its power about halfway through, when the cinematic power stops running and the campaign structure burns at its repetition. Such a godly aesthetic and ridiculous effort put into it though. Still good, still worth looking into by more people, still sad the multiplayer is mostly dead to where I can no longer functionally experience it without a heavy amount of effort.

i have a very heavy fascination with tim rogers. I don't exactly love the guy, nor do I think his frame of reference for art is something I exactly encourage, but the way he talks and spells out his view in such a magazine format is so engaging. His pac-man video is what i'm referring to here, and it's kind of why i played this, rather than what my review would otherwise state. I have to because this was a point in the year where I took a modest amount of inspiration from him and retooled a lot of my thoughts. I don't agree with him mostly still, but his idea of 'texture' laid a groundwork for me to start thinking differently, that people here on backloggd like ghost_girl, drigo, pansydragoon, woodaba, etc. would help me turn into something I think is better.

i played this when i was 11 :) god what a long time ago. It was nice to return to this, not so nice to see what the ports had become to where I had to burn through some disgusting EA-created bugs to get to the meat :/ But i'm, maybe sadly used to it.

I don't have much else to say about touhou, but doesn't it kind of have an interesting following? I mean no disrespect towards it of course, but it's such a crazy niche. I'm not saying I played these to get into that niche, but I did hope to see some kind of understanding. And I did, although not in the way I expected.

the masocore i feel good about finishing, less caring about it later.

i put in too much time in this just to burn time. Disturbing mobile game, should be burned. I don't want to be addicted!

the most disappointing game to my statistical mind. This is quite literally the game design core I fuck with, but it's tied to the most repetitive structure that certainly needed at least another year to know how to keep things fresh that did not involve a roguelike structure to it :/

Oh well, I enjoyed it a lot and stopped before it got too disgusting to swallow.

I must reiterate that these shmups are probably cooler than I give them credit for. Especially after what I'd like to call a more artistic awakening for me (a pretentious way of saying I know what vibing is now in an emotional sense), I could maybe appreciate them more.

Not interested though. This is a good time even still!

Very cool from a gameplay-specific lens and nothing else, unfortunately. Enjoyed my time but wish it got more out of it from a design sense if it was only going to toy on that area.

it's free though like wtf am i even saying there lol

replaying one of the first pc games you ever played when you were still in single digits age :)
so cute, i feel old

there's a depressing footnote i could go on about this, how some developers had to adapt to the newest generation of games in ways that ended up shooting themselves where they had ample opportunity to shine.

I'm not saying this happened here, because that would be utter projection. I simply just do not like the direction the love de lic staff here chose to follow. It sickens me, and that's my own selfish hate to get over.

Please somebody take hugo martin out before he does something drastic. I fear the future of DOOM now with him at the helm

going to repeat what i said about espgaluda, but now with a more sadder undertone that it's definitely more raw than I give credit for. Still not my vibe, somehow.

Late 2020-Early 2021 me was a bit of an uncharitable rut. I think I keep realizing where my feelings on art go over the years, and this was an unfair play of mine. The vibes are fine, but I somehow was npc face the whole time.

In part my craptop was to blame though, it was running like SHIT and I decided, foolishly, to play it out to the end.

Confidence isn't exactly a dying medium, so I don't entirely understand how this dev team felt above all else to compromise their own vision. For being inspired by ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, it certainly doesn't play to those strengths. It could have to do with the year delay, just throwing out their open ended nature after playtesting showed a harsh entry point. But they so sincerely overcorrected. Sad to sour on a whole dev team but that's exactly the end result of something like this.

such a pretty charming aesthetic attached to what i feel lays the groundwork for indie skinnerboxes in a way. Obviously this is maybe stupid of me to conclude with, but there's a cthulhu like poison seeping out the back....

The first game that made me realize that maybe this new way of playing games tried out by complete random from a huge all encompassing backlog was a mistake?

Why'd i think i'd like this game, i'm averse to bro military team vibes and the fps cover shit is irritating as hell.

its a vibe in a way i imagine drakengard and the rest of its ilk are, but there's no way you could convince me that its point is fun enough to swallow. Just prodding and made me want to play etrain odyssey again tbh

it's still backlogged for me, because I already feel it needs a desperate re-evaluation from me on its aesthetic alone. But god fuck this game design. I don't like to single out this part but there's something so infuriating about the rationalization you're just bad at the game and then the further you play-by-play the scummier the game gets and poisons the entire fucking well.

ditto ikaruga in that it needs reevaluation, but i was feeling burnout when i was playing this game at the time. It's not its fault, I was awful

Very neat. The best I can talk about this is that itch.io games of its ilk kind of deal are a subset of games I cannot wait to dive into with the help of friends who give some of them strong recognition.

See The Guardian Legend below, but think of it slightly better.

NES isn't bad, I do have a bias for N64-gen on and other than Genesis games it's hard for me to encompass the thought of being mystified/being led to believe that a game from this era could shock me or lead me on an evocative core.

Doesn't change that a lot of these just suck. Not interested in these games' use of space and gameplay.

Played at the final straw-broke-the-camels-back of my 'rut', distaste from burnout and playing shit at random. Didn't enjoy, and I think the saturn version really didn't help with some of its changes, and neither did the emulator, but I just couldn't fuck with this. My interest in the sequels hasn't decreased though.

....

Got roped into this with a server thing. It was neato just to kind of see what the general talk of the town there was like. Oh right there was a game here,,, it sucked lol

Played this on a whim from a twitter thread going "underrated gem! look at this parkour system!"

You grow with some things every day huh? Don't take bizarre shills like that from strangers.

Don't trust uchikoshi for shit

if you ever get the feeling "ooo i'm enjoying this genre! I should do everything i can to play the rest!", i understand you. I'm not going to discourage that, maybe MMOs are the bad apple.

I just ask you to consider slowing down before you play something rash.

What I said about The Guardian Legend, but with far more vitriol and disgust.

My most uncharitable thoughts of the year, but this is such a thinly veiled pop-off that doesn't really care to find a heart of its own. I do not believe a soul that loved this game, just thinking about it boils my blood.