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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Spoilers for the newest game.

    spoiler

    The frame story of Returns, where Guybrush is telling an account of his life story to his son, is that a filter we’re now supposed to retroactively apply to the whole series? The end of this game, another “it’s all just Disneyland” ending like Revenge had, felt very pointedly like a cover-up.

    The whole story is low-key building up this theme of Guybrush actually being a terrible person and his quest being both personally unhealthy and harmful to those around him, with little things like the game silently marking off the checklist of horrible things he did on the how-to-be-evil pamphlet he got from LeChuck and big things like Elaine confronting him with his actions while they travel together, so when the ending turns into such an anti-climactic non-sequitur it reads like he can’t bring himself to tell his son the truth of what happened and you hope it’s because he actually gave up the quest and knows that isn’t the story kids want to be told but fear it’s because shit got real in a different sense and he doesn’t want Boybrush to view him in that light.

    With that in mind, now I can’t stop wondering if that’s what the Carnival of the Damned always was: an act of self-censorship by the hypothetical storyteller.






  • Radiant Historia

    The enemies are placed on a grid and your characters have abilities that can move them around or place traps on certain squares, plus as part of the game’s time travel theme you can reorganize the upcoming turn order. Use those together and you can arrange the absolute sickest combos, knocking everyone into a big cluster and then wailing the shit out of that cluster.

    Just be sure to play the original DS version and not the enhanced 3DS version with new art, voice acting, and story additions that ruin the tone.





  • PS2

    • best d-pad ever made
    • comfortable to my big hands without being uncomfortable to friends’ regular-sized hands
    • pressure sensitivity all over the place, even if that did get underutilized
    • versatile design that’s equally comfortable to use for 2D and 3D games and doesn’t specifically favor a small number of genres
    • smooth, strong, and yet quiet rumble
    • good heft
    • uses a cord so no fucking around with batteries
    • sensibly named and located Start and Select buttons (Everyone‘s been dropping the ball on that front, lately. Sony most of all.)