KneeOfJustice99

I think this might be one of the first intentional 4th wall breaks in fiction but the story itself, well... it's bizarre. Originally published in Superman #19 in December, 1942, this story (one of several in the issue) follows Clark and Lois going to the cinema to watch... the 40s Superman Fleischer cartoons. Whilst the story was retroactively declared non-canon in the form of an "Imaginary Story" (which would later morph into Elseworlds), it originally was... and actually raises some interesting questions about the fictional world in which this takes place.



See, here's the funny thing - not only does this story actively imply that the Superman comics exist in the world of Superman in the exact same form as they do in the real world, but the animations playing are strongly implied to be the actual Fleischer cartoons. Weirdly, Clark comments in the story about how it's really weird that the writers know so much about Superman - but even weirder is how the story centres primarily around Clark distracting Lois from the film at the right points, so as to keep his secret identity from her. And nobody else in the cinema. So, by this logic, everyone else except Lois knows Superman's secret identity is... Clark Kent?

It's interesting to look at this in hindsight because the interplay between fiction and reality has been played with so much across comics as a medium, though for the most part, it pretty much started here (or at least, most prominently.) Funny to think that without a weird side story in a 40s-era issue of Superman Volume 1, we wouldn't probably have gotten characters like Deadpool, Ambush Bug and She-Hulk in quite the same way we do now...

comics are ****ing weird

The Knee Minute - Observations #273

I think it'd be cool to see radio drama have a resurgence. Given the popularity of non-music content such as podcasts on platforms like Spotify and the like, it'd be really cool to see radio drama - a fairly obscure method of telling a story in the huge Hollywood-led world of the modern media landscape - really come into its own. After all, it's actually one of the cheaper methods of telling a story these days, and there's a lot of things you can do with it that you might not be able to do with other formats! Of course, I'm aware radio as a whole is a dying breed but it'd still be cool to see the format survive.

Okay, I know I've joked about seeing a GLA series before now (WHICH I STAND BY) but I've been doing some thinking, and with Marvel planning to introduce mutants into their MCU, I think there's a potential goldmine of possibility with one specific group that could be really, really interesting. Specifically?



X-Statix. No, I'm dead serious. You could actually do so much fun stuff with this specific show that it'd be incredible.

See, X-Statix are unusual in the Marvel universe in that, as opposed to being started with the intention of being a hero team, the group was moreso started with the intention of being popular and marketable. The whole thing is a sort of tongue-in-cheek observation of celebrity culture and fame. Where most mutant teams are interested in fighting for the acceptance of mutants... X-Statix are kind of just in it for the money. Thing is, the group's mostly made up of C-listers but nonetheless focuses on merchandising and promotion above actually doing things - though the group obviously do have to do things in cases.

So, here's my concept. The X-Statix show is formatted in a way such that it's mostly made up of the footage recorded by the group and their workers, with the show sharing similarities to reality television as well as observing the group doing their thing. The "central villain" isn't really a big bad the likes of Magneto or Sinister, but it's literally the showrunners - manipulating events in such a way that they can make the most money out of the group, manufacturing romances and the like. The show itself follows both the group in their roles as superheroes, but also as everyday people - but goes one step further, examining them as celebrities.

And hey, you could even use it as a great way to rep some less notable mutants or villains of the X-Men - I'm aware X-Statix isn't exactly a headlining name in the comics world, so maybe like shove an arbitrary scene in one episode where Wolverine briefly appears and then the showrunners are trying to work out how the hell they're supposed to handle the legal pressure from the X-Men caused by them showcasing Wolverine in the TV show or something. I mean, interesting concepts like these haven't been outside the realm of possibility for the MCU - the first half of Ms. Marvel and most of She-Hulk tried to delve into this - but... it'd be really nice if it didn't devolve into a classic CGI schlockfest. I just think it'd be cool!

Given it's coming close to Halloween, random character concept you think would be cool but SPOOKY. Go!

Mine's Mr. Blobby in Dead by Daylight. No, seriously. Sure, he's BBC-owned and there's quite a few other potentially interesting picks (a Dalek springs to mind, actually) but I feel like Mr. Blobby is on this perfect precipice of being a combination of obscure, well-known-ish, absolutely terrifying and yet made with completely good intentions.

It's funny to think that in spite of DND being generally seen as "the archetypical non-video-game RPG", technology still hasn't come far enough for an actual DND game to be able to be made due to the sheer level of potential interactions it can entail. I find it pretty interesting, personally - like how it took until the 90s for chess computers to really be able to keep pace with humans, it's interesting to see how slow the transition between table and screen really is!

NOT THE MIKE MYERS CAR

spooky time. (i've even got my costume prepared)

hi sorry i've been kind of inactive these past couple of days i've been absolutely knocked sideways with sickness lmao - im feeling a lot better now though so its all good

today i learned that the game with the most runs on speedrun.com is... subway surfers. interesting. i've actually never come across "a subway surfers speedrunning community" as such but it's literally got more than twice the number of runs for the next most runned game (super mario 64) which is incredible to me somehow. maybe it's because of the ubiquity of the game?

hey all, just a lil reminder of a few useful things i think you should know

• did you drink anything today? if not please try and grab a lil water even if it's just half a cup
• if you havent eaten in a while feel free to grab a lil snack even if you dont feel like it just do a lil nibble
• remember, usb ports have a lil black spot that indicates the right way up if the port's horizontal
• if you've not been sleeping well try and take a short break from screens for a short while, doodling helps me with it!
• if you haven't taken your meds that you need to then please please please do okay
• oh, just a reminder, send that message you forgot to earlier! if you "didnt forget" then check anyways!!!

y'all are really cool don't let anyone tell you otherwise

Okay, I've come up with a really basic concept for something I think would be amazing. Picture this: a Mario Warriors game.

That probably seems bizarre but like, Super Mario does pretty much have everything it could realistically need to pull this off (plenty of "fodder" enemies as well as "generals" whilst having main characters on multiple sides and plenty of weapon potential.) Like, there's even a lot of potential for unusual picks whilst including obvious ones too - someone like King Bob-Omb being a semi-puppet fighter who can summon Bob-Ombs to run forward and explode whilst also being able to throw them (and himself!) around would be fun, but then also including level elements from Bob-Omb Battlefield like the cannons could be cool too. Likewise, I think a moveset for Peach that uses the paintings from Super Mario 64 in order to both teleport and summon weird and wonderful things (like using the Dire Dire Docks painting to summon the Eel) would be really cool and unique!

Honestly if I had the time or energy to I'd love to make a thread for this because it'd probably be way easier to work with than the Pokemon Warriors concept I had a while back. Needless to say I'm not going to, so feel free to use it if y'all want

I wonder if Troy Bolton will become a more popular pick for a Disney Channel rep in Disney Smash fan rosters now that we live in a post-LeBron society. I mean, High School Musical was undeniably a massive "thing" in the 2000s, right? Maybe that's just "nostalgia" talking, which is kind of odd in my case because I've never watched any of them, but hey that's life

i learned today that rachmaninoff wanted to like be friends with stravinsky at one point and he'd casually mentioned in passing that he liked honey so one day in the dead of night he just. arrived at stravinsky's house with a jar of honey for literally no reason. plus he was like 6"7 like this massive bloke in the dead of night like. "hello. i bring honey."

its refreshing to know that utterly terrible social skills isnt just something i have

Honest question: do you think UNDERTALE or DELTARUNE have a chance at making it into MultiVersus? I ask because it's an interesting question that got posed in my old college Discord server - with the devs making it clear that (licensing aside) theoretically anyone could be on the table, it seems like an interesting proposition.

And on that note - do you have a favourite candidate from either game? My personal "non-obvious" pick would HAVE to be Mettaton, but purely out of complete personal bias. Ideally in his EX form - but I wouldn't be opposed to his classic look!

can't wait to tune in to the next official farm simulator direct

My stance on something has changed with hindsight and this is a major change in my worldview:

I honestly don't think that pivoting future Mario Kart releases to some sort of "Nintendo Kart" is a good idea, and whilst it might seem like a cool concept at first, it feels like... kind of a missed opportunity, sort of? There's so much stuff from the world of Super Mario you could use in cool and unique ways in a kart racer, and pivoting away from that feels like it'd kinda be a bit of a shame.

GOOMBA TOWER KART WHEN

Imagine if Ness was added in Smash Ultimate like I wonder how he'd differ from his current iteration

I mention Ness specifically because I think the MOTHER series would be really different in terms of it's inclusion in Smash if it were only included more recently, both in terms of moveset and content

I have an interesting hypothetical question for pretty much everyone here because it's something I think is pretty cool to look into; specifically, do you think competitive games are objectively "more fun" when balanced?

Hot take, though it's kind of my own opinion more than any sort of objective statement: Sm4sh had its issues, but the music composed for the game (as well as the general leitmotif) is way more appealing than Lifelight for Ultimate. It has way more of a feeling of "look at this incredible crossover!" that Brawl kind of overdid that feels like it would have been really fitting for Ultimate's whole "EVERYONE IS HERE" thing.

I wonder what a "bullet-hell tennis game" would be like? Like, imagine it being a little like something like Touhou - but instead of the grazing mechanic, the unique mechanic is that your only method of attack is by striking opponents with their own tennis balls (as you have a racket yourself.) Maybe you could like face off against the various gods of tennis and then there's a secret boss simply called TENNIS ULTRADEATH or something

Given all of the strange dreams taking place on this site, I'm half expecting to visit my Magicant tonight at this rate. I just hope that the Flying Men who join me will be able to help me face off against the statue that made the local arcade-owner attack me with a knife and then made the carpenter down the road start a cult

Random observation: technically speaking, Toon Link (WW) is the Link who has been in the most Smash games.

Smash 64: Link (Ocarina of Time)
Melee: Link (Ocarina of Time) and Link (Ocarina of Time)
Brawl: Link (Twilight Princess) and Link (Wind Waker)
Sm4sh U: Link (Composite/Twilight Princess) and Link (Wind Waker)
Sm4sh 3DS: Link (Composite/Twilight Princess) and Link (Wind Waker)
Ultimate: Link (Breath of the Wild), Link (Ocarina of Time) and Link (Wind Waker)

Whilst Toon Link (WW) may have appeared in the most games, however (four specifically), Link (OoT) has had four appearances throughout the Smash series, albeit twice in one game.

Smash Bros is ****ing weird

Word of advice to the aspiring software/internet designers here, if you make a thing of any description with "yes" and "no" buttons intended to act as the responses, two things:

1. Don't make the "no" button say something like "maybe later" because that is an obvious and clear-cut failure of bothuser interface design and the basic concept of consent
2. Actually make it "no" as opposed to "if you click this, the pop-up will vanish, but it'll come back on every single page of the site and is intended to take up like 70% of your screen and you have to click it every time because we reeeeeally want you to click yes"

Regardless of what your superiors tell you I think I can speak for literally all consumers when I say we don't want this, just have the options be "yes" or "no" and it's easier for everyone (this isn't throwing shade at anyone in particular just the general practice of making the internet so much more difficult to use for no good reason)

does anyone else sometimes just think like it's so ****ing weird that smash bros exists

Some guy rocks up to Nintendo with a concept for a fighting game that plays nothing like any other fighting game whilst just randomly putting in characters they had no right to put in and Nintendo, famously stingy company that doesn't like change is like "**** it why not", fast forward like 5 years and Hideo Kojima and Yuji Naka are like "bro PLEASE can we have our characters in your game and you do 5 years later, fast forward like 10 more years and ****ing Disney are involved

And now platfighters are a deadass genre of fighting games that companies like Warner Bros. and Viacom have enough interest in to slap some of their premier IP in there too

Not sure who it was that mentioned "History Warriors" in the profile posts a short while back (I've slept since then I'm so sorry) but I think Ronald Reagan riding a velociraptor clutching an American flag with a small armory of guns would be a good 80s rep

I've been giving it some thought and you know what I think could actually be incredibly cool? An Ice Climbers reboot! The idea of a vertically-oriented platformer with a focus on climbing lots of different mountains could be really cool - an idea I had was that you could have the mountains be like, towers of sorts, but with lots of icy stuff present.

Hell, you could even include other NES-era characters and concepts if you wanted! The idea of Popo and Nana meeting people like Balloon Kid (from Balloon Fight) and Bubbles (from Clu Clu Land) along their journey would be really cool!

i have discovered a SIGNIFICANT lack of wave race music in smash why do this to me

on another note is it just me who sometimes like subconsciously associates wave race and the 1080 series as "nintendo games from the 90s/00s with a focus on extreme sports" i mean one of the wave race characters' sister is in 1080 i think thats cool

fun fact of the day: the "banana flavour" you usually get in things that are banana flavoured (like in those weird dental things they fill your mouth with after poking around in there and you cant eat for like an hour afterward) were originally taste-tested based on how well they matched a species of banana that went extinct in, like, the 30s. thats why "banana flavour" doesnt taste anything like banana

I learned today that apparently, during the filming of Return of the Jedi, the film crew had to include people with incredibly bright clothing and hi-vis vests to accompany Peter Mayhew in between shots, specifically during certain scenes. The reason? Well, the battle that took place at Endor (in the woods) was shot in California, and there were genuine concerns about hunters shooting Mayhew - because he played Chewbacca, and could be mistaken as "something to shoot at."

Honestly, this is unreasonably funny to me (luckily nothing actually happened to him) because it makes me imagine the idea of California just being crawling with armed hunters like a late-game MGS level

Here's a random question for y'all - what games would you love to see a sequel to, but know they'd never happen for some reason or another?

In my own case, I'd like to point to Metroid Prime: Hunters. The use of alt forms as well as unique weapons and interesting original characters to the Metroid universe worked really well in that game, and the set-up of a more one-on-one based nature with the characters all being bounty hunters works really well. Problem is, the game's focus was mostly on the multiplayer with the single-player being kind of an afterthought, a spin-off Metroid game is probably unlikely after Federation Force, and Nintendo already have an online multiplayer shooter with a unique mechanic that increases mobility at the cost of long-range attack options - Splatoon.

mach rider being included in a new f-zero game would be lit that is all

The power move of making your main one of the weakest characters in the entire game and still wiping the floor with your opponents in order to remind them who made it all possible. As the video says, "He Is Entertainer".

i currently have a djungelskog upon my head due to my little gremlins (siblings) but this is, in fact, exceedingly comfortable, i believe it is referred to as a "fashion statement"

Hey y'all, Knee again. Headed to uni for the first time today, doing a games design course of all things. I don't think me from like 5 years ago would have ever really even dreamed of being at uni at all - let alone doing this - so it's... kinda cool.

Lowkey I just wanna thank y'all. I'm not going anywhere or anything, but it was pretty much this place - as well as a few others, Scratch bros rise up - that managed to convince me that games design is what I wanna do. Especially me in like, 2018, joining some weird cool Smash Bros. site I found on the Internet one day in a pretty sheltered home, never would have gotten here, and I'd like to think yall are partially to thank for that. Love y'all.

Anyways as for today's funny, Shrek is drek kid

I like to imagine this is how people losing to Sephiroth online see Sephiroth


I am in no way qualified to give out this slander and I cordially apologise

No shade meant by this whatsoever - but I half want to run like a Melee tournament and promote it as a fairly bog-standard one but then have every legal stage be banned and leave all items on and just see how things develop

This might seem like a really mean and petty thing to think at surface value, but I honestly think it'd be interesting to see how "modern Melee" functions with items in the mix - seeing how newer techniques and mentalities are paired with such a major shakeup in terms of mechanics and the like would be pretty neat!

Okay not to get political but how the hell do those American drug adverts get away with their incredibly poor-quality, thinly-veiled """""""""parodies""""""""" of popular songs, meanwhile today on Twitch, UMG once again nukes SmallCreator296's entire online presence because someone played the first drumbeat of Take On Me from across the street and it's absolutely and utterly necessary to protect the intellectual property of small company Warner Records Inc.?

: MUAHAHAHHAA, NOW THERE IS NOBODY TO STOP ME FROM ENFORCING A HEALTHY DIET!!!
: M-Mario, w-what happened to y-you?...
: You fail to understand, Doctor... your PhD limits you, it weighs you down. I am no doctor. I am a plumber. I have no such restrictions as your Hippocratic Oath.

Okay, hear me out here - if they ever do another Punch-Out!! game I think it'd be really cool to see some weird and somewhat obscure picks tossed into the roster of fighters. Bear in mind - Bald Bull, for example, originated in Arm Wrestling, and the Wii game did have Donkey Kong!

Here's my thoughts: first up, someone from Pro Wrestling. Whilst Starman is the more famous pick, I'd personally go with The Amazon - his nature, being inspired by monster movies like The Creature from the Black Lagoon could be really interesting and fit right in with the weirdness of some of Punch-Out!!'s characters. And hey, if you wanted to go the route of the Amazon's appearance being a costume, that'd be awesome. I do also think the Urban Champion from, uh, Urban Champion could be cool. Any thoughts of your own?

Y'know, shoutouts to that one guy from the very first showing of the Melee intro who exclaimed in a combination of shock and delight, "Ice Climbers???" when they were shown on screen. It's weirdly warming to see (or, well, hear) a response like that in person to a pair of characters so relatively obscure at the time. Hope you enjoy their improved jump physics in the Smash series, wherever you are!