KneeOfJustice99

i know social media is slowly in the process of swirling around the proverbial drain but like it's genuinely mindmelting to get sent something from one of those slop accounts from a friend and it's going on about how they just came across this guy pouring milk on himself in the subway that they just recorded today and it's footage from the ****ing eric andre show from like eight years ago

Happy Earth, Wind and Fire Day!

...Did you remember?

One thing I think doesn't get discussed about Mario enough is actually the role he served (that is, within Nintendo) throughout the early 80s, and a little less toward the end of the decade. A lot of people think of the various appearances of his in retroactively-"canon" games like the Donkey Kong games, Wrecking Crew, and a couple of Game & Watch titles, plus games like Golf, Alleyway and Punch-Out!!, as little more than cameos; but I think it goes a little further than that.

The idea of Mario as an "everyman" has always been popular, but I think that specifically led to him being a really good blank slate of sorts to just... slot into any role you needed. Happen to need someone to referee your boxing match, to pilot your strange Arkanoid-esque spaceship, to light and detonate bombs, to fend off eggplants in a demolition site, or to play golf with? Mario can just be sort of... slotted into those roles.

It's interesting, because I feel like that almost gives him a feeling loosely akin to characters featured in "rubberhose" animation of the 20s up to about the 40s - malleable beyond just a couple of iconic elements, and capable of being changed and altered as needed to slot into different roles. After all, so long as he's got his iconic moustache and hat, it's Mario! And, obviously, Luigi's an easy enough Player 2 to slot in too.

Over time - especially following the success of Super Mario Bros. - it's as though Mario himself was a little more cemented into a specific role, and by the time we get to Super Mario Bros. 3, we're seeing the end of what people think of as "cameos" mostly because Mario and his world really have a quite distinct identity of their own. That being said... it's interesting to look back at a time like this and think about what it might mean for the concept of a "videogame mascot".

Not sure why I felt like sharing this. It just feels like a neat (albeit underdiscussed!) little element of Mario's characterisation from his early years, which... a small part of me thinks could maybe be well-suited with other characters. Like I mentioned, I think Mario's world (and his sheer popularity, at this point) really don't suit him well to the everyman role of a "stock" character in any kind of setting you might need, but it's still a neat part of his history.

I have Ultra Primate Sphere on the brain again. Help.

Really random game design tidbit, but I think one of the most underdiscussed elements of genuinely brilliant and intuitive game design in the entire series is something featured in almost all of the games as something most people would describe as pretty much iconic to the franchise, despite probably not consciously thinking about it unless pointed out.


The "spinning intro" that the SMB games use to introduce their stages are actually one of the best design elements in the entire series because they actually fulfil several really useful functions in terms of game design... such as;

• At its best, it shows at a glance what the stage looks like - giving a view of particular "lines", obstacles, or hazards to consider before even playing the game (which might be difficult to see when the camera moves behind your monkey.)
  • This is especially useful when you consider the series' arcade roots! Within mere seconds, you can have a good understanding of the stage and its hazards without having to be walked through it.
• It also implies very clearly that the stage is "seperate" to the background, implying and reinforcing the control scheme of the game even before you engage in the very first tutorial level.
• And, beyond that, it immediately gives you the implication of no "hidden information", which immediately showcases to the player at little more than a glance that this game is a pure test of skill (and cements that with reinforcement.)

Obviously there's some stages that don't work great with this kind of thing; SMB2's Switch Inferno level is, beyond just being awful from a design and gameplay standpoint, really not helped with this, and I think the stylised choice of how Banana Mania did this entire showcase (like picrel!) by darkening the screen and putting giant words over the stages really didn't help the concept.

Idk, I think it's interesting to be able to look more critically at things you usually wouldn't notice, and occasionally peeling back the layers of decisions that seem so basic can lend a neat little glance at the developers' intentions.

tl;dr i like it when the primate sphere do spinny

there is a small, chaotic part of me that wants to deliberately add a red cross to something like a medkit in a game i end up working on, purely so i can add "removed geneva convention violation" in the patchnotes

I sometimes find myself "uncovering" little tidbits about something I already found cool, and it just sends me down a strange little spiral of conceptualising some of the potential behind it. A good example of this is the concept of DS Download Play - I've spoken about it here before now, but I've always found it to be one of the most fascinating (and underdiscussed!) little parts of Nintendo's history.

But... I didn't know before today (or at least, forgot) that it was also used as a method of showcasing demos with the use of specialised DS kiosks. The idea behind that was to allow you to bring your DS to a game store, and then check out the demos on your own hardware, without having to use a dedicated system that the store itself would upkeep (beyond the kiosk.) That's so damn cool.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again; I'm genuinely kind of shocked that the Download Play concept hasn't been explored more, especially in the smartphone market. (Maybe there's some sort of patent preventing it?) After all, a lot of the initial limitations that existed for Download Play really aren't that much of an issue nowadays - such as the DS only having 4MB of RAM compared to a lot of modern Android devices having 8GB - and, more prominently, the (relative) issue of ubiquity.

Then again, with a lot of smaller-scale handhelds like the Playdate or some of the Retroid-adjacents fairly recently coming to prominence, it springs to mind as a potential avenue for exploration in those kinds of markets.

shoutout to puzzle games with jungle/dnb inspired soundtracks. rare, but very much appreciated

did you know doki doki literature club was marketed as super mario literature club 2 in us markets? for more information, google "bloody mary" three times at 3am

shoutout to the super monkey ball skyboxes for being really cool and like. not exactly "abstract" but still really weird. kind of unfitting for an actual game's world of some kind but really fitting for the gameplay and the general feel and all coming together to just give everything a strange sensation of "right" that doesn't quite work. idk. it's neat.



really liking this one (clock tower factory from smb2). whole ass medieval city in the background. why? idk. just move your monkey around. lol

I found MartianSnake 's challenge pretty interesting, but decided to take it up to eleven with a 102-spot wheel to pick from. Here's the wheel, if you want it. My results ended up being... Data East, Sun Corporation, and Taito. With that in mind;


I tried to get a decent variety of characters from all kinds of sources and genres (with some minor choices like having a dedicated fighting game character in each one), but the nature of these companies meant a lot of my choices trended to the older side of things.

sicko mode or mo bamba?

In hindsight, probably the funniest thing about watching footage from The Jeremy Kyle Show nowadays isn't actually the content of the show, but actually the fact that Jeremy entirely unironically does the Hannibal Buress bit of awkwardly hovering around the set after bringing his guests in

There's never enough chairs after he's brought his guests in (and better yet, they keep changing the number of chairs as needed, but still never bring enough for him to be sat down too), so after bringing in the second guest to spice things up, he sort of just shambles around the set, sometimes sitting down on the steps going up to his stage, and occasionally shuffling up the stairs to hide amongst the audience like a bored child

I have to imagine it was intended as making Kyle seem "seperate" to the guests as a "mediator" (or, more likely, a class signifier), but looking at older episodes nowadays as cameramen try and scramble to zoom in or out or pivot to wherever he's wandered off to at any given moment is pretty funny

Funnier than the working class being exploited for television at least

you ever have that thing where it's late at night and you remember a mistake you made

i am now thinking about that time several years ago when i attempted to cook an omelette but forgot to omelette the eggs so i just ended up with like eight fried eggs and the kitchen was literally uninhabitable for days because the air was like 80% egg

they should totally bring back the subgenre of games in which you're a sphere or ball of some kind and need to get around while taking into account your momentum. apparently people call it "marble games" but some of them aren't really marbles (such as a monkey ball or a kirby.)

super metroid ball when? nintendo are cowards

If you've ever felt self-conscious about procrastinating, don't worry about it too much. The Eiffel Tower was supposed to be taken down about 130 years ago and France still haven't gotten around to it.

imagine being an avant-garde slovenian rock and roll artist in the 1980s with reasonable success, only to become wildly popular in the 2010s because i eat, jon, it's what i do like that must be wild

Did you know? It's possible to stack your Mario & Wario cartridge on top of the cartridge for Mario the Plumber 3 in order to play a combined experience with extra content, Mario the Plumber 3 and Wario!

Additionally, did you know that George Michael composed some of the music for Mario the Plumber 3, including the tracks used in Festival Day World, Lava Pit World, and Landing Pad World? It's for this reason that those tracks were replaced in the Mario Origins collection.

it's kinda wild to me to think that nuclear reactors, probably one of the most complicated machines we've ever built, are in essence steam engines. like it's almost like it kind of comes full circle in a weird way, in that steam engines were one of the earliest forays into industrialisation we ever did and yet it's still with us. idk. it's pretty cool.

squidward when he is suddenly shocked by an event taking place in front of him

by the way, speaking of ryu, did you know it's (canonically) his 60th birthday today?
happy birthday ryu from streets

this is probably a really stupid question but like. do you think anyone would actually mind if they cut mario from the next mario kart? like you always hear people like "yeah i want this new character" or "god i'm so glad i can play this character" but i have literally never heard anyone say "i can't wait to play as mario in the standard kart with the standard tyres and the standard glider!!"

Apparently, when Luke was revealed as a DLC fighter for Street Fighter V, Nakayama (or at least his Twitter account) deliberately took the opportunity to confirm that this Luke was not, in fact, a returning character. See, one of the three original Capcom Fighting All-Stars: CODE HOLDER characters - Rook - was actually also named Luke... and was also blonde.


In the process, they apparently confirmed that a Capcom Fighting All-Stars board not only still exists, but that a full cabinet exists somewhere at Capcom. See, the pictures in these Tweets were apparently not from some sort of Capcom promotional image vault - but they were just taken before posting.

...look, I know the location tests said the game sucked ass or whatever but for the love of god please just release the ROM or something

Imagine working for some company or organisation or whatever and you're in an office with three other people, and they introduce themselves as like "Steve", "Chris" and "Michael", and while you're not on particularly good terms with any of them because Chris is weirdly self-centred, Steve keeps stealing your lunch, and Michael does a pretty **** job at running the place, it pays well enough that you're fine working there.

Then you arrive next week and suddenly Steve is called Chris, Chris is called Michael, and Michael is called Steve. No real reason for it, but then they keep changing for no reason and it kind of gets confusing when you're trying to handle office business, so you decide to call them "Narcissist", "Glutton", and "Incompetent" and pretty much everyone's fine with that, but you still need to try and make sure their name is correct for documents and even passive discussion depending on who you're talking to.



Pic related

I appreciate that despite AI apparently being in the cultual zeitgeist for close to two years by this point, and despite all of the evolutions that the technology has made over time, it still hasn't made a better greentext than the bottomless pit supervisor

Fun fact: one of London's most iconic landmarks of the past 100 years, the Post Office Tower, didn't exist until 1993.



Despite it being built in 1964 and opened to the public in 1965, and featuring a souvenir shop, viewing galleries, and a highly-rated restaurant, it was in fact a criminal offence to disclose the location of the building - to the point where a journalist, Duncan Campbell, was tried in court for revealing the tower's existence, and to the point where if a typical Londoner were asked for directions to the tower, they could theoretically be tried and sentenced.

The reason for this is a quirk of the Official Secrets Act 1911, which states that it is an offence to disclose the location of important communication centres to prevent espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. However, the Post Office Tower was for decades an essential central point of London's communication systems for radio and television, meaning it came under the perview of the Act.

In 1993, the MP Kate Hoey used the tower as an example of the protection of frivolous secrets under the Act in Parliament, which led to the tower being "revealed" to the public for the "first" time... which I imagine must have been a shock to the people who've eaten in the tower's restaurant for close to thirty years prior.

Random thought, but I'm a little surprised that (from what I can tell) F-Zero 99 is one of the only modern projects that springs to mind that uses a sort of simulation of Mode 7 graphics. (Though, it obviously wouldn't work exactly like it did on the SNES.) Considering how various elements of older consoles have been explored in different indie spaces and whatnot before now, I'd have thought Mode 7 - a pretty substantial SNES selling point - might get similar treatment.

I suppose, to a certain extent, Mode 7's been superceded by true 3D with voxel graphics for a similar "retro" look, but I think there's still potential in it. Then again, it's kind of interesting that (from the top of my head) I can't even think of games that mirror the Final Fantasy gimmick from IV, V and VI where there's travelling/airship sections that use the technology.

Maybe the issue is that it wouldn't work as well with widescreens, or that making it pixel-perfect would be quite difficult with modern engines? I mean, it occurs to me that there's a lot of workarounds you could use from modern engines in regards to sprites and hitboxes in a 3D space, so it seems like it'd be less hassle getting the actual process to work than on older hardware... but I'm just spitballing, obviously.

I might be completely wrong here, and maybe there's an entire Mode 7 indie recreation community out there I'm just not aware of. I'd honestly just have thought it'd get a little more use nowadays.

if you think about it, gambling is a fantastic investment of money. you can only lose 100% of your money but if you win you can win up to infinite% so like. just win

Y'know speaking of anniversaries, today is (probably) the 20th anniversary of the Angry Video Game Nerd's first on-screen appearance, specifically in the Jekyll & Hyde episode - though it's not exactly certain, because this date comes from the script for that episode (which says it was finished on June 15th, 2004) and it's presumed the episode was filmed that day.

So uh. Happy anniversary (?)

Hey all, just a random note to the Brits among us - make sure you register to vote for the General Election!

You've got about a week until its too late for you to get your voice heard - and even if our FPTP system is, frankly, ****, even deliberately spoiling your ballot or voting parody candidates sends a message to those in power.

Obviously I won't tell you who to vote or anything like that, just to get yourself registered to if you haven't already. (It's completely free, and it's only about a 10 minute job.)

Also, you can register for a postal vote if you like, so you don't even need to go to your local polling station!

Out of curiosity, say a crossover occurs - for argument's sake, a fighting game, but it could be anything - do you prefer when each character or world is represented with its own unique artstyle and sensibilities, when everything is redesigned to fit a more general style for the crossover, or something inbetween?

the main reason i think we should never do space tourism is because there is a 100% chance that it'll be like 2050 and your xittergrambook feed or whatever is just the same dog**** photo of people on the moon pretending to hold up the earth over and over again

i am lowkey mad it took this long for me to actually listen to DOOM's albums because this stuff is crazy good

Random F-Zero list I think is kinda interesting, namely crossover characters of sorts because it's lowkey a little surprising

• James McCloud is the one everyone actually knows about because his characterisation, design, and machine are intended to be a reference to Fox's dad in the Star Fox series, but there's actually a few more Star Fox connections
• Octoman is unusual in that he's retroactively a crossover character, appearing as a pilot in Star Fox Command
• Also, John Tanaka was the creator of the "G-Diffuser System", which is a system inside the F-Zero machines that allows them to negate G-forces - notably, the "G-Diffuser System" is also featured in Arwings for the same purpose
• More well-known is that Mr. EAD is probably intended to be some kind of interpretation of Mario, given his portly figure, moustache, and Starman belt buckle - plus that his name represents Nintendo EAD
  • Side note but Mr. EAD's vehicle, the Great Star, is implied to have been made out of Mr. EAD's "brother" in one of his interviews in GX, so uh, Luigi is his car I guess
• Billy is also kinda weird because he wasn't originally a crossover character, but his redesign in GX features an icon of AiAi's head on his belt - from the Super Monkey Ball - because of SEGA's involvement in GX
• Similarly, PJ in AX is directly intended as a callback to SEGA's Crazy Taxi series, though that's moreso in terms of his vehicle's design and name - Groovy Taxi
• Daigoroh might be a reference to the character of the same name in Lone Wolf and Cub

I probably missed a few here but one I should point out is that there's no real connection between Leon and Wolf beyond them both just being anthropomorphic wolves

if disney ever end up doing a fighting game of some kind i'm just gonna put it out there right now, one of my like top three picks from day one is going to be bill nye the science guy, who'll utilise his scientific and guy-based educational wackiness to absolutely science guy all over the competition

concept; necromancer who exclusively resurrects dinosaurs

hey remember that time mtv gameripped the character models from the revenge of the sith game then made a machinima of anakin skywalker singing a franz ferdinand song with yoda, mace windu and obi-wan in front of an army of clone troopers then broadcasted it on live television

Possibly one of my weirder takes, but an element I've grown to really like about the first Super Smash Bros. is that - due to the limitations of the N64 sound hardware and the decision to make almost every piece of music in the game a remix - it really feels like the game has its own more unified musical identity in which every "world" fits, rather than just being a collation of different "worlds" into its own through the use of gamerips.

There's probably a ton of reasons why Smash seems to have... lost a little identity over the years, but I think that's a small part of it. Also, Melee's orchestral tracks are fantastic (and I won't deny that in the slightest), but I do think there's a certain... appeal to the first game's sound. Not sure how to put it.

It wasn't until I became President that I realised...

the j

Random fun fact of the day: while there are several political borders all over the world that are visible from space, one of the only former borders to be visible from space is the former one between East and West Germany.

It's not actually the border itself that's visible, however - when viewed at night, the lights in both regions appear slightly different, due to running on seperate electrical grids installed after the border's installation. Despite the falling of the Berlin Wall, the effects of that period of history are still quite literally visible from space!

Of course, not everything we do is visible, but everything we do does have an effect. Not all of those effects are under our control, and sometimes it really does feel like we're on an out-of-control train barrelling somewhere unforeseen.

I just want to say, be good to one another, tread carefully - and above all, be kind. Even just a little. We may not necessarily be special, or important, or visible from space - but we matter. You matter. Kindness matters.

I considered doing this as a weirder creates thread but to be fair it'll age horribly either way so I may as well do it here;

In the scenario where you're essentially given control over the launch lineup for the "Switch 2", what would you choose to make it look like? Bear in mind you'll still need big stuff throughout the console's lineup, but feel free to go a bit wild with what you'd suggest otherwise lol