Bio
no more, overthinker. easygoing overeager. sticky noter. favorites flicker. sorry spammer. life waster? network tweaker. struck stuck off kilter. amnausiac sleeper.

constellations:
5★ miraculous
•4.5★ peak
4★ outstanding
•3.5★ great
3★ compelling
•2.5★ good
2★ competent
•1.5★ mediocre
1★ bad
•0.5★ disgraceful
Personal Ratings
1★
5★

Badges


Gone Gold

Received 5+ likes on a review while featured on the front page

Listed

Created 10+ public lists

Donor

Liked 50+ reviews / lists

Well Written

Gained 10+ likes on a single review

Pinged

Mentioned by another user

Popular

Gained 15+ followers

GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

Organized

Created a list folder with 5+ lists

Liked

Gained 10+ total review likes

Best Friends

Become mutual friends with at least 3 others

1 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 1 year

Noticed

Gained 3+ followers

Elite Gamer

Played 500+ games

Shreked

Found the secret ogre page

Gamer

Played 250+ games

GOTY '22

Participated in the 2022 Game of the Year Event

N00b

Played 100+ games

Favorite Games

Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing
Fishing Resort
Fishing Resort
Sega Marine Fishing
Sega Marine Fishing
Legend of the River King 2
Legend of the River King 2
Luna's Fishing Garden
Luna's Fishing Garden

746

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

126

Games Backloggd


Recently Reviewed See More

A surreal feeling struck me in my first time restarting a run of Balatro immediately after ending another almost successful one. Suddenly, all of the twisted rules that gradually seeped into my playstyle and mind reverted to their original blank slate. I noticed my instinct to seek out diamonds and straights which my previous jokers favored in my winning run and subsequent leap into endless mode. When I recognized that my recently game-over'd ways were no longer especially effective, there was a realization of how this game had hypnotized me into a fool. I had only gotten just a taste of this game's addictive nature; I would continue to be made a fool time and time again for hours upon hours.

The gently swaying UI, the steady rhythm of the soundtrack, and the exponentially snappy turns all bolster Balatro's enchanting attitude. Even I, with the majority of my poker experience only being with Luigi, found myself entranced in this spin on a card game I only vaguely admire.

This game has boiled down the familiar roguelite to one of its simplest yet most effective spells yet. If this game has piqued your interest, beware the intoxication.

some of my First Discoveries:
Octohorse
Sex Nun
The Return Of The Homie
/r/showerthoughts
Neil Confused

Generative AI wasn't always so revolting disheartening. The appeal I found in programs like Big Sleep and the early versions of AI Dungeon was always in their chaotic flaws. Big Sleep produced grotesque, surreal images that could only be tangentially related to your prompt's concept. For early AI Dungeon, it had something charming in its inability to cohesively keep a story together and tendency to go off the rails to a batshit insane degree. Modern generative AI programs have smoothed out all those goofy edges, leaving their software less silly and more uncanny.

Infinite Craft brings generative AI to the old alchemy game trend. Like those games, the only goal is continuing to find as many valid combinations as the game allows. This grows your set of ingredients to work with. Every solution can hopefully serve as a part of another experiment.
The limitations on solutions used to be what the developers had already devised. With Infinite Craft, that restriction has been pushed all the way to the limits of a large language model. This reliance on machines for solutions leaves the game unable to match all of what was special and precious in what inspired it. This genre used to require some thought towards making concocted combinations to solve curated puzzles. Emotional intent is what chose elements in games like Little Alchemy and Doodle God.
In Infinite Craft, the systems in play have taken out all of that human expression to become an almost emotionless toy. New discoveries feel inevitable and far less wonderful. Your results are spat out by a heartless machine.

To make up for the lost human input, the AI is sufficiently absurd. As the phrases you combine stray further from your initial set, you'll find baffling random results and odd combinations. The deeper you go, the more chaos ensues. You may find yourself wondering how you got so deep in a long string of nonsense.
If Infinite Craft was made with more reasonable interpretations of inputs from its LLM, it would be a far less charming experience. This neat little time waster ends up being a pleasant trip back to that more experimental era of generative AI software.

At the time around its early access release, Palworld is a heated main topic in the circles gathered around gaming news. The game has sold at least 8 million copies already in its first week, exceeding all expectations. This has sparked a lot of discussion about why this game is finding its success. In my brief participation in some discussions in various parts of the internet, I consistently found that others would try to slot me into one of two camps: A freak for Game Freak who believes Nintendo can do no harm, or some techbro weirdo defending modern generative AI and plagiarism. This is based on whether I'm expressing positivity or negativity about the game, with no regard for what is praised or criticized. Conversations have turned into vitriolic flamewars under these dogmatic perspectives.

Palword isn't doing much new while being responsible for all of this heated debate. All of this hubbub is happening around a game that would be, in a vacuum detached from the present's perspective, ordinary and uninspiring. This game lifts a bunch of ideas from other games, and makes them all shallow enough to unobtrusively stick together. It's a baffling blurred mess of familiar popular ideas. You'll see Pokémon, Ark, Elden Ring, Tears of the Kingdom, and Fortnite all jarringly mishmashed into a clumsy excuse for a game.

In the game's evoked confusion, there's something fascinating about it all. The game, for me, ended up being a mildly fun experience and a mildly funny joke. These lifted elements of gameplay, as jarring as they are, make an interesting base for the gameplay to work from. The loop keeps me more hooked in your standard open world survival crafting experience than anything else I've tried in the past decade's deluge of these games. The mimicry of Palworld's inspirations leads to some hilarious exaggerations in Palworld's interpretations. There's always some goofy goal or weird new Pal to keep me engaged. The game, whether by accident or intention, serves as a parody of the modern gaming landscape.

As of writing this, Palworld has only just entered "Early Access"/"Game Preview" but in its current state, it might effectively be seen as a condensed reflection of current common interests. Palworld is everything that makes a game popular in January 2024.