not technically finished yet, but i get the idea of how i'm gonna feel after its over. this game is super charming with a really cute artstyle. i've never actually played any kirby games before and my extent of him is going "wow he's so cute" when someone shares miscellaneous screenshots or videos of him, but i've wanted to dabble in the series for a while! the plot i dont care for, but the game itself has been pretty fun.

the controls are kinda weird. not the actual button mapping, but how they feel. i always associate platformers with having really tight, snappy controls since thats what feels best imo but i mean, its kirby so he's gonna be pretty floaty. that's not really a problem for me, but i do hate how slippery he can feel. some of the levels in this are genuinely not very fun because of it and finding the stickers or the level icon things can be really annoying when the slippery controls make you fall really far back in a level or into a death pit you really shouldn't have hit. its not a skill issue because while i am definitely not super great at this game, just tapping the d-pad shouldn't send me flying off the cliff ... maybe its my inexperience with the genre overall thats leading me to have trouble with this stuff, but it really makes me dislike some of these levels. i like that they all have their own gimmicks and the boss fights have been, while unexpected, really fun.

this game is nothing super special but its decently short, not too difficult, and very cute. i think some of the level design is tedious in an unfun way, but generally i don't have to think too hard when attempting one for the first time. it's just okay.

i'm struggling to rate this one, because i loved it. this game is so unique, and uncovering the mysteries within was so deeply satisfying as the story went on. i am a zoomer, but i still get so nostalgic for the early internet because i got a tiny glimpse of it as a kid. while i was heavily supervised and couldn't do much, i had a facebook and a myspace page that i decorated and used to talk to my cousin. forum boards were before my time, but when i got older i browsed tumblrs and google plus accounts and livejournals and so on and so forth dedicated to my nichest interests and while geocities was something very different, hypnospace outlaw brought me right back to that.

all the side stories with the teens, the fucking censorship cartoon, mind's eye stuff... ALL of it was so interesting and fun to watch change. everytime the os updated i was excited to see what had developed and changed since i last saw everyone, and i rehashed out hidden pages after hidden pages because i knew it would be fun to follow up with.

despite all this, the third act/final chapter really dragged for me. i had already caught onto the twist coming and i didn't like being forced to backtrack through pages for secrets i had... already found... when i was already so thorough during my normal playthrough. i get the point of it within the narrative, but after such an interesting and strong start and middle, this game really failed to stick the landing. even once i'd beaten it and saw the credits, i couldn't help but feel a "that's it?" after feeling so immersed for the hours i put into it. it's a really big shame, because i think it ruined the game a lot for me even though i still feel overall positive about it.

an easy recommend, and i am so excited to keep an eye out on the dev team behind this game to see what they'll release in the future. really glad to have finally ticked this one off the "to play" list! i've always heard nothing but praises for it and i'm glad i can understand why.

i've been spoiled by homebrew. the characters never really captured me, and i wasn't intrigued by the world at large. i think its best for people who have little experience with D&D, but because i've only ever experienced D&D as something fun with friends where we play super unconventionally, i just didn't vibe with it. also the character creator sucked :(

no rating because i think it's objective score and the way it landed for me are very different. its clear how much effort and how polished this game is (at least in act one which is as far as i got), but i don't see myself ever going "yeah this is a ten outta ten fr."

i should have done this a long time ago, but i finally decided that as a self-proclaimed rogue-like enthusiast, i should actually play the game that introduced the genre.

it's a turn-based ascii dungeon crawler that uses a lot of text-based inputs to progress. it's really simplistic in presentation and truthfully, it is simple in gameplay as well (despite how much more complex it may seem as thanks to the lack of tutorial and long list of commands). it was... fun? but i've definitely been spoiled by the roguelikes of modern day. i played a few runs, never really did particularly great, and i doubt i'll ever really come back and try to progress super far. i will say though, that this brought back a lot of really fond memories of making my own text-based choose your own adventure dungeon crawler in high school when learning to code. overall, just happy to finally have experienced it!

why do all house flipper/home decorator games insist on the hyper-realistic artstyle. it just looks ugly. a lot of the actual decorating systems in this is pretty nice, and imo functions a lot nicer than the sims & house flipper. i like the way jobs are specific and how customers evaluate your score or commission especially if compared to house flipper. i love being able to flip between first and third person, and overall it just feels way better to set dress houses for whatever you want. i love the feel of cleaning and demolishing houses in house flipper, but the sims has always had a level of polish in actually placing down decor that nothing else could close to. i think hometopia hits pretty close to that for me, while still remaining very distinct and different. i've not seen/played enough to really rate it, but it has promise and i think that if enough of a community forms this could really be something i sink my time into. even if its just for set dressing houses for fun and never saving them.

brotato is easy to dismiss as another vampire survivors clone and you'd be partially correct. if you dont like the vampire survivors dodge-and-weave-auto-attacking playstyle, there isn't much brotato can do to convince you to change your mind and you're better off just saving your money.

with that being said, if you played vampire survivors and liked it but found it was too simple or too same-y with not enough challenge or variety, brotato is perfect for you. there are SO many weapons, characters, and intricacies to the stats systems and weapon systems that are simple enough for someone new, but can be min-maxed enough if you want to really try-hard. this game is very much a roguelike in the way it presents its shops, upgrades, and gentle power-scaling, but is also very reminiscent of teamfight tactics with the way it handles weapon progression. you merge commons to form epics, epics to form rares, and so on and so forth, with bonuses if you stay within the same class of weapons.

i want to say more but i feel like i need to play it for longer to really have a solid opinion worth listening to. the game is only five dollars and the devs deserve every penny. if you're remotely interested you should definitely go for it. this is a tentative early rating but i really do think it will change in the future (hopefully more positively).

bonus points btw for having so much accessibility options. granted the game is simple but having a mouse-only way to play is cool. ever since my friend on twitter has dealt with a wrist injury, i've come to note just how many things are impossible to play for anyone who is disabled. its impossible as a small team to cater to everything possible, but it's nice to see some attempts be made. i've found myself making more notes on games' accessibility features even if i wouldn't ever recommend it to my friend just because now its something i'm more aware of. it's astounding how many games are not as accommodating as they could be, so it's nice to see some options here.

my honors biology class was my first period freshman year, and my teacher openly hated teaching freshman. he only taught honors bio because the school forced him to teach one period of it to justify him teaching upperclassmen in AP biology. this was very obvious to everyone, especially my class who he never taught anything to. instead he would post one question he copied off a random quizlet onto the board, let us copy the answer from the same quizlet, and then give us the rest of the period free.

needless to say, we did nothing productive or educational. super smash flash DOMINATED that classroom, and i remember my friend dennis kicking my ass in every single match we played together. it was so unfair. i dont really care for smash much outside of as a party game, and the controls on this sucked especially if you were playing on the same shitty, tiny laptop. fond memories, though.

holy shit, pinturillo. i almost forgot about you.

back in 2013, i would sit on skype with my best friend and we would 1v1 on pinturillo. i swear i don't remember it being pinturillo "2" and not just "pinturillo" but my memory of those days is getting more fuzzy as i get older. one thing i do remember? this was when we were DEEP in our minecraft phases, so if we weren't being cringe on wattpad we were being cringe on skype. when i think of pinturillo, i think of the skype groupchat we had. i remember spamming that stupid dancing turkey emoji, and never ever having cams on but sitting in calls for 8 hours anyways. i remember how every single prompt of ours ended up with us forcing our minecraft youtubers in it somehow like dolls, or just drawing each other.

i think we just liked drawing together, and these little guessing games were just a fun way to do that. imagine if those 13 year olds had access to magma or drawpile??? we would have been UNSTOPPABLE. the way we churned out fanfics was a testament to how dedicated we were, i cant imagine giving us access to a collaborative paint tool sai in tandem lmao.

but anyways, i still have screenshots of her pinturillo drawings posted on my old instagram account. maybe i'll call her up for a game sometime.

okay technically... i didn't play this, and i also don't think is:
a) very fun
b) much of a game in the first place

but im still going to rank it, count it as played, and use it as an excuse to talk about a very special thing that is close to my heart; gambling <3

just joking, kind of. i'm going to use this to talk about pachinko as a whole, but mostly because i have some COMPLICATED feelings on it. i mean really, this game was oddly enough one of the things i was most excited to play for like the past year? some context: i went to japan this summer! wow, crazy, i know. it really was a special trip for me, and i was looking forward to going for literal years (thanks, pandemic, for letting this booked trip sit in the void for 3+ years), and before going, i found out this existed. however, thanks to the fact that this game is from the early 2000s and all the information circulating comes from ONE article that is in japanese, i thought it was a REAL pachinko machine. i knew that my chances were slim since osomatsu is not at all very mainstream in japan, but i was really hoping i'd get to go to a pachinko parlor and play it. not to mention, i am super fucking cringe and i really wanted to play pachinko cause the matsuno sextuplets do it a lot in the anime, lol.

so, after like 2 days of being in japan, we get to kyoto and i spent the evening alone with this guy who would eventually become my boyfriend a week after i go back to the USA, and we decide that we're going to go play pachinko. me, because i wanted to see what all the fuss it was about, and him, because gambling seemed fun and he brought a shit ton of spending money lmao. once we entered the pachinko parlor, i realized a couple things.

1) i could not fucking hear myself think
2) wow, that is a lot of older men. i am so out of my element here
3) while there is anime, osomatsu is DEFINITELY not going to be here

we walked around before picking a random cheap 1 yen a spin machine and it was. ridiculous. the lights were so bright and the noise was overwhelming and giving me insane sensory overload. we sat next to each other, literally less than a foot apart, and still i had trouble hearing his voice when he raised it to talk to me. not to mention there is... no instructions. well, scratch that, there ARE, but they were entirely in japanese. i knew vaguely how this worked (spin slots with metal balls and trade those in for cash) but actually seeing all the dials and the screens and just everything was different entirely. you basically pull a lever that reminds me of pinball and send one of your metal balls zooming across a pachinko board where it'll fall into various holes, and depending on the hole might activate the screen where you will do a slot spin & potentially win money. if you get the screen to light up, the machine does a FUCKING RAVE and blares music loudly. combine this with the hundreds of machines in a tiny, tiny room, it's maddening.

i didn't really win for a while, but i didn't really care. it was a cool experience. my friend did (and a lot) and eventually after a little bit one of the older men who i guess was working the floor realized we were foreigners and entirely lost, so he walked over, hung around, and tried to instruct us on how the machines worked, how to win, etc. with gestures and pointing. it was a cool moment, i don't really know how to describe it. we ended up getting the hang of it, and i tapped out at 1000 yen (something like 7 dollars), but i ended up leaving with 5000 total (like 40ish dollars). it was... honestly kinda boring LOL. it was cool having all the lights going and just experiencing everything go for a bit, but sitting at the machine, holding a single lever down and just spacing out while the metal balls clinked around and played on their own was mind-numbing.

a few days later when we went to another part of japan (i want to say it was in yokohama, but i honestly can't remember), 2 of my other friends who hadn't gone to play pachinko wanted to join my boyfriend and i since we had already done it, so we said sure and went again. i only spent 1000 yen again (and i lost it all), but this pachinko parlor was HUGE. there was like 7 floors, two connected buildings, and probably like a thousand machines on one floor alone. there was re:zero, evangelion, fate/grand order, and loads more anime but... no osomatsu. it was cool to try and play some of the more gimmicky ones, but we got bored and left early. i don't think i even spent all of the 1000 yen i set to gamble with, which all brings me to my point of:

pachinko isn't fun. you only play it if you want to gamble, and even then, i can think of so many more fun ways to do it. so imagine taking away all the lights and the atmosphere of a bustling pachinko parlor with friends, and putting a fake machine that you play alone in your living room in poor quality on a ps2.

yes, you don't lose any money, but it's so pointless. the animations were cute, i admit, and i would have loved playing this machine in person, but playing it at home is just. lame. its somehow more soulless than gambling already is. i guess that isn't the fault of osomatsu-san (well, osomatsu-KUN and not -san), but it still just feels so uninspired. i think the tie-in makes sense considering every other episode has some reference to pachinko, but it's just. sad to sit and watch gameplay of this. i can't imagine spending 40 usd to play pachinko alone at home. i just, don't get it, i guess.

anyways, if you read this, thanks i guess. i hope you enjoyed a look into my japan experience for a few minutes of your life.