• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2024

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  • I guess I just don’t get the tribalism here. Both are cool in different ways.

    Singleplayer games offer a more curated experience. A story and a set of hand-crafted challenges. But that generally means finishing one and moving onto the next, rather than really sinking my teeth in it.

    Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There’s always a better opponent. And I’ve made a lot of good friends through these communities.


  • I play games that are so niche that the ‘matchmaking’ consists of pinging people on Discord. Because we don’t have proper matchmaking, we struggle to retain new players because they come in, get pulverized into the dust, and give up.

    The point of matchmaking is that even a more casual beginner can find opponents at their level, without having to grind a ton to catch up with those of us who have been playing for years.








  • Crypt of the NecroDancer.

    There are three big challenge characters in the base game:

    • Aria can only use the starting dagger, no other weapons. She has only one hit point. And she dies if the player ever misses a beat.
    • Monk dies if he picks up gold. All enemies drop gold, even ones that normally wouldn’t, which turns the game into a routing puzzle where you must never step on squares that an enemy previously died on.
    • Bolt plays the whole game at double tempo.

    Once you have beaten these three challenge characters, plus the other six easier ones, your next task is All Chars Mode. Beat the game nine times in a row, once with each character. If you die, you must start the whole marathon over.

    Beating that unlocks the tenth character, Coda. Coda combines the restrictions of Aria, Monk, and Bolt all at once.

    And if you can do that, the final achievement is Lowest of the Low, which requires you to beat All Chars Mode without collecting any items.

    The DLC adds a few more hard characters, and another achievement for an extended 13 Character Mode, but they aren’t considered to be as hard as Coda or Lowest of the Low. A single digit number of players have stacked the challenges for Coda low% and 13chars low%.


  • I’d been on the microblogging side of Fedi for a while and was aware there was a federated reddit-like, but my initial impression of it was that it’s a long way from getting enough of a userbase to sustain the kind of niche hobby/fandom communities I used reddit for.

    But once reddit’s API scandal happened, I dropped it and decided to check out the alternative. Still feel like it isn’t really there yet, but eh, I’m here anyway 'cause I’m not going back.






  • Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Haven’t had a whole lot of time to practice, but I’m working on charge partitioning. Managed to get double ball a few times in a match.

    Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - After getting demoted to Expert I went on an even worse losing streak for a bit, but I seem to be clawing my way back now. It’s just sample size, or so I keep telling myself.

    Splatoon 3 - Grand Festival was rad. Not the Turf War part, Turf still sucks, but it was the second best concert I saw all week.




  • I love everything that Fedi stands for, I wouldn’t still be here if I didn’t.

    But it’s hard to shake the feeling that I’m mostly posting out into the void. I’m not optimistic about Fedi’s future, I think at this rate Bluesky is going to win even though they’re clearly only paying lip service to federation. Maybe if they can demonstrate that their federation works I’d consider trying a third party server, but it’s clearly not ready yet, and leaves a sour taste in my mouth as yet another corporate thing pretending not to be.

    Ever since I swore off Reddit after the API fiasco, and ever since I left the one Discord server where I used to feel like I fit in, it’s felt harder and harder to find alternative places where I can talk about my most niche interests, because nowhere else is big enough for it to be likely I’ll find anyone else who also wants to talk about those same things.

    I don’t think Fedi will ever be that for me. The one thing I can say for Cohost is that at the rate it was going, I was able to find a lot more posts relating to my hobbies and fandoms, and I kinda regret that I didn’t post more and lurk less.

    It just sucks to feel like there’s nowhere else on today’s dying internet to go that will suit my needs.