#also it was around this time i got a new gaming PC and kinda lost interest in TF...

[yumyumsteak]

IDW2 road rage x nautica / 2019

#transformers #nautica #road rage #i never finished idw2 im sorry brian ruckley's writing was too complicated for me to read (boring) #also it was around this time i got a new gaming PC and kinda lost interest in TF...

[bonny-kookoo]

I have transcended here, so follow my vision:

Jungkook is always taunting the hybe staff that monitors his lives right? What about a fic where he does this because he kinda likes the pretty new IT intern 👉👈 and she is always stressed out working the night shift and wondering is he asleep yet should I end the live? oh no is he about to give a major spoiler, he would not do it right? workout sounds are kinda suspicious and low-key obscene should I "accidentally" end the live?

Hm... warning for like.. jungkook flirting? And suggestive themes lol

Your heart beats faster whenever you get the notification. But not because of the same reasons the fans pulses might race quicker.

No, you personally get palpitations because of him, personally.

You don't even know why he's bitten into you like a stubborn dog like this, not daring to let go, teeth buried deep in your skin. You don't think you're outstandingly pretty, you're not special, you're not even supposed to have any sort of friendly or private contact with him whatsoever. Your job is on the line every time he has his 'fun'. But every time you scold him with that fact, he's got the same answer.

'I've got enough money for both of us, baby.'

You're not sure how the hell the agency has not yet caught onto his games- teasing words never directed at the fans, but you on the other side monitoring- them hearing in on it simply collateral damage. He knows you watch him every time he goes live. Your angry emojis you send him every time he edges on getting inappropriate in front of millions worth it every time, as he has to imagine you angrily scolding him so cutely just like last time you did.

He wonders how long you'll let him toy around with you like this.

He remembers when you ended his live when he fell asleep, calling and ringing his doorbell in panic because of the still burning candle- but when he'd tried to lure you into his claws, offering to have you sleep over at his place since it was late and raining heavily, you'd declined- probably having sensed his actual hidden motive.

You're not easy. And he can't deny that he loves the chase.

At first, it was just fun. He thought if he played it cool and most of all smart enough, you'd eventually cave in- but by now, he's actually become much more personally interested in you. It's not just about what you might feel like all messed up under his hands with his dick balls deep inside you anymore- that's somewhat moved into the background, lust no longer the main reason for his interest.

It's the soft domesticity you offer him here and there, gentle care a man like him can do nothing but fall for.

You're nothing but IT staff, newly hired for your exceptional skills when it comes to recovering data from the most messed up hard drives, and your talent for making sure nothing leaks out where it's not supposed to. You take your job seriously, work with all your soul and energy, always try and do your best even in the most lost-cause-scenarios. But he remembers you restoring almost all of his files after his pc crashed, offering him gentle reassurance and some water to calm him down. And a few weeks later when his tablet was infected with a virus (most likely stemming from the.. not so family friendly he occasionally visits...), you'd simply giggled about it, not making a huge deal out of it, even sharing your homemade food with him in his office while you waited for the new firmware to install.

You cook really well. Not perfect- but perfectly imperfect, just like home cooking is supposed to be. And you're so sweet- it's giving him cavities just thinking of you.

And yeah- you're also called his 'babysitter' whenever he's live randomly at night, since you yourself can't sleep all that much. He wonders if it's insomnia, or another health issue. He wonders if he could do something to help you sleep at night.

He wonders if you'd hold onto him when asleep. He wonders if you like holding hands.

He's asked you these things privately often, at first just to tease, but these days he means those questions. He wants to know more about you, about who you are apart from your job, but you take your role in the company pretty seriously it seems like. You never break your contract, always remind him that you're not allowed to either answer his questions, or have any private contact at all.

And he hates it. He hates that you're so goddamn nice, never daring to break any rules.

"Hm? Ah yes, it's late.." he comments at the chat flowing with thousands of messages, not truly paying attention to them. "Its late, I can't sleep~" He hums, leaning back against his couch, sighing. "Maybe I should eat? I'm not on a diet right now.." he wonders to himself, picking at his new piercing. "..maybe. Would you eat with me?" He wonders, and on the other side of the live, in your office chair, you want to hit your head on your keyboard.

He knows exactly what he's doing. You want to punch that dumb smirk right off his face.

"Hm, would you.. I'll make some food, yes." He nods to himself, getting up to take the phone with him, setting it up in his kitchen. "Late night Ramyeon.. yes." He sings, dancing a little as he opens two bowls. "I'll eat two. I've got.. a big appetite." He says, having turned around to look at the chat again- or more so the camera. "And I'll put some sauce in it too. I like it hot, you know?" He giggles, and you on the other side wonder if it would cost you your job if you 'accidentally' cut the connection.

Instead, you send a red-faced angry emoji and a pointing finger as a warning.

And the moment he receives it he brightly grins laughing to himself. Are you watching him from your office at the company building? Or maybe you watch him from home? Possibly in bed? And if so, are you wearing anything? Images of you in nothing but underwear spark in his mind, making him space out as he leans on the kitchen counter, hand playing with his bottom lip. He'd bet half of his wealth you probably wear cute lacy underwear, with bows in the middle.

He could probably rip the frail fabric of your underwear off your pretty body with his bare hands. He knows he's got the strength for it.

"Hm, maybe I can't finish two though?" He wonders as he fills both bowls up with hot water. "But I'll try.." he sings to himself, not a care in the world while you watch, being tortured by the sight of his broad back. It would be a lie to say that he's not attractive- he knows it too, after all, and you're not blind. You're simply just not putting your job on the line for a simple affair- you won't be used like that.

You've been through that before. You can't do this again.

The rest of his live is uneventful, he doesn't actually eat any of his food, ends the live with the excuse that he's tired after all, and you're finally falling head first in your lap before your phone rings. Accepting it, you don't answer, but his voice on the other end does.

"If you come over now, it'll still be hot when you're here." He chuckles, and you know he refers to the instant food he'd made.

"Jungkook-ssi, I can't do that.!" You groan.

"Why not?" He wonders almost innocently. "Its not like people will know." He tells you.

"I'm not putting my job on the line for.. an affair." You decline. "You might have your fun, but I'll have to deal with the consequences later." You say, and for a moment, there's no sound, before he sighs.

"You know.." he starts, sitting down on a chair at his kitchen table. "..weeks prior I would've given up at this point. Would've told you 'alright, cool' and then let it go, you know?" He tells you, one hand supporting his head while his phone lays on the table. "But I honestly don't wanna just.. have an affair, as you call it."

"Oh?" You scoff. "Jungkook-ssi, I have to end this call. Please refrain from-"

"I want to get to know you." He rushes out. "I.. genuinely want to. I take all of the blame if things go south. I'll make sure you get the best job if Hybe kicks you out, promise." He offers, before he sighs yet again. "Just.. let's just eat ramyon at my place, no strings attached." He asks, and you laugh after a moment, making him grin too.

"Eat ramyeon at your place?" You giggle, and he clicks his tongue.

"You say 'wanna see my cat' these days." He says, and you get up into a sitting position.

"Well, I mean, you were aiming to see a cat, in a way." You attempt to flirt back, and its quiet. "Oh my God sorry, I really shouldn't-"

"No, no-" he laughs. "That was adorable, really." He grins to himself on the other end of the call. "So?"

"I can't." You decline. "I don't have anything else than this job. Please don't make me do this." You say, and he bites his lower lip.

"I meant it." He repeats. "No funny business. Dick stays inside my pants, and I really will make sure to get you a new even better job if someone finds out and gets you fired." He promises.

"How can I trust you?" You ask.

"Have I ever done something to get you into trouble?" He asks, and you think.

"I can think of a few times-" you start, before laughing when he groans out in agony. "The food is cold now anyway." You say.

"I can heat it up." He offers.

"I don't like spicy things." You respond.

"Nothing wrong with being vanilla." He jokes, and you roll your eyes on your side of the call.

"You're such a pervert. What would the fans think?" You scold playfully.

"They love it." He chuckles. "Just like you'll love me."

"Bold claim." You say.

"Just give me a chance." He offers. "One chance to make you fall for me."

"What if you won't fall for me?" You ask.

"Impossible." He hums, voice low as he watches the phone on his table. "Already did."

And you're quiet for a moment, before you sigh.

"I'll bite your hand off if you touch me inappropriately." You threaten, and he laughs.

"And I'll willingly accept my punishment, baby."

#bts imagine #bts fanfic #bts fic #jungkook imagine #bts jungkook imagine #jeon jungkook x reader #jeon jungkook imagine #bts jungkook fanfic #bts jungkook x reader #bts jeon jungkook x reader #bts jeon jungkook imagine

[thankskenpenders]

So I wrote a whole long thing about Amy's tarot cards, but what about, you know... the rest of the Sonic Frontiers DLC? The new alternate story route, the hours of new gameplay, all that?

Having now played it, I'm not sure Sonic has ever had this specific combination of good ideas that make the future of the series look bright, and execution that I fucking hate.

(Full spoilers ahead.)

The good

There's a lot to like here, conceptually.

First and foremost, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy are finally playable in a new mainline 3D Sonic game for the first time since 2006! Seventeen years! We've been begging for this for so very, very long. Nature is finally truly healing from the fallout of Sonic '06. Early on I hedged my bets and expected them to be locked to Cyber Space or something like that, assuming that there was no way they'd be fully playable in the Open Zone. But sure enough, while they're a bit limited compared to Sonic, they're still all full-blown characters with skill trees to unlock and lots of exploration to do.

We also got a more bombastic alternate final boss fight, after the first take on The End kind of underwhelmed. And it's obvious that Sonic Team has listened to our pleas to focus on the 3D platforming over the forced 2D sections, and to reduce the amount of automation in the level design. This update is chock full of Actual Platforming. Wow! I can only pray this means we never get an area as agonizing to explore as Chaos Island again.

Sure, there's still some jank - especially with Knuckles' movement, which is kinda rough. But if this is the stuff they're trying out so that they can refine it further for the next game, then I'm really excited.

On the other hand, good fucking lord is The Final Horizon tedious. And that tedium sapped most of the fun out of it for me.

The frustrating

The new scenario massively increases the difficulty over the base game, seemingly out of a desire to give the hardcore players who were posting speedrun videos and whatnot more of a challenge. It's the Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels of Sonic. This difficulty comes in many forms throughout your playtime, some worse than others, and continues to ramp up over time.

Rather than giving you a tutorial level, the new scenario dumps you directly into a remixed version of the final island and makes you do some fairly precise platforming with Amy, Knuckles, and Tails - new characters with new movesets that you won't have any experience with. You'll also need to find character-specific Koco that give you free levels, because Sonic's friends all start at level one and certain locked moves in their skill trees will be mandatory to progress. They don't even have Cyloop unlocked at the start. And because they're all low level, that means you'd better steer clear of the beefed-up bosses scattered around the map, which will absolutely annihilate Sonic's friends. (I honestly just avoided them and never bothered beating any of them, not even with my high-level Sonic. I have no idea if they're beatable with the others.)

None of this is explained to you particularly well. I spent my first few minutes with Amy wondering why the attack button did nothing, only to eventually think to check her skill tree and realize that I had to unlock her basic attack. If you don't bother to take the time to read through the skill trees, you'll very quickly find obstacles you have no way of getting past with no clues as to what exactly you're supposed to do.

Adding to this confusion is the fact that objective markers often tell you to go half a kilometer into the sky, and you'll have no idea how to get up there because all of the relevant platforms are out of your draw distance. Many objects seem to only pop in for me when I'm within about 60 meters of them, which isn't a long distance for a high-speed open world platformer like this. I was having this problem running the game with high graphics on PC, so I can only imagine how obnoxious it is on Switch. I'd frequently find myself poking around nearby clusters of platforming objects and praying that they'd lead me to a spring, rail, or cannon that would eventually point me in the direction of the floating objective marker.

There were always complaints about the art direction in Frontiers and the way it relies on floating rails and prefab platforms that are visually disconnected from the natural scenery of the islands, but it's even more dire here. The new platforming sections are dense and complex, but they seemingly didn't have the budget to change the topography of Ouranos Island at all, so it all takes the form of these prefabs. It very strongly gives the vibe of a Forge creation in Halo 3, back when there were no blank canvas maps and people just had to make "new maps" by jamming a bunch of shipping containers and barricades together in the sky above one of the default arenas.

I was still more or less having fun, though, despite the jank. It's a big creative swing, I told myself! They're trying stuff out! They're experimenting!

And then I hit the towers.

The towers are agonizing because they're SO close to being great. The logical part of my brain understands why some people love them, but god, I just fucking hate them. The platforming there IS cool! These layouts are cool! The individual challenges along the way are a bit tough, but totally doable. You know what's not cool? Making one mistake and slowly falling 800 meters all the way back down to the ground, forcing you to start over. Because none of these towers have checkpoints. For me, this one decision transforms what should have been a fun set of platforming challenges into a massive, unfun difficulty spike.

I enjoy some masocore platformers, but those are typically games with quick deaths and restarts like Celeste, Super Meat Boy, or VVVVVV. Hell, the Mario games tend to get way more difficult than the average Sonic game, and those are obviously all great. Quite frankly, unlike those games, Sonic Frontiers is nowhere near tight or polished enough to make this difficulty feel fair. Bits of jank that I could ignore in the base game due to its lower difficulty are now matters of life or death. Missing a jump because I boosted off an incline in a way the game didn't like for reasons I don't understand is not fun. Falling off a tower because the camera was pointing in the wrong direction while I was in midair and I couldn't see the next thing I was expected to homing attack is not fun.

And it's such a jarring spike when moving from the base game to the DLC that it feels like the game is suddenly quizzing me on skills it never bothered to instill in me. Maybe if you've spent the last year labbing out the movement tech in this game this is all a no brainer, but for the average returning player it's a kick in the dick.

I'm sure I could've beaten these towers normally if I gave them enough tries. They aren't the hardest thing in the world. But I very quickly decided I had better things to do with my life and turned on easy mode, which adds tons of extra springs and homing attack balloons to make all of the platforming piss easy. I wish there was a middle option between Only Up: Sonic Edition and this extreme hand holding, but when given the choice between the two I gladly picked baby mode. I just wanted to see the story.

(The new Cyber Space levels are also long, challenging, and devoid of checkpoints, not unlike the towers. But I only ever found the entrances to two of them. So I only did two. They're theoretically required, because they give you "Lookout Koco" that you need for... some reason? But in a rare act of mercy, Sonic Team put Cyloop treasure spots that give you free Lookout Koco all over the map.)

As I continued, so many little things started adding up to piss me off. Why do you only reveal like five tiny squares of the map at a time? I would've loved to find all the new 1-on-1 dialogue scenes, but not if I had to do dozens of hard mode versions of the stupid little puzzles and challenges to reveal the whole map. Why does every character need their own unique collectibles? What is this, Donkey Kong 64? Why can't I just grab this EXP for Amy when I find it as Tails? Why can I only manually swap characters by talking to an out-of-the-way NPC unlocked right before the final boss? Why is fast travel disabled? Why are the new vocal themes you hear when playing as Amy, Knuckles, and Tails so monotonous, with a single verse repeating over lo-fi beats ad nauseum? Why is the jukebox feature completely disabled throughout the DLC, even after rolling the credits? Why can't Tails homing attack? Why do I have to wrestle with the camera so much while also holding the jump button to fly as Knuckles and Tails? How many right thumbs do they think I have? Why is this animation for picking up animals in the Cyber Space levels so incredibly slow, and why can I still take damage while it's playing? Why does the stupid starfall event have to make it so hard to see what I'm doing when climbing these towers? Why does this shitty combat trial have a popup that makes it seem like I should be using the Cyloop when the actual strategy revolves around repeated parries? And on and on and on...

The story

What about the new story? Well, there sadly isn't much to chew on here. Most of the DLC has the cast running around and finding different macguffins for arbitrary reasons, as part of some sort of plan to divide up the work on the last island so that Sonic can go train with the spirits of the Ancients and harness the power of his cyber corruption. What the fuck is an Impact Form? I don't know, but Knuckles needs something to do, so go find one.

It's a thin excuse plot meant to make you do platforming challenges around Ouranos Island, with little room for Ian to add any real flavor of his own, even though he certainly tries. Having Sonic meet the spirits of the Ancients who controlled the Titans, who are revealed to directly parallel the personalities of him and his friends, is kinda neat, I guess? It's something. The optional conversations seem to have some fun bits, including both conversations between the supporting cast and additional lore. But again, I only found a few of those because of how tedious filling out the map was.

The writing is also let down by the voice acting - or I guess the voice direction, because I know this cast can do better. Roger's voice continues to be weirdly, distractingly deep as Sonic, which was clearly something that was requested of him just for this game. (For a recent example of him going back to his regular Sonic voice, see this LEGO trailer.) The performances of Sonic's friends are also WILDLY mismatched. This is most clear when they start feeling the effects of the cyber corruption. Knuckles seems to be barely affected at all, Tails sounds like he's moderately hurt and low on energy, and Amy starts completely overselling her pain out of nowhere. The extremely strained performance makes it sound like Cindy's literally being tortured in the fucking booth. I have no idea what's going on over there.

The final challenges

People have debated whether or not things like the towers and the new Cyber Space levels are fair challenges. What's not up for debate is the fact that Master King Koco's Trial is complete and utter bullshit, and I can't believe they shipped this.

Before you can fight the new final boss, the game forces you to do a boss rush of the first three Titans - INCLUDING the pre-Super Sonic climbing sections - with a hard limit of 400 rings. For all three lengthy, heavily scripted fights. Back to back. You can't even cheese it with the leveling system, because you're forced to do this at level 1. This all but forces you to look up speedrun strats for the Super Sonic fights so that you don't run out of rings and fail the trial.

And the real kicker? They changed the parry just for this trial! Originally, you could just hold down the bumpers endlessly and Sonic would ready himself to parry the next attack, whenever that may hit. Now it requires you to do a "Perfect Parry" with specific timing. And you HAVE to hit those parries if you wanna clear this trial and get to the new ending. Miss a few and you're probably fucked. You just have to reset. Time to go through all those fights, all those climbing sequences, all those QTEs, and all those unskippable mid-fight cutscenes all over again. This is by far the most egregious example of the DLC deciding to quiz you on new skills that the base game never required of you, and it's one of the most absurdly unfair things I have ever seen in a Sonic game.

Easy mode does make this trial easier by making the timing window for Perfect Parries much more generous, but that's all the help you get. It's still easy to lose time failing to parry Wyvern's hard-to-read animations, or to lose rings by getting hit on the climb sections, or for things to just fuck up because these fights were always kinda jank. I gave it a few shots. I looked up guide videos. I tried the Quick Cyloop and stomp combo strat that seems all but mandatory. But I quickly decided that, again, this wasn't a worthwhile use of my time. It just sucks. And I really, REALLY didn't want to overwrite all my fond memories of these Titan fights, some of my favorite setpiece moments in any Sonic game, with memories of this shit ass boss rush.

So I cheated! And if you're on PC, you should too.

With the worst hurdle out of the way, I turned cheats back off and moved on to the new final boss. It was pretty cool. It's much flashier than the original fight against The End, that's for sure. It's still kinda annoying, and it requires you to do very specific shit without properly telegraphing it, but it's nowhere near as bad as the preceding challenges. I was hoping for one last new metalcore song to go with the new fight, which we sadly didn't get, but at least the new version of I'm Here is good.

The ending is... mostly the same, with a couple altered scenes that don't really change anything in the long run. But overall the new finale was pretty good. I just wish it hadn't been such a slog to get there.

Closing thoughts

Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon wants to be three things:

A patch that adds a new alternate ending that was probably supposed to be in the base game in the first place.

An experimental take on making Tails, Knuckles, and Amy playable again, presumably testing things for the next game. And...

An official Kaizo Sonic Frontiers mod for the sickos.

The thing is, the people showing up for #1 and #2, the main things that Sega hyped up about the update, are not necessarily going to be down for #3. If they had announced some uber-hard new Cyber Space levels for the arcade mode or whatever, I'd be like, neat! And then not play them. I would never touch Master King Koco's Trial if it was an optional challenge. I would leave that for the sickos. But instead, they made the hardest content mandatory for anyone who wants to see the new Good Ending where the final boss gets an actual budget.

I'm mostly left in a state of shock that it shipped like this. I cannot believe they playtested this and decided this was the state The Final Horizon should be released in. That this should be the note Frontiers ends on. That this should be how we remember those Titan fights. That this should be the lingering taste in our mouths as we wait however many years for the next 3D game.

Armchair devs always love to say that things would be "easy to fix," but like... there really would be easy fixes for the insane difficulty and general tedium here! Add a few more tutorial popups explaining what the game expects of you with Sonic's friends. Give the Cyber Space stages and the towers a couple checkpoints. Give the combat trials more generous time limits, especially on the lower difficulties. Remove half of the map puzzles, and make the ones that remain uncover twice as many squares. Skip the startup animation for Knuckles' glide. Let me turn on the goddamn jukebox. Since so much of this update was designed around fan feedback, I can only pray that Sonic Team is still listening, and that they tweak at least a few of these things with a balance patch.

But still, after those many, many paragraphs of complaining... this still somehow makes the future of 3D Sonic seem pretty promising?

Sonic's friends are FINALLY playable again, and the focus is back to proper 3D platforming, rather than railroading players into awkward forced 2D sections in what's otherwise an open world. These are the things that they hopefully want to carry over to the next game. The difficulty? Well, that's just because it's the postgame DLC that's supposed to be the toughest challenge in the game. It's just an unreasonably cruel one of those - an example of how designing and balancing for a vocal minority of your fanbase can really hurt your game. But Sonic Team is onto something here, and I hope that they can learn the right lessons from this expansion and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

#tkp post #other media

[eccentric-nucleus]

i'm gonna be talking about the weird porn game stuff i'm working on now, so you know, watch out

so as you may have gathered from my various posts, i've been working on the hell game 2 engine. currently i have events running mostly-correctly from data files, but i don't currently have state & pc data hooked up correctly so i can't actually e.g., test out various different sex scene variations based on the pc's bodytype. given one of the big failures of hell game (the first) was that i never really got complex event interactions working, i should probably think up some multi-stage demo events and get them working early on, so i don't end up repeating the same mistake

anyway as i have been putting this together i've been reflecting on the stuff i was dissatisfied with with hell game. unfortunately for me one of those things was "the sex scenes weren't as parametric as i wanted". hell game tended to break sex scenes down based on fundamental body plan (what i usually call 'bodytype' b/c that's the variable name for it in the code). that was stuff like: biped, centaur, quadruped, naga, snake, and 'other'. that's already a lot of totally-different variations but given i also let people change size there did kind of also need to be at least some size-based changes. but that's even more stuff to write for a single sex scene to have full coverage.

(this kinda thing is why i love to bring up the whole thing about nagas having a thigh gap in TiTS. they didn't want to change the scene blocking for all the doggystyle sex scenes! you can just say "between your thighs" either way!! i mean i get it, just, lol.)

but the other thing with hell game is that it was always uhhh a very early demo. it was basically a collection of contextless sex scenes with demons, and while there are worse things for a game to be, i did kinda have aspirations of, you know, plot, story, named characters that weren't just procgen demons, etc. so one of the things i've been working on currently is a ~design doc~ that covers setting & story details in a concrete enough way that i can reference off it and not end up writing myself into a corner.

and that gets us to the weird porn part of the post. i haven't fully committed to the current setting concept (scifi space station sucked through an interdimensional portal so it's now orbiting around hell, a la your dooms and hellpoints and the like; i feel like i'm maybe being a little too derivative here) so i won't go into too much detail but on the whole there is probably gonna be a more pronounced, you know, horror/grotesque influence. we'll... see how that works given that it is also a porn game

like yeah yeah plenty of porn games are kind of libidinal nightmare realms. coc had the parasitic dick worms. people love gross sex stuff. i feel like i kinda lost touch with a lot of my audience and now i spend more time around, uh, normal people who don't have deeply-rooted fixations. currently the first encounter i have outlined for this is uhhh a reanimated zombie who... lemme just paste the description in

A thing that was once a dead body, overtaken by something new. Its skin is a faded grey and its muscles are overgrown, proportions inhuman: shoulders impossibly wide, arms and legs slabs of striated muscle. It moves with an inhuman gait, as if the thing inhabiting it is still getting adjusted to human articulation.

There's a squirming thing wrapped around its head, all leathery purple-black flesh. A central mass covers the corpse's head: face smooth, back of the head a mess of overlapping tentacles. It has many long octopus-like tentacles that fan out across its shoulders and back. The tentacles trail down its body, clamped tight to the skin, before they sink into its body across its shoulders, chest, and back, squirming under the skin like gigantic veins. The skin around the punctures is painted with purple-black bruises. Glowing green ichor pulses through its body, pumped into it from its penetrating tentacles, feeding its muscles with unnatural energy. Its skin is a faded grey, streaked with ash, save for where its glowing-green blood flows, forming branching lines of bulging veins that cover its shoulders and chest.

A single loose tentacle extends from its face like an enormous proboscis, tapering in wormlike rings to a squirming tip, slavering shed ichor in gummy lines down its bare chest.

Its cock hangs heavily between its thighs, perpetually bloated and half-hard, with its glowing green ichor visibly pumping through its altered flesh. Its massive, oversized balls churn and lurch behind the fat stalk of its dick, pulsing with burgeoning larvae. Thick, translucent grey pre perpetually spills from its bloated glowing-green cocktip, painting wet smears of fluid down its monstrously-muscular legs.

it talks to you and asks if you wanna get pumped full of squirming zombie larvae so it can reproduce and reanimate more corpses. a lot of the encounter design is very much "what if you could fuck this DOOM monster"

anyway, that's like, normal. that's completely usual actually. having a cop fetish is what's weird and disturbing. okay okay that's just dumb glib moralizing i don't actually think that. but i mean, it is super weird to write stuff like that and then go back into the normal realm where people keep talking about college jocks or w/e.

but before i do much more writing i gotta hammer out the rest of the engine. next up: a lot of variable storage & thinking about how to separate npc data from the events they take part in. that's all stuff that needs to get coded regardless of which setting i go with

[semi-imaginary-place]

khux nonsense 2

665: ava's right why bother starting new unions. for that matter why have a war wipe out daybeak town and the unions, have only a small group of survivors where only the 5 new unions heads have knowledge of events. i remember when this dropped, fandom lost their heads over ven being one of the 5. I really do need a book club but a have have is this tumblr to keep track of questions. Which dandelion union leader gets the book of prophecies copy.

675: just had the realization that khux is just a game of pvp enabled amongus. What the hell does that mean. Scenes are all at different points in time and cutting out into one another and i cant tell what is the chronological order or what are dreams. Love kh and is ay that both earnestly and sarcastically. There's the new union leader talking, pc breaks up a union fight that leopard? Bear? encourages (lux isnt power, victory is power, something the union on top) which is actually a dream??, There's pc helping at the warehouse fighting heartless business as usual, there's ephemer talking with ava about the future (flashback?), and then the scenes of pc laying in the keyblade graveyard and then skuld and ephemer talk to them. Well the "war" has begun and the main take away is that it happened because the mom made everyone distrust everyone else.

By modern standard malificent is exactly the sort of character a certain subset of the internet would go bonkers for. Crying screaming throwing up over the dommy mommy goth milf. Kinda like that one woman... Uh the tv show tumblr is obsessed over... Morticia adams yeah except maleficent is like the drag queen version

725: there's strelitzia. I'm surprised the concept of years even exist this whole game feels pretty fairytale-esque and timeless between the paper doll aesthetic and this supposedly being the ancient past but mickey is there and its also all a dream. 2 years have passed since the player character met ephemer. wait is strelitzia saying they saw the player character around before the day they waited for ephemer, what day is she referring to?

730. She's dead?? (Or well as dead as anyone gets in kh). ok so strelitzia got murked and she book of prophecy stolen. Ah so this is why ppl were losing it over lauriam. He's structurally implied here to have murdered strelitzia and replaced her as new union leader although technically it could be ventus or brain we didn't see them get recruited.

I feel like i need a book club to get through this game like just to discuss what literally happened surface level plot.

#kh #khux

[crescentblossom66]

A Corruption in Time

TRIGGER WARNING FOR: BLOOD AND GORE AND MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH, WHICH IS DESCRIBED IN DETAIL

This is a creepypasta inspired story. For those that don't know, a creepypasta was a scary story about either lost episodes of tv shows or a glitched game, of course they were all made up. The most notable example of a creepypasta was 'Ben drowned' a stroy detailing the horrible things that happened in an allegedly haunted copy of 'The legend of Zelda Majora's Mask'. So I decided to present you with this, have fun reading

I should preface this by saying that I didn't tinker with the game in any way, heck I don't even know how to code or access game files. This all happened with the regular downloadable copy of the game on steam, no mods were installed, as I wanted to experience the game as it was intended, so I have no idea how the game ended up the way it did. I also didn't have any of the DLCs, I wanted to buy them, but the Nyakuza Metro DLC didn't even exist at the time of the events, and I completely forgot about the seal-the-deal DLC.

Alright, now that that's out of the way let me begin to explain the strange things that happened when I decided to download A Hat in Time again after 4 years had passed between me playing it initially.

I was finally setting up my new PC and got Steam back on it to play my favorite games again, when the box art of A Hat in Time caught my attention. I remembered how much fun I had playing this game and decided to redownload it immediately. When it finished downloading, I got a notification that the steam cloud files got corrupted, and that due to this, all my save data was gone for good. Well, I wanted to play the game again from the start anyway, so that wasn't too big a deal. I booted the game and everything went normal at first.

Made in Unreal engine logo, created by Gears for Breakfast, all normal. Hat Kid's ship came and flew by, and the starting menu appeared. I pushed A (I was playing with an Xbox 360 controller, don't think it mattered, but thought that I should mention it regardless.), and I was greeted by...nothing. Normally Hat Kid is supposed to be striking a pose on this screen while you select your save file. I didn't think anything of it, as I hadn't started a completely new file in ages. After selecting File 1, everything played out more or less like it should, aside from the fact that Hat Kid's hat was not on the nightstand and also didn't land on her head like it normally did after she faceplants on the ground. Hat Kid just got up, yawn and went on with the day, unlike me who tried to remember if she got her hat later or something.

Now that I could control Hat Kid, I exited the bedroom and went to the main room of her spaceship. I should mention here that she controlled like normal, aside from the fact that I couldn't use her hat ability, which was kinda bad, as you can probably imagine. I just went up to the screen that showed how far away she was from her home planet, she activated it and then it started to knock on the glass. Without hesitation, I made Hat Kid walk over to the Mafia Goon and the cutscene played. Strangely enough the little “How rude!” Didn't play after she closed the window to stop the Mafia, but the rest played like it should. We lost the time pieces and plummeted down to Mafia Town.

That's when the first real strange thing happen, the title card from the level showed up, it depicts Hat Kid running away from little crows, one Mafia Goon points at her, while another rolls a meat on a bone in her direction, meanwhile Hat Kid turns around afraid, while running away. Now Hat Kid was just...missing, it appeared like they were chasing nothing. This became a theme with all the title cards, Hat Kid was just missing in them.

Nevertheless, I, along with the Mafia Goon, landed in the back alley, Hat Kid struck her normal landing pose and on I was to explore Mafia Town, still hatless. That's when I found out that there were no yarns, no matter where I looked, even places that I KNEW should have one, were completely empty.

I was a little freaked out by that, but thought that it would be a nice challenge to try to play through the game without hat abilities.

One strange thing I noticed was that none of the Mafia Goons would talk to me, not even the ones that played a game with you only to punch you in the face weren't interacting with Hat Kid. Speaking of not interacting, they wouldn't even look at her, Hat Kid looked at them, but they never looked at her, even when I placed Hat Kid right in front of their faces.

Due to me skipping the tutorial, I didn't get Mustache Girl to tell Hat Kid not to stalk her. I wondered if she would have reacted, because what happened at the fountain left me thinking that something was indeed very, very wrong with this game. The cutscene with Hat Kid and the Mafia Goon that had the umbrella played, however he didn't react to Hat Kid and the alien girl just waved her hands in front of his face, equally as confused as I was. He was supposed to push her away, which would have resulted in her snatching his umbrella and pointing it at him, while he freaked out.

First, I didn't remember Hat Kid just waving at the Mafia, even MY memory told me that was wrong. Second, now I was really contemplating just reinstalling the game and trying again, but my curiosity got the better of me. After beating up the distressed Mafia Goon, he dropped the time piece, at least all of that was still normal. I got back to the ship, and had Hat Kid switch on the energy for the kitchen and main room again, which caused the telescope to appear. I entered the kitchen and rotated the camera around to check if anything was wrong in the room, the only thing of note wasn't the surroundings, but Hat Kid herself, she looked a bit...dull in her color scheme later on I'd learn that it was far more serious than that. She also looked distressed like she does when Snatcher appears before her or when the bomb is tied to her.

To make it easier for me to gather my thoughts, and to make it easier to read, I'm going to explain level by level from here on.

Mafia Town Act 2: Barrel Battle

The level started out normal enough, Hat Kid landed near the market, Mustache Girl screamed for help, just as usual. I made Hat Kid move toward the stack of barrels, where the Mafia Goons captured the blonde girl. That was where it turned weird again, the Mafia didn't react to Hat Kid arriving and Hat Kid tapped her foot for a moment, as if she was waiting for something to happen before she just sighed and the cutscene ended. Confused, I simply tried to attack one of the big men, who yelped in pain and then turned as if to look who had attacked him.

I got a cutscene that I didn't even know was in the game, the Goon continued to look around and then spoke.

“Mafia trying to teach lesson, don't interfere...nobody is here, but Mafia got attacked. What's going on?” He looked visibly spooked. Without my button input, Hat Kid attacked the guy that held the red-hooded girl and she scampered off to safety. “Mafia is being attacked by g-g-ghost, AAAHH!” All four just started to run away, that was when I regained control, I chased down the fleeing Mafia Goons and reclaimed the time piece, by beating their leader, which concluded the level. The small scene with Mustache Girl at the end didn't play at all and I was simply brought back to the spaceship.

Now that level confirmed a theory I had from the interaction with the Mafia so far, they seemed to be unable to see Hat Kid. She could still interact with the world around her. Curiously, not much could harm her either, it became more and more clear that whatever it was, was only effecting Hat Kid and not the other characters in the game.

Mafia Town Act 3: She came from outerspace

This level made me question things even more, I thought that with Hat Kid being covered in mud, the Goofy Mafia would just run away form her, likely just seeing the dripping mud, however he didn't react, not even with the mud and the eerie glowing eyes was she able to get a reaction out of him.

Hat Kid seemingly had given up on trying to get the attention of the people around her and the cutscene just showed her looking up onto the platform where you'd get the time piece from the Mafia member. I just decided to go with it and climbed across the banners and platforms until I grabbed the time piece. When I came back to the ship, Mustache Girl didn't show up, not that I could have used her advice anyway, not being able to use hat abilities and all. Hat Kid didn't react to that sequence break at all, however she still had that concerned look on her face, like she knew or felt that something was very wrong.

Mafia Town Act 4: Down with the Mafia!

When I got to the the Mafia HQ, the Goons were still attacking Mustache Girl, without being prompted to do so, I proceeded to attack the Mafia. After I killed the first of them, the others once again panicked, spouting some nonsense about ghosts. Mustache Girl seemed to shiver for a moment before jumping down, “How did they...eh, doesn't matter, time to mess with the Mafia a little.” She walked right past Hat Kid, who only made some kind of pouting noise, while I moved her over to the switches that opened the entrance to the HQ.

Upon entering, I for once wasn't assaulted by the Mafia throwing cans at me for no reason. The cutscene with the Mafia carrying the time piece through the doors still played, so did the rest of the level pretty much. I got the key, opened the door to the freezer, went through the vent, and ended up in the hallway. No Goons were send my way, probably because no one could see Hat Kid approach in the first place. When I arrived I had to attack the Mafia Boss instead of him jumping out of his chair to attack me after giving me a speech about how glorious he was.

“What was that?! Some invisible intruder, wants to pick a fight with me? Alright, let's settle this Mafia style!” With that the fight went more or less the same, dodging his shock attack, jumping over the daggers, getting on top of the Mafia Ball to get a hit in, nothing new. The little interaction between the boss and Mu played out a bit differently, he didn't say anything while Mustache Girl said something about him having lost his marbles for fighting something that wasn't even there. Where was a certain uncertainty in the way she spoke though, as if she was trying to convince herself. After the fight the scene was vastly different though, the Mafia ran away from the unknown entity that just beat their boss into goo, while Mustache Girl only looked at the time piece and...ran away. She didn't pick it up, she only looked at it, and bolted away with a terrified expression on her face. Hat Kid then picked the time-altering object up with a smile and I got brought back to the loading screen.

I wondered how the fifth chapter would play out, now that Mustache Girl didn't know about how the time pieces worked and seemingly started to avoid them entirely. Cooking Cat also didn't show up to talk about relics after I returned back to the ship, but I still remembered that they triggered the purple time rifts.

On that note I will tell you that those and the blue ones hadn't change, so I won't have to go over them.

Mafia Town Act 5: Cheating the race

A level that would normally be all but almost impossible without the time-stop hat, but due to the Mafia not even seeing Hat Kid, I could just snatch it away and didn't have to even play the level. A bit boring if I'm being honest, but I never liked that level that much anyway.

Mafia Town Act 7: The Golden Vault

Another level that played more or less the same, the interesting thing was, that I had tried to select Act 6 before, but somehow I was unable to select it for whatever reason. Instead, I just decided to do Act 7, thinking that maybe I would be able to select it after. Another weird thing that I didn't remember happening in the game was that the alert for a new time rift showed up right after Hat Kid returned to the spaceship. The strangest thing about that rift was that it was neither purple nor blue, it was red.

Still confused, I checked where to find that rift, hoping that I didn't get too vague a picture...looking at you blue alpine skyline rift. It appeared to be on the clock tower, where Mustache Girl normally waits for you to find a way up to her in the tutorial. Easy enough to find I thought, and went there to check out what those red rifts had in store for me.

Now this is probably where you'd think something bad was gonna happen, but those red rifts were actually quite interesting, but something about them was indeed disturbing.

Mafia Town: Red Rift

Hat Kid landed in same out of place zone as with the blue rifts, just some white platforms with water effect, just that the secondary color on the platforms was red instead of blue and so was the background. Next to Hat Kid were a Mafia Goon, the Mafia Boss, Mustache Girl and Cooking Cat. Thinking that maybe I could talk to them and they'd have some interesting dialogue, maybe wondering where they were or something, That wasn't the case, however...I could pick them up. Considering that at the time I didn't even have the DLC that was a bit odd.

Just like in the first DLC, I could make a stack with the characters and it appeared that that was what I had to do for this level. Another thing that I noticed was that all of them were slightly transparent, I wondered why that was at the time, I got my answer later...much later.

So, with my mission now clear to me, I made Hat Kid walk from one platform to the other. It was pretty straight forward until I heard a strange noise and stood still for a second.

That was when I saw something following me. It was about the same size as Hat Kid, and moved similar to her, however it was a bit taller and undefined, and looked more like a jumbled mass of red pixels. It did exactly what I did when I was in the position it was in, if I jumped over a gap, so would it. For simplicity's sake I will refer to this...pixel mess as Red Kid.

Hat Kid gasped when I made her stop to get a better look at the thing, she seemed to outright panic, shaking and motioning for me to get moving, by pointing forward with her free hand. So I did, the level itself wasn't very difficult, just some long leaps that could be cleared without the help of the sprint cap, which I was thankful for, otherwise my play-through would have ended right there. The only thing that made things hard was the teetering either to the left or to the right, due to the stack of people the young girl was carrying.

At the end was no time piece, but a portal that Hat Kid proceeded to throw the characters into without my input. Red Kid stopped only briefly and jumped down at the end of the platform, which completed the rift. Back on the ship, I checked if now I would be able to play Act 6 and found that I could. I wasn't ready for what awaited me.

Mafia Town Act 6: Heating up Mafia Town

Again the level started out just like normal, the Mafia asked Hat Kid to switch off the faucets that the lava comes out off. I realized something was very, very off however, when I tried to attack the faucets to turn them off. To put it simply, nothing happened. I tried and tried again to switch off the endless stream of lava, I even went to another faucet, just in case I had to switch them off in a distinct order or something, but nothing happened.

When I stopped to contemplate what to do, I noticed that the lava was slowly rising, the rather comical bouncing of the Mafia after they got burned by the lava was also replaced by them getting slowly engulfed instead, I watched in shock and turned the camera away after a few seconds, unable to watch the goofy crooks die so horribly. I knew this game could get dark at times, however, this was clearly NEVER in the game!

I tried to find out what my objective was now, most of the faucets were completely submerged in lava by now, even Hat Kid reacted by panting and wiping her forehead when idle, adding to the tension I was feeling. I needed to find away to stop the lava from rising, but I couldn't do anything!

That was when I spotted Mustache Girl in the clock tower, sitting there with her legs pulled to her chest, staring into the boiling lava below with tears in her eyes.

“H-How? H-How could this h-happen? I j-just wanted to get rid of the Mafia-” Mustache Girl wiped her face with her sleeve, “-Now EVERYONE will....All of us will.....” She buried her head in her hands, crying louder. Unlike me who pitied the girl, Hat Kid's expression showed anger mixed with disappointment. Making me think that she knew that the red-hooded girl was the one who doomed the island.

With nothing to do but to climb higher to escape the red, burning liquid, I moved Hat Kid to the cannon and jumped to the HQ, hoping that it would not reach that high. Soon Mu followed and so did the remaining Mafia that had survived until now. Some looked like they were burned by the lava, their character models were charred in some places like the shoulder and a couple of big smoldering spots on their backs. I felt bad a little, even though they were just character models, I still kind of felt bad for the guys.

“What's going on?!” The Mafia Boss, now in the jar, I should mention that he wasn't in the red time rift, came outside, followed by Cooking Cat. Both looked distressed, Cooking Cat's ears were flat on her head and she had pulled down her hat and was kneading it with both hands, while the jar was completely motionless.

With sheer horror, I noticed that the lava kept rising and was now even starting to take over the plateau everyone thought they had found shelter on. I made Hat Kid climb onto the building using the awnings, only Mustache Girl followed her.

Writing out the next thing that happened still chills me, I know that the characters aren't real, but...those screams, those terrified screams of pain and terror, I'm not lying when I tell you that I can still hear them in my nightmares...

Hat Kid was apparently also unable to take all of this, the blue-eyed girl sat down and started to cry, no one able to hear her silent sobbing but me...I felt terrible for her, call me a crybaby, but I really felt for her. First no one can see her and now, all those people died around her.

The red-hooded girl continued to cry and quietly sat down on the roof next to Hat Kid, looking at the ground while the lava slowly crept toward her, threatening to end her, just like it had ended the lives of everyone else in Mafia Town,

“How could I be so stupid...All I wanted was for them to leave...and now, and now-” She trailed of and looked up briefly before looking back down,”I'm going to...” the poor girl was trembling horribly, while I watched on helplessly. I couldn't do anything to save them, I felt like I failed Hat Kid and the people in Mafia Town.

When the lava reached Hat Kid, she didn't react at all, the girl looked at herself confused. For a moment I was a bit relieved at that but was torn right out of my brief moment of respite by loud, terrified shrieking once more. I only caught a small glimpse of the red girl, before I forced myself to look away. It was too horrible to watch...Her clothes caught fire as the lava reached her ankles.

That scene went on for what felt like hours, but was only around a minute in real life...a minute I and Hat Kid spent in hell.

That was when she got teleported back to her ship. Physically she appeared to be alright, but most certainly not emotionally.

I was about to just close the game when a cutscene played, the screen that showed the progress toward Hat Kid's home planet, showed static and Hat Kid went to check it out, still wiping away tears. I felt so bad for the girl.

The static showed a gray, humanoid shape, it spoke in a distorted manner, very low-pitched and quite eerie. “ You can't save them!”

That was all it said. Hat Kid looked shocked and confused and a little frightened. What did he mean with 'You can't save them!'? Who were we trying to save? What was up with this game!? I only wanted to play a nice platformer that I hadn't played for a few years, and now this! No, I didn't sign up to play a disturbing horror game, where a kid is forced to watch people die! No way in hell!

When I went to close the game window, however, a pop up window appeared.

Do you really want to have them all die?

Hell Yeah! No, I have to save them!

I stared at the screen blankly for a moment. Did this game honestly think that I would fall for that! If I uninstall and reinstall the game, I can play normally again, and don't have to deal with this horror. I clicked on 'Hell Yeah' and another box popped up.

So you don't care what will become of the birds, Snatcher and the minions, and the nomads? You're fine with knowing that you killed them, even though you could have tried to save them?

Nothing would please me more! I was only joking!

I would love to say that I just closed the game regardless, like a sane and normal person, but...I felt bad. I wanted to at least try to prevent them from dying. I know it's a stupid reason, but I wanted to see it through.

Alpine Skyline Chapter 1-4

After I so naively decided to continue playing, I checked where I could go to next and found that strangely enough the only area I could go to was the Alpine Skyline. I didn't even have the 14 time pieces required to enter the area, but it wasn't like I could go anywhere else. The gates for Subcon and Dead Bird Studio weren't open.

Wait.....how was I even supposed to GET to the Skyline, never mind even getting to the telescope! I had no hook shot! The hook shot badge was in the second level of Subcon Forest! I tried and tried to make the jump from the room with the washing machines over to where the telescope for the alpines was, thinking that maybe something was in that room that could help me, but I just couldn't make the difficult jump. Was that finally where I couldn't proceed any further because the game became to broken to continue? I did what everyone does in such a situation; backtrack out of desperation. I went to the main room of the spaceship, but couldn't find anything there that could help me, I had a couple of rift tokens though, so I decided to give that a shot, maybe I could get hat flairs, or maybe something changed there.

I did get something out of it, believe it or not! It was a strange badge that looked like the first dweller mask you get, the one with the fox head and the green glowing eyes. Oh, I should mention here that the badge seller appeared to be the only person in the whole game I could interact with. So far I had the no-bonk badge and pon magnet. The scooter- or the fast hatter badge obviously wouldn't have helped me considering my non existent hat. I had all three slots for badges, hoping that maybe I'd find something that could help me. Before I left him he said something I don't remember from the game, “You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?” To which he produced a strange green badge that did nothing once I equipped it, shrugging it off, I removed it and swapped it with a badge I could actually use.

Now the badge I got from the machine in the main room worked the same as the dweller mask, the green aura appeared and I assumed that I could enter the lab, now that I had the dweller mask and low and behold what do I find, the hook shot badge! At least I could proceed now, I equipped both, the dweller mask badge and the hook shot badge, and thus I could actually enter the Alpine Skyline chapters.

I walked up the long mountain path to the top and hit the weird spinny things. Then I made my way up through the clouds to the Skyline that, just like Mafia Town at first, looked pretty normal, No changes. That went through literally the whole Skyline though, so I can actually sum most of it up here.

The nomads couldn't see her, so I never received any directions form them, which wasn't too bad as the Alpines are quite big, but fairly easy to navigate through. The Birdhouse and the Lava Cake were quite easy and I only struggled a little in the Windmill, due to the lack of the sprint hat that can help you with some of the longer jumps there.

Before I went to the Twilight Bell, I noticed something again, I already said that Hat Kid looked...off a bit, now it was even worse, she was very visibly transparent now, and looked just...sickly. I figured that it had something to do with the whole nobody-can-see-Hat-Kid thing, but I had no idea what to make of it. She still controlled like normal, but appeared more pained, like something was hurting. I felt bad again for making her go through all of this, especially now that it seemed that whatever it was was causing her pain. Pushing my concerns aside, I pressed on, making my way to the Twilight Bell, that would have been all but impossible without my newly acquired dweller badge.

The real problems started when Act 5 rolled around, and the pollen were released. Before that though I got a pop up that another red time rift had appeared. It was strange, because normally you'd have to leave the Skyline to have any time rift appear, I had already cleared both of the blue ones and the purple one, and the pop ups for them came after I returned form the Windmill and the Twilight Bell and had assembled the relic for the alpines.

Alpine Skyline: Red Rift

The location of the rift was very easy to discern, it was on the knife of the Lava Cake. I found it strange that I could still explore normally, as Act 5 follows right after the last of the 4 levels was cleared. The red time rift looked the same appearance wise. The difference was that this time, I had to carry out lightly transparent versions of a nomad, a goat (I have no idea how she managed ot carry one of those. Well, she carried a walrus in the DLC sooo...), and a Lazy Paw Gang Cat.

Just like before, movement was a bit weird, due to the stack, but I managed alright. A couple of seconds in, I heard the weird noise again and when I turned the camera to look behind me, Red Kid was after me once again, this time I could actually make out something like a hat that they were wearing, but nothing else.

The stack teetering almost threw me off one of the platforms once, especially the fast spinning ones that rotate made it very difficult to jump on safely. I fell a couple of times, thanks to me being garbage at timing jumps right sometimes. All in all it was harder than the first, but still easily manageable. At the end I lost control of Hat Kid again, as she shoved the three characters she was carrying through the portal. Red Kid stopped again briefly, and this time they spoke: “You can't save all of them.”, with that taunt, they jumped off into the bottomless, red abyss, and thus the red rift ended.

Alpine Skyline Act 5: The Illness has Spread

This is where things took a turn for the worst again, go figure. I braced myself for the worst, and started the level. The title card displayed (Again without Hat Kid in it), and I had a bad feeling already. I hoped that it wouldn't be like Mafia Town where everyone died a cruel death that still shakes me to the core to this day when I think about it.

Tightening my hold on my controller, I made Hat Kid move through the dark despair that awaited us both, the three icons that displayed the location of the flowers showed up, and I made my way to the first one. I went with the one near the Birdhouse, avoiding the fire and the thunder of the lethal environment around me. When I got to the platform where it showed the huge plant, getting to it was exceedingly easy, thanks to it not realizing that Hat ´Kid was there to destroy it. Foolishly, I thought that this would be a piece of cake, that all I had to do now was break the flowers and I'd somehow find the time piece after.

My rude awakening out of that sunshine and rainbows daydream happened the moment I made Hat Kid attack the plant...only for it to do nothing, absolutely zero damage, not a scratch or any indication that I did anything. I tried again a couple of times and my hand started to sweat the more it became apparent that, once again, I couldn't do anything.

Hat Kid made a noise of confusion, before the big plant released another cloud of purple pollen. I didn't know what to do, so I just moved around aimlessly, trying to find a hint to something that I could do. When I got back to the small mountain where Hat Kid always starts out form, I could see the damage the pollen had done, houses had burned down all the way to the foundation, and fire and had spread to the point that I had to carefully jump around to not have Hat Kid lose health by stepping on it. Suddenly Hat Kid recoiled and did the animation she does than Queen Vanessa speaks for the first time, she crawled backwards and I had to turn the camera to see just what had scared her so much, due to the dense smoke. I wish I had just turned Hat Kid around and left, but I was too curios and as we all know; Curiosity kills the cat.

I saw the normally territorial, but otherwise harmless, goats chase after the nomads on a platform just below, the huge animal kicked on of the nomads to their doom down the huge mountain, his friend however met a worse end. The nomad seemed to plead for his live, bowing and folding his hands in prayer, but the huge herbivore showed no mercy. I was so glad that I for whatever reason turned Hat Kid around, so she didn't have to look at the horrible scene that unfolded. It still sickens me to this day and honestly I almost threw up when I saw the huge goat stomp on the small nomad, the loud crunch of his spine breaking echoed through my speakers and made my blood ran cold. Even thought blood is pink in this game, it still shocked me to the core to see the bloody mess that had once been a nomad. Hat Kid was crying and visibly distressed, and I couldn't blame her. I moved back, careful to not turn the young girl around. I have no idea if she was programmed to react to all of this or even if this whole scenario was coded and had been in the game before and I somehow accessed it or something, but whoever I have to 'thank' for this mess, I would like to send to a psychiatric ward. This was waaaay too messed up for a kids game.

The level ended when the whole area was full of pollen, so much so that I couldn't see Hat Kid anymore and just stood still in order to not fall off any cliffs. It just suddenly...ended. I wondered if any of the nomads escaped or if the goats killed all of them.

I got brought back to the ship and didn't move for a solid half an hour or so. First Mafia Town, now the Alpine Skyline. This cutsy platformer turned into a Silent Hill game faster than Sonic gets through Green Hill Zone. When I finally got the courage to grab the controller again and to move on, I noticed that Hat Kid was even more translucent, whatever was happening to her was getting worse it seemed.

I thought about just quitting then, but what Red Kid said at the end of the red rift, stuck with me. “You can't save all of them.” Were they referring to the characters Hat Kid tossed through the portal? Were they safe on the other side? It motivated me enough to see where I needed to go to next and I found that the gate to Subcon Forest was now open.

Subcon Forest Act 1: Contractual Obligations

I made my way over to Hat Kid's bed room, still reeling a bit from the horrifying events that continued to flash before my eyes. The first couple of acts for both Mafia Town and the Skyline were more or less tame, and Sucbon proved to be no exception to that rule.

I entered the creepy forest and started my way toward Subcon Village, where the fire spirits were. On the way, I half expected to actually still be captured by the net, but it didn't trigger at all, however I triggered a cutscene a bit further ahead near the bridge where you'd normally find an eyeball enemy that you needed to destroy to get a yarn, but as you know, no yarn for me. In place of the yarn, I got a cutscene that featured two minions talking to each other. The topic turned out to be one of the time pieces, apparently it fell into the bonfire that the fire spirits dance around. Hat Kid listened in, more like stood technically in plain sight, but the minions were also no exception to the No-one-can-see-Hat-Kid rule. I kind of hoped that, given the paranormal and occult themed forest, someone here would react to poor Hat Kid, whose appearance was more akin to a wraith than an actual alive kid.

I didn't waste any more time and moved Hat Kid over to the entrance of the village. I noted that she seemed to move a bit slower than normal, it could have just been my imagination, at least I thought that at that point in the game. When I arrived I obviously didn't get that scene where Snatcher makes sure that you're doing your chores, but it still zoomed in on the fire spirits and even showed the time piece that had fallen in the fire. I knew what I had to do, and was thankful that I at least could still pick things up, given that I had trouble attacking the plants, I had been worried about that. It didn't take me all that long to throw the paintings into the fire and extract the time piece. Before I could go and grab it, one of the fire walls disappeared and Snatcher appeared in the village and started to talk to a minion. I'm going to paraphrase here, sorry, I can't remember what he said exactly anymore.

“Did...did you managed to get rid of those annoying fires that stopped me from getting to parts of my forest?” He looked a bit confused, I'd be too if the thing that kept me trapped suddenly disappeared without cause.

“...Yeah?” The minion cowered in fear, probably hoping that telling his boss that he did it would be a good idea.

“Why didn't you do so earlier!? Well, it doesn't matter, get rid of the other ones too, now that you're at it.” Hat Kid appeared to pout after the Minion just blatantly took credit for something she did.

“...Thanks.” With that the, soul-stealing ghost vanished back in the ground, leaving me to finally claim the time piece.

Subon Forest Act 2: The Subcon Well

When I got back to the ship, I didn't realize that I missed something at the time. The levels in Subon usually needed to be unlocked by stepping into Snatcher's traps, with him now being unaware of Hat Kid strolling around in his forest, I could have easily gotten locked out of the rest of the levels. Thankfully, the corruption or whatever unlocked the rest of the levels aside from Vanessa's manor. That boded very ill.

After I entered the level and was brought back to the Snatcher's stump, I started by getting rid of the fire spirits in the swamp, which I could do earlier than normal, thanks to already being in possession of the hook shot badge. I got another cutscene where two minions talk about the well and that their boss wanted it to be cleaned. All in all not much of a big change here. I went inside the well, broke the ice that clogged it, and found the time piece. I decided that I would open up the other areas by getting rid of the fire spirits though. After all the death I'd already seen, I was far more uncomfortable than the first time I played the game, that I had to get rid of them.

Subcon Forest Act 3: Toilet of Doom

Yet another level mostly the same, it appeared that the outhouse got possessed differently this time, Hat Kid still had her soul after all. The fight went well enough, I got hit a couple of times, due to forgetting that the shock waves the toilet created, tripped you. The only other thing that change, was that a minion got praised for destroying the wretched bathroom appliance, to which Hat Kid shrugged again.

Subcon Forest Act 5: Mail Delivery Service

This one shared a fate with Mafia Town Act 5, due to Snatcher not being aware of Hat Kid, I could just grab the time piece without even needing to deliver the mail, not that I could have done so without the sprint hat.

Subcon Forest: Red Rift

The red rift showed right before I braced myself for the 4th act of Subcon, this time it was placed near the entrance to the manor just across the bridge where the destroyed tower or something is, it took me a while to realize where it wanted me to go. Awaiting another tougher platforming rift, I went over to the glowing orb and entered. Same deal as before, no explanation necessary, I think. I had to pick up a Minion, a Fire Spirit, a dweller, and of course Snatcher, strangely, no Queen Vanessa. I had only 2 health this time though, and due to the stack and Hat Kid's more sluggish movement that I mentioned earlier, I had quite a bit of trouble getting through the spinning platforms and the gear tower things. Red Kid's shape became even more defined, they looked like a boy with short hair and a coat that flowed sightly when he moved, which was the only way for me to tell what it was.

After some very tight jumps and lots of anxiety on my part, Hat Kid finally managed to get the people she had been holding through the portal at the end. Once again, Red Kid stopped.

“Why won't you just give up and disappear!? Just stop struggling already!” He exited by leaping away again. I got back to the space ship with Hat Kid looking confused. Was he the one who put me and Hat Kid through this traumatic nightmare? If so, why? What did he gain by doing that? With noting left to do, I tried to open act 4 again and this time I could access it. I took a deep breath and braced myself.

Subcon Forest Act 4: Queen Vanessa's Manor

Of course the scariest level in the normal game was also the trigger for an even scarier event in this weird corrupted, or glitched, or whatever you'd call it game. I had already been dreading this level, not only because of the strange and horrifying event that I already had to go through, but also because just like with Mafia Town's Act 6, it was kept for last without me being able to select it prior to completing the others.

I was honestly relieved and disappointed when nothing of real note happened at first, everything went normally. Some Minions once again opened the act by explaining that they saw one of the time pieces fall near the manor and emphasized that they would NOT go over there, under no circumstance, a sentiment that I kind of shared, but had to fight against.

Reluctantly, I made my way across the bridge and through the little ice puzzle to the wide nothingness that stretched out all around the manor of the ice queen. I avoided those nasty ice statues at the front because I remembered that you had to enter the manor from the basement. I sneaked around and the door to the cellar opened and I made Hat Kid jump right in.

Kind of random, but the title card for this act without Hat Kid in it was somehow very eerie, just and empty nothingness through the open door the blue-eyed child would have peeked through if this had been a regular version of the game.

This level had one of the biggest changes to the original, so far most of the levels played the same aside from the invisible Hat Kid thing, but now this invisibility caused something worse to happen, I already found it strange that the red rift appeared before I even had access to the final chapter, the reason was pretty weird.

I maneuvered my way through the house as usual, and almost got a heart attack when I opened the door to the hallway and found the shadowy figure of Queen Vanessa just walking toward the kitchen door. Hat Kid did her little skidding animation upon seeing her, while I almost dropped my controller. This may just be the only instance in the game where I appreciated a person not being able to interact with me, even Hat Kid looked relieved.

This relief didn't last long however, I needed to go to the kitchen to open the door on the left side of the hallway and the door that let to the room with the piano was locked, so I had but one option. I carefully moved Hat Kid past the queen and opened the door to the kitchen, which seemed to make the red-eyed apparition recoil.

“What?” She then followed me through the door and I opened the fridge foolishly, in hindsight I should have waited for her to turn around or leave, as that led to Vanessa being even more confused and upset, which further doomed the already pretty miserable citizens of Subcon. “What is happening?!”

Hat Kid was freaking out and so was I, due to the shadowy mass now trailing the purple-clothed child everywhere I made her go. She followed me up the stairs and into the bedroom, watching as I did what you regularly do in this level. I noticed that she started to shake more and more, I assumed it to be out of fear, but no....it was out of fury. “Stop playing tricks on me, my prince. I know you're here.”

I don't know what delusions she was conjuring up as I got the key and entered the attic. At the top I found and opened the treasure chest and that doomed Subcon.

Remembering all of this sends a chill down my spine as I'm typing this. But I'll promised myself that I'll see ti through. I just hope that I can get some answers to why my game ended up this way.

When Hat Kid opened the chest and claimed the time piece, something else fell out...a wilted, old bouquet, the flowers it was made out of preserved forever under a thick layer of ice. “You came back to me...just to get this back for her, didn't you?” Anguish and spite laced the words of the cold queen, before it switched to sadness and then anger. “I thought you came back to see me, but now I understand...-” Ice started to spread under her and toward Hat Kid, who I had no control over yet again, as she jumped onto the window sill, her eyes wide with fear as the ground started to shake.

“YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A FILTHY CHEATER!!!”

That was the line that made Hat Kid bolt, she jumped through the glass and started to run back in panic, the ice spreading behind her, as I gained control again once she landed on the ground outside. I panicked, I panicked as the view turned around and I could see the ice encase the whole manor, turning it into a huge ice crystal. The ice kept spreading at a rapid pace, and even though I had no sprint cap, Hat Kid still ran, she ran as fast as her little legs could carry her, as all I could see was the ice behind the space traveler.

Adrenalin kicked in and I tried to tilt the camera forward again, but I was forced to watch the ice spread as it covered the trees, the rocks. I almost dropped my controller entirely as an insane cackle echoed through the forest and almost made Hat Kid trip.

I only saw something dark and red run past Hat Kid as she entered the village, I hadn't even realized we had made it there already. The cold magic reached the blue-eyed kid, and once again, she wasn't affected.

Again I was powerless, again I couldn't do anything but watch.

That was when the view switched and I could see dwellers and minions slowly freeze to death, while they flailed around in a panic, and begged for it to stop, but to no avail. Hat Kid started shaking, the cruelty on display in front of her becoming too much to bear. My attention was drawn to the distance. Red and purple flashes lit up the horizon. I didn't want to go there, but I had no choice it seemed.

When Hat Kid arrived the ice was spreading up a shocked and terrified Snatcher, I turned Hat Kid around again as he slowly stopped moving and joined the ranks of the endlessly suffering ice statues. The evil cackle from the queen gave me goosebumps and I flinched when she simply shattered the ice sculpture of the tormented ghost. The insane laughter continued, while Hat Kid sat down and pulled her knees to her chest, before she started to cry. That was when it ended again and I simply got brought back to the ship.

It scares me how good the human is at adapting to things, as I was slowly getting used to these horrifying stuff that I had to bear witness to. I realized that I could see through Hat Kid now, even to me she was slowly turning invisible. Only one more chapter, only Battle of the Birds remained. I dreaded what the corruption would do to my favorite characters of the game, but I found out soon enough.

Battle of the Birds Act 1: Dead Bird Studio

Just like all those times before, I entered the first level of the Chapter. Neither the owls nor the penguins acknowledged Hat Kid, nothing new there, and both directors were to busy with the usual spiel of yelling at each other. The cutscene played and I sprinted up toward the vent, not even trying to talk to either of the directors' subordinates. The level proved no challenge, you know why by now. At the end, I simply found the time piece for the level, maybe because I couldn't interact with DJ Grooves and the Conductor.

Battle of the Birds Act 2: Murder on the Owl Express

The interesting stuff happen from this chapter onward. Murder on the Owl Express was there things got really strange. It started the same way, only that one of the owls was talking with the Conductor and the yellow bird told the express owl that he had to go to front of the train to get something. With nothing better to do, I followed the brown owl and witnessed him getting questioned by the crows. One asked him what his favorite sting of numbers and letters was to which he replied with ABC123.

Another question was about his pet's pet name, Pecko actually made me smile a little, which I appreciated after the ordeal in Subcon. It was a bit strange not being the main character in a game for once, given that all I could do was follow the owl to the front, there he picked up the detective costume and got a call about his uncle's sister, Owlina, visiting.

The owl that I had trailed for the past 2 minutes then went on his way to find the clues on who committed the murder, after he had quite the panic attack, due to the other owl lying in a pool of blood, it seems that my owl friend also couldn't tell that it was a mere set up. The important part was that he then just stopped after leaving the room with the blood and hid in the corner, shaking like a leaf.

Hat Kid just looked at the owl, a bit surprised, she hardly paid any attention to things around her anymore, if it was because of her getting more transparent, or due to the horrible things she had to see, I didn't know. I decided that it was best to just find the files and go form there, so I did. Thanking the game for still letting me pick things up at least, I grabbed the files and after I got the one that implicated the presumed dead owl from the cafeteria, the button that lowered the platform to reach the room where you'd find Hat Kid's file wasn't even there, so I simply walked back to the room the detective owl was in. Hat Kid threw the files toward the owl, which hit him in the head.

I wondered what would show up on the movie recordings for a moment, floating files that made their way through the whole train, more like a horror movie than a thriller. In the end the Conductor asked the owl, who the murderer was and the owl picked one of the suspects at random and just blurted out that the other Express Owls did it, which they then confirmed. That concluded this level, I had to look around for the time piece, and found it outside on the little balcony of the caboose.

Battle of the Birds Act 3: Picture Perfect

This time around Hat Kid landed on the big moon set, and we were following a moon penguin who was tasked with establishing a big fan club for himself. He did the endorsement scenes mostly on his own, I helped with pushing the dog cutout from the fountain, which was literally the only one of those that I could do. The others were just the penguin guessing incorrectly at the card game, and him answering with ranch when it came to the way he preferred his tuna sandwiches.

The best part about the level came from when I noticed that the penguins weren't taking pictures of their comrade, and I found one of their cameras near the area you land when the game starts. For a few minutes I actually forgot the pain and suffering the game had put me and Hat Kid through, and I had fun photographing the little moon penguin. It even showed the fedora-wearing bird in the photos that I took of him, the controls for the camera were the same as with the camera badge. All of this came to a sudden end though when I got the time piece as it popped out of the balloon, and the alert for a red rift appeared.

Battle of the Birds: Red Rift

I found the rift near the end of the Dead Bird Studio, right behind the big plastic award. I wondered how hard it would be this time and wasn't disappointed on the difficulty front, I had ONE health, if I screwed up here I wondered if I could even attempt the level again, or if I ended up killing the characters if I messed up. I really needed to concentrate this time. I made Hat Kid pick up the birds, which consisted of the two directors, an express owl, a moon penguin and a crow.

As you can imagine, moving around with a stack of five birds was really hard, fighting against the constant swaying while landing safely on the platforms was near impossible, given my horrible skills in this game. Red Kid, whose shape was now clear, was even more determined than ever to catch up to the little girl I controlled. I had never seen that character in the game before, at the time I was desperately trying to figure out who he was, not even Hat Kid seemed to remember him.

I was so happy once Hat Kid tossed the flock of birds through the rift, Red Kid stopped once again and only glared at the blue-eyed girl for a second before he left. I breathed a sigh of relief after that stressful rift, and I knew that the area I had to go to next would not be as pleasant as 'Picture Perfect' had been, after all following the red rift was only the untimely demise of the remaining cast, the other rifts before made that abundantly clear. I knew that 'Train Rush' and 'The big Parade' would not end well.

Battle of the Birds Act 4: Train Rush

Train Rush...oh where do I begin with Train Rush. This was by far together with the parade the most traumatizing act in the whole game...I honestly don't even want to open this can of worms, but by now you're probably just as interested to see what happened as I was during all this. This morbid curiosity that led me to continue through this whole ordeal...The human truly is a strange creature, that never seems to be able to know when to quit.

I landed on the balcony of the caboose, and entered after the Conductor told the owl that his next movie was gonna be the bomb in a good way...No Conductor...This bomb was bad on so many levels.

The owl pulled the trigger for the bomb, and immediately after the yellow bird stopped talking before telling him to get to the front to turn it off, he faltered, just like in the movie before. Hat Kid panicked and tried to get the hysterical owl to move, of course it did nothing. In my panic, I thought that maybe I could have Hat Kid switch it off, we could interact with objects so far, so where was at least a chance! I made my way through the exploding train carts, screaming and yelling followed Hat Kid as she ran.

I made it to the front, jumping and trying desperately to press down the switch, which didn't budge in the slightest. I yelled and cursed at the thing, while the clock kept ticking away the life seconds of all owls on board. 10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1 Good bye

“Good bye.” Right before the loud explosion destroyed the only train on the planet, a weak low whisper broke the silence in the room, what followed after I could only tell from the wind shield. The train tilted to the left after the explosion send the wagons in the back off the rail, which caused the others connected to them to get flung off as well. Hat Kid fell toward the left, due the control room digging itself further into the sand, as the wheels spun around to find the traction they had lost.

That was when the shock wave created by the explosion in the back reached the front. The owl, just like Hat Kid, ended up being tossed around by the violently shaking train. He hit the control panel rather hard, a sickening crackling noise barely leveled itself above the cacophony of other noises in the chaos, but I heard his bone snap before he crumbled to the floor. It felt like hours before everything came to a stand-still, it was almost completely silent after what felt like an eternity, broken cables swinging around and fire burning somewhere in the distance were the only things I could hear...that and a creaking noise...How I wished that Hat Kid was able to interact with people.

I gasped when I noticed that the old owl I had presumed to be dead slowly got up hissing in pain. Hat Kid moved over to him, trying to help the wounded bird. He yelped when he tried to move his right wing, and almost slumped back down. He survived! I couldn't believe it!...but of course this wasn't the end of this, this game was cruel and unmerciful. It only toyed with me, making me believe that one of my favorite characters could actually survive.

The same loud creak replaced the quiet hisses of the owl with gurgling noises as a pipe broke off and impaled him. Hat Kid shrieked and started to tremble once she realized what had happened. Blood poured out of the owl's beak and from the huge wound in his abdomen, at least he appeared to have died the moment it hit him, as he didn't struggle to free himself. I felt nauseous when his limp body sank further and further down, impaling the dead bird more and more due to gravity, that was when I finally got my act together and made Hat Kid leave.

The owls didn't have it any better. As I walked around the literal train wreak, I could see that most of them had perished in the explosion, some had been crushed by large objects or debris, while others were looked singed and burnt. One particular owl broke my heart, he tried desperately to drag himself through the hot sand, as he slowly bleed out from a large, gashing injury on his side. I lost control once Hat Kid fell to her knees and cried, once again broken by what happened around her. That was when we finally returned to the ship.

Battle of the Birds Act 5: The big Parade

When I came back to the spaceship after everything once again simply faded to black, I cried together with Hat Kid, I just couldn't help it this time, call me a cry baby, but seeing all of owls meet such a terrible end made me sick even if it is just a game, I really connected with these characters the first time I played the game, so seeing all of this just tore at my heart. The two quarreling bird directors were my favorite characters and now one of them died with Hat Kid and me just a few mere steps away form him, it made my hands shake and I still had one more level to go through, one more level of agony. I was determined to see it through to the end though, I had been through enough of this already, so I deserved some closure. With that in mind I entered Act 5, and prayed that it wouldn't end nearly as bad...You already know what I'm about to tell you though, of course it ended in huge calamity.

Just like with all the levels before it, the first few minutes nothing was wrong, the penguin put on the parade costume and started to roam around the set, while the band of owls followed him. The bad stuff started when the DJ interrupted the parade for a moment and sent the penguin to turn on the pyrotechnics, the floors stayed electrified longer than in the original version, which didn't effect Hat Kid, but made it hard for the other dancing penguins to not get electrocuted.

My unease solidified more and more as I watched them struggle, Hat Kid appeared like she wanted to help the penguins and tried to interact with them, to no avail. The DJ told the star of the show to switch on the fireworks...and that was when things went from bad to worse...far worse.

In the original I already hated those fireworks, that behaved more like homing missiles, but after this I swore to myself that I'd never launch another one of those at new years out of fear that it will trigger this dark memory.

The homing missiles didn't chase after Hat Kid, they instead targeted the penguins and objects closest to them. The very first rocket hit a building, making concrete rain down on the gathering below the stage. Screaming once again echoed through my speakers as penguins got hit and either were terribly injured or got electrocuted by the floors that now had an electric current run through them nonstop, due to one of the missiles hitting one of the buttons.

No matter where I looked, all I could see was pain and suffering, once again I couldn't save Hat Kid's psyche, she had to watch the penguins jolt and twitch as the electricity slowly killed them. One small explosion after another made my skin crawl and my eyes water yet again. Hat Kid screamed out loud as I unfortunately jumped right toward the little area where DJ Grooves stood during the parade, and two missiles were headed right his way. The kid seemed to want to warn the panicking DJ, trying to get his attention, trying everything in her power to stop him from meeting the same fate as his rival and countless others met before him. It was for naught.

The sparkling, highly explosive objects that were meant to spark joy to those that watch them combust in the night sky now only sparked sheer terror as the first one hit the turntables, sending boiling hot shrapnel at the tall penguin's face, he shrieked in pain, as his jacket caught fire from machine breaking around him. For better or for worse the second missile ended his suffering fairly quickly when it stuck him in the back and made him slump over. The missiles continued to wreak havoc, but both Hat Kid and I were paralyzed, unable to turn away form the smoking feathers and the still slightly burning red jacket. The always dancing and moving penguin now laid eerily still, his star-shaped shades were teetering at the end of his beak, threatening to fall to the now empty street below at any second.

We were only brought out of our stupor when the screen went black once again and we found ourselves back in the spaceship. I couldn't even process the events as the little girl suddenly screamed in pain. At first I thought that it was due to all the mental trauma. Damn that red boy! Speaking of the devil.

“You may have saved them, but you won't be able to save yourself!” With that threat, the screen went black once again and I landed in what appeared to be yet another red time rift.

???

This rift was more or less like the others, the first thing I noticed was poor Hat Kid, she was almost completely invisible to me now, I almost had to make my way through it, only knowing by the camera always being centered on her. The blue-eyed girl moved painfully slow now and did the little panting noises no matter if I was standing still or not. I got uneasy, not sure what I should do, but decided to just try and get through the rift. Red Kid spawned again, and this time it happened, this time Red Kid caught me, and Hat Kid did lost her last health and she fell to the ground.

“Finally! Now I can finally exist! Sorry, Hat Kid, but it had to be done.” Red Kid finally got his normal color, he had short black hair, a red jacket, a brown hat, and a white shirt with something printed on it. Some blue, tribal-looking tattoos were painted on his face and he had purple eyes. With strain in her voice, Hat Kid finally named the boy that I had labeled as Red Kid.

“T-Timmy?” He looked shocked for a moment but composed himself.

“So you do remember me! The sidekick you abandoned, and doomed to non-existence!” Hat Kid tried to move and get up, but only fell back down.

“Why? I wasn't the one who did this to you.”

“I just want to live, okay! I've been stuck in endless darkness for so long, while you had a nice, adventure and made lots of friends. I was jealous!-” The sound effect and the little poof, that happened when you switch hats played, and the brown hat, was replaced by Hat Kid's iconic top hat.

“All I had to do was steal the thing that linked you to this world, that made you the main character. Now that I have it, you'll fade away and end up in obscurity just like I was before. Now I can go on adventures and make friends. Don't worry, I won't forget you...but the others will.” With that he jumped away and left the girl on the floor.

This was it? This was how this gruesome game ended...with Hat Kid fading into nothingness? Again where was nothing I could do to help, I had to watch as she slowly faded completely. I opened the menu to find something, anything that could help. That was when the green badge the badge seller gave me caught my eye. I hurried to equip it and now it did something. Hat Kid seemingly faded back in a bit, she regained all 4 hit points and her movement was back to normal.

I ran through the parkour, determined to confront Timmy and get Hat Kid's hat back. Of course I felt a little bad for the poor boy, especially now that I know that he was scrapped in beta, maybe someone in the team put this story line in because they were upset that he was cut...what a sadistic asshole, making the player and Hat Kid go through that!

The rift ended on a huge round platform, that practically screamed 'Boss Battle', and I was right. As soon as I got there, Timmy opened a portal that showed the spaceship and the planet in the background. Timmy noticed Hat Kid approach and ran toward the portal, ready to jump in.

“You won't stop me!” He yelled, but the purple-clothed girl was having none of it, she send the hook shot and grabbed his jacket, pulling back. He growled and thus I had to battle the upset boy.

This battle was like fighting Hat Kid from the normal game, if she were an enemy. He could run very fast, due to the sprint hat, and he could slow down time with the time-stop hat. Thankfully the green badge gave me some health recovery every 30 seconds or so, which at least gave me a fighting chance, I still struggled to stay alive. I'm really bad at describing this battle, sorry, but everything just turned into a blur as I was so focused on the fight. I didn't want to lose and potentially kill Hat Kid, and have her drown in darkness forever.

I beat him after what felt like at least half an hour, and he skidded across the floor much like Mustache Girl does at the end of the battle in chapter 5. Hat Kid walked over and retrieved her top hat from the beaten Timmy, who started to fade, now that he had lost the hat.

Now I was back in control, two choices presented themselves, either leave Timmy here to fade into obscurity again, or take him through portal together with Hat Kid. As I said before, I felt sorry for him, he just wanted to exist, live and have fun, go on adventures and make friends. His actions were horrible and caused a lot of pain and trauma, but I felt bad, even though he was technically just a video game character that was scrapped.

I picked him up and just like the other characters I threw him through the portal, jumping in with Hat Kid right after. The screen faded to black and I ended up back at the title screen. I switched the game off right after, but not before selecting new game to see if it had returned to normal, which I think it has now...the only difference was the option the game gave me after I selected a file...

Start a new game as

Hat Kid Timmy

#ahit fanfic #ahit hat kid #ahit mafia goons #ahit mafia boss #ahit mustache girl #ahit cooking cat #ahit conductor #ahit dj grooves #ahit express owls #ahit moon penguins #ahit snatcher #ahit queen vanessa #ahit timmy

[joshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh]

Josh trivia: my first tumblr URL was the-legend-of-elder-scrolls (I actually can’t remember if the dashes were there though lol), with “the legend of” referring to guess what, and the Elder Scrolls referring to, uh, yeah.

Skyrim’s a game that throughout my life I’ve probably put over 2000 hours in. I don’t actually know the exact number - I’ve played it through I think 3 different Xbox 360s with lots of corruption across them all, and even outside of the Xboxes failing me I’ve had plenty of 200+ hour files where I got bored of the character I was playing or bored by having done every major questline and would just start new files that would get however far they do.

Obsession went beyond just playing the game as well - my favourite YouTube channel was Fudgemuppet and I’d watch tons of other channels too, especially modded content, I think longing for the PC version of the game while I remained trapped on console lol. I’d stare at the UESP for hours, get into arguments in comment sections, Facebook even had a political beliefs thing you could add in your personal info for some scuffed reason where I established myself as a firm follower of the Stormcloaks. I was too stupid to get dosbox running on my laptop so I couldn’t play Arena and Daggerfall, and I was too “I don’t have a way to digitally use cash at all” to play Morrowind, but I could certainly get Oblivion on Xbox 360 as well and... not quite play the fuck out of it to the same degree because man that core gameplay feel is very rough around the edges, even compared to Skyrim. But still! For a few years I lived and breathed Skyrim and it was the best.

But yeah that, did kinda stop. Primarily because of how long I’d played the game for. It was just very easy for me to get bored of it. “Seen it all” mentality because true enough I’d finished every main guild questline and DLC story and Daedric quest like ten times over. I knew how to game the systems so strongly in my favour that I wasn’t so much “playing Skyrim” as I was just menuing all the challenge out of the game. I was also so committed to roleplaying specific characters with specific equipments that I’d almost lock myself out of doing fun things as well as purposefully kind of cheat the game (as much as 360 allows anyway) to achieve my desired build faster. But that’d mean once I had all the components of a build I’d kind of lose all desire to play that character anymore lol. I just lost the ability to actually enjoy the game anymore.

However, I’d never say I lost interest. There’s a classic question - if you could replay any game again for the first time, what’d it be? - obviously it’s purely a hypothetical you can never really do but, my answer’s probably Skyrim. And while I can’t replay it for the first time, perhaps if I give myself a good few years away from the game, it can feel fresh to me again? And that’s what I’ve done. After god knows how many years, I’ve gotten the game on PC and started finally replaying it. Several times before now I’d considered pulling the trigger and buying the Switch version for ease of accessibility - but the £50 price tag for an 11 year old game is steep lol. So we’re on PC now using Steam’s family sharing thing, since my little brother owns the game. It was actually helping him out with mods that kind of inspired me to push myself towards playing the game again, and yeah, here we are. I have Skyrim on Steam. We gaming.

Since it’s a relevant detail, I am running a couple of mods - but it’s important to me to fundamentally preserve the vanilla experience here. That’s what I fell in love with in Skyrim in the first place, and it’s what I’m here to re-experience all these years later. Accordingly, I’d describe basically every mod I downloaded as just adding a bit of atmospheric and some gameplay flavour. I didn’t even wanna fuck with Nexus so I’ve just gone workshop and downloaded the entire cities and villages enhanced collection, the entire sounds of Skyrim collection, what’s basically an immersive armours substitute adding the armours individually (I deliberately excluded one set that pushed outside the lore a bit too much for my taking) and an actual immersive weapons substitute just to get a couple more weapon types that still work with the world. I actually think the only gameplay mods I really got are a few that make like Daedric and other unique weapons a bit stronger to justify their lore position a bit more. For all intents and purposes though I really am just playing vanilla Skyrim but with a touch more atmosphere by way of sights and sounds. And that’s what I wanted.

Aside from that, the one other rule I’ve really set for myself in order to get the most out of this is just try play it like it’s my first time. By which I mean, let myself get distracted. Don’t lose myself in overarching goals. Wander into that cave. Take your time exploring. Chat with NPCs. I have a character, but I’m not really roleplaying. I’ve not specifically decided on an armour set I’d really like. I’m playing on apprentice even to avoid getting bored by damage spongy combat encounters. On finishing Helgen I walked westward, away from Helgen and that first main story segment I’ve done to death. I’ll get back to it eventually, sure, but I’m not interested in the urgency anymore. Instead I met Angi in her cabin in the southern mountains of Skyrim, where she trained my archery - which is not a thing I think I was ever even aware of having existed. Then I went down to Falkreath, where I learned that the current Jarl is a lazy bastard whose uncle the former Jarl was basically demoted in what almost seems to be an Imperial ploy. It’s weird, a younger Josh got so wrapped up in Tamriel’s version of the creation myth or whatever that I didn’t even really engage with the minutiae of actual current lore in just Skyrim as a place. And sure, reading wiki pages for hours has its charm, but just playing the game itself and talking to people and reading books? This is what I missed. This is what’s making Skyrim fun for me again.

I don’t know if I have a fun or interesting or really at all conclusive way to approach this post. I’m really just playing Skyrim again and wanted to talk about it, for nobody’s sake but my own. I’m just so happy to finally be playing it again.

#29.12.22 #skyrim #elder scrolls #the elder scrolls #thing is i might actually have one of those as a tag but i'm not sure which #and either way they're not actually completely up to date at all #i just #eh #want ease of access i suppose

[enter-the-phantom]

I almost tagged you in that horse game post bc I know you play them and I don’t doubt that there is some drama and I do kinda want to know about it.. but anyways sorry & wishing you drama free game time 🙏

Basically, horse people are, more often than not, catty and cliquish gatekeepers. This extends into the virtual world.

Star Stable is my main one and boy howdy. People claw each other’s eyes out over things like the correct names for coat colours, whether it’s dressage or drill, whether we deserve the game experience we paid for, etc. There’s all these Star Stable “influencers” on YouTube who don’t help to quell fights, and there’s been some controversy recently over “game ambassadors”, how they’re chosen, and favouritism. Riding Clubs can be really bitchy, throwing people out for not buying certain clothes or horses. Even my usually chill and cool riding club got hit with some friendship drama recently involving the admins and is starting to fall apart.

One good example is this coat colour they released, a peacock Appaloosa. People lost their shit over this horse and whether or not he was based on some real-life stud with a genetic illness carried on his coat gene and if buying that horse was supportive of real life irresponsible breeding practices. You’d get bullied if you were caught riding around on that damn Appaloosa. Something similar happened when some bridles were released or some shit that some people said were abusive and others said weren’t (someone in the horse community is always accusing someone else of abuse or being irresponsible. It’s like every horse person is the only good horse person and everyone else is trash).

Some recent drama sprang up over the new character models, too. They released some new body types in beta because up until now we all had one very outdated character model that couldn’t be customised very well. The problem is that all the new body types look the exact same—they’re all bigger girls. So now there’s accusations of fatphobia against people who want a wider range of body types (including large bodies!). People are also losing their shit over SSO confirming that male PC’s will never be a thing because the game has a theme of sisterhood and girl power and that made a bunch of people mad (even though facial hair is available as an accessory and the game is supportive of transwomen).

And then there was all that drama when they made Alex a lesbian and Rowan and Syntax nonbinary, because the horse community has a huge queerphobia problem…

Basically horse people, both online and in real life, suck. Stay away from them if you know what’s good for you.

No this doesn’t go for ALL horse people, I do know some genuinely kind ones—they’re just rare. Yes I sound salty because yes I am salty. I’ve been mistreated by a lot of horse people, and their behaviour is common knowledge by now.

#discourse #ask enter

[foxstens]

thinking about it.... i did in fact grow up playing games

i don’t know why i keep thinking of myself as someone who didn’t grow up with games and is a casual gamer/new to gaming. i guess it might just be because the games i grew up with nobody ever mentions, and the games most people grow up with i’m just getting to experience now. i also didn’t grow up with any consoles or anything to play games on besides a pc, which definitely adds to it. but the thing is, i /did/ actually grow up playing games and have been playing games for most of my life. and now i’m going to talk about it.

for some context, according to my mom we first got a computer when i was like 6 yrs old, so around 2003-2004, which i don’t remember at all and i have no idea what games i might have played on it. probably stuff that was already installed since i wasn’t yet computer-savvy lmao. what i do remember is our second computer, which we got probably around 2006 and used for like 10 years, until i started college.

i remember some of the games i played on that quite vividly. hercules, tarzan, jazz jackrabbit 2 which kinda scarred me for life, and both me and my mom played a lot of luxor and shanghai ii dragon’s eye. idk for how many years i played these games but i do know i never actually finished any of them.

then i just stopped playing those, probably because i got into winx club which then took up all my free time and also introduced me to browser-based games, which i then went on to play for a good few years. i played all sorts of things on shockwave, miniclip, agame, friv, girlsgogames. 

around the same time i got introduced to farmerama by my cousins and spent way too much time on there, like i’d actually rush to finish my homework so i could harvest my stuff on time oh mygodddddd. i still have that account and check in occassionally, though it’s mostly lost its magic by now.

in high school my time spent gaming got drastically reduced bc it’s when i got into 1d and tumblr, but i still played a lot of temple run and pou during classe. at some point i also got introduced to transformice by my cousin, which i spent way too much time on and got really good at. then i got to watch my other cousin play ori and the blind forest as well as one of the assassin’s creed games, probably the first

this was in my last year of high school, and i got into ori myself but for some reason didn’t do so with assassin’s creed at the time. at the time i was into reading so apart from ori i mostly just played online games while listening to audiobooks. i also played need for speed most wanted 2005 at some point, i loved it a lot and spent a lot of time on it though i never finished it. 

it’s in college that i started actually looking into pc specs and what games i could run + which of those games would actually be up my alley. i didn’t think i’d like it but after i saw hollow knight recommended all the time everywhere, i finally tried it out and could run it perfectly though i did drop it the very first time i tried it. 

so i guess that’s really what got me into gaming as i do it now, but i have in fact always been a gamer. and not a very casual one tbh. 

#my posts #my rambles #long post #read more #gameblogging #i was just thinking about this one day #and realized that i've kinda been lying to myself for years

[oshicakes]

when your classmates tease you with other guy

pairings. kageyama tobio x reader, suna rintaro x reader, kenma kozume x reader

genre. fluff

an. to anon, this is your request. hope you'll like it hehe. its kinda long, im sorry sksksks have a nice day!

other: shirabu and futakuchi, kunimi and hoshiumi, sakusa and oikawa, miya twins, aone and yamaguchi, konoha and semi

Kageyama Tobio

your relationship with him is still new, like a weeks. so not a lot of people knew about it.

it was a fine day when someone from the other section confessed to you infront of your classmates.

it was embarassing, to the point you don't know what to do. the guy made you accept the letter he gave you and ran away.

leaving you alone with your teasing classmated and the knowing look of some students from other section and year.

you didn't miss the look that kageyama have when your eyes met with his. he knew that guy who confessed to you, it's his classmate.

althroughout the class, he stared intently at the guy's back. if looks can kill, that guy's already dead by now.

in your case, everyone around you is teasing you. you already told them about having a boyfriend, it's kageyama.

"stop lying, y/n. we just went to karaoke last week and you said you're single. besides we didn't hear about him courting you or even confessing, he's only interested in volleyball, so it's impossible."

you're really offended with what they said about him but instead of arguing with them, you just keep your mouth shut.

it's been three days, and you are forced to accept the love letter within those days. at the same time, kageyama's really in the foul mood. his teammates talked to you about this. so you came up to the solution of talking to the guy even if he ran away gain.

"can we talk, please?" you talked to him. he vigorously nodded and followed you until you reach a more peaceful surroundings. you also didn't miss the knowing looks and the teases that were thrown at you by your classmates.

"im sorry, but i can't accept your confession. i already have a boyfriend."

he just stand there with now a blank face. "but you took the letter i made."

"you forced it in my hand then ran away before i could reject you."

"just one date, y/n. then i'll leave you alone." he desperately said.

"im really sorry, i can't do that."

before anything could happen, a ball hit his back. it was not hard and not that soft too, just enough to make him flinch away from him.

you we're about to check on him when someone grab your wrist. it was kageyama. wearing a scary aura around him. "what do you think you're doing with my girlfriend?"

"k-kageyama? he's your boyfriend, y/n?"

"yes, got a problem with that?" he said. "if you don't have anything to say, go home. leave y/n alone or else you'll get to taste another spike on you. but this time its more harder and it'll land on your face."

the guy was about to say something when kageyama glared at him then the guy just walked away. it was weird but it somehow relieved you. "are you okay? are you hurt?"

"im okay, tobio."

"ill walk you home."

"okay. but please refrain from hitting someone with that ball. i know how powerful you are."

"i won't promise you anything, y/n."

"tobio." you said in a warning tone.

"okay, okay." he surrendered. you kiss his cheeks as a thank you for somehow saving you. he blushed profusely. see, he's a cute litol bean.

the next day, the news about you and kageyama spread around your class and his class. all day, kageyama just wear his smirking but scary but still smirking beacuse of happiness face.

Suna Rintarou

your relationship was a secret, to spare you to the chaotic twin. he doesn't want you to be bothered by them. although you told your classmates that you're in a relationship with your mom's friend's son, which is true.

knowing that you're taken, they didn't stop shipping you with your classmate who always talks to you.

ofcourse, you denied and said you have a boyfriend but they keep on teasing the both of you. it lasted like two weeks and each day, you just want to shout to them to stop.

welp, you didn't know that this day would come. he eventually spread that your his lover now.

it you confronted him infront of your classmates. although he whispered to you that he was just messing around and he just see you as a friend. which made you sigh in relief.

you tried to make him stop with what he's doing but he cut you off and laughed. he pulled you next to him. "come on, y/n. just play along with this. look how funny their faces are." he whispered to you. "sorry, my girlfriend is a not in the mood."

"she's your what?" a voice coming from your behind. oh no, you know that voice. you glance behind you and saw your boyfriend standing there. the guy face him and made you too.

"she's my girlfriend." he confidently said, he even put his arms around your shoulder.

his eyes are now menacing, jaw clenched and fist are closed tightly. you gulped because of that. "really? if you're y/n's boyfriend, then did you know that i slept at their house yesterday? y/n cooked me a breakfast, also prepared a bento for me, and we kissed before coming here."

the guy and your classmates we're speechless, like their mouths and eyes are literally wide open. you mentally face palmed, and you could also feel your face heat up.

he grabbed you away from the guy and claim you infront of them by encircling his arms around my waist and resting his chin on your shoulder. he even kissed your cheeks.

"don't claim other's girlfriend, got that? you're lucky we're not in the gym or else a ball will hit you directly on your face."

after that, he held your hands and walked away from your classmates. before the both of you could get away completely, the twins and some of his teammates blocked the way. "oh great."

"damn! you have a cute girlfriend and you didn't even bother to tell us?" osamu said.

in the end, both of you got cornered by his teammates and made you answer their questions and listen to their rants for an hour. while you classmates specially the guy keep on apologizing to you and him. you assure them that it's okay, but don't do it again.

"stop using your phone, y/n. give me your attention."

"okay, okay. what do you want to do?"

"sleep." then he pulled you and made you lay beside him and locked you between his arms.

Kenma Kozume

both of you never intended to make it a secret, it's more like you date privately. you know.

you don't know if your classmates know that you and kenma are a couple. but you mostly hang out whenever it's break and lunch along with the other volleyball players.

it was a usual day where your classmates invited you to play with them in a game called valorant. and your in kenma's house.

the game ended after a few rounds. they keep pairing you up with this boy in your class. they keep teasing you with him like, "you two have a good chemistry in this, why don't you just date", "you'd be a great duo!"

it happens that the issue was brought to your class, now all of your classmates tease the both of you to each other.

you explained that you already have a boyfriend, but they acted like didn't hear you, instead they said that "oh really! he's your boyfriend, y/n?!" now, you don't know if they misheard it or they're just being dumb. it goes on for weeks.

you're in kenma's house once again. both of you are playing when that guy invited you to play. so you accepted, you tag kenma along.

as the game was going, your classmate that was playing too keep on teasing the both of you. they didn't know that your boyfriend can here them. you looked at him and you can't read his face.

however, who ever tease you with that guy, they end up being dead. the game ends, your team wins thanks to kenma but what shook you was, "hey, y/n. would you mind going out with me?"

"im sorry but i have a boyfriend already."

"it's just a date and he wouldn't know about it." he already know! he's beside me looking intently on the screen and his grip on the mouse are tight, you wanted to say to him.

kenma muted his and your mic. "tell him you'd agree but in one condition, he needs to win against you. 1v1. and if he lose tell him to get lost. but ill play it instead of you." then he umute your mic.

his brows we're almost meeting, waiting for you to say it. you cleared your throat. "ill agree of you win against me in a 1v1 game."

"sure!" that made them shout and cheer. kenma pushed your chair and move his infront of your pc.

the game ended with kenma winning the game. "one more time, y/n. ill be serious this time." the guy said. you looked at kenma and he just nodded. "okay."

and again, kenma won. "hey, uhm.. are you serious about it, y/n? you know we can still go out if you want."

this time kenma answered him. "you lose, so get lost! don't bother my girlfriend anymore." after that he disconnected.

"kozume." you caressed his arms when you saw how he grip his mouse tightly. "calm down, please. even if you lose or win, i wouldn't dare to date him. i love you, okay?"

he faced you and buried his face on your chest. "im sorry, i lost my cool. he just got into my nerves." you're now caressing his soft hair. "its okay. let's eat dinner at my house, mom made something for us."

the next day he walked you to your class which is new to you but you have a hint on what's going on with his mind. it's a great timing that the guy opened the door so he saw you kissing kenma's cheeks. you instantly pulled away.

"you're the one i defeated yesterday, right?" he looked at the boy. "before you date and steal y/n away from me, make sure you're strong enough to win against me, got that?"

everyone went silent, including your classmates. he looked inside your classroom. "enablers." then looked at you. "wait for me later, okay? mom's home so she wants to see you. see you later."

after that he walked to his class which is just next to yours. he glared one more time at the guy before going in.

#haikyuu #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu headcanons #kageyama tobio x reader #kageyama x reader #kageyama headcanons #suna rintaro x reader #suna x reader #suna headcanons #kenma kozume x reader #kenma x reader #kenma headcanons

[struggling-with-time]

Rainy days [Corpse x reader]

Paring: Corpse husband x Female!reader

Summary: “corpse x fem!reader ( she’s also a youtuber ) where they are just friends for a few years, but reader has been developing feelings for a while now. with corpse’s fan base growing so quickly, there’s also a lot of growing attention from other girls ( fans & other social media influencers ). corpse is happy with all the attention, while it is breaking the reader’s heart more every day. basically, super angsty lol and it’s totally up to you how you want to end it!” requested by anon

“please make one where like the reader and corpse fought so its like raining outside and yk the cliche type” requested by anon

Warnings: Angst and jealousy, kinda sad, I’m sorry

Words: 1.8k

A/N: Open for requests. Two requests for one.

Read part 2 cloudy afternoons here

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

You’re happy for Corpse, of course you are. What good friend wouldn’t be happy for their friend when they suddenly start to shoot for the stars? You definitely would. Right? It’s not like it hurts to watch him take in all these girls that throw themselves at him, he has never been happier for the many years you’ve known him. His YouTube channel is finally paying the bills for him, and you’re happy he doesn’t have to fear getting an eviction note, for dancing on the line a little too long. You’re happy that he has all these new friends. You’re happy he’s enjoying himself. You’re happy, because he’s happy.  So why does it hurt so much?

You’ve had feelings for your best friend for quite some time. You tried to push them away, which in return just seemed to cultivate them and make them stronger. You tried your damn best just to be his quirky happy best friend that was along with him for the ride. You never minded being the one to pick up the pieces when he fell apart. He would do the same for you… He would do the same for you, right?

You wipe away a tear escaping from your eye. You’re sitting in the shower crying on the floor. This is really what you’ve become? You think to yourself, as you lean your head back against the wall, looking up at the wooden ceiling.

He would do the same for you…

You dryly laugh to yourself, of course he wouldn’t, because then he would have known when you started pulling away. You wipe the tears away, get up and rise off your face once more, before stepping out. You look at where your mirror used to be. You took it down, not able to face yourself was easier than to accept this is just how you look permanently now. Dark circles underneath your eyes, as they’ve sunken quite a bit.

You kind of forgot how you really looked sometimes, until you caught yourself in something reflective, like your pc when it ran out of power, or your metallic glazed mug. You smile bitterly at the memory, Corpse had bought it to you when you reached 100.000 subs on YouTube, saying the play button wasn’t enough. It used to be a prized possession, now it was one of your worst.

You’re happy you build your YouTube brand on variety gaming, without a face cam. You couldn’t imagine having to explain away the way you looked. The monotone in your voice was hard enough.

I was just having an off day

Sorry, kind of sick today

My microphone isn’t picking up my voice probably.

You sigh to yourself as you collect your phone, and your empty bag. The fridge doesn’t fill itself. You’re pretty sure your fans caught onto something being wrong by the 4th excuse. You lock the door behind you, and glace up at the sky. It seems to be getting darker. You sigh as you realize you’re not going to be back home before it’s raining.

You walk the short distance down to the bus as you wait for it to arrive, you scroll through your twitter feed. It’s filled with pretty girls, much prettier than you are, throwing themselves at Corpse. You get a sudden urge to throw your phone into the passing traffic, but money has been tight lately with your down tuning of content, to take more time to be able to self-pity in the living room with a shitty romance show going on.

You really lost your best friend to your own feelings, huh. What an anticlimax.

You step onto the bus, not noticing the black dressed, black masked guy in the end of it. Watching you intentionally. If you had been able to read minds, you would hear the ongoing battle in his head on whether or not to approach you.

The bus pulls up the grocery store and you get off. Not sparing the other two passengers getting off a second thought. You pull your jacket closer together, as the wind starts getting colder. You finally arrive in the store, just a few seconds before the rain starts to drop.

The calming ominous music of the store fills your eyes, as you focus on getting something edible that isn’t directly just sugar with more sugar. You pick your groceries carefully, nothing that needs a lot of preparation. But if you eat one more tv meal, you’re going to throw it up. You’re too distracted by what pasta to choose, that you don’t realise the guy in black has now passed you for the 5th time, while you’re in aisle 9.

You choose both and head for the register. You sigh as you watch the long line, there’s only one way out, and you’re certainly not leaving your groceries now. You step in line. And pull out your phone. The lock screen taunting you with a picture of you and Corpse mushed together somehow in his gaming chair, you’re pretty sure it was Dave that took the photo. You shake your head and check the time. The bus just left. You sigh knowing there is a little over an hour before the next one leaves. Fucking public transport.

It finally becomes you, you watch the price tick up further and further. You take your card out. Swipes it through.

Declined.

What? You try it again

Declined.

C’mon, it has got to work. You try again

Declined.

And again

Declined.

And again

Declined.

You smile apologetic to the cashier, as you start to figure out what you won’t be needing too much.

“I’ll pay for her.”  A deep voice speaks further down the line. You know exactly the person whose voice that is.

“Please, you don’t have to-“ You watch as Corpse steps out of the line and puts a box of cereal on the register for the cashier to ring up with the rest of your stuff.

“I don’t-“

“That’ll be 79 dollars and 32 cents, please.” The cashier ignores you.

Corpse pays and gets the receipt, knowing you’re going to beg him for you to pay him back. You used to do the same when you were little. Corpse stands by as he watches you pack your groceries, and he waits for you. He barely recognized you in the bus. It’s been weeks since you last spoke, and even longer since you last saw each other. He knows you were getting bad, but not this bad. He don’t know why he never reached out he knows he should. But there are too many unsaid things hanging in the air, and neither of you wanting to be the one to pick the first one.

He reaches out to take one of the two bags. But you take it right underneath him, and walk to the doors, leaving him to hurry after or be left behind.

“Y/N I-“

He gets surprised by the rain, he hadn’t noticed the darkening sky earlier. You keep walking until he calls out after you again.

“Y/N! Please!”

You stop in you tracks. To think you had missed hearing your name from his lips, he uses it like it’s not the only thing you have left that’s your own.

He jogs the remaining distance and puts his hand on your shoulder, and you let him turn you around to make him face you. He’s not sure if it’s the rain, or if it’s tears that’s starting to fall. He takes the rest of your face in, the dark circles, the clear weight loss. He know, you don’t know how much you don’t look like yourself.

“Listen, thank you, I’ll pay you back next month. But if you’re not going to say anything, I have places to be, and-“

He puts his hand on her chin caressing it. She suddenly looks so small standing there in front of him. You quickly pull yourself back, wanting to lean into his touch, but knowing that it would only make what hurts, hurt more in the end.

“What did you want?” You snap at him. And something snaps in him too, as his brows furrows together.

“Oh I don’t know. Say hi to my best who just up and disappeared from the face of earth two months ago. I wonder what I want.” He snaps back at you, his deep voice nearly emitting a growl of frustration from him.

“So what, that’s what it takes 2 months before you want to find me. Did you get tired of all those girls throwing themselves at you? Did you get tired of your new friends you just cast me aside from? Did you get tired of all the money? Please do tell.” You stretch out your arms in a welcoming stance.

Corpse takes a step back, you’ve never yelled at him like this before. Tears streaming down your face as you’re soothing anger.

“…You think I threw you aside?” Corpse sucks in a breath waiting for your anger to come at him, but instead you suddenly look small again.

“Didn’t you Corpse? The excuse why I could never come over anymore, why you never had time. I was happy for you, you know, I supported you all the way. Heck I even fucking loved you, and you cast me aside, you up and threw away so many memories and a long friendship, just because I suddenly didn’t fit into your new group.” You look him straight in the eyes. “Corpse, I’m tired okay. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t keep picking up your pieces and help you reassemble yourself, for you to keep casting me aside. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t need your pity; I don’t need anything from you. I’ll make sure you get the money first thing next month.”

She takes a step away from him, the before intimate atmosphere now fully escaped.

“All I ask is that we part here. I love you too much to watch you fall apart again.” Your voice is trembling as you turn around heading for the bus stop, leaving Corpse in the rain to fend for himself.

#corpse husband #corpse #corpse husband x reader #corpse x reader #corpse husband fic #corpse husband fanfic #corpse husband x y/n #corpse husband imagine #delias own writing

[loquaciousquark]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E111 (Redux! Oct. 13, 2020)

Gooooood evening good evening good evening, all! I started the VOD late for this recap and somehow the first four or so minutes of the show have a Twitch audio copyright claim, so I am reduced to only reading Brian's lips when he asks if we're on the internet. Hilariously, Marisha's background room is a comfy-looking blue/gold fabric wall with a ceramic colorful abstract lamp and a yellow silk scarf over the lampshade, and Taliesin's is an industrial looking games room in grey and black with multiple monitors, overhead speakers, and mysterious metal fixtures behind him. What a treasure this group is, honestly.

Tonight's guests: Marisha Ray & Taliesin Jaffe, discussing episodes 110 and 111 again. I wildly speculate once more about what might have caused their absence: jury duty? Sam appearing on The Masked Singer? Something to do with the animated show? One day, we’ll know, one day... (One day this “copyrighted audio” section will come back from the wars, too. Ugh!) Finally! The audio comes back to reveal Brian discussing the endless reality of digital meetings and Marisha talking about (I think) her glare-reducing glasses she’s wearing. Welcome to the New Age (welcome to the New Age, to the New Age).

Announcements: Marisha suggests checking out Dimension20, another live tabletop gaming group, which premieres live on Wednesdays at 4pm (CollegeHumor). 

Brian immediately wants to know how they feel about the revelation that Molly is alive. Taliesin’s personal reaction: he “knows some things” he can’t talk about and is aware of several possibilities that might be going on, but had a sneaking suspicion that there would not be a body for them to find. He says it’s almost all there for anyone to see in past material. Marisha’s personal reaction: she just wants to know how she’s doing with her theories, & was trying to block Tal’s face out deliberately as she was going off on her theories in the last episode. Taliesin says he thought her ideas were pretty good!

Cad has no clue what to think - it’s like listening to your friends talk about Buffy. Marisha thought it was a 50/50 Molly would still be there, but Beau had no idea. Not that it mattered, because as soon as Matt went through with it the reveal still blew their minds. Tal laid out his plans for the character with Matt during Campaign One (towards the end) after they all got their VM tattoos.

It is a “horrifying and gross” thing to dig up a body, and Beau was pretty reluctant to do it. Tal, as Cad: “Sometimes dead’s better.” The moral quandary of trying to speak with a dead friend was very different here than the frequent occasions they used the spell in C1.

Taliesin says his poker face is very bad, so it’s easier for him to over-react and let it all play out. The only other player he can see very easily from his place in their current setup is Travis, and because he knows Travis doesn’t watch TM, tweet, or participate in social media, he admits he thoroughly enjoyed watching Travis freak out at his freaking out. He says he only knew about 20% of what Matt described at the end of that episode. He was picking things to mug to increase Travis’s surprise. I love this so much.

Taliesin provided the table left leg shake; Travis provided table right. Ha!

Beau is really accepting her role in the Cobalt Soul. It’s good when “as a person, you feel like you can settle into your calling. Sometimes you can do more from the inside than fighting from the outside.” It’s a mirrored but opposite path of Keyleth from C1; Beau felt like she was too good for her duty, while Keyleth thought she wasn’t good enough.

Caduceus is not a big believer in jumping to conclusions. He does have an idea/notion of the “city of the undead” and thinks all this necrotic energy must come from somewhere, and wonders if this is the “capital of anti-death.” He’s willing to believe whatever he sees. This is one of the few things that trigger a bit of loathing and disgust in him. It was terrifying that the Wildmother didn’t know anything.

Beau is pretty confident in her Charlie Day impression laying-out-the-research last episode. She enjoyed taking the things that were known & extrapolating around them; this is a huge facet of Marisha’s own personality and she really enjoys it, so she built a character this time that would allow that kind of puzzle-solving. It’s also why she repeatedly notes when Beau journals, so she can avoid metagaming. Trent’s mention of Vess Durogna’s tomb raiding was completely circumstantial, and the only reason she’d made the connection to the Tombtakers was because she’d recently reviewed those notes for a separate unannounced project. Sometimes she tries to make connections and Matt is like, “It was...just descriptive. Just flavor. The curtains were red...” and she has to discard a paragraph of notes. She feels like it’s still something they have to do because of “look at what he does! Look! It’s totally valid!”

Cosplay of the Week: @kitsunstudios with a gorgeous Caduceus with a very intricate silk vest.

Caduceus’s takedown of Trent! One of my favorite moments in the entirety of C2. Taliesin felt Trent was an asshole; Caduceus felt sorry for him because of how dumb he thought he was. Caduceus’s response was "this is the dumbest man I’ve ever met in my life. He’s so dumb! Is nobody going to tell this guy how dumb he is? Oh, they’re all freaked out. Somebody needs to tell this guy he’s an idiot before somebody gets hurt.” (Marisha: “Before?”) Tal says it was the product of several years of therapy and many drunk conversations with Whitney Moore. It was from a genuine place of concern from Caduceus. “How are you allowed to have this much power and be that dumb?”

Brian loved how funny it was to watch everyone tiptoe around Trent and then Caduceus bulldoze through the end of the meal.

Taliesin: “Damage doesn’t make you interesting or better. It’s not what makes you good. Character isn’t found in damage. Just recovery.”

Brian & Marisha commiserate going through the stage where believing surviving something automatically made you a stronger person, better for the pain; instead it just meant you had to pick up the pieces after. Marisha talks about how strength through survival may be true for some people, but it shouldn’t be considered a necessity. Taliesin talks about how he used to think he had to be miserable to write. Brian talks about how believing he liked reading and writing miserable things only limited him for years.

Marisha feels it’s a C2 theme that almost all the PCs have someone trying to handwave or take credit for their accomplishments or explain their pain as being for their own good (Trent, Beau’s dad, Obann). She thinks it’s interesting to see all the various ways people try to take credit for your work/delegitimize you as a person. She loves that RPGs allow you to explore these odd moralities in interesting ways. The only way to fight it is to have a sense of your own self-worth, which is a problem a lot of the M9 started with.

Caduceus likes everyone, and really likes people who appear to need role models (Eodwulf). “With the right friends and the right bar and the right attitude, I think he’d be okay. Come over here where it’s so much better. That seems like an exhausting friendship that you have there.”

Marisha loves the mix of personalities in the M9; Veth, Cad, & Jester were all “we kind of like them!” after the dinner, and she immediately made eye contact with Travis and they both shook their heads. She knows Beau has to go along with it for Caleb’s sake for now, but she & Fjord are pretty sus of Trent’s proteges.

Beau is less concerned about Artagan’s relationship to Jester because “he showed his ass--she’s less worried about Jester now because a little of the magic is gone.” It’s a little like becoming an adult and realizing your parents are also just adults & human. Caduceus wasn’t suspicious of the Traveler for a long time until they got to the island. Aside: Taliesin loves the pantheon in D&D. “The notion of attempting to apply common Western conceptions of religion to a world where you have a pantheon of interventionist gods as baseline makes no sense to me. Everyone admits that every other god is there and doing shit; it has more in common with ancient Rome than anything else.” Now that he knows it was a con, he feels the wind had been taken out of it. He does have a sense that Jester’s gotten back together with an ex: “I hope that I’m really happy for you.” They’re both interested to see how Jester navigates the new relationship.

My internet goes out, of course. I panic for a second, thinking I’ve lost everything above, but all is well! Thanks, Form History Control addon!

Marisha loved punching Artagan, but regretting rolling so poorly. “I miss violence.” Dani lets us know it’s been about four episodes since the last battle.

There’s no way the Cobalt Reserve doesn’t have a single document on the Eyes of Nine. Beau believes “there are no real secrets” because people are just bad at not writing things down. For there to be no information at all seems really suspicious for her.

Fanart of the Week: @oddalchemist on twitter with some awesome Beau conspiracy red-thread boards overlaid a distant shadowy Molly walking away.

Caduceus feels a little guilty for really enjoying his time right now with the M9 and not wanting to go home. He’s starting to suspect that he’s going to go home very different than when he left. “He has the softest problems. I don’t know if I want to move back in with Mom & Dad.”

Beau is trying to get comfortable with the idea of being happy. Jester is probably Beau’s first real best friend & one of the first healthy female friendships she’s ever had. As long as she still has Jester in her life, she doesn’t care. For Yasha... “At the end of the day, Beau is a lonely person and has always been a lonely person. And I think you kinda reach this point where once you’re not lonely anymore, you can kind of come out of the fog and realize that was horrible! And terrifying! And is even more terrifying now that I know what I could have, and I don’t want to go back to that. At the end of the day Beau doesn’t want to be lonely anymore. There’s always been that flirtation with Yasha, but everyone had to figure their own shit out. And now it feels like it’s coming out a little bit of that haze, maybe this actually could be...” There are a lot of ways they complement each other & are good-different from each other. Marisha believes people can be attracted to more than person at once.

Caduceus doesn’t think nature turned against him on Rumblecusp, it was just a reality of nature being dangerous and violent. “He has a complex relationship with nature.” He doesn’t expect special treatment.

Thoughts on the mansion: “Man, it’s nice to be seen.” Marisha: “I don’t know how I ended up becoming the Scanlan of this campaign, but I’m living for it.” It felt like an echo of “I’m better for having known you.” They compare Marisha taking specific notes on the campaign to Liam taking specific notes on people’s favorite tapestries, comics, etc.

They talk about missing theme parks and daydream a park version of the mansion in CritRoleLand. It’s lovely.

Taliesin never expected Divine Intervention to work; he just wanted to roll some dice. He’s still processing what he saw/heard. They all agree it was very useful in the Vokodo fight.

Vilya! Marisha: “Ah! Ah! Ah!” As a player, Marisha was so deep in Beau’s eyes she didn’t pick up it was Vilya at first (especially since Matt really emphasized they should not be looking for C1 NPCs). Marisha’s brain melted. She bawled her eyes out on the ride home after that episode. Right after it ended, Laura told Marisha “Keyleth finally gets her happy ending,” and it makes Marisha emotional again since Keyleth’s story ended so bittersweetly. She talks about the very real feelings of “just wanting them to be happy, though!” She went back and listened to all her old Keyleth playlists. Everyone was teary after the episode. “Everyone has these 100% real memories of being these characters and having these good times.”

And that’s that for that! Thanks for your patience, all, and is it Thursday yet?

#critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina #talks machina spoilers #long post for ts

[queen-of-bel]

Oh jeez, I just realized I never wrote up my thoughts on Demon’s Souls so...

Okay, I gotta first start off by saying that I’ve only done one playthrough, I’m planning on replaying once I finish Dark Souls, so I’m sure my thoughts will change some once I do another playthrough.

That being said~

Overall, the game is fantastic. Absolutely loved the atmosphere, the music, and just the general vibes this game gave off. 

The one thing I don’t feel qualified to comment on is the gameplay. I emulated the game on my PC, and my rom was... fucky, to say the least. Bosses spamming AOE or lunge attacks, enemies suddenly being granted teleportation abilities... I honestly wouldn’t have even known that these were bugs if I didn’t have friends telling me otherwise. Whatever my experience is, it is apparently atypical of how the game is supposed to be so... Oh well. I still had a fun time.

My world order was absolutely bonkers according to... literally everyone. I did Stonefang, Boletaria, Latria, Valley of Defilement, and then Shrine of Storms. I was really stubborn and didn’t want to move onto another world until I finished Boletaria, so...

So many designs absolutely fucked. The fat officials are absolutely amazing and that’s not a design I will forget any time soon. That design just screams gluttony and wealth. The shiny gold accents, the smooth plated face-- like this feels like someone who has been corrupted by greed through and through. Seeing him at the top of the stairs during the Tower Knight fight? You get huge “head honcho” vibes; someone who thinks he's above it all, and makes his underlings do the work for him.

Characters were great. Yuria and Biorr (rest in peace, brave soldier) were my faves (altho I may have come to be very fond of Ostrava if, you know, he survived...). Yurt and Patches were also cool, but in a “yeah you’re a neat character, but I will toss your lifeless corpse over a cliff” kinda way. Yurt dropped some absolutely sick armor, though. Whereas Patches only dropped... I don’t even remember what. Something useless.

In terms of areas, Latria was definitely my favorite. It was a great and eerie vibe, and I got to collect lots of friends :) Valley of Defilement was probably my least favorite. I really did not like the swamp area because I got lost so easily and moving so slowly just got... frustrating. That being said, Maiden Astraea was a heart-wrenching boss and I felt awful after that.

Valley of Defilement did, however, bring possibly the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen in a video game:

This fucked up little rat thing is an absolute mood.

Anyway, as it stands, Demon’s Souls is a solid 9/10. My guess is that this game will really shine with new game + playthroughs, so I’m anticipating the score to go up once I get around to the second playthrough.

#amelia plays demons souls

[spirit-shroud]

what are some roles that have been largely changed for cityrune? since you said queen was an influencer now :]

hi ty for asking me im vibrating. havent gotten to talk about this au now for three years and now that chapter 2 is like real and this time i can like........draw occasionally and i have more understanding of nuance...... [grips table] [screams]

this isnt quite what you asked but heres what's everyone from chapter 1 has been Up To with a little bit of context (and under a read more bc it got LENGTHY):

kris - professional stay at home teen (they live w/ asgore n help run the flower shop sometimes. this decision was entirely bc i dont like toriel). was wrongly diagnosed w Sudden Soul Rejection when they were incredibly young and given an experimental transplanted soul as a replacement. it works for them fine, give or take having to see gaster once a month for checkups. but sometimes the soul makes them skittish n decides they're going to sit in front of the pc and play 30 consecutive hours of a certain simulation game and not even let them drown people in the pool. if it were entirely up to them, they'd be like. passing out on the sofa to documentaries about bigfoot. or practicing cool knife tricks to impress their friends at their next tabletop meetup

- EDITED IN: the soul is kind of their friend. they are wearing a hypothetical get along shirt. most of the time, they agree on actions and things to do. tends to refer to themself + their soul as we/us which originally was just something they did in their head but they kept slipping in speech/text n just became a Thing of how they talk. switches to 'I/Me' whenever smth is wrong.

- also edited in: they believe the soul they have is their original soul bc nobody has told them otherwise. whenever theyre like 'oh yeah we think about our soul n view it as a separate entity to us like. all the time. it likes to hurt if we make too many choices it doesn't seem to like and kind of forces us to be a toned down version of what we want to be but thats just how souls are haha' and everyone is like.... 'Hey Kris That's Really Not How It Is.' theyre like. 'huh. gonna ignore that for now' - this was going to be a plot point

toriel - head of H0MEWOR1D (H01)'s department of education; kind of lost her roots as a simple math teacher as she was pushed into a lot of power she didn't even really seek out. divorced asgore over some miscommunications in their relationship; also loosely as a result of grief from asriel's death

asgore - the same. runs a lil flower/gift shop. people come in more to talk with him than to buy flowers most of the time, though

asriel Flowey - he's back in flower form, thanks to the government an accident. causes a lot of technology glitches wherever he goes, and wants revenge. isn't sure how to go about it. asriel "died" around 8 years before the story takes place and kris still misses him and refuses to even THINK about even the IDEA of calling someone their sibling after what happened, just in case it somehow happens a second time

susie - more of the same really. she spends most of her time either at grillby's (she's sort of become his assistant n helps with opening/closing. it just happened) or getting into low-stakes trouble w/ kris

noelle - she's in the city's equivalent of college and shes so tired. shes So Abysmally Tired n got kinda pushed 2 follow in her mom's footsteps. she's rarely around anymore except through text or on monsters & mages (dnd) night. (however.........she will come back w/ a long break n hang out w everyone again)

berdly - tbh i didnt even consider berdly when i made the au initially. idk what he's doing. probably in a similar situation to noelle??? canonically got kicked out of the M&M group due to clashes w/ other players but lurks in their group chat to posts memes sometimes

didnt rly think of any other of kris' classmates (+ their families) after ch1 and probably will continue to not, until chs 3-5 come out and i gotta whip up roles and histories for like. a lotta guys all of a sudden. i also forgot about noelle's parents

sans - runs a convenience store that everyone kind of thinks is a front, but also it has really cheap snacks and the local teens make a point of stopping there after school. so essentially, more of the same papyrus - similar to ut. is a very polite and sweet boy but you'll know when he's coming

grillby - he's back. he runs a bar like back in ut but the cozy vibes and weird-for-a-bar hours keep attracting kids who need parents, so half of his menu is comprised of overly sweet mocktails. usually only frequented by monsters

QC - same as usual. has a "rivalry" with grillbz but, theyre besties and have a book club

mettaton - he's real and he's back. he's similar to how he is back in ut w/ his EX body. likes to hang out at grillby's and talk to unsuspecting fans. has a show for everything

napstablook - similar to how they are in ut. helps mtt with making music sometimes. doesn't leave the house too often, but spends a lot of time posting on undernet

undyne - unfortunately. more of the same. she is a cop in the monster district. i am also upset by this but couldn't think of anything better for her

alphys - a doctor studying under dr. gaster in the hopes she'll one day take over his research. she spends most of her time as a nurse with a bigger title, though, and blocks out the weirdness of her job with anime.

gaster - weird guy. H01's top soul researcher and resident House wannabe. trying to manufacture the ultimate soul that can be controlled with simple internal switches, but so far he's only had 1 (very limited) success with a certain human. monsters just melt, and darkners just sorta......get weird... he's onto Something, though.

ralsei - lonely boy with some very strange hobbies. popular on UnderNet for poetry, baking videos, and general cryptid vibe. is the DM for the monsters & mages group (also seems to think everything is actually very fine in H01 when it is very much not)

lancer - about the same. professional Round Boy. lives w/ rouxls full time. follows susie around like a lost puppy and calls himself her "underling."

rouxls - runs a hotel/casino kind of deal where the objective Bad Guys hang out, and usually ends up doing any of the spade king's paperwork.

spade king - mafia godfather. kind of a dick. don't play cards with him

seam - works with the spade king as his right hand cat more or less because they have for a lot of years and are in that 'sunk cost fallacy' zone. thinks of retiring to a quiet life in the monster section of town like, daily

jevil - used to work with the spade king, but got imprisoned for Crimes. got weird after The Accident (separate from asriel's accident)

temmies (all) - dont really get mentioned except offhandedly but they run the monster space station. so far, are the only monsters who have ever been to space.

as far as chapter 2 goes:

yeah i dont have much so far for characters. in the original version of the au i accidentally made darkners as a whole just kinda..... not great? like all sorts of weird organized crime ties n sort of going out of their way to be A Problem to the city (not even in like. a revolution way. in a working against them but with the same goals kinda way). with the whole context it worked At The Time, bc i just had the spade king to look to as a villain, and also in this au the darkners are just trying to survive a world that ultimately was not built for them (that humans think they own, and monsters sort of... seeing this and wondering what it'll mean for them whichever one wins), but w/ new info abt how the dark world works n more guys to work with i want to kind of. edit the vibe a bit. like yea darkners will ultimately do whatever it takes to take over H01, but maybe in a better way than like. idk. all this. it doesnt have to be peaceful or anything it just has to be more adaptable as we meet more kinds of darkners

however yeah i thought up 'queen as some sort of childless mommy blogger/influencer' and that completely revived all memory i had of this au. she should be on mtt's talkshow. also she sells collectible wine glasses w/ her likeness

spamton is another one of gaster's failed soul experiments, but he hasn't melted yet, and seems............fine? sort of. so he hasn't gotten decommissioned yet. he does want to give you malware tho. hot monster singles in your area n all that

im blanking on the rest of the guys but i hope any of this was comprehensible

#kc takes questions #cityrune au #idk if tumblr still autotags things but if it does i am SORRY

[roguish-gallery]

Did you ever make that joker tier list, I always like seeing what people think of all the different ones. Though if they put Romero last I can no longer respect them.

LMAO I DID! I think I’ve made it kind of obvious in this blog but I... don’t... particularly... care... for... the joker.... unless he’s, y’know, fun to watch. Cause he’s a clown, and clowns are supposed to be entertaining. But since you politely brought it up, and and because I have a deep respect for mutual Romero-lovers, I guess this would be a good time to explain my rankings and just discuss my general thoughts on each clown:

General Thoughts:

For the most part, I don’t really care for the Joker. This is hardly an uncommon opinion here on tumblr, but I definitely fall on the side of the fandom that feels that he gets too much attention from DC. I get WHY they use him so often for films and comics, and I don’t have anything against *most* folks who consider them their favorite Batman villain, but at this point he’s used more for shock value and as a crutch instead of anything interesting. Like, instead of giving attention to the other Rogues, writers (at least for the comics) will try and make up some bullshit story that they can shoehorn the Joker into, ‘cause it sells. It’s tiring, and I feel like the character has lost his meaning; I can only read so many stories about the Joker, I don’t fucking know, wearing a suit made from dead babies and Jason Todd’s flayed corpse before I get sick of it.

I’m at the point where I’ll like any Joker who’s just fun to watch. I genuinely respect those who prefer darker interpretations of the character, but that isn’t me; I vastly prefer the lighthearted takes on him, because... at this point... writers who use the “cleaner” version of him tend to be more creative, since they actually have to write a Joker story that doesn’t rely on gore/torture porn.

TIER ONE:

Joker Baby: Self explanatory. Joker Baby is thematic, thoughtful, and intense. Everytime I watch this video, I shiver with fear and pleasure; something primal in me awakens whenever Joker Baby runs his fingers through his spray-on dyed hair, and ends up smearing green paint on his forehead- it represents the inner turmoil, the chaos, that resides within the disturbed body that is Joker Baby. Nothing can ever hope to top the artistic and cultural impact Joker Baby has had on society.

TIER TWO:

Batman Ninja: I genuinely believe that Batman Ninja is one of the most fun, organic, and creative things to come out from the Batman side of DC comics in like... hmmm... a decade, maybe (I could talk for hours about how much I love this movie but that’s something for a future post). This Joker is easily, and unironically my favorite interpretation of the character, period. I love his energy, his design, everything. This is the most fun I’ve ever had watching a Joker on-screen, and for that I’ve gotta give the film credit where it is due.

Batman ‘66: I looooove Caesar Romero. Batman ‘66 in general is one of my favorite pieces of Batman media, and I absolutely adore this Joker. The show is pure, genuine fun, and it’s nice to turn my brain off and watch a show where the entire cast was allowed to goof around. This Joker is just a cute, goofy little clown-man who likes to commit crimes, go surfing, turn Gotham’s water reserve into gelatin, and have wild orgies with Penguin, Catwoman, and the Riddler. I massively appreciate the hustle. I love his little mustache and his facial expressions. I’d give him a chaste little kiss on the cheek if I could.

The Batman: EXTREMELY CONTROVERSIAL TAKE BUT. I think TB!Joker is better than what people will give him credit for. I can only imagine how stressful it must have been to be the first Batman cartoon to follow BTAS and the writers for this show knew they were gonna be fucked no matter what they did with the Joker, so they just decided to try something completely different with him. Personally, I appreciate the new direction- he has a fun, unhinged energy. I’ve placed him higher than BTAS/BTNA!Joker simply because The Batman was the show that got me into the Rogues in the first place, and I’m just a bit closer to this Joker because of it. Also his vampire form was cool as FUCK in Batman Vs. Dracula and the scene where he gets drenched in blood at a blood bank is fucking awesome.

Batman the Animated Series/The New Adventures: Everyone loves BTAS’s Joker, and I’m no exception. Mark Hamill is fucking great, and the writers clearly knew the character well enough to create a version of him that can be fun and threatening. As an aside, I unironically like his redesign in BTNA- I remember Hamill mentioning somewhere that he thought it was neat that this Joker looked more like a shark (I’ll see if I can find a source on that... I think he said it in an interview with Kevin Smith?) and I kinda agree with him. the redesigns in the final season are hit or miss, but I didn’t get why so many people bitched about the Joker’s new look.

Batman Unlimited: Hear me out... Hear me out... Clown... funny... and cute... He wears a little crown and gives Solomon Grundy a little smooch on the cheek and it is as delightful as it sounds. Yes the Batman Unlimited films literally only exist to sell toys but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy them on some ironic level.

TIER THREE:

Lego Batman: He’s a gay icon. He has the range. Enough said.

White Knight: This is just a genuinely good, original take on the character, and the art in White Knight is absolutely gorgeous. 

Arkham: My friends and I joke that this Joker is basically a more unhinged version of BTAS! Joker and... yeah. I’m glad Hamill and Paul Dini got to fuck around with the character more, but I never really dwelled on the Joker parts of the games like I might have for other characters. I definitely liked him the most in Arkham Asylum, as he was more fun to watch. Arkham City was fiiiiine, but I think I replayed the game so much that I kinda got fatigued with everything about it. Genuinely hated his part in Origins, and I was pissed that he stole the attention from Black Mask and Bane (who’s the best fucking part of Origins IMO). I’ll admit that I... Haven’t... played... Knight yet (I have it on PC but my laptop is too wimpy to run it) but like... He’s dead at that point, so I’d assume he isn’t the main point of that game anyway. I love Mark Hamill and the fact I can personally beat the shit out of this Joker, so he’s ranked up pretty high for those reasons.

TIER FOUR:

Batman ‘89: TBH this Joker should be a rank higher, but I’m too lazy to hop onto PicsArt to change it. NIcholson was an excellent choice, and I apprecaite how this Joker makes use of the playful and unhinged aspects of the character. Also, his outfits are cute, and I love the museum scene.

Brave and the Bold: Technically this Joker SHOULD be ranked higher since he’s literally based on the more lighthearted comics in the 60′s but... ehhh... I haven’t really watched BATB so I don’t have any strong opinions on the show and how it handles the character. he’s ranked this high through beause I appreciate what they were going for.

Golden Age: The quality of comics are always subjective, based on the creative team behind them. Some I’ll like more, others less so, It’s kind of hard to rank the pre-52 comic version of the Joker because of this.

TIER FIVE:

Killing Joke: Read it, didn’t care for it. I acknowledge how massive the impact this comic had on... everything, but just because I recognize how important this graphic novel is, doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The Dark Knight: Ledger did an excellent job with the role, but uhh... I’m kind of sick of the alt-right chuds who are out there sucking this Joker’s dick. The fanbase definitely ruined the character for me.

TIER SIX:

99′: Eh

Endgame: No

Suicide Squad: NO

Death of the Family: Hate him. Despise him. Lame stupid dumb little edgy bitch.

Gotham (Jeremiah): I don’t particulary care for Gotham in general, but the only reason I ranked this Joker over Jerome is beause I thought it was kinda funny to see that they made him a little rat-man, and I liked watching all the fujoshi on here cry and complain that they can’t ship this version of the joker with the pre-pubescent Bruce Wayne in the show bc he’s too ugly.

Gotham (Jerome): stop shippping this freak (who is fucking eighteen years old) with a literal twelve year old child. what the FUCK is wrong with yall.

UNRANKED:

The Joker (2019): I don’t plan on watching this film, nor will I ever. I know this is ironic, coming from someone who runs a Rogue blog, but stuff that focuses primarily on a character’s deteriorating mental health makes me reaaaaallllllyyyyy anxious (it’s kind of a phobia) and considering that I don’t particularly the Joker, I have no reason to watch something I know will only give my dumb ADHD-ass intrusive throughts.

#tier list #this was nice to finally write out- I don't typically write Joker stuff unless someone prompts it #the joker #gonna tag this as discourse just to hopefully keep it out of ppl's feed #bc i know how... defensive... joker fans... can get... #discourse #long post

[retphienix]

Digging my 360 out is always a weird blast from the past for me, especially if I hook it up to an ethernet and look at more stuff (I recall getting really emotional over a lost family member's account still being there the last time I did this, I won't this time I promise).

Instead I just wanted to point at some of what shows up on My Games tab because it's a fun mix of good memories and things I don't recall at all.

Beat Hazard, played a bunch of songs on that.

My nerd ass getting all the achievements on Fallout 3 and NV because I was obsessed.

GAME ROOM existing, oof.

Hitman Absolution was my first hitman game if you don't count a handful of minutes at a relatives! I LIKED it! What the FUCK! lol I'm glad I liked it, but I honest to god could not go back to it today, I'm certain of that.

Maxed cheevos on I Am Alive- a game most don't respect at all but I really enjoyed it at the time- it came out when I was obsessed with post apocalypse stuff so it scratched that itch at just the right time.

I Made A Game With Zombies in it is a MASTERPIECE of a game, highly recommend looking up a playthrough for the music alone.

Iron Brigade is actually a game I've brought up before! For good reason! It's a game I love wholeheartedly and I think to date it is the only game I became THAT invested in the COMMUNITY side of things.

And what a unique experience that was.

Picture a game, right. You love it, it is niche as heck and you love it. The game has an official forum and pretty much no other place on the internet- so the forum is active! The devs are there! The best of the best and the most obsessed are there!

Now picture my nerd ass diving in, making an ass of myself, becoming at least recognized by a great portion of them, receiving a gift from the DEVS THEMSELVES, building the wikia with them, writing guides with them, stupidly turning down the opportunity to be involved in world first perfect runs with them (what the fuck was my problem) building broken strats with them-

I was incredibly active on the community side for that game, I miss that dearly. I really should take such a big commitment step again for the next niche game I enjoy :)

Enough about IB.

I went and maxed out Minecraft on 360 for some reason? What a bizarre thing to do. I'm pretty sure the achievements were stupid as hell (I ain't checking) and I don't recall really "playing" much? But that's also the biggest platform I ever played minecraft on? Oof.

Monday Night Combat, that was a fun game during its time.

Maxed out oblivion- fun story on that one.

Oblivion was one of those few games that I was hyped beyond words before release. I would watch the trailer again and again, I'd talk with friends and family about it nonstop, I recall going on and on about being able to choose how you used weapons, dual wield, one hand, two handed, magic, bow- I was blown away by the concept.

I did a similar bit of "gushing about basic mechanics" with Halo 1 to parental figures, that was fun.

But anyway- I was hyped for Oblivion, and I got all the achievements as you can see- but to this day I have not actually done much in Oblivion lol.

Little kid me was new to the entire concept of an open world RPG!

Little kid me JUST followed the quest markers and ONLY for the main quests and guild quests!

Little kid me did NOTHING in Oblivion! lol

So I have all these hours in it, I went and did a lot of the traditional Oblivion things like making a 100 chameleon armor set with duped sigil eyes or whatever but I haven't actually "just played" Oblivion, outside of stealing, I did a lot of stealing. But side content? Nope.

OH HECK YEAH PAYDAY 2!

I played Payday 2 on 360!

For those who don't know, PD2 on 360 is the OLD version, the OG skill system and the like. It's kind of a train wreck, but I played it nonstop for like a week? Maybe just a weekend? I recall telling my cousin to get it and then I don't remember us actually ever playing? I played with some friends, then by myself, then quit.

Fast forward and I buy it on PS4 and play it TOO MUCH then buy it on PC and play it TOO MUCH lol.

Oh, Rainbow Six Vegas is in the mix. Vegas and Vegas 2 were extremely fun IN THEIR TIME. I'd revisit them with a friend I'd bet, but the liklihood of that is kinda low.

You could use the 360 camera to add yourself to the game which was sick, and I'll never forget that sniper rifles could pinpoint blind fire due to an oversight. If you went against a wall (it's a cover shooter) and clicked in the zoom toggle for a sniper you would "zoom" your blind fire reticle which actually made the sniper go from "blind fire inaccurate" to "pinpoint directly on the reticle accurate" so snipers were busted lol.

If my reckless ramble wasn't a hint at what I'm about to say at the beginning: The 360 was the true height of my gaming history. It was the console I played as a teen which is to say it was the console I had infinite time and resources to pour into, and pour into I did.

Even today I don't just sit around playing games nonstop, sometimes I wish I would, but it just doesn't "fit" anymore- but kid me? He loved that shit.

So when it comes to stories I have about games, most of them are about the 360 which means a lot of them aren't really the most entertaining to share I think?

Most people want to hear about classic game stuff, or modern game stories- but I have all this weird and out of place knowledge about what it was like being obsessed with games on the 360- an experience a lot of people my age also have so, again, they aren't interested in hearing :P

#retphienix #xbox 360