#i call that premium character development

[blueberry-lemon]

Shouting into the Void about Palia, which has begun its open beta.

Palia is a "cozy sim MMO set in a fantasy world", as pitched by the developers at Singularity Six. If I had to set it up in one sentence, I would pitch it as something like "what if an MMO didn't need to have combat?"

Which is something I'm really excited about.

To clarify, I think the MMO term is slightly misleading. When you log on, you're sent to an instance of around 25 players or so, similar to how Sea of Thieves works. For what it's worth, I think this is actually a preferable experience versus being a "true MMO" with hundreds of people crowding around the town area. I think they made the right call.

Although I have some small critiques and some reservations about recommending Palia during its open beta state, I'm having a really fun, relaxing time and I'm really looking forward to how the game grows. Full thoughts below.

--- I'm sure people will be quick to compare Palia to Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. This is valid, and probably something the developer wants you to do. Like those games, Palia is about relaxing and having a good time in a simple town with charming NPCs.

That said, I think the closest analogs to how Palia works are actually Disney Dreamlight Valley and Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Dreamlight Valley I think is the most direct competition, so to speak. It's funny to see that another developer got to the multiplayer pie before Disney's teams were able to fully add multiplayer, lol.

In Palia, you dress up your character and you customize your home. I think the art is really great, and the animation has really impressed me. There's a great variety of outfits (although to be clear, 30% of clothing options are available from the start and the other 70% is, for now, premium currency only.) There's unfortunately only 2 choices of body type in the Open Beta, although the devs claim that more are coming.

There's a shocking amount of customization for your house and your lawn. At least, picture Animal Crossing: New Horizons but with better controls for dragging and dropping where you want everything. People who like setting up their plot of land will have a good time. You can even expand your property to make it larger.

The core of Palia's loop involves you hopping around between progressing the Main Story and progressing 8 different skills: Cooking, Hunting, Bug Catching, Gardening, Foraging, Fishing, Furniture Making, and Mining. In addition to this, you're progressing your friendship meter with the different NPCs and, if you'd like, selecting one to Romance.

There's some really smart innovations in Palia that I like.

For example, your Mining skill only increases when you PICK UP the ore loot that drops from destroying a vein of ore. Why is that? Because you're supposed to work together with friends and strangers. If the skill increased for each time your pickaxe struck the vein, then you'd get annoyed if your friend helped you, because working together would destroy the vein in less strikes. If the skill increased for destroying a vein, then only the person who got the "last hit" would reap the exp reward. In Palia, so long as a player strikes the vein at least once, the loot will drop for them when it's destroyed. This way, anyone around you can "get their hand on that ball" by helping strike the vein at least once. This encourages working together, sharing the loot, etc. The same goes for chopping trees: anyone who contributes at all will get the wood that drops. This naturally encourages people to work together. There's no reason not to, because you're not "stealing" the loot from anyone else or "stealing" the exp.

Cooking is the most fleshed out co-op experience from what I've seen. Recipes require ingredients and a stove or prep station. Then, when you start the recipe, you do minigames to chop ingredients and stir them. So long as any player contributes an ingredient or does one of the minigames, they get the full exp and the finished dishes from cooking, even if that contributing player doesn't have the recipe. So if your friend loves cooking, and has a bunch of recipes, they can initiate the cooking and then you can bring the mushrooms and do the chopping. Then you all get to level up and get the dishes.

Even activities like Fishing are more fun to do together. If you fish near someone else who's fishing, you'll both get a buff that makes the fish bite your hooks much sooner. It stacks higher the more you fish together.

Another smart innovation: a rework of the infamous "stamina meter." This time, it's a Focus Meter. If your Focus Meter drops to 0, nothing happens. You don't pass out, you don't starve, nothing. However, if you DO have Focus, you get a Exp Gain Multiplier. This encourages you eating dishes to stay well-fed without punishing you too strongly if you ignore it.

And then, lastly, the core conceit of the game: there's no combat or danger. Although there is a Hunting Mechanic, it's completely one-sided, like hunting deer (which the game is quick to tell you are overpopulated in the area.) You can't die, you can't get hurt, you don't take fall damage, you don't even have health, period. I think this is great at trimming the unnecessary parts of a game like this and keeping it truly relaxing.

Although I'm having a fun time, I can't wholly recommend the open beta of Palia for everyone. The game is still early in its life and is missing a lot of important UI/UX and central features. The Pause and Settings menus are pretty sparse. You can only have 1 character so far, there aren't multiple character slots. You can't even change your characters name once you've made it, so choose carefully. In addition, you might feel like there "isn't enough to do together" if you play with friends, which is similar to a complaint I have about Animal Crossing multiplayer. It's mostly a chill hangout game about fishing next to each other.

There are a lot of things in the game that still need to be fleshed out, but I'm really happy with the core structure they've set up. Once this game leaves Open Beta, I think it'll be an easier recommendation, especially for folks who have enjoyed Disney Dreamlight Valley. I think these devs are smart about how they're handling the core desire here: wanting to play a game like Final Fantasy XIV or Stardew Valley without having to worry about combat or stamina.

My partner and I love to play these relaxing zone-out types of games. While trying Atelier Ryza recently, my partner said: "I just want a game where you zone-out and pick stuff up off the ground." My friends, we finally found it. It's called Palia.

You can find the Palia Open Beta on PC, and the game is slated to release on Nintendo Switch.

#Palia #Palia game #Disney Dreamlight Valley #shouting into the void #sitv #blogofkylelab

[thekillingvote]

Tʜᴇ Kɪʟʟɪɴɢ Vᴏᴛᴇ

Thirty-five years ago, DC Comics opened a phone poll to kill Batman's child sidekick, Robin.

The poll was open to paying callers in the U.S. and Canada for a window of 35 hours, starting on 15 September 1988 at 9AM EST. There were two premium-rate phone numbers—one for Robin's survival, and one for Robin's death. Each paying caller could call multiple times. The results were decided by a margin of 72 votes out of a total 10,614 votes—the difference was just under 0.68%.

Now you decide.

KILL ROBIN

Jerry Smith of Covington, Kentucky claims to have sold his Mercedes-Benz to pay for votes to kill Robin

"Who Killed Cock(y) Robin? I Killed Cock(y) Robin" article by Glen Weldon (2008)

"1-800-DEAD-ROBIN" autobiographical comic by Tony Wolf (2015)

"We killed Jason Todd" feature by Matt Markman (2021)

SAVE ROBIN

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a noted Bat-fan and scholar, denounced the episode as a "Roman gladiator-like readers vote."

"I loved him [...] I personally voted for him to live 100 times, and my mom flipped when she saw the phone bill," says magazine writer Savas Abadsidis.

MJG6 said: I was dead broke, working my way through college, but I voted. My first job was at a comic book store, making me an OG fan girl, I guess, and I encouraged people to vote to save him. [...] Because killing a teen, in a role kids are supposed to identify with, that was just sick.

Further Reading

"A Death in the Family, or: How DC Comics Let a Phone Vote Kill Robin" via r/HobbyDrama

"Living Dead Boy: Jason Todd vs. The Culture That Killed (and Resurrected) Him" on Women Write About Comics

"The Vote to Kill Robin" - trivia, misconceptions, opinions by comic-commentary

Some fan letter columns from Jason's later times as Robin

No Birds Allowed: Batman without Robin

"A lot like Robin if you close your eyes": Displacement of meaning in the Post-Modern Age by Mary Borsellino, an essay on dead Robins, sexism, and classism

🦞 The Tale of Larry the Lobster 🦞

Submitted arguments below:

Kill Robin

Anonymous propaganda IN FAVOR of killing the lobster the Robin!

I love Jason Todd. I love his post-crisis Robin days, I love his sense of justice and his adorable love of learning and his silly curly bangs! I say this to emphasize that I don't want him killed out of any dislike of the character.

I want him dead out of a love for storytelling that gets to stick to its guns and doesn't pull its punches. In context of the poll we readers have just seen Dick Grayson get kicked out of the role due to Bruce's fear of him getting hurt, then he turns around and gets a new Robin anyways because he misses him! I really like that Bruce is being messy and hypocritical! Let that have some real consequences please!

If there were no real consequences then Dick got shoved out of being Robin for what? Hairbrained overprotective worry? Why even change the way he graduated into being Nightwing so much then or heck why even kick him out in the first place?

One might argue that we haven't even given this Robin proper time to develop, that instead he might be taken in new and interesting directions as his own unique Robin shaping the mantle into a legacy rather than just something that was Dick's. I admit this is a very good point, and we are cutting off some possible interesting avenues. As I mentioned, I do like this character! But are we really going to get that?

If DC is already prepared to toss him out of this mortal coil and through the pearly gates after such a short while, do we really think we're going to get much more love and care applied to him?

I say let's roll the dice for something new! May the comics world and all these characters have to deal with the ramifications for many years to come!

Save Robin

robin’s death (and subsequent resurrection) is, frankly, an insult to robin fans of that era. to want to see this child get killed in a brutal manner for no apparent reason, to see jason essentially removed from the narrative so batman could go back to being gritty and depressed—this is awful to me. he hadn’t even been robin for very long!

but that’s not why he should’ve lived.

the resurrection of jason todd as the red hood was narratively interesting enough that it kept most fans of the original jason hooked, and it still does! he has become a prime example of a trauma survivor: his death changed him, and those who loved him have difficulty accepting that.

but there is no resolution to that story, nor was there a resolution to jason’s tenure as robin. dick chose to leave robin behind and take on a new mantle. tim, steph, both had robin taken away from them (and let’s forget about how tim is still robin, because that doesn’t matter right now). damian’s role as robin conflicts with his misconception of his role in the family. everyone else has had an ending, and jason’s death…well. after his resurrection, he has somehow remained stagnant and wildly inconsistent at the same time. this applies to under the red hood too.

at its core, utrh is a deeply classist retelling of jason’s life pre-death in the family. winick makes him a villain—albeit a sympathetic one—who fucks over or kills people that he would’ve thrown himself in front of to save as robin. in utrh, the implication is that jason had always been violent and angry (and morally compromised), and that he was destined to become worse.

it sometimes feels that jason’s transition into being the red hood (and all the characterization that comes with that) was a decision dc made for shock value. just from jason’s robin run, it’s difficult to imagine jason becoming the red hood. it doesn’t feel inevitable. it’s tragic.

ultimately, i believe that jason never should have died, and that his death was a stunt by dc for its shock value. jim starlin wanted jason dead because to him a child sidekick, in a medium that was originally made for children, was “sheer insanity”. he was fridged, plain and simple.

#DC Robin #DC Comics #Jason Todd #Robin DC #DC Joker #Joker DC #Batman comics #Batman #Batfamily #thekillingvote #comics #Batman A Death in the Family #Jason Todd meta #Batfam #Batkids #Batbros #comics history #ADitF #1988 #described #ID in alt #image ID #ID in alt text

[storythesilly]

INTRO - PLEASE READ THIS MY MENTAL HEALTH AND ISSUES ARE GETTING REALLY INSANE AND I NEED YOU TO KNOW THESE THINGS!! IT GETS UPDATED A LOT TOO..

Hi!! I'm Story, or Adam.

Names: (red = PLEASE CALL ME THAT!!!!!)

Story

Adam

Colin

Silly

Garrett

Storii

Icy

I'm a minor, and I use They/He/Xe/Silly/Moon pronouns, meaning I am a demiboy. I'm also gay and trans (FTM). DNI if you like nsfw, vore, you're an israel supporter, you don't stand with palestine, if you think vomit and starvation is hot, shit like that.

I know a bit of Russian!! :3

Please tell me if I make you uncomfortable or sad!! I can't really tell so like!!

My memory isn't the best right now, so if I forget something, please tell me! даааа

I get stressed when in public games such as Regretavator and Phighting!. I like the games (though I'm not in the Phighting fandom, while i love regretevator) but I get scared in public. If you wanna play them with me, we can as long as it's a private server.

Art tag is #story's fuckass sillies, whenever I post some shit about a baldi mod called "Purple's Fun Trivia Game," it's #purpleposting and #pftgposting

Multifandom, I really like Baldi's Basics mods and will be happy to tell you about them! (Including my one that's in development...)

FORCED FANDOMS - DON'T ASK ME ABOUT THEM I HONESTLY DON'T REALLY LIKE THEM!! :[

TADC, Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, kinda Warrior Cats? I'm not really uh. Into it anymore. But I pretend to be. Anyways there's more I just don't wanna have another crisis!!

Also I'm a Lampert enthusiast. Regretevator.. Ooh..

My list of comfort characters is very long, but if you wanna make me happy, all you need is Diamond Man from Dave's Fun Algebra Class.

Blogs ran by me

@lee-odwaga @diamondman0 @storys-alt @do-you-accept @alex-abibaz (also there's a playrobot one but i can't find it)

My askblogs!

@ask-lampert @carl-the-dwindler @ask-staticschoolhouse @gfag-garrett

Emojis I use: 💔💀🤯🥶💅😭💥🦅🔥

@zionanelequaso is my best friend, please go check her out.

Arts and Crafters. He's so fucking silly and cute..

Don't ask me for money. I'm a minor. I will always refuse.

Other socials!!

YT: https://youtube.com/@StoryTheSilly?si=nbgNPyw6nLZiIYGX

DA (please i need one more watcher for 69 /NF):

https://www.deviantart.com/storythesilly

erm my roblox is Story_OnYT (im usually in character as a baldi/baldi mod character! also im premium so those are the key factors to look for)

Wattpad (please read static schoolhouse i beg /nf): QuiteSilly

don't look up storythesilly on fandoms please my mental health isn't good on the gfag wiki

Pinterest:

https://pin.it/2JPa2hXNH

1'M A B1T OF A ZC3N3K1D!!!!!! FUCK Y34H!!!!!!

im pretty sure i have issues with speaking? like. verbally. i sound weird and have problems saying certain things so if you and i ever magically go on a vc then beware

#story's fuckass sillies #purpleposting #pftgposting

[theresattrpgforthat]

Do you know any games about building houes or settlements? I had an idea about a minecraft one shot but haven't found anything that fits.

Hello! I have a few that might fit the bill. Here are a number of great town (and world)-building games for you to check out!

Theme: Town-builders.

Grasping Nettles, by adamebell

A small town lies stranded on the wrong half of a planet split in two. An isolated city of flame stands in defiance of a frozen wasteland. The moon colony established by the Apollo 11 mission finds life-lengthening compounds on its surface. A city explodes out of the Prismatic Sea at the convergence point of dozens of leylines.

Grasping Nettles is a worldbuilding game for 1-6 players about a community and its story over the course of generations. You take turns dictating various things about a world of your creation. On your turn, you move one of three faction pieces around a central game board called the Wheel and perform the action you land on. Actions include defining factions, describing locations, discovering issues, creating characters, starting projects, catching glimpses of other communities, and framing scenes.

The art for this game is intriguing and draws you in; and the open-endedness means that you have the liberty to be as creative as you desire! It’s designed to help you build a world where you can then proceed to play in, regardless of which system you choose afterward. The game comes with seeds of worlds in case you have trouble getting started. There is also a design guide, as well as a space supplement called Stellar Nettles that you can check out, created by emmv.

Ex Novo by Sharkbomb Studios.

Ex Novo is a playable city-generator that helps you construct, and populate fictional villages, towns, and cities. This physical game can be played solo or with up to 3 friends. Playtime ranges from 1 to 3 hours.  Meet with your friends, and collaboratively draw the map of your city as you explore the history of its founding, and the forces, factions, and events that shape its development. 

The three of you are playing as guardian spirits of a freshly founded settlement. You use d6s and some sets of tokens throughout three phases that set the scene, play out your city's history, and then culminates in a wrapping-up scenario that ties up loose ends. Things will be added to this city as you play, but they might also be taken away! When you're done, you have a city to play with (or just look back and revel in)!

Sharkbomb Studios has also created a dungeon creator in the same spirit as this game, called Ex Umbra.

Before the Beginning, by Rafael Carneiro Vasques

"You and your family are survivors. You survived the old world, you survived each other. Now I'm asking you to survive once again. We need to rebuild the world or we will be part of it's ruins. Yes, cities, communities, pretzels, laughs. We need a city to be citizens. We need houses to belong."

Before the Beginning is a game of scavengers and their families struggling to build a city in a post-apocalyptic world. You will face moral challenges and dangers of all sorts: witches, doomsday religious cults, cyborgs, mutants... everything to build a home, to belong somewhere. Once the city is built, you can finally rest. Until there, there's no room for cowards.

This is a game of exploration and survival - it comes with one page for the players, and one page for the narrator. Building a shelter is if premium importance in this game because you need it to survive - however you’ll have obstacles, such as enemies, injuries, and environmental hurdles to deal with. The layout itself is rather minimalist, reflective of the stark nature of this game.

If you want a game that is incredibly focused in genre and goal, without a lot of rules or lore to figure out before you play, I’d recommend Before the Beginning.

Homes found in Unusual Places, by somewhere with stories.

A collaborative storytelling game about building homes and creating the characters who might live there.

You are playing a game in which each story told adds a layer to a home. The game comes with a list of options to choose from, but it also encourages your own creativity! As the home gets bigger, the stories that surround it (and the people who live in it) grows and grows. You’re going to need a pack of playing cards in order to play this game, rather than dice of any kind. If you want to stretch your creativity in a game that has suggestions, but no dedication to a specific list of prompts, this might be worth checking out!

Beak, Feather & Bone by Possible World Games. 

Beak, Feather, & Bone is a collaborative worldbuilding tool as well as a competitive map-labeling RPG. Starting with an unlabeled city map, players are assigned community roles before taking turns claiming and describing locations. Players draw from a standard 52-card deck to determine a building's purpose and then describe its beak (reputation), feather (appearance), and bone (interior). As buildings are claimed, a narrative for the town and its inhabitants emerges, including major NPCs and shifting power-dynamics. 

This is a highly-lauded game that allows your characters to watch a city form in front of them, and give them a setting all their own. If you like the mechanics of this game, and want to flesh out your setting even more, another game that uses a similar system but for character and faction generation is Smoke, Fuel & Fire by eldritch mouse.

Greetings From, by C.R. Legge.

Greetings From ______ is a mapmaking/worldbuilding game for 1-6 players. Players take turns moving around the map and creating what they find there. Work together to build a unique world that can be used for other role-playing systems, creating stories, or whatever else you might want to use it for (because sometimes you just want to make a cool map).

This is a game that depends on dice rolls to tell you what kind of feature you’ll be adding to a map. There’s a few rules that you can choose to include on your map-making game, but the basic rules just require a couple of d6s and the breadth of your imagination. The author has a single-page version and a brochure version - which provides you with a grid to use for your map and is honestly, really smart in it’s layout in terms of use of space.

i'm sorry did you say street magic? by Caro Asercion.

An archipelago-based fishing town, separated by its various islands, gathers annually to celebrate the turn of the harvest.

A collective of magical artists embarks on an ambitious project: a guerrilla public transit system powered by enchanted street art.

In a sprawling metropolis decades from now, breakthroughs in biotechnology offer citizens superpowers far beyond mortal ability.

This city that we call home has a magic all its own. It is wonder, and joy, and spirit — and with that spirit, we breathe life into our city together.

i'm sorry did you say street magic is a GMless city-building story game for two to six players, that runs three or more hours.  Discover and imagine a city filled with life and vivid detail, packed with a myriad of neighborhoods, landmarks, and residents. Discover their true names, and the ways that they intersect—then set events in motion that will change or alter their relationships.

This is an enchanting game, with the breadth you need for any city, whether it be fantastical, futuristic, or modern-day. You can mix and match with different themes, and each player has a chance to imbue the city with their own personal touch. At the end of every round, one player instigates an event that will certainly stir up excitement, but wil usually won't be resolved by the time the game is over. If you're looking at establishing a setting for a game with distinct city sectors and characters that act as emblems for a larger neighbourhood, if you want a game that hands a series of story hooks over to the GM by the time you've finished, this is absolutely the game for you.

The author has also written a supplement that you can use to generate true names if you want some inspiration. It is called there are names more powerful here than our own.

#indie ttrpgs #map-making #dnd #tabletop games #game recommendations #asks #city builder

[allstartrekgames]

Star Trek Online

Original Release: 2010

Developer: Cryptic Studios

Publisher: Atari, Perfect World, Gearbox

Platform: PC, Xbox One/Series, PlayStation 4/5.

I’ve played a lot of Star Trek Online in the past, so for this playthough I decided to start from scratch on Xbox. The game is still evolving with gameplay changes and new content, so my thought here are based on my original time with the game from a while ago on PC, along with finishing up to the end of the Delta Quadrant on Xbox.

The gameplay for this game is best described as “serviceable”. It’s not terrible, but it also isn’t the most exciting. It gets the job done and is just about entertaining enough to get you to the next part of the game. In space combat, you have to keep an eye on shield arcs and weapon charge while activating powers, while on the ground it plays a bit more like a shooter, but doesn’t have exact aiming (you can also play as a more traditional MMO game on PC).

The main enjoyment I got from the game was the story, having a few dialogue choices (even though they change nothing) and just interreacting with the world. The overall story arc is about a mysterious threat pushing people into war and being discovered before everyone starts banding together to investigate and stop them. Early on, voiced dialogue was rare, but is not much more common, although some missions have sections where the dialogue is just text, which creates an odd mixture of the two. There are lots of references and a lot of characters from the shows crop up, usually voiced by the same actor.

The mission lengths vary a massive amount, and you really have no idea how long a mission will be before starting it. Some just involve talking to one person while others can be a few hours long. Some can be just combat after combat (sometimes massively overstaying its welcome as wave after wave of enemies turn up) while others are more story based with lots of information to reveal, characters to interact with and puzzles to solve – these ones are worth playing the game for.

At certain ranks you get awarded a ship, you can pick a name and registry. I decided to call all mine the USS Saru, adding letters as I got new ships. You only have a choice between a few ships, while the rest you’ll have to grind by collecting dilithium or pay for with their premium currency of “Zen” – there are a lot of different currencies in the game, which kind of goes against Star Trek a lot. By the end of my playthough, I had enough dilithium for one ship.

What is nice about the ships is that you can customise them, choosing different hulls, saucers, pylons and nacelles, as well as some hull designs. Some options are locked behind premium currency, though. I ended up changing all of my ships. I would absolutely love a new game similar to Starship Creator that just let you design ships using all of the options available in Star Trek Online.

There’s plenty of Star Trek Online that I didn’t such, such as the group activities. I do remember doing a few missions in he past, including one where you fly through a massive Voth ships that is so large that it has multiple hangar bays that carry Voth city ships. There’s other kind of repeatable missions to help grind for upgrades, which is something I really don’t enjoy.

I enjoyed my time with Star Trek Online, but at towards the end of the Delta Quadrant missions I felt extremely underpowered (while up until a few missions prior, I felt overpowered) and even buying a new ship didn’t help much. I think I had reached the point of grinding or coughing up money.

You can choose not only different factions in the game (although later missions mostly are the same for all), but different introductions. A major one is the New Romulus faction, who can then join the Federation or Klingons after their starting missions. I tried out the Discovery era missions (you end up forward in time to carry on with the main campaign) and enjoyed it, you get to interact with Lorca. The tutorial mission is just a slightly reworked version of the normal tutorial, but at least you get to meet captain Shran. The ship you use also has one of the nicest bridges in the game (the ship interiors are terrible for the most part). I do appreciate that you essentially get to play a short Discovery game.

I don’t think I will return to Star Trek Online, though, due to the game’s economy and grinding. Once development for the game slows down, I would certainly be very interested in a one-off purchase “Star Trek Offline”.

#star trek #star trek gaming #star trek online #star trek tos #star trek tng #star trek ds9 #star trek voy #star trek ent #star trek dsc #kelvin timeline #star trek pic #star trek ld #lower decks #star trek snw

[waheelawhisperer]

regarding my last ask, you mention RWBY: Amity Arena as being particularly bad. i have never heard of this game before

if you have time, and are willing to humor me yet again, i would love to hear your wisdom

First of all, I'm sorry it took me a week to answer this. Work has been absolutely brutal (I've regularly been leaving the office between 8:00 and 9:00 PM for like 2 weeks now) and I really haven't had time for anything that takes actual effort. Please bear in mind that A) I'm tired as hell, and B) this game shut down in early 2021 so everything I'm telling you is based on memory that would potentially be spotty even if I was at my best.

To start with, I'll give you a brief explanation of what Amity Arena was before getting into the reasons why it sucked ass. RWBY: Amity Arena was a PVP mobile game where the goal was to destroy your opponent's base (which consisted of a central tower and two turrets to defend it) located at the other end of the map using a collection of units derived from the show. Each player had a deck of eight units, which they could deploy into one of two lanes corresponding to the two turrets. The units in question would advance toward the opposing tower, eventually converging on the base structure, and could potentially wander between them via the use of skills or by targeting enemies that stood close enough to the border for them to lock onto and follow.

The player deployed their characters by expending a resource called Aura. The player had a maximum of eight Aura, which regenerated at a set rate over time. Each unit cost a fixed amount of Aura, ranging from 1 to 8. The order of the cards (representing the units) in the player's prebuilt deck was shuffled at the start of the match and then cycled in order as the player deployed units. The player could hold four (I think?) cards in their hand at a time, and as they played a card, the next card in the deck would appear in their hand.

There was a great deal of unit variety: units were broken up into melee and range, grounded and aerial, and some cards could deploy singular strong units and others deployed swarms of weaker units (for example, Scythe Ruby deployed one powerful fighter, while White Fang Gunners deployed three relatively weak ranged fighters), and some cards had special skills they could activate to gain an advantage (Shadow Blake, for example, could dash a short distance and leave behind a targetable clone, making her very good at drawing aggro and switching rapidly between lanes, while Shield Pyrrha could throw her shield, dealing damage to all units in its path).

(If you've noticed something about the naming convention for the units above, you're on the right track: I'm about to talk about the gacha system)

So, there were a few ways to actually acquire units to add to your deck: first, you had to progress far enough up the ranks to actually unlock them. There were specified tiers that you moved up through by winning enough, and each tier gave you access to a broader selection of units. After every game, you'd get a randomly generated crate that you could open to get currency and copies of cards. Once you had a card, you could upgrade it with additional copies, and you could use the currency you got to buy stuff in the shop (new units, cosmetics, crates, premium currency, etc). I'm not going to go into exactly how the different currencies worked, mostly because I don't remember, so suffice it to say that like a lot of other mobile games, you could buy shit with real money and it fucking sucked.

Like every gacha game (or game with gacha elements), the rates were awful. Units were divided into four rarities: Normal, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. The unit distribution in each rarity was reasonably balanced early on, but as the developers added more units, it started to skew toward the Legendary category because adding new basic units didn't make money and adding rarer units did.

To give you an example of how much money, consider this: I remember one of the relatively big-name players (inasmuch as a RWBY mobile game has big-name players) would regularly roll for units on release so he could stream himself using them and give the playerbase an idea of what they did. When Sienna Khan released, this man spent 800 fucking dollars trying to get her. He wasn't even going for duplicates. He just wanted the character.

(IIRC this guy spent low 5 digits total on this game, it was insane)

This was an egregiously bad incident that didn't represent the average player experience, but I'm including it to point out that trying to even acquire new units, much less stay competitive by enhancing your cards with duplicate copies, could get real tough real fast.

(You also had to go for duplicate copies of your core units, because matchups could swing significantly if the opposing units had enough of a level advantage - say, by allowing them to survive burst from a unit that would counter them at equivalent levels)

This is before we get into the way the game balance was consistently and completely fucked. I won't bother listing every single instance, but I will go over some of the more egregious mistakes in terms of unit design. Let's start with...

Neon Katt: Probably the single most hated character throughout all of Amity Arena's run, Neon Katt somehow managed to be more annoying in the game than she was in the show. Upon deployment, Neon skates toward the opposing tower and taunts all units that enter her range. Sounds like an okay unit idea, right? Well, you're not wrong, but they fucked up the concept. First, Neon is cheap as hell (costs 2 Aura). Second, she was initially invincible until she hit a turret, so she could run down a lane and get chip damage for free while also providing utility in the form of her taunt (Neon was a major contributor to the godawful chip meta where you just spammed long-range skills that could hit structures and avoided interacting with your opponent as much as possible until the game was over). Third, her weight value was Heavy at launch, meaning she could actually push other units, which lead to the hilarious and annoying Disco Bear strat (deploying Neon behind an Ursa Major, an extremely strong, slow, and durable tank) and pushing it at top speed into the turret while preventing it from taking damage along the way.

Nobody liked this. The playerbase begged for nerfs. The devs eventually patched out Disco Bear by making her weight Light and decreased the range of her taunt or some shit idr, but it took seven fucking months to get an actual nerf, which they did by changing her from being invincible to having an HP value of 20. Normally, that would mean she dies in one hit, but they set it up so that she only takes one damage per hit, meaning you had to hit her 20 fucking times before she'd finally die. They eventually nerfed it down to 14 or 15 or something, but then they buffed it back to 20, so fuck them and fuck Neon lol

Baby Death Stalkers: Not as obviously obnoxious as the rest of this list, but they warped the meta in insidious ways by invalidating a shitton of single-target melee units. Baby Death Stalkers dropped five relatively fragile melee units with high damage and attack speed for the low, low cost of 1 Aura, allowing players to both hold a cost-effective counter to a large number of units in reserve and cycle their deck at minimal cost when necessary. Baby Death Stalkers hard countered most single-target melee units without an AoE skill or high attack speed because you could drop them around the target and force them to land five attacks to clear them, during which time the Baby Death Stalkers could attack uninterrupted with their high damage and attack speed as the target killed one, turned, reacquired a target, and repeated the process. This was how you got the comical and frustrating sight of in-universe badasses like Ren and Winter getting their asses kicked by five baby scorpions.

Using Baby Death Stalkers to counter a higher-value card often gave the player a 2+ Aura advantage, something that could rapidly snowball, and even if there wasn't a target in the field to hard counter, you could just drop them in front of one of your own higher-value units as a cheap meatshield or toss them out to cycle your deck by drawing a new card for minimal cost.

Jinn: Jinn is what happens when you think Neon isn't obnoxious enough and decide to make a unit that's actively worse for the game. She's also what happens when you look at the issues with both the playable meta and the game experience as a whole and think "that's not a bug, it's a feature!".

To start with, Jinn was a Legendary card, which meant that not only was the game continuing to release a disproportionate amount of higher-rarity cards (that made money), actually getting her was a pain in the ass. Yay, gacha.

Jinn was capable of stopping time around any unit for 7 seconds (i.e. everything caught in the blast was essentially frozen as it was. It couldn't take action, but nor could it be harmed). This meant she could be used to protect vital units by freezing them so that they didn't take damage from active effects or weren't prioritized by enemy units or to counteract enemy threats by freezing them until the player could deploy a counter or bring a skill off cooldown, and she could do it for two Aura. This is already insanely strong, but Jinn was a structure, meaning she'd just sit out on the field without moving into range of the enemy and could be used multiple times if she survived until her skill cooldown refreshed, and her incredibly low cost meant she could both provide enormous amounts of utility insanely cheaply and help cycle the deck as needed.

To make matters worse, Jinn was very obviously not playtested, both because she was broken as shit and because she initially stayed on the field long enough that if you could cycle the deck quickly enough, you could deploy two copies of her and make your towers permanently invincible, forcing a draw at worst. You could literally just say "fuck it" and prevent your opponent from even having a win condition.

(and also some of her early interactions were bugged as shit - if she used her ability on certain units during their skill animations, she could make them invincible and jump structures to the top of their priority list, so if this happened you had an unstoppable juggernaut hell-bent on destroying your towers to the exclusion of all else)

Finally, Jinn enabled a shitton of other cards that would've otherwise been okay without a get-out-of-jail-free card vs. their counters. Some of the cards I talk about later just got... so much fucking worse with Jinn. Holy shit.

White Fang Gunner Barracks: This was honestly the card that gave rise to the worst meta I've ever played. White Fang Gunner Barracks was a structure that would periodically spawn a White Fang Gunner (relatively weak ranged unit), which was pretty forgettable initially because it took a while and only spawned one at a time for a cost of 5 Aura, but then they fucking buffed it so that it spawned two at a time. It also spawned three Gunners upon expiring or being destroyed. Three White Fang Gunners is a 2-Aura value as it is. That means it only has to spawn enough Gunners to grant 3 Aura in value to pay for itself. It spawns 2 Gunners per wave. Each Gunner is worth two thirds of an Aura unit. One wave is worth 1 1/3 of an Aura unit. If the structure survives to spawn 3 waves (which it almost always did unless you had one of its small number of counters on hand to deploy immediately and the opponent couldn't protect it from those counters with Jinn), it's not just paying for itself, it's giving you more value than its cost (6 Aura vs. 5)... and it could just keep spawning Gunners. This thing stayed on the field for 45 seconds. It spawned a wave of Gunners every 7 seconds. That's 6 waves of Gunners if not stopped - 12 total Gunners from the waves, 3 Gunners from the destruction/expiration effect, for a cumulative 15 Gunners and 9 Aura of value. Admittedly, it took time for the Gunners to build up, but once they did, they could mow down a tower in seconds and you had to constantly dedicate a response to them, while the Barracks was a set-and-forget card that let the player using it focus on other parts of the battle while it did its thing.

Gunner Barracks defined the meta for six straight months. Every team had to have one of its small number of counters, all of which could be negated by Jinn and most of which were higher-rarity than Barracks and thus it was easy to level up Barracks to the point where it could survive the burst/DoT output of units that ostensibly dealt with it. This was genuinely the least fun I have ever had playing this game.

Chip Meta: I won't go into the Artillery Arena chip meta a ton, but there was a very obnoxious point in the game's lifespan where the primary method of winning was to use cards with long-range abilities that targeted enemy turrets directly to chip them down with minimal response. It was boring and uninteractive and most people hated it, much like they hated the way the abundance of AoE and presence of Baby Death Stalkers invalidated both large swarms of units and a number of single-target units.

Launcher Nora and Rifle Pyrrha: These two units were late additions to the game that were meant to help provide counterplay to the bullshit that was the White Fang Gunner Barracks, among other things, but they were annoyingly overtuned on launch and the game died before anyone could bother balancing them properly.

Launcher Nora was a unit with massive attack range (one of the three highest in the game, iirc, and one of the very few units that could outrange turrets with their basic attacks) and high AoE damage. Being a Rare card, she was easy to upgrade, which meant that she'd often just barely survive things meant to kill her, and her absurd range meant even getting to her without a skill with the range to either close the gap or just outright hit her could be extremely difficult. If properly protected, Launcher Nora could just sit on the field and tear your base and forces to pieces with very little counterplay.

Rifle Pyrrha wasn't as bad, but she was still an example of the devs kind of rushing stuff out and not giving a shit. Rifle Pyrrha was a cheap (3 Aura) ranged unit that had a long-ranged active skill automatically kited backwards after every basic attack, making it hard for melee units to catch up to her. She absolutely shat on things like the stream of Gunners coming out of the Barracks, but represented just... one more frustrating thing to play against in a game already full of them.

This isn't even getting into the way so many units and interactions were outright bugged and how much shit just didn't work. The Apathy were a unit that periodically duplicated and initially had no cap on the number of copies they could create, meaning that if you left them alone long enough, they'd just fucking spawn enough additional Apathies to crash your goddamn phone. Checkmate was supposed to make allied units in its AoE temporarily invincible and sometimes just didn't. Sienna Khan's skill regularly bugged out. Etc etc.

Compounding every one of the game's problems was the fact that the developers were extremely unresponsive and regularly ignored community feedback. Neon went untouched for ages despite the community crying out for changes at every level of play, units like Jinn and Barracks took far too long to be addressed for the community's satisfaction, even basic QoL changes or new features the community had been begging for for years never got implemented... Like, it was real bad. Units were extremely over- or undertuned and stayed that way for a long time, patches gradually went from addressing large numbers of units to only addressing a few, the devs stopped responding...

And eventually the game just died. The incompetent balancing drove players away (the playerbase decreased to the point where most people who still bothered with the game could identify the bots the devs seeded the lower levels of the ladder with so that newer players had someone to play). The devs went AWOL around December 2020 and just kinda stopped pushing shit and the team running the social media (official Twitter, community Discord, etc) admitted that they had no idea what the fuck was going on. The game went a month or two without any new content while the community wondered what the hell was happening and posted memes to cope, and then there was an official announcement that the game was shutting in January 2021. I don't know if the devs just sucked or if the killing blow was really Rooster Teeth's influence. I know RT had a hand in it because they were pushing the dev team very hard to ship new units in time for Volume 7 of the main show's release and that led to a lot of the problems mentioned above with the game balance, but I don't know how much responsibility each party bears.

Well, that's my half-remembered history of Amity Arena. As with almost everything else Rooster Teeth has ever touched, it remains an object lesson of what not to do.

Sorry it took so long, I've been very busy.

#rwby #rwby amity arena #amity arena.

[amemixfan]

So I had previously canceled VIP because choices had a dry spell with books that seemed interesting, but I recently reactivated it with Kindled coming out. I also took the time to check out some of the other VIP books.

So rapid fire reviews:

1. First Comes Love is a garbage fire. The entire book radiates so much Pick Me energy that I’m half expecting MC to go into a “pick me, choose me, love me” speech.

I can practically imagine that entire book told in a Reddit post from the point of view of Rebecca. “Help, my lover’s toxic girl best friend is trying to break us up.” It’s so, so toxic. We could have gotten an interesting story of friends deciding to marry out of loneliness while realizing they had feelings for each other yet we got a love triangle with the emotional maturity of a playground fight. I’m surprised they didn’t make Rebecca a cheerleader just to hit all the “You Belong With Me” boxes that book is trying to hit. (Seriously I mean, gasp! Rebecca loves to travel and likes fancy stuff? Oh the absolute horror!!!)

2. Roommates With Benefits. Meh. I couldn’t make it past the first episode because the book seemed dull. The love interests didn’t interest me and the writing is meh. Not much more to say.

3. Kiss of Death. This book is frustrating because they’re selling you a mob star crossed lovers book with an MC who is so outside of the world of mobsters that most of the book is just her venting about how everyone treats her like a kid. It’s not a mob book if the main character is shut out of the family business.

I wanted to like it because it gave me Halsey’s music video vibes of Now or Never which I liked, but the end result is meh. The book would have been fascinating had MC actually been a trusted member of the mob and had a lot more power and importance. Instead, it seems like this is a teenage coming of age story with no edge or flair.

I treated it as a diamond mining book and didn’t see any relationship development that isn’t just lust or horniness between MC and Vic. MC tells them she loves them after one day and there’s not much explanation why. Even her bestie calls her out on it. The book just hinges on one random less than a day long encounter years ago as the premise of their love story. Like I get Romeo and Juliet were also dumb kids who thought they knew what love was, but Choices’ characters are supposed to have been grown adults.

4. Getaway Girls. This book I’m actually enjoying. It’s funny and light hearted. I’m just a few chapters in but it seems fun. Not a huge fan of the constant POV change, but each character has their own personality and taste which keeps it from becoming repetitive. We’ll see how it goes.

5. The Duchess Affair. I love a good period piece and am always biased in favor of it. This one isn’t the best Choices has put it, but it’s interesting compared to its other VIP books. The adultery aspect is bleh for me, but it’s not surprising giving The Nanny Affair was such a hit. I wish they hadn’t made the husband such a tool and given more high stakes to the story, but I guess they had to let people not feel guilty about cheating.

I will say though, it’s weird to see MC fawn over their tutor while diamond mining. I haven’t taken any premium choices so her worrying and fretting over committing adultery is bizarre given she’s only just talked to her tutor a handful of times and sat close to them. This book was definitely not designed to be diamond mined.

6. Kindred. This one seems promising. I love the art and the premise behind the book. The LIs seem interesting and the world seems fascinating. I definitely don’t regret resubscribing just for this book. It seems like it could become a favorite of mine.

My only complaint is that the plot moves fast. It’s very blink and you miss an entire explanation. The book thrusts you into what seems like an already developed world and expects you to just know everything already. I can keep up with some ideas because I’m pagan and know some of the concepts, but it’s still confusing to have so many revelations in the first two chapters and no time in between. I wonder how many things were cut from the book before publishing. It just seems like the entire thing is on fast forward and the characters themselves don’t react to major, groundbreaking news. Hopefully this’ll be fixed going forward.

I also know there’s a select release for a TNA POV book, but I don’t have access. I envy those of you that do though.

So yeah, this current line up is not the best Choices has ever had, but it’s also not the worst.

#playchoices #choices vip #vip choices

[twh-news]

Pioneering Audio Art NFT Project Featuring Tom Hiddleston To Be Released | Forbes

by Josh Wilson

Popularly celebrated for his performance as the Norse God of mischief - Loki - in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Tom Hiddleston has always been labelled as a lovable actor on and off-screen. Soon, a set of NFTs will be released that will be illustrated through pop art, coupled with his well-known voice.

Residing in the blockchain, this triple featured multi-media NFT project is called The Masters Audio Art Collection. Created from exclusive audio recordings of celebrities reciting their favourite poems converged with the progressive digital artists from the OWNFT Studio, the creative arm of OWNFT World - a Singapore end-to-end Web3 and blockchain solutions developer.

The Masters Audio Art Collection NFTs are a collection of artistic creativity from three individuals. The poet who wrote the poem, the celebrity who recites it, and the artist who illustrates the pop art that will tie everything together into a one-of-a-kind pop art NFT.

The Tom Hiddleston collection features the actor reciting excerpts from 12 of his favourite classic poems including “The Mower” by Philip Larkin, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost and “I am” by John Clare. The full poem recordings have been streamed more than 700 million times on Ximalaya FM, SoundCloud and Youtube. However, these exclusive NFT arts on offer were created from a collection of never-before-seen photos of Tom in the recording studio, and are aimed to immerse buyers into a journey of emotions expressed in the poems visually and auditorily.

Pop art is an art movement that emerged during the 1950s and was made prominently relevant by the talented Andy Warhol, the art movement is famously known to consist of colourful and vibrant elements that displayed imagery inspired by popular or mass culture, including iconic celebrities, comic book characters or elements, and other popularly known objects.

Drawing inspiration from the pop art movement, The Masters Audio Art Collection aims to celebrate cultural icons as the masters of their field. Through the art of rendering techniques, each piece of art is prepared to blend into the audio, so buyers can somewhat feel each word being spoken. This meticulously curated 360 NFT is a collectible that is planned to celebrate the mastery of performing art skills surpassing time and cultural progress, a collection aimed at both digital art lovers and fans alike.

According to Fiorenzo Manganiello, the President of the Lian Group’s Lian Foundation, which was set up to collect NFT art and to support millennial arts digital education, “Masters Audio Art is leading a new trend appearing in the space of iconic pop art NFTs,” He specified after being invited for a private viewing of the Collection. “They are moving towards merging conventional arts through time and medium on blockchain to ensure the authenticity and conservation of celebrity pop art.”

Series two of the collection is set to feature Dame Helen Mirren, best known for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the movie The Queen, and as Queenie in the recent F9: The Fast Saga.

The Masters Audio Art NFTs are available for sale from the 14th of May on OpenSea. A premium Web3 NFT marketplace.

The owners of Tom Hiddleston’s NFTs can also invite people to attend Tom Hiddleston’s Masters Audio Art Exhibit on the upcoming Ploutus platform from OWNFT. In addition to the site, the Ploutus app will be packed with augmented reality (AR), and virtual environments offering multi-level immersive engagements for NFT owners.

Premiering in the Commonwealth Fashion Council (CFC) 3D interactive museum gallery in conjunction with U.K. royal Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee month in June, on the Ploutus app, the interactive art exhibit shall showcase sold NFTs from the series so that owners can display their acquisitions to the world.

“Ploutus is where NFT owners can list, engage, and have fun with their digital assets.” OWNFT World’s founder and director, Patricia Pee stated. She further added that it is more important than ever to create NFT projects that are of value creation, meaningful and can remain relevant for a long time because this is the aim of blockchain in the first place.

‘‘Web3 NFT projects have got a lot more to offer because the market is increasingly sophisticated now than before and that is why, with an art project like the Masters Audio Art Collection Series, we have to create not just the art but also think about how buyers can enjoy and share their art collection in different ways that will hold or increase their value over time.’’ She concluded.

Around the viability of the collection, I also spoke to Manav Golecha, an expert in the NFT space, on the viability to scale and sell NFT collections around celebrities in a brief period. Golecha famously started the Women of Crypto collection, which sold 8888 NFTs in 5 months. Women of Crypto however had a particular mission to empower and educate women in this financial and technological revolution.

“Any time you're utilizing a strong brand name - celebrity in this instance - it’s positive when it comes to NFT projects as a whole. Most NFT drops fail because of a lack of marketing and effort. With something like this, it’s important that the advertising of it is spot on, so people know it’s there, and also from a security standpoint it is protected and is on a secure platform. Which it looks like this is.”

From art to enhancing security and helping develop thriving communities - Golecha expands his abilities to make sure a project’s processes are secure end-to-end to benefit its community and to also strengthen the project’s marketing. He further helps NFT projects with auditing smart contracts to identify bugs. This helps NFT collections in optimising gas for their contract to reduce the overall gas fee.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars are stolen from people because of hackers in NFT Discord groups. Manav uses his skills in Discord cybersecurity to help NFT projects fight against hackers and remove webhooks from the Discord server. This helps bring down the probability of hacks and keeps the community secure.

Golecha also mentioned the need to give back through collections. He assists NFT collections in partnering with nonprofits to increase their impact. He’s also personally donated $100,000 to two entities, namely Women Who Code and Crypto Chicks.

“Philanthropic endeavors should be a key part of this industry. It’s certainly key for me and I stress to all my clients to make sure that they heavily contemplate how they will give back to a specific community or an area that they are passionate about.”

OWNFT’s Tom Hiddleston project shall be making a contribution to Tom’s favourite social organisations including UNICEF.

Currently, only 1.4 million individuals have activity on OpenSea, an NFT trading platform. Meaning that 99.9% of the internet has not bought an NFT, yet.

Golecha predicts that this will change in 15 years and NFTs will have a significant market.

Two big drivers for this growth according to him will be the upcoming Coinbase marketplace which already has roughly 3.7 million users on the waiting list and Eth 2.0 which will drastically reduce gas fees once the network moves from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake mechanism.

#tom hiddleston #The Masters Audio Art Collection #NFT #non fungible tokens #OWNFT #article

[shockersalvage]

Salvage Smallcase: Ryo Oba

We interrupt the next Showcase to bring you the first of sporadic discussions! To celebrate this character's birthday, it was suggested by @drmedicsgamesurgery to make a 'showcase' for Ryo and I really liked that idea. However, given his state as being essentially a 'minor character to a semi-important character' and not having much to him, I decided he would be the first in what I like to call Salvage Smallcases!

Smallcases are Showcases that lack a proper Rundown section due to a character's dismal screentime, lack of fleshing out or non-real importance to the plot. Think of these guys as being under the Ted Chikatilo effect, except its less egregious, since these guys are supposed to be fairly unimportant in the bigger picture (instead of the plot acting as if they were important or well developed when its not the case).

So with that out of the way, let's delve into Hajiki's buddy!

Summary

Ryo Oba is Hajiki Yaki's friend who he occasionally brings along to help him bust illegal casinos. Ryo was originally one of these illicit gamblers, having had a bad childhood and a poor education. Ultimately, his career as a gambler ended after he had a kid with his girlfriend and lost miserably to the rising gambler herself: Celestia Ludenberg.

When Hajiki became a member of Yui Samidare's team, and volunteered to take on the GOODBYE Bar of the 12 Duel Noir Challenge, Hajiki opted to get his buddy to come along with him, since Ryo knew the area of the bar better.

Together, and with Gunzo Arai (who worked for the insurance company that owned the bar) they traveled to the location. Before they could enter, Hajiki would receive a call from Katsumi Kodama, a Target that was tied up in the bar. The three rush in but, little did they know, that they triggered a trap that had Katsumi stabbed by a poisoned knife. As such, Katsumi is found injured, but seemingly still alive. Ryo is panicking given that he has much to lose due to just becoming a father, but is still able to listen to Hajiki when his friend asks him to stay on-guard to block the door and even able to point Hajiki to the only possible exit: one that would lead into an alleyway. Thinking the culprit must have ran off, Hajiki would rush into the alley, despite his friend's protest...

Unfortunately, for Ryo, Hajiki would later run into the Victim of the Libra Girls Academy Duel Noir - his teammate Sachi Mizuiyama - and would be killed by her. As for Katsumi, he too would succumb to the poisoned knife. What Ryo and Hajiki didn't know was that the culprit of the GOODBYE Bar was the Scorpio Victim of the 12 Duel Noir Challenge and the other person who tagged along with them: Gunzo - who killed Katsumi because the guy murdered his Dad for an insurance premium.

While the case would be solved, Ryo would not show up again the Danganronpa Kirigiri series. Ryo held a friendly attitude with Hajiki, being more than willing to work with him, mostly for casino busting. Yet, he is not nearly as equipped to handle serious situations, like murder, and panics at the thought of getting in trouble for his involvement. His retirement from gambling, and reasons for it, suggests he's the type to quit when he knows he can't hope to measure against someone better than himself, and if there are people more important that require him to be better.

Personal Thoughts

One of the things I love concerning the supplementary or side material of Danganronpa is when they do nods to the mainline titles. Be it in the form of cameos or just references that they exist.

In this case, I really enjoyed DRK just having some of its original cast mention how the other Ultimates were active. From Yuzen bringing up the Ult. Imposter in DRK2 and Chihiro's programming getting stolen for use in DRK 6. And, likewise, we have DRK 5 having Celeste be the reason Ryo quit gambling (which is just funny to me)! Like with the Mukuro Cult I find it as a nice way to make the world of Danganronpa feel bigger, showing that these guys we got to know of in-game really had an influence on the world they lived in.

Though, outside of that, Ryo's treatment in DRK, is rather depressing when you stop to think about it. He's just trying to help his friend out but ends up not only having his buddy bludgeoned to death soon after leaving the crime scene, but the Target ends up dying on him as well. And the only other living witness to these events? Yeah, the person he's with is a murderer who could easily kill him if need be. Thankfully, its implied that doesn't happen, but he's left in a pretty low point for the plot...which doesn't focus on him again. After Hajiki dies, and unlike the St. Anne students or the M.R.S of DRK who have some bearing on the plot beyond their Duel Noir, so dies Ryo's involvement in the proceedings.

He doesn't even get to know who killed him or be there for Sachi being taken down, and the main cast never gets to interact with him. He's pretty much just collateral damage that doesn't get a chance to be more than that unlike the students who became detectives or the MRS who were the ones to defeat Sachi. He's just abandoned by the plot. Honestly, I find it kind of disheartening, because Ryo could have served as 'something' to keep Hajiki's memory going even after death.

Perhaps have him join Salvador and Kyoko's anti-Duel Noir team in the epilogue (throw in the MRS in there too...and heck maybe that broke college student from Sachi's) as a means to honor Hajiki dying trying to help and make up for not being there to save him. It would mean that there was 'weight' to a death that that I've long since felt was just an author writing out the extras they no longer need in favor of Team Samidare just being about Yui and Kyoko again. But, that isn't what happened, so what we have is just a neat extra who gives an entertaining reference and fades into the void once the kinda-ish important character they were with croaks. An unfortunate situation, but that's the fate of a Smallcase character.

Next Time: Kirigiriso returns with a certain plant as our topic of interest!

#danganronpa #kyoko kirigiri #dr kirigiri #danganronpa kirigiri #drk #salvage smallcase #hajiki yaki #sachi mizuiyama #yui samidare

[redjaybathood]

Always read TOS before signing up. Always. Important things have to be repeated thrice, so: ALWAYS READ THE FUCKING TERMS OF SERVICE BEFORE SIGNING UP. Otherwise, you would end up like me, who's literally trapped in a virtual reality hellscape of one of my most hated comics franchises, about to be beaten up half to death and blown up to smithereens.

When I saw an ad for "Mind Mapping today - Immortality tomorrow" I was like, well, what the fuck this is about? Sounds like a scam, but what is this scam about? And then I clicked to their website, and look. It looked nice, professional. Convincing. Innovative. I was like, why nobody is talking about it? This is huge! You can, like, upload your brain - all your memories, all your personality, - to their server. Then, should something happen to you, your mind gets activated and you can continue your life in virtual universe. In reality, you will be dead, but you still will be online. Your relatives can contact you, you can chat with your friends or even make video calls through AI powered 3D generated animation (if you subscribe to Premium+ package). You can read or watch movies you never had time to, keep up with the news. Finally finish your novel you started in high school. Visit virtual museums, play games. And, who knows - with cybernetic industry developing as it is, maybe becoming a cyborg is not out of question, after ten years or so. If you can afford it.

Except for people like me, who use Basic plan. Turns out, that before we get to all the blessed idle posthumous life - basically a retirement, nothing that I could expect to enjoy irl - we can be used by the Mind Mapping, LTD, for Behavioural Modeling and AI Research. And it sounds benign, right, like filling out some kind of questionnaire, or allowing websites to save cookies or something.

Except what Mind Mapping meant by that, is their biggest investor is one of monopolists of Entertainment and Telecommunication & Internet corporation field. And they love money very much but don't like to spend money when they don't have to. So their recent project, yet another reboot of that comics franchise universe, powered by AI, is starting soon. The visual side is done by AI, like the video thing for rich ghosts in the machine. As for the plot... It's a mashup of all their past properties related to that franchise. Supposed to be, AI takes the best hits out of almost 130 years of history, except there were constant bugs and glitches. More than once, this universe ended up in Apocalypse before the things started to be interesting.

So they decided to rebrand. Put poor ghosts like me in a story and let us figure out how to make it satisfying for the fans. Then, as we reach the happy ending, they will cut a movie or a series out of our experience, and sell it to the fans.

And we can't leave this world without playing till the end. And if we die, it's game over for us, breach of contract. We are going to be deleted.

Me, personally, was put into a villainous cannon fodder, who has had his own series several times, but, except for a very enthusiastic group of followers, isn't liked by the mainstream. (No wonder, it's because of constant character assassination and OOC and that's why I don't like this comics franchise - I loved it too much before finally giving up) And my mission was to white wash all his evil deeds, redeem him, and turn him to the road of success, face slapping, and, preferably, group petting.

This character is Jason Todd. And I went online just as the first blow of crowbar grazed my cheek. Yeah, that's right: he was just about to be killed by the Joker. Which means, I was about to be killed by the Joker, now.

#transmigration into Jason Todd AU #fic ideas #basically a concept #god I hate to write the first person. i need to think how I can introduce the setting differently but another time #this is inspired by a ton of Chinese web novels about transmigration and rebirth

[dans-den]

Soul Hackers 2 Review

What's going on everyone? It's Dan here and today I'll be giving my first Video Game Review on the turn based JRPG, Soul Hackers 2!

This game is another entry from one of my favorite game developers Atlus and Published by my favorite Publisher Sega. I enjoy playing Atlus's other game franchises such as the Shin Megami Tensei series (I've played 3 and 5) and my personal favorite Persona (4, 5, Royal, etc). Both of those franchises have their own distinct personalities in terms of gameplay and theme.

Soul Hackers (much like Persona) was a spinoff game of the SMT series, specifically devil summoner. I find it strange they chose to make a sequel of the soul hackers game 25 years later but it might be due to the success of Persona and SMT back in 2021 with Persona 5 Strikers and SMT 5 doing well. I never played the original Soul Hackers game it was released the same year I was born on the PS1 and by the time I started playing games we had entered into the 6th generation of consoles (GameCube, PS2 and Xbox etc) so I had no clue of this games existence. When I saw Soul Hackers 2 trailer and how this was an Atlus game, I was intrigued to pick it up, I kept an eye on it and didn't end up purchasing the game until last month during Sega's steam sale where I bought the premium edition for about 60 dollars which I consider a decent deal getting the entire game and DLC's.

Now this game has had a very mixed reception and I wasn't sure what it could be. I looked into it and while playing the game, I think I was able to find some of the issues and saw some things I liked about it. I'll start with the theme, SMT is known for being Dark while Persona is more comedic and somewhat light-hearted. Soul Hackers 2 falls more into Persona territory where its theme is more quirky and light-hearted moments with some dark themes mixed into it for the sake of the story, People do die in this game and at times can be graphic. Their gameplay styles also help separate them, SMT is naturally a more difficult game to play even on normal and even easy mode at times. If you mess up once in SMT, your whole turn is done. Persona is more forgiving in that regard though it has its moments where its challenging enough while being able to progress through the story. Soul Hackers 2 is an easier game to play than Persona. Persona still had the turn based mechanics similar to SMT where if you mess up, you only lose a couple turns. It doesn't matter if you mess up in Soul Hackers 2, your turn will be unphased meaning you can complete all four turns whether you mess up or not in battle. That also means that even if you find the weakness, you don't gain a turn, its only four turns. Normally you would gain turns if you find the weakness of enemies, but it doesn't matter here in Soul Hackers 2, four turns is the ruling.

The characters in Soul Hackers are different from SMT and Persona protagonists since instead of high schoolers, the Protagonists consist of Young Adults in their 20's (assuming mid or late 20's) which is refreshing rather than the typical high school A-team. The characters are alright, they have their own personalities to them and their own stories. Ringo (yellow-green) and Figue (Purple) are two sentient AI's in humanoid bodies sent by Aion to protect the world from the impending doom of humanity all while learning what it's like to be human. Arrow is a Devil Summoner of a group called Yatagarasu who's the straight man of the group who lacks in some social queues but is a determined individual loyal to his friends and what he believes in. Milady is the assassin devil summoner from the other devil summoner group called Phantom Society and is the former lover of the main Antagonist Iron Mask. Saizo (my fav) is the comedic relief of the group who is a freelance devil summoner who workers for both sides and is a smooth talker with a charismatic personality. Each one has their own reason to fight and the chemistry between them are fun to watch I'll admit. Though the writing at times feel like they're trying to be hip and appeal to the younger audience and it comes across as cringey at times. But overall, the characters and their interactions are good.

The Story itself is not bad, but its also not great either, it's alright. The story is your typical Apocalyptic situation from Atlus where it takes the SMT route by having a big bad guy trying to destroy our current world so that they can create a new world in their own warped image. Our heroes have to stop them from destroying the world. The way its done in Soul Hackers 2 is done decently well where Iron Mask is collecting 5 covenants to give himself the power to destroy the world and create a new one. The story has a twist near the end which I wont spoil but I thought it was cleverly done. Soul Hackers 2 has an area called The Matrix where out heroes go through their souls and fix their souls from enemies invading it and as you keep exploring and leveling up your level for each character, you'll unlock deeper parts of their souls and stronger foes to fight and collect. I have issues with how they structured progressing in the game, I feel they should have made the Matrix a more essential way of progressing in the story and leveling up.

As mentioned before, the game is easier compared to other Atlus titles, as long as you level up you'll do fine though I do have issues with how you level up. Though there are moments where the EXP you get from fighting enemies doesn't feel like a substantial reward after grinding and fighting, feels like you're cheaped out at times. I also noticed that it has that resting mechanic that Persona 5 Strikers had where you'd exit the portal and rest up immediately which was a complain Strikers got. Soul Hackers 2 has that same mechanic with the Safehouse, you can go to the safehouse and rest up or eat a meal and replenish your HP/MP with zero cost or consequences. This is what I feel holds great Atlus games back, when they make it too easy with these replenish areas you can use whenever you feel like it but again that's just me. I also want to mention how the difficulty in this game doesn't change much. I did this game on all three difficulties and they hardly change. in SMT, the difference is drastic and even Persona has a more noticeable different in difficulty when you change it.

As mentioned, I purchased the DLC for the game since it was all on sale. The main meat of the DLC is a big side story with the young novice Devil Summoner named Nana. She eats a lot, she's sassy, a bit of a brat and her story was lackluster to say the least. She wasn't anything significant to the game, I wish they had done it like Royal where Violet was added as a main part of the game and it fit well without any real plot holes. This is why I'm glad they went with adults rather than teens or I would have just said "this game is dollar tree persona". I understand she's just DLC and not an actual part of the story, but if you're gonna make a DLC side quest, at least make it where it adds something meaningful to the game. The other DLC's are demons that were obtainable before in other Atlus games but now in this game they're behind a paywall which was another criticism I was seeing and I totally agree with that. I hate it when things that were free and obtainable through skill in the past are now locked behind a paywall which is just anti-consumer. So yeah, DLC's were definitely a flop due to how they handled them.

Overall, the game is a decent turn based JRPG. I see this as more aimed towards the average gamer or gamers not familiar with Atlus or turn based JRPG's. This game is definitely not meant for the Atlus fans such as myself even though its structed almost the same as SMT and Persona with different endings (which are both cool) and fusing characters (the fusion scene in this game is kinda lame) but its structured to be easier than their other franchises. I still had fun beating the game and collecting demons and leveling up. I still think this is a fun Atlus game to play, just not one I'd play after I played games like SMT or Persona.

Rating this game I am giving it:

7/10

I would recommend this game to someone who wants a fun turn based JRPG or wants to get into the Atlus games, though if you're a long time fan of Atlus, wait till this game is on sale like I did and play it as filler while waitin for the next Persona or SMT game. This game is good, but could have been great if only handled better.

That's all I got, See ya!

#dans den #video games #atlus #dungeon crawler #game review #jrpg #turn based strategy #sega #overworld #soul hackers 2

[sulettaofficial]

Unsolicited (un-Sulett-ited???) opinions on Gundam Evolution

The game is more fun than Overwatch, imo, despite being an Overwatch clone. That's almost 100% because I have zero emotional connection or investment in Overwatch, meanwhile my (poorly constructed) Char's Zaku II and RX-78-2 Gunplas cheer me on while I play GE.

Playable Heroes/Mobile Suits

The small pool of Mobile Suits is frustrating (let me play a Qubeley!) but I feel like that's actually a good thing for the game There's less to learn and less to counter, meaning that you can probably become decent at a few mobile suits and become a viable player in pretty much every match. On top of that, it makes it easier on the developers when it comes to making ~ unique ~ effects. If you have five suits where their main gimmick is funnels (because who doesn't love funnels?) then it just becomes a game where everyone uses funnels and they might as well as change the name to "Funnel Evolution." Granted, I do want to play as a Qubeley >://

Customization/Battle Pass

The customization options feel really barebones. I'm hoping they add more interesting designs, skins, charms, etc. I don't have a lot of money right now, so I couldn't purchase the ~ Battle Pass ~ even if I wanted to, but I don't even want to purchase the battle pass. All the rewards are just. Meh? Halo Infinite has better battle pass rewards if I'm being honest. If Bandai is trying to pull in a new group of fans with a F2P shooter, they really need to add something to the game for the Fortnite players who are used to absolutely zany skins and the Halo Infinite players who are used to having a ~ super custom and personalized ~ SPARTAN-IV. Sazabi white lines? Sazabi black lines? Stop this. The most interesting skin is for the Nu Gundam - at level 60 - which is "Active Resonance". Nu Gundam with neon green lines. It looks nice but like. Okay? At level 51 you unlock Methuss "Sky Blue Lines" which is just the Methuss with...sky blue lines painted on it. Nu Gundam is an MS that you have to pay money for, about $10 USD. Over the course of the 60 levels of the battle pass you earn 990 EVO coins, which is the in game paid currency. Conveniently, 990 coins is the price of a MS. So you get to the final level, unlock the Nu Gundam skin, and assuming you haven't spent your coins on anything else, then you buy Nu Gundam. Otherwise, you'll unlock a skin for a MS that you don't even have. On top of that, since this is a hero based game, you're unlocking a skin for an MS that you might not even want to play. If you're a Barbatos/Exia main, I don't see you ever wanting to get Nu Gundam. If the final skin was for a free MS, I wouldn't have any complaints. Also you get an animated "stamp" - GE's version of "Sprays" - at Level 51 of a Psycommu but it's called "Psycho-Frame Light" and it's a 3D "T" spinning with green light around it. And I'm pretty sure the Psycommu in CCA was a bit more stylized than just being a gray version of the Teen Titans Tower. (I would check, but even the wiki doesn't have an image of the Psycommu, so maybe I'm wrong. And I don't feel like booting up my copy of CCA.)

There's also loot boxes that you open via tickets, which you can earn from the (paid/premium) battle pass. You can earn skins and other cosmetics from them. That's fine. I don't like loot boxes but between the minimal options and the fact that it doesn't feel like it's super monetized makes me feel like it's more acceptable compared to other loot boxes. Granted, I wish that there weren't loot boxes, but since I don't really care about the content it's like "Eh? Whatever?" At the same time though, that's more of a criticism of the less-than-stellar (in my opinion) skins/cosmetics. So actually no, loot boxes bad. Get them out of the game >:///

Also, the lack of in-character voice lines is insane. Why do you just have generic voice lines across all your suits rather than having some Char impersonator read an iconic "I came here to laugh at you." for the Sazabi? Where is the Setsuna-adjacent "I AM Gundam." line when you activate TRANS-AM? Who made this decision to not have any voice acting? Was it you, corporate?

Aesthetics

Absolutely not a fan of the art style nor sense of scale. In terms of scale, rather than feeling like I'm fighting giant mechas in a city, I feel like I'm fighting normal sized people - wearing power armor - in a toy city. MechAssault did a better job with scale (imo) and that game came out in like 2001. As for the art style, it just makes everything look like toys. I'm guessing they're trying to go for a CGI Anime look(???) but it doesn't look great. Between the toy aesthetic and sense of scale, I feel like I'm playing as the self insert of my 12 year old self with Gundam action figures in a game of ~ pretend ~ with my friend.

Thing I'm disappointed about >:///

The fact that it's an Overwatch clone is...disappointing. When my girlfriend told me (like months ago) there was a new Gundam game coming out I was so jazzed because I was hoping it was going to be a big(ger) budget game or at least something unique/interesting. Instead it's just...Overwatch. I understand it from a business strategy point of view but like c'mon. Where's my Gundam RPG where I go on missions with my pilot that I spent hours in Character Creation on and meticulously chose my skills and perks??? Or at least give me a PvP Online Only FPS that's not Overwatch.

TL;DR

Overall though, it's actually pretty fun. If you don't like Overwatch's gameplay then you'll obviously not like this. Some of the controls feel a touch off, but that's nitpicking and it's 100% tolerable. If you like multiplayer games then I'd say it's worth checking out. I've been playing exclusively Casual matches (though I plan to play Ranked when I unlock it) and I don't feel like I'm getting stomped by other players (of course some matches are better than others), so it's generally just been good matches. It boots you out of the lobby at the end of each match (at least I'm pretty sure it does. I always leave of my own accord, but there's a timer next to the leave button and I am assuming that means it either auto-queues you for another match w/o the people you just played with or it boots you to the main menu automatically. But I could be completely wrong). I mention this because I have been told this is a sign that a game is using SBMM, so if you don't like games that have universal SBMM that might be a turn off for you. Personally, I don't mind it in Halo Infinite, and if I'm right about GE I don't mind it here either.

"Neva, why are you talking about this game now? It came out in September!"

My PC is broken so I had to wait for it to come out on Xbox ;___; Pls be nice to me, a console pleb ;___;

Also when you open a loot box, RX-78 like fucking. Airdrops it to you, and it's just the most funny (in a good way) and endearing thing. It's like he's like "Hello, I brought this for you." and then the box dramatically opens.

#Mobile Suit Gundam #Gundam Evolution #Long Post #Neva Posting #The TL;DR is 'Its fun you can play it'

[rocket-69]

Hey there! So sorry to bother you but you’re the only person I follow who posts Destiny stuff. I’m curious about getting into Destiny but I’m not really sure how? Like how important is the first game in terms of story and lore and is there a good way to catch up? How is the process of like, getting caught up with things? And like, how social does it actually require you to be, like can you just queue into dungeons in a random group or do I have to like seek out a guild or something? Sorry for the whole blast of questions and feel totally free to not answer but I think I would really like to give this series a try. Thank you either way!

Hi anon! The first game sets a certain stage and tone but I’ve never played the first game! There’s an immense amount of written lore in lorebooks on a website called Ishtar Collective, which compiles all the lore from books in the game, item flavor, and other things. Youtubers my clan recommends for lore are mynameisbyf and Myelin! I’ll be honest I haven’t read everything and I know very well that I miss a lot of small details, but if I pay attention to the story and themes I hardly find anything I think up for my OCs to be outside of lore consistency. My advice is to get a general gist of the story and setting (mynameisbyf has a big lore recap) and then look things up based on what interests you. Maybe you like the exos (good taste *nod nod*) so you look up Clovis Bray and Braytech. Maybe you like the Awoken so you deep dive into lore surrounding the Dreaming City.

My primary interest in this game is in seeing what other creatives do with their characters- each guardian or OC is just a little bit unique and they react to the story a little differently as they think about their relation to these much larger life-giving or world destroying forces. I’m definitely still playing it because I am in a clan full of people who like to create interesting guardians figuring out how they react to various story beats (or even how they live in this setting).

Destiny 2 is controversial as there are entire arcs of the universe’s story that are completely inaccessible to new players (Destiny developers opted to “vault” planet maps, story expansions, even the main questline it was released with) to make room for the next set of expansions. That said, each expansion’s maps have been quite detailed and a person can spend a lot of time in one or another worldspace. The new tutorial they put in after vaulting their first one is also not that long. It’s very likely that when the next expansion drops, the oldest expansion currently available will be vaulted as well. Further, there’s “seasonal” content which means each week a new piece of the story is released, but after some time it also gets vaulted.

As for how social, this is definitely a game that you can play almost entirely solo, but is much more enjoyable IMO with friends or a clan. But you can solo-queue for most team activities, worldspaces are populated by other players, and I know that there are good rewards for soloing the dungeons (but this is of course, difficult). Raids can be arranged with strangers but that’s through an LFG system that isn’t in the game itself. But! There’s no requirement for you to play the PVP game modes if you don’t want to, though you’ll lose out on some PVP specific cosmetics or weapons (but there are so many weapons overall imo it’s fine).

I recommend trying it out! The base game is free, at least. I don’t buy the cosmetic/exotic gun DLC/premium currency, and I have plenty of fun as is.

#asked #I also don't mind helping out newbies! Feel free to message me off anon and I can join you :+) #sorry the answer is so long! i'm just trying to be thorough

[starfriday]

*Ajay Devgn’s NY VFXWAALA announces strategic international expansion in collaboration with GBK, Sweden*

Ajay Devgn's award-winning entrepreneurial initiative, NY VFXWAALA, a renowned Indian Visual Effects Studio, joyfully announces a strategic partnership with the acclaimed Swedish studio, Goodbye Kansas Studio, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, through its offshore subsidiary. Goodbye Kansas Studios boasts a remarkable portfolio of services, seamlessly integrated across feature films, TV series, commercials, games, and trailers. Their expertise spans VFX, FX, CG productions, 3D face and body scanning, digital humans, creature and character design, performance capture, animation, and real-time capabilities.

This significant investment establishes two pivotal relationships:

• *Secured Major Stake:* We have secured a major stake in Goodbye Kansas, through our offshore subsidiary, solidifying our collaboration.

•Immediate Joint Venture Studio in India: Simultaneously, we are launching a joint venture studio in India.

Goodbye Kansas is a powerhouse in creating cinematic trailers for top triple-A games worldwide and delivering visual effects for live-action productions. Their impressive portfolio includes work on games like Cyberpunk 2077, God of War: Ragnarök, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the Battlefield franchise, and PUBG Battlegrounds. Beyond gaming, they’ve undertaken fascinating visual effects projects. Their ongoing collaborations with HBO, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney, Apple TV, Paramount Plus, and others are truly exceptional. Recent shows they’ve contributed to include True Detective Season 4 (HBO), One Piece (Netflix), and Carnival Row (Amazon Prime). Additionally, they’ve lent their expertise to numerous commercials and feature films, including Asteroid City and A Man called Otto (both featuring Tom Hanks). Their outstanding work has garnered prestigious awards, such as the VES (Visual Effects Society) award for “Outstanding Animated Character in a Commercial” for their work on the character “Dex” in the Cyberpunk 2077 E3 trailer, presented at the 18th Annual VES Awards gala in Los Angeles.

Our shared vision revolves around mutual growth, leveraging our collective creativity and technical prowess. Together, we extend premium services to global clients, inviting talents from India and Asia to collaborate on exciting future projects.

Our joint efforts will contribute creative and technological expertise, delivering technology-driven visual content to film, TV, and gaming companies across India, Asia, and beyond. By employing global resource planning, we aim to enhance production efficiency and elevate industry standards.

· Accelerating Revenue Growth: Our strategy involves scalable capacity expansion and intensified sales efforts within existing business segments (VFX, Animation, Game Trailers, and In-Game). We’ll target new geographical markets and capitalize on the growing trend of outsourcing VFX and gaming content. Additionally, we will adopt a global approach to resource planning and talent acquisition.

· Global Service Strengthening: Our combined scope of services will strengthen our global service offerings. We’ll strategically exploit opportunities in the Indian Games market and other Asian markets.

· Expanding Scanning and Motion Capture Studio: Goodbye Kansas’s state-of-the-art scanning and motion capture studio will extend its services to clients in Asia and beyond.

· Research and Development Collaboration: We’ll establish a collaborative Research and Development (R&D) team between both partners. This team will focus on creating innovative tools and technological advancements.

“Our endeavours involve setting new benchmarks with each project. We embrace a continuous process of learning, evolution, and adaptation to the latest technologies. I am delighted to extend our NY family through the Goodbye Kansas partnership. Our unwavering passion for delivering excellence persists, fueled by our core values and dedication. We take pride in associating with a like-minded partner GBK, and look forward to this journey together.” said the founder and chairman of NY VFXWAALA, Mr. Ajay Devgn.

“NY VFXWAALA is an ideal partner for Goodbye Kansas, sharing the same dedication to outstanding talent, cutting edge technology and engaging narrative. This strategic partnership brings together our strengths in a way that will benefit both our organizations. Together, we’re positioned to create exceptional value for our customers, and open new development opportunities for our talented co-workers.” says Goodbye Kansas’ chairman of the Board, Per Anders Wärn.

“I am happy to announce this combined financing solution and strategic partnership, welcoming NY WFXWAALA as a business partner and a strategic investor in Goodbye Kansas. Our partnership will significantly contribute to our mutual growth and provide major opportunities for expanding production resources and capabilities, supporting Goodbye Kansas’ journey towards profitable growth” said CEO Stefan Danieli.

"We are thrilled about partnering with the Goodbye Kansas team. Our joint vision is to raise the quality benchmark, drive global expansion, and deliver exceptional service to clients worldwide. With unwavering commitment to our goals, we eagerly look forward to expanding our business and welcoming dedicated talent not only in India but globally, to collaborate on an exciting future," says the Creative Head and Co-founder of NY VFXWAALA, Mr. Naveen Paul.

NY VFXWAALA, India an award-winning studio has worked on approx. 300 Films, has won prestigious awards like 64th National Awards, India, 10th Asian film Award and more, it remains committed to raising the bar through this strategic partnership, ensuring the delivery of premium services to our esteemed clients. We deeply appreciate our existing relationships with clients in India and around the globe. The prospect of offering cutting-edge solutions further fuels our excitement. Our journey, from a modest small studio to an expanding international presence, keeps us grounded yet relentlessly pushing boundaries. Our global growth aims to provide competitive, high-quality services, and we eagerly invite talents from all corners of the world to collaborate with us on this remarkable journey.

[s10safecare]

How Robot Medical Scribe Can Help You With ICD-10,CPT And E/M Coding?

Robot Medical Scribe & ICD-10, CPT and E/M coding

Healthcare professionals have traditionally had a difficult time providing high-quality treatment while assuring efficient clinical recording and appropriate medical coding. In emergency departments, which are hectic settings with a variety of expertise, things grow much more difficult. Therefore, emergency rooms face distinct problems with medical billing and coding. To get the appropriate payments, skilled medical coders and billers with the relevant expertise and powerful analytical abilities are required, in addition to competent clinical personnel. We provide our opinions on the particular medical billing and coding issues faced by emergency rooms in this article, as well as the recommended procedures to guarantee the highest possible reimbursements.

What Is ICD-10?

The term "ICD-10" refers to the tenth edition of the International Classification of Diseases, a system of medical coding developed primarily by the World Health Organization (WHO) to classify medical conditions by groups of related illnesses under which more specific illnesses are listed, tying subtle diseases to more extensive morbidities.ICD-10-CM is used by physicians, coders, health information managers, nurses, and other healthcare workers to help them save and retrieve diagnostic data, according to WHO. The creation of national mortality and morbidity data also makes use of ICD records.

What Is CPT?

CPT, or Current Procedural Terminology, is a coding system developed by the American Medical Association used in medical billing (AMA). As the name implies, CPT is a coding system that is used to assign codes for medical operations so that healthcare professionals, patients, insurance payers, medical coders, and billers can all communicate clearly. Depending on the category, a CPT code is made up of five alphanumeric or numeric characters. CPT codes are often broken down into three categories: Category I, Category II, and Category III. However, the American Medical Association has created a new class of CPT codes known as Proprietary Laboratory Analyses (PLA) codes. Each category has its unique set of CPT codes according to the kind of medical services.

Recommended Reading : Ambient Voice Technology

What Is E/M coding?

A medical coding procedure used to assist medical billing is called evaluation and management coding. In order for Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance to pay practitioners of health care in the United States for patient interactions, E/M coding is required.Private health insurance firms have accepted it as the norm when judging the nature and severity of patient problems. This enables medical service providers to keep records and submit invoices for payment of services.

The Benefits Of Medical Coding And Billing 

It is now fairly obvious that medical billing and coding are essential tasks for maintaining hospitals and medical offices. Medical institutions rely substantially on money from insurance companies and other healthcare initiatives. Insurance firms generate a profit by levying monthly premiums or taxes on policyholders. Depending on the contract, the insurance companies are able to pay the majority of policyholders' medical expenses thanks to the buy-ins from the participants in the pool. In light of this, the amount of money received in reimbursements—and not from the purses of consumers—is significant. Due to this, it is crucial that medical billing and coding be completed and done correctly. Every patient who enters a hospital, an urgent care facility, or another medical institution must have information recorded. Furthermore, precise medical billing and coding are crucial to guaranteeing that patients and their insurance are billed correctly for the right services and that they aren't forced to pay more than necessary for a procedure. 

To get around issues with documentation, a lack of coders, strict rules, and a lack of time, physicians have begun using robot medical scribes for EM coding too. Instead of completing documents and managing electronic health information, Robot Medical scribes help doctors to concentrate more on medical treatment. Physicians tend to patients as scribes do computer coding and note-taking. According to a poll by the ACCP-SI (American College of Chest Physicians - Sleep Institute), most doctors only get the minimal amount of sleep necessary for optimal work. Face-to-face clinic visits typically run no longer than 16 minutes as doctors take on more patients to make ends meet. 

Pros Of Hiring A Robot Medical Scribe 

In the US, demand for robot medical scribes is rising as they relieve physicians of data collection and EHR reporting load. This lets healthcare professionals work more efficiently, give patients their entire attention throughout, and deliver high-quality, reasonably priced medical treatment. In real-time, the Robot Medical scribes record the patient's history, the treatment plan, the exam, and other clinical information while doctors engage with the patient in the exam room. The Robot medical Scribe has built-in models to handle medical coding and insurance verification too. 

At the conclusion of the clinical session, the doctors evaluate and make corrections to the scribes' paperwork. Scribing requires more than just entering a doctor's dictation into the EHR; it also entails condensing the patient-doctor exchange into a brief document and error-free coding before delivering it to the coders and billers. Scribes are in charge of assisting doctors in keeping track of the tests that are requested. They also help them by reminding them of treatment plans, helping them manage several patients, and making sure that test results, medication refills, and paperwork needs are completed. This real-time access to information makes the Robot Medical Scribe the best bet to do the medical coding too. 

The current state of healthcare procedures makes it hard for physicians to handle everything. In the US, the majority of scribes still work for emergency rooms and urgent care clinics. But during the past two to three years, numerous specialities, including OB/GYN, ophthalmology, dermatology, and gastroenterology, have begun to use robot medical scribes to lighten their workloads and increase income.

#s10.ai #medical scribe #medical scribing #medical service #robot medical service #s10.ai robot

[jscreativemedia]

Evaluation

Evaluation term 2 - 2nd March 2024 

To conclude this second term at Arts University Bournemouth, i think I've definitely developed as a designer, furthering my exploration of typography, character design, and overall skills across the Adobe suite.  

For the pick pack sell brief, i was concerned when i had no ideas spring to mind initially, but after i digested the brief properly, i got very motivated very quickly. I was slightly lost after i had done my first few sketches, because there wasn’t any weight behind why i chose a Viking theme, and then i had a brain wave n thought about spinning it into a gym supplement which then made the ‘BARBARIC’ brand make sense. This also allowed my target audience to shrink, giving me more purpose and felt like i had a select group of people to appeal to which made idea generating easier. Then i started drafting and generating brand assets and the rest followed nicely, it was like a spark went off as soon as i came up with the creatine idea. 

The thinking behind my designs was to use bold type and bold colour. I wanted to make my product look and feel premium, however i wanted to add some aggression and i did this by using a front type called ‘grot rough’ which is a bold and distressed looking typeface, as soon as i discovered it, i fell in love with it. My character was drawn in a cartoon like style, but throughout the project i started to use him less and less, i think this is due to my audience changing from being everyone who likes bon bons for those who will use it as a supplement, it went from feeling childish to then being quite chic. 

As usual i managed my time very well at the start. And then i lose energy and motivation as the weeks go on. But I'm always making sure i get the bulk of the work done and the hard thinking and planning in the beginning, so it allows me time to refine as the project goes along. 

There was a controversial conversation that was had during one of the tutorials highlighting my visuals as not being appropriate. Although i had a slightly different opinion, i took it onboard and understood why what got said, got said. I then changed my poster design even though it was a really good design! (was definitely gutted) My overall attitude towards my feedback is very positive in that i take feedback constructively and then implement what gets suggested or redesign when a problem or solution is noticed. I think this is a great attribute to have a designer because it shows i care and i don't let my ego get in the way. 

I think the more feedback i get, the better i become. There are certainly areas where i need to improve, and i often pick faults in my work when i see everyone else's work on the wall being presented at the end of a design workshop, sometimes standing back and having a look from a far can highlight both crap and good design. The main two things I've identified i need improvement on is net design and animation, these are two things ive never done until now so i think what I've produced isn't too bad considering these are skills i have only just gained, still need improvement though, repetition is key to my success.  

The design workshops were my favourite lessons this term, the poster and social media workshops were class. 

#viscom