Anonymous asks:

all-time favorite games?

So, I'm not sure how to answer this in a satisfyingly interesting way. I suspect that you're looking for more than just a bulleted list, so I'll try to provide a bit of context for each one:

• My all-time favorite game is Super Mario Bros. 3. In critique corner I write a little bit about why I still like it more than Super Mario World, even if the latter is technically the better game.

• My all-time favorite action-adventure game is Guardian Legend, for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Blue Lander, a helpful round creature in the game, is the source of my surname. If you have about six hours to kill, you can watch me play the entire game on youtube

• My all-time favorite roguelike is Fatal Labyrinth for the Sega Megadrive. People who are serious about roguelikes probably do not consider it worth their consideration, but I played it before I ever owned a computer, before I had ever heard of Rogue, and it stuck with me. If you have about six hours to kill, you can watch me play the entire game on youtube

• My all-time favorite action roguelike is Spelunky for the personal computer. If you have an hour to kill, you can watch me play the entire game on youtube. Disclaimer: this video is ~8 years old and I may be completely different than I am now. Sorry if I say anything shitty.

• My all-time favorite exploration platformer is Super Win the Game for the personal computer. You can watch me play a randomized run on youtube... if you have about 3 hours to kill.

• My all-time favorite RPG is Dragon Warrior 7 for the Sony Playstation. I haven't had a chance to say much about it, because it's well over 100 hours long, but it's good. Here's a video of me playing the first 3 hours (sans commentary) which is just about enough time to have encountered the first monster.

• My all-time favorite action RPG is Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis. I haven't had a chance to say much about it. It's pretty wonky, and I'm not sure I can recommend it to anyone, but it's one of those unpolished gems I played as a kid and grew to love.

• My all-time favorite simulation game is Tokimeki Memorial, which I wrote about in heartthrob 101

• My all-time favorite rhythm game is Rhythm Heaven Megamix for the Nintendo 3DS. I loved Rhythm Tengoku for the GBA enough to have perfected it before there was even a fan translation. When Rhythm Tengoku Gold came out in the US as Rhythm Heaven, I was super disappointed. The tight button-based rhythm games from the GBA were replaced with really sloppy non-tactile touchscreen taps. I missed out on Rhythm Heaven Fever because it came out for a system I never owned. When Rhythm Heaven Megamix came out, even though it was mostly just a collection of previous minigames with a few new ones thrown in, I was unfamiliar with almost all of them, so to me it was like an entirely new game; and I love Tibby and all the other characters and the goofy little framing device they added. It's the reason I'll never get rid of my 3DS.

• My all-time favorite first-person-shooter is Doom. Explanation: it's Doom.

So... I hope that answered your question.

Kite says:

Dear m;,

I just want to thank you for your blog. It really means a lot to me and it's there for me every day, no matter whether it's a beautifully composed train of thought, a Garbage Digest of jokes that never fail to make me laugh, or a sentence or less about writer's block. The constancy is everything in these tumultuous times (college).

You've introduced me to the writings of Tim Rogers (though I still don't know whether Tennis Monster is a real book-in-progress, or an elaborate Bit) and I look forward to watching his videos on the next rainy day. And the other authors you link in the Sunday Links article posts are always fascinating reads for one reason or another.

I was spurred into writing this by your posts about analytics. Not only did they really speak to me, as someone who sometimes writes and reads fanfic for an incredibly niche fandom where 50 hits is a viral post (goodness gracious I empathized with that "hit counter only went up because I viewed the page"), but because I had been following you on mastodon and then just dropped off the face of the fediverse, and with that post I realized there was one fewer person liking your posts. I just wanted to say, still here! daily reader of the blog!

Also, the large post lamenting the inability to disable analytics, with the very next day simply being an "Oh. You /can/ do that." spoke to me on a very personal level. I dunno, I think it's a human experience of the deepest sort.

Anyways, thanks for the blog. Take care, especially with the new spreadsheet shop happenstancings! Sometimes a slight bit of workplace stress makes for exciting anecdotes―my summer job at a halftimes-overstaffed halftimes-understaffed boating dock gave me some ridiculous tales, and a friend―but most of the time it's all one can do to stay afloat.

I wish you well!

Thank you so much, and I'm sorry for the delay in responding to this. Google Forms was showing me responses all out of order, so I thought the new message was someone re-sending an old message.

I think Chronicle of a Tennis Monster is a real book that may or may not be written down. He's talked about it so much that even if it was a bit in the beginning, it has become real; it might only exist in his head at the moment.

I'm still on Mastodon, if you decide you wanna give it another shot! I'm on gamemaking.social now.

The spreadsheet shop isn't quite a new development—I just passed my 1-year anniversary there in August—it's just so dull that I rarely have anything to say about it. I just thought, well, I'll need to write about these characters in my life from time to time, so I might as well give them names.¹

Thanks so much for your kind words, and good luck with the ol' college endeavor! 🦝

---

1. edit: oh, I misread, I see you meant new as in current events at the shop, not that the shop itself is new. Apologies.↩