finally, i don’t have to stream from my PC to play the funny card game

Through monstadt, it really does feel like a clone. Though as the game opens up, yeah it does carve out its own identity.

At the beginning before you get any good teammates, your party members are basically just the different BOTW weapons, and their skills are the different shieka slate tools. Kaeya’s your Cryo, Amber’s your Bombs, Noelle’s your hammers, and you need them to get to korok seed stand-ins. Domains are obvious parallels to shieka shrines, but they mostly get abandoned after the prologue chapter as anything other than gear grind spots. Even the grind of ascending characters and their weapons feels like doing great fairy fountain gear grinds.

edit: oh, and you climb and glide around to traverse the massive environment; it’s a surface level feature comparison, but worth mentioning.

The comparison does begin to fall apart when you find out that the meat and potatoes of genshin is the (mostly self contained) main storylines, and once you start unlocking character storylines, it becomes even further distinct. You’re not building up to reunite with your sibling by just picking a direction and exploring (or even just making a mad dash to the cryo nation), you’re sequentially building up and knockign down local threats, only occasionally getting glimpses of the main thread. And of course, the mobile game mechanics that permeate the whole thing after AR 30 or so really pull it further away.

genshin, wholly in spite of its fucked up gacha party system. If it was a normal 60 dollar game with less scope and without the gambling, I’d like it better than BotW.

All of the fake martial arts (from no-touch knockouts and kayfabe wrestling) have given me a bad impression of martial arts in general. If you’re not mystifying your arts or trying to pass them off as something they’re not to impressionable and vulnerable people, hey you’re good. But I’m still internally lumping them all together as scams in my head.

nothing will fundamentally change

Waluigi and Samus.

What this says about me is that I’m a lanky crook who underneath the rough veneer is a clumsy weirdo with a hyperfixation on birds??? I guess that’s actually pretty accurate, though the slang is pretty archaic there.

mmm no, i dont think so. Crushed red pepper and jalapenos tho? Hell yea

I’ve somehow managed to capture a bit of childhood wonder with videogames of all things again.

Way back when I was a kid, my uncle showed me Super Mario Sunshine on the Gamecube, and I was blown away by how good it looked. Clear water, beautiful scenery, bright colors. I was absolutely astonished. It felt like I was living in the future.

When I was a bit older and got my first gaming PC, I felt that same sense of wonder seeing Ironforge populated with so many people running around in their cool armor and epic mounts.

It’s been a hot minute since then, and I haven’t been wowed like that again until now, when I’ve slid my phone into a controller and steamlink’s a fully modded skyrim from my PC to it. I just spent a couple hours marvelling at how sick that is that I can do that, lying on the couch and experiencing real ass games.

Now granted, the switch and the psp / vita etc have all been around for a minute, but this is my doomscrolling machine, turned into a handheld console with as high end graphics and mods as I can handle on my PC. It blew my mind since I’ve been dismissing the phone gaming ecosystem as little more than microtransaction shovelware hell for the longest time. It’s just really neat!

Omikron the Nomad Soul.

It’s david cage’s worst game and I have no idea how he tricked David Bowie into collaborating on it. Also, listen to the music.

edit: whoops, got silvagunner’d. Here’s the real track.

cheemsborger

holy shit your buddy sounds unhinged

I grew up really poor, so high definition audio isn’t something i’ve really ever had access to growing up, and I’ve never felt like I was missing out once I had the money to spend on new stuff.

Yeah, I throw dynamite around.

I just wish it wasn’t so expensive. I can pick up a big case of cola for cheaper than a modest sized case of fizzy water.

I just katamari all of my music into one big obnoxiously large playlist. If I want to hear music of a specific type, that’s what albums are for.

cheemsmburmger

oh fuck, I’d kill for a plate of that right now. That sounds amazing.

theuppermostinlife - It’s just one person scooping up all of the music they like and curating a bunch of compilations. I’ve found lots of music I listen to regularly thanks to their efforts.

it’s time to get into wigs

To me, it looks more like social camoflauge. “I’m just a normal guy, i have normal opinions, trust me bro” is the vibe I get. I get putting it on for things like work, but if you decide to blend in as your preferred look, ehh, i dunno, maybe I’d rather hang out with the bear, you know?