Promiseland

[knightofcups]

my frowny face is not a quote.

: (

[Fetian]

A little bummed

I've always had good luck washing ties by tying them into a pillowcase and running them through a gentle cycle, but today several of my ties have been damaged and a few of them are ruined, including a couple of my favourites. When the cycle was done, there was still soap in the machine, so I ran it through a rinse and spin without thinking, and it's probably that that did it. Or I didn't tie them in tight enough, or I ran too many at once, or you're just not supposed to run ties through the washing machine in the first place, or.

Can't say it's been a super-duper great day, all things considered.

[Fetian]

The vibes today are. Bad.

[Fetian]

Yooka-Laylee is on sale for four bucks, so I bought myself a copy and spent a couple days playing it. I'm glad I didn't pay full price, because I 100%-ed it in about thirty hours, which is less game with less polish than I'd prefer for $40

It is fun, though. My biggest issue with it is that the difficulty level is inconsistent -- most of the game is very forgiving and casual, but the bosses and rextro minigames ramp the difficulty up into, certainly playable and beatable, but turn it almost into a rage game. A few of them feel outright broken and unfair, and my playtime would have been a few hours shorter if the controls worked properly.

A lot of people say the game feels "empty", and I agree to an extent. Aspects of it definitely feel rushed and unfinished; things that feel like they should do something, but don't. Overall it feels kind of unrewarding

It ends up in a weird place, though, where people spend a lot of time explicitly comparing it to Banjo-Kazooie, which is ultimately a fair comparison and one the developers were inviting, but they do this at the expense of judging Yooka-Laylee on its own merits, and they do it through very firmly planted nostalgia-goggles. You get a lot of "it's just not as good as my childhood" reviews, which do not take into account the flaws Banjo-Kazooie &c had

I hope they make a sequel, or at least another collectathon 3D platformer. I haven't found much news of what they've been up to in recent years, but the secret robot in the game has reached 98% (it was at 50.1% in 2017) and there's even odds on it being tied to an announcement of some kind, more content, or a troll

[Fetian]

Started playing Conker's Bad Fur Day again, which is not a collectathon but is very much a Rare™ game - as in the company, not as in it being unknown or difficult to find, or having unusual qualities, though it arguably is those other things, as well.

I'd gotten pretty far into it before, but that was a computer ago. I enjoyed it at the time but on a second runthrough of all of the earlier levels I'm finding the controls are grating on me and that I'm struggling with the logic behind some of the puzzles. I'm making frequent use of save states to save my sanity and hopefully I'll be back to where I left off soon.

Because so much of it is shock humour, it doesn't hold up as well to a replay as many of Rare's other titles, and if it's not funny then it's not anything much. I do often wonder what directions the video game industry would have gone in if Conker had managed to be popular

[Fetian]

Of course, I'm now going to have The Great Mighty Poo's song stuck in my head for days

[Fetian]

Up early this morning finishing Conker. Thank god for save states because there's a point at which the game becomes wildly and unrelentingly frustrating, I absolutely would not have made it without them.

I think I'm done with 3D platformers for a while, now, which once again means I need to find something else to play.

[Fetian]

Io Saturnalia!!

[Fetian]

Starting a Saturnalia tradition of electing one of our pets to be the Lord of Misrule

[Fetian]

Been having a rough time of things. It's winter, it's cold, I'm not getting out enough, blah blah blah. Everything feels meaningless and like it doesn't matter, whatever.

I'm also, lamenting the state of the world, a lot. I know that there are more good people than bad, that humanity is fundamentally and inherently good, and social, and cooperative. But it's been getting to me, lately, how awful it is that there are any nazis, terfs, bigots. That humanity is capable of that kind of hatred.

It's just getting me down.

There's also health stuff getting to me but I won't go into that right now.