Finished ActRaiser (SNES).

ActRaiser plays like two games in one. One half is a top-down 'god game' city-building simulator, the other half is your standard side-scrolling platformer with very oldschool difficulty. Although the two modes have such different visuals and gameplay, they are integrated. Your success in the citybuilding increases your health/spells in the platformer, and your success in the platformer unlocks the next part of the citybuilding.

I have to admire how much effort it would have been to include both these two modes. They are so visually different you basically can't recycle any assets between them. Another cool thing is that the overworld map, shown with the 'mode 7' efffect, shows how your city actually looks at the present time- the terrain changes, and the placement of cities- not just some constant pre-canned thing.

There is a sequel to this game, ActRaiser II, but they axed the city-building part in favor of just having the platformer alone. Kind of a curious decision since that's what really made this game unique.

The difficulty of the game varies wildly. The SIM parts are quite relaxing, and some of the early-game bosses are a joke, but the final boss gauntlet is something else. You need to fight all the bosses from the latter half of the game in succession, and then an additional final boss with two forms. In between bosses your health doesn't replenish. Your magic doesn't replenish. You can die twice but no more. Oh, and the bosses are all sped up compared to before. I was able to put together a 'take no damage' strategy for a few of them but not all. I got through it by the skin of my teeth.

This was a very challenging but fun game, I loved the two-genres-in-one and visual style. I had rented it a couple times when I was younger but never owned it, and for some reason, I had never beaten it even though it's short. Maybe it was too hard. Now I got to revisit it. There are a lot of games I was not able to beat when I was younger but I can beat them now, I think because I became better co-ordinated.

And between this, Kirby's Marx and Lagoon- seeing any 2D game level whose background is just a moving starfield makes me instantly know what's going on... It's a huge cliche!

I... don't think that's how that works

Finished Secret of Evermore for the SNES.

This was an action-RPG I had really wanted to play when I was little, but wasn't able to obtain a copy. Nowadays the world is at your fingertips so I can finally play it. It plays very similarly to Secret of Mana.

The graphics and visual style really left an impression on me. Compared to most other RPGs from around the same time period, everything feels very 'larger than life', probably because it's actually bigger in terms of pixel size- that is, if you compare it to say, FF5 or FF6. More frames of animation too. The design for the bosses "Thraxx"/"Coleoptera" was really cool. And as for the art style, it feels kind of realistic and gritty, none of the words seem too inviting, and it works for this game. Combined with ambient sound instead of background music for a lot of parts, the environments tend to feel kind of lonely and spooky.

It turns out it was developed by a North American division of Square which explains a lot. It is loaded with gags and pop culture references and in general feels way too western to be a JRPG. Although it does follow the cliche of having the obligatory Mode-7 airship type of thing toward the end. Overall, 10/10 would recommend.

In some ways I'm fearful of the future because I'm alive now. Not in the past, but now. Nowadays there are more human beings than there have ever been in all of history, over 7 billion... So it's statistically more likely I would exist now, rather than in the past. That's fine.

But why was I not born later in the future? Since the world population seems to be ever increasing, wouldn't being born in the future be even more likely still? Maybe, the world population does not grow, and the trend stops. Maybe, something catastrophic happens.If something catastrophic happens, then if any human being were to be alive, it'd be very likely to be now, but very unlikely thereafter.

The problem feels reconciled if I remember how unlikely things can happen. If you pick a random human in all of history, you'd be much more likely to pick a random person from modern times than a person from the Middle Ages. But humans existed in the Middle Ages.

So if I'm to be a random person from the history of human civilization, it might be an unlikely choice for me to be alive now (rather than at a later date, when were are more populous) but that's still an entirely possible, valid outcome. I just don't want to know what the actual likelihoods are.

Finally, I get to share this out! This is PIX, something I've helped build. Debug+profile ALL the DirectX12 games.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pix/2017/01/17/introducing-pix-on-windows-beta/

>"Let's start playing pokemon sun!"

> Hi let's get you acquainted with the game. To start, choose your trainer profile image.
> How clever! (Although a little presumptuous) It automatically detected a female profile from my Nintendo account or something, so it shows me these photo options
> I pick the one in the top row, third from the left
> Everyone in the game calls me "My boy..."
> mfw

I came up with this puzzle but found few people who could solve it.

Today being a federal holiday, Anne and Mary are neighbors that both have the day off. They live in the United States. Being close-by neighbors with long-ago-established phone numbers, they have the same area code. It was Anne's birthday the month before last.
They run into each other outside.

Mary says to Anne, "Why don't you call me sometime? With a birthday like yours, it should be easy to remember my number." Although it then occurred to Mary, that she doesn't know the exact day of Anne's birthday.

Which holiday is today? (Answer is in a comment below.)

Defeated the campaign, watched end credits for Star Fox: Zero. Now I will admit this game has some redeeming qualities. But not a lot. The control scheme never agreed with me, there is just a lack of precision using the Wii U controller tilt and it's not optional.

They keep forgetting Star Fox is a rail shooter. Rail. Shooter. Why do they force you to use the Landmaster? Why are you forced to use the Walker so often? It's Star Fox not Ground Fox. Nobody in the history of time has ever asked for this. On the bright side, I guess, once you beat it it tells you how much your team got paid, which is sort of funny

Seen when playing Demon's Crest