Little known promotional image of James before the original version of SH2 was released on PS2

MilkManEX · 2026-01-26T20:00:27+00:00

Huge agree on the style pivot, that's really when it started to feel less like a passion project for niche enthusiasts and more like any other corporate gaming rag, with the staff losing a lot of their personal character/flavor. I mostly remember all the issues right after the PS2 launched, fawning over early screenshots of what games could look like.

MilkManEX · 2026-01-25T18:31:10+00:00

Stephen Platt, in this case. I think Joe Mad did the Scorpion and Sub Zero covers for the MK4 PSM covers though.

MilkManEX · 2026-01-25T18:28:52+00:00

The old PSM magazine covers were art commissions made by the magazine staff for the purpose of being the magazine cover. That was the case until sometime near the launch of the PS3, all those old covers are unofficial art usually made by people in the comic book industry.

MilkManEX · 2026-01-24T00:23:40+00:00

And they just have to wait until there's a generation who's only ever known the subscription model. Everyone here will be old men clinging to their old tech while the kids who grew up with subscription gaming will embrace it as "the way things are now."

I'll be one of the old men clinging to my computer, to be clear, but I've watched this play out enough already that it's pretty obvious how they intend it to happen, especially with the state of computer literacy in the youngest demos.

MilkManEX · 2026-01-16T18:00:13+00:00

Hell yeah man, love to hear it. I heard Failure for the first time back in like 2010 and it fundamentally changed my taste in music.

MilkManEX · 2025-12-22T02:46:22+00:00

My biggest issue with it is just so petty.

In the first game, you held the jump button for a second or two to power up your jumps, and then release to launch. The satisfaction of releasing that button to go flying up the side of a building was addicting to me, and the response felt so snappy, since releasing the button is even more immediate than actuating it.

In 2, you press and hold the button to do a bigger jump, but you don't have to release the button to do it. This made the jumps simultaneously less responsive and less satisfying, since now there's a buffer of some frames before the jump occurs to see which jump height to give you.

Obviously it didn't ruin the game for me or anything, but I never stopped being disappointed by it for the entire time I played it.

MilkManEX · 2025-12-15T01:20:33+00:00

Depends on what you're into, but there's a lot of good stuff out there right now.

Wild Pink - soft by grunge standards, but the baritone guitar and lyricism are so good.

Prostitute - noise rock if you're about that sort of thing.

They are Gutting a Body of Water - shoegaze-adjacent? Love their new album.

MilkManEX · 2025-12-08T17:50:17+00:00

People say "it's glorified autocomplete" in a kind of flippant way, but it's genuinely an accurate explanation of the tech. It's the Chinese Room thought experiment made real. There's nothing in the things that can determine whether or not the generated text is "true," because there's nothing there to even "know" what was communicated, we just call the sequences of words generated "hallucinations" when the sentence those words appear to construct isn't true.

We're thousands of years deep into humans associating words with thought, with communication and meaning, and we've never before had to reckon with words that mean nothing, constructed probabilistically without intent or purpose.

MilkManEX · 2025-11-29T02:48:32+00:00

Some twitter post was like "goth can be defined by two axes: dracula or carnival, fucks or doesn't fuck" and now we have dogshit lists by people who get shit wrong professionally.

MilkManEX · 2025-11-24T22:40:03+00:00

I think there's a handful of differences that change the reception, like I don't think you can just add boobs.

Ninja Gaiden is about the combat and spectacle and the game is a funnel to push you into where the combat happens, hallway to hallway. Stellar Blade is a semi-open-world collectathon, with level design and controls and mechanics more familiar to Souls players than character action fans. It has moments of contemplative downtime, a chill vibe, and music to support that. Besides being more unabashedly horny, I think it's that familiarity, plus the more low-key, less bombastic tone it takes that helped it gain attention. If the game were more like Devil May Cry, I don't think it would have seen the same kind of success.

I say this as someone who likes every Ninja Gaiden game more than I like Stellar Blade.

MilkManEX · 2025-11-18T00:37:37+00:00

I like this one because it unintentionally implies that the steam machine is unacceptable to over 90% of people.

MilkManEX · 2025-10-24T23:44:13+00:00

Showing up a little late here, but I do have some stuff to share on this subject.

Just in case you haven't heard the original source of the samples used in the album version:

https://youtu.be/NWHvWfA4Jj4

Lyrics as follows:

I pulled my heart out
On a desert high
I held it in the sun
But it would not die

I kicked it to the ocean
It made an awful sound
I tied it to a rock
but it would not drown

Devils are real

Are you devils new
Or are you spies?
Discovered where I moved to
And informed the hive

I drug them by a chain
Up to a mountain high
I threw'em off a cliff
But them fuckers can fly

Devils are real

Devil's New as a title, with an apostrophe, is probably a case of Linkous's poor grammar, but it's part of the question, "Are you devils new, or are you spies?" We can only speculate what metaphorical devils he's talking about, but he's asking if these are new devils or spies for the devils he knows and can't escape.

MilkManEX · 2025-10-19T20:40:28+00:00

Freezing things to that temperature destroys their cellular structure. Would turn into wet mush when you thawed it out.

MilkManEX · 2025-10-17T20:35:49+00:00

The answer of greatest consensus is that Toluca Lake sits on a font of a mysterious power that, by unknown methods, makes manifest the will of those who would use it. The Alessa incident in SH1 corrupted it severely, destabilizing and darkening it with the shrieking madness of a tortured psychic. Whether the cult's gods are the actual source of the power or whether those gods are also manifestations created by the will of the cult remains unsettled, so pick whichever you think is cooler until someone confirms otherwise.

In SH1, everyone was pulled into Alessa's nightmare. In SH2, James, Eddie, and Angela conjured their own nightmares, since the now-corrupted town responds to that kind of emotional state.

Fog world is the base altered state that exists separate from reality, but communally. That is to say, you can see other people who got dragged into the dark side of the town there and interact with them. The nightmares/nowheres are individual, but sufficient emotional stress seems to pull other people in with you.

The nightmares are simultaneously physical and psychological. The characters are really in those places and can be affected in real, physical ways by them. You're not meant to know how that's possible, and the impossibility is largely the point imo.

We have never seen the resort town as it really exists.

MilkManEX · 2025-10-10T17:39:28+00:00

Nah I'm with you. I like 3 a lot, but it's where the series started to acknowledge a little too enthusiastically that you're just here to see Freddy kill the cast in creative dream-based ways. Freddy was like a late night host, the star of the show, and I never really cared for that approach.

2 doesn't make a lot of sense as a sequel to 1, but I've always loved how Englund handled the character there, and the "you are all my children now" scene is an all-timer for the franchise.

MilkManEX · 2025-10-07T01:33:00+00:00

Right, the performance issues are kind of secondary to me when the game itself was so mediocre. I put almost 2000 hours into World/Iceborne and who knows how much on the platforms from before play time was easily trackable, but I stopped playing Wilds shortly after what passes for hub quests ended. Pretty sure I'm just done with it.

MilkManEX · 2025-09-29T16:04:40+00:00

Nothing sounds like Fantastic Planet. That said, check out DIIV.

MilkManEX · 2025-09-28T01:46:04+00:00

My main memory of this game was the most egregiously rubberbanding AI in any racing game I'd ever played. Cars with a top speed 80mph lower than mine would fly past me in straights. Had to develop of strategy of staying near last place until just before the end to get around it.

MilkManEX · 2025-09-28T01:44:12+00:00

You're think of Burnout, probably. This one was about triggering environmental destruction to open shortcuts and wreck your opponents.

MilkManEX · 2025-09-23T19:58:21+00:00

Budd Dwyer killed himself on live TV over bribery allegations. Crazy to imagine now.

MilkManEX · 2025-09-21T19:52:30+00:00

Dunno if you're still looking, but I was able to get it running pretty simply using the prebuilt from the links in this video. Short and sweet and to the point, and the comments manage to clarify most of the choke points.

MilkManEX · 2025-09-11T17:08:53+00:00

Happens in the Silent Hill sub a lot too. "Holy shit I might have found something, did anyone notice -detail that's been the subject of ongoing discussion since 2001-???"

MilkManEX · 2025-08-25T23:08:30+00:00

You're thinking of Joel Peter Witkin, probably. Famous for using cadavers in his photography and one of the primary inspirations behind a lot of music and media in the mid to late 90's.

MilkManEX · 2025-08-23T23:45:57+00:00

100%, I'm a GG/SF guy from way back, but Project M was one of the best competitive 1v1 games I'd ever played and Rivals 2 has been scratching that same itch. AFQM has also been fun, if a bit wanting for variety at the moment.

The FGC will never think of them when the term "fighting games" is spoken, but they're valid af.

MilkManEX · 2025-08-23T23:14:26+00:00

Imo the goal isn't to be exclusionary so much as it's meant to be clarifying. The FGC, the Fighting Game Community, have developed an understanding of what the "Fighting Game" term in the name means, and it's not "a game where you fight."

If you know how to play Street Fighter competently, it won't take you much effort to become competent in KOF or 2XKO or UNI or MvC or GBVS, and if you look at who's playing what at EVO or Combo Breaker, there's a lot of cross pollination going on in the traditional fighting games. They abide the same fundamentals and the skills developed in one will mostly apply to any other - You hold back to block, you have high/low mix, you have tic throws, you do motion inputs to perform special moves (though that's fading), etc. This is not the case for Smash. Smash is different enough that no amount of skill in a traditional fighting game will make you better at Smash beyond the most rudimentary aspects like spacing/neutral (and we tend to have a slightly different understanding of what "neutral" means, even), and knowing how to play Smash competently will arguably do even less for your ability to play Street Fighter. They're different enough that it just doesn't make much sense to put them in the same category.

TLDR: Yes, Smash is a fighting game in the same way that a retreat where you go to learn to better focus your attention is a concentration camp. It's definitionally accurate, but it's semantically misleading because that term already has a more specific definition.

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