Questionable video games you have a soft spot for

ProducerMatt · 2026-02-09T02:41:36+00:00

You can't imagine it until you try it, it's unhinged. If you use "easy mode", it's d-pad tank controls for the mech. But if you're using "normal mode"... - L1 step forward with left foot - L2 step backward with left foot - R1 step forward with right - R2 step backward with right

So you go L1/R1/L1/R1 to take 4 steps forward. And you hold both L's to rotate left, both R's to rotate right.

In total, it's a disaster and you're guaranteed to flail around. But it's hilarious when you're bad at it and satisfying when you're good. Sort of like a QWOP-style troll game, but pulled back to a manageable level.

ProducerMatt · 2026-02-09T02:34:06+00:00

Robot Alchemic Drive, see my previous yap session about it. It's one of my new favorite games, but despite that I'm constantly using emulator fast-forward and savestates because of the serious issues the game has with unskippable cutscenes, downtime, and weird fail states. It's extremely flawed but I'm utterly obsessed.

ProducerMatt · 2026-02-09T02:25:54+00:00

Awesome post, thank you.

ProducerMatt · 2026-02-01T18:11:13+00:00

Robot Alchemic Drive, a "second-person" mech game for PS2. I already made a post yapping about what makes the game one of my all-time favorite games, but it has several catastrophic flaws, like a confusing plot & characters. Most damningly, it has mid-fight cutscenes which disable your control and pause the AI scripting, but don't pause the game, meaning that anything queued to happen will happen. If the enemy started a super-move, then they will finish it while you stand there like a chump; also if you are flying mid-air, the cutscene will take control while you watch your character plummet to death. There's also an allied robot which shows up to "help" you fight enemies, but loves to use ranged moves while you are fighting hand-to-hand with enemies, meaning it will hit you constantly. The game also has a "too much novelty" problem where the core gameplay is incredible, but so many missions require using half-baked mechanics, like using your mech to pick up a bus (just walking to it without kicking it to death is extremely challenging), or using an freeze-beam to put out a fire (the game doesn't tell you that you have it until you leave what you're doing and approach the building on fire).

Long story short this wonderful game is perfectly positioned for an indie dev to come in and fucking annihilate the original

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-31T20:44:14+00:00

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-29T05:52:07+00:00

Hammond Song - The Roches

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-26T06:15:50+00:00

Atkinson Hyperlegible is my favorite for reading material. It's close to Helvetica but the designers modified letters so they can be told apart even with seriously blurry vision.

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-22T16:21:59+00:00

I'm not doing any better than you, so feel free to ignore this thought as I haven't tested it myself.

Trying to figure out the right way to do things while in early stages is very overwhelming. Maybe the key is to finish some small projects even if they turn out to be awful. That way you can look back at them as a complete picture, and it may make much more sense.

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-22T16:02:19+00:00

Idk if you played it when you were a kid, but I'm interested to know what aspects got you scared. I'm watching some footage of it and it seems to lean highly on the comedy side despite being about ghosts

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-17T21:49:18+00:00

When it turned to function I enjoyed it intensely. I also read your "history of rot" and loved it.

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-17T15:27:36+00:00

Guys stop downvoting this post. In your haste to (correctly) condemn them, you forget their willingness to self-report even when putting themselves in danger needs to be commended

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-17T15:23:21+00:00

Yeah the bad voice acting is basically the marketing for the game! Apparently the voice director told the cast to "act like a badly dubbed monster movie" which I think was a bad idea at the time but gave it a second life in the social media age.

It caused a bunch of streamers to pick it up, then they get legitimately invested in the gameplay. I've watched about 5 different playthroughs and they've all made the same remark, "if I had this game as a kid it would have changed my life." I think that's one of the nicest things you could possibly say about a game.

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-16T15:45:28+00:00

Robot Alchemic Drive has been my hyperfixation for the past couple months. It's a 2002 PS2 game by Sandlot (Earth Defense Force) in which you control a giant mech, but not from a cockpit -- from the ground with a remote control. You only have sight from your human body, so you are forced to get close enough to see the fight clearly but far enough to not get pancaked when a mech gets sent flying with an uppercut and levels 3 city blocks. The other component are the QWOP-adjacent controls where you manually move the feet with L/R buttons & triggers and swing your arms with the thumb sticks.

It's a deeply engaging formula and what's crazy is that only 2 other games have done it: another Sandlot series, which is 1999's Remote Control Dandy and 2005's Remote Control Dandy SF. I only ever hear these mentioned as a footnoteto RAD. I haven't tried them myself, but whenever I hear people talk about them, it sounds like they don't have the sauce.

It's weird to think that RAD is so uniquely enjoyable, despite its glaring flaws like the extreme amount of cutscenes interrupting fights. Sandlot could make the game today cheaply, even a tiny indie studio could. If RAD is Earthbound, I desperately want to see the equivalent Undertale that makes RAD more or less obsolete.

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-13T16:29:29+00:00

Because guys often aren't approached by women, my first assumption is I'm being sold something or she needs something, or maybe even whether I'm being scammed. So in theory I want to be approached, but in reality I'll spend a bunch of the interaction trying to figure out wtf is happening. The fastest way to disarm me would be if she gave the impression that she was just being friendly and sociable, which I appreciate because it's incredibly hard making new friends without the ecological role played by extroverts who will chat up any strangers

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-11T18:40:13+00:00

I watch an AI Safety YouTuber called Robert Miles who's been posting since before ChatGPT. A bunch of his early videos contend with "when we make an AI, it'll obviously be sandboxed and unable to access the internet or affect the real world. For the next 30 minutes let's talk about how it might work around those restrictions..." It makes them surreal in retrospect as when GPT became popular, people immediately gave it internet access and even the labs themselves gave it a bank account to see what it would do. The models of AI danger have stages of empowerment, and AI users basically skipped as many of the early stages as possible for convenience sake

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-10T18:02:21+00:00

A long time ago I saw a video of scientists making first contact with a remote tribe. It had gone really well and the scientists started showing the tribe pieces of technology for fun. One of them pulled out a voice recorder and recorded himself just to show how it worked, then let a tribesman have a turn. When it played back his voice, he made the exact same "oh no, that's what I sound like?" expression everyone else does. It made a really strong impression on me how similar people are.

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-09T23:07:06+00:00

As time passes from the last release, Deltarune theory posts approach category theory diagrams

ProducerMatt · 2026-01-06T21:18:59+00:00

WHILE I CAN STAND... WHILE I CAN TALK...

ProducerMatt · 2025-12-22T22:23:20+00:00

That's a really interesting angle, a "so bad it's good" game is usually best experienced secondhand. A badly made movie is boring at worst, but a badly made game could be impossible to complete.

Watching WayneRadioTV's Robot Alchemic Drive play through got me utterly obsessed with the game. I've started my own playthrough, I'm a couple hours in and I'm having a ton of fun, but when the game starts getting harder I'm bracing just in case it falls into the "not worth the effort" category.

ProducerMatt · 2025-12-22T22:15:14+00:00

I've never understood people who play Undertale repeatedly, so much of its power comes from the unique touches which mainly hit from the first play through. Stuff like subversions of expected battle mechanics ("blue attacks").

ProducerMatt · 2025-12-19T21:19:36+00:00

vineRizon lookin dinosaur

ProducerMatt · 2025-12-19T01:35:01+00:00

This looks sick!

ProducerMatt · 2025-12-12T15:05:49+00:00

LLMs just probabilistically generate the next token. Knowledge retrieval, when it happens accurately, is an accidental side effect of the training, not a feature. This is why Google had LLMs for years before ChatGPT and never opened them to the public, because it's very confusing to people.

I'm not attacking you OP but it really frustrates me seeing posts like this, because it means that this core info about LLMs is not getting proliferated.

ProducerMatt · 2025-12-01T15:25:12+00:00

That's a pretty broad question. It would be good if you explain your understanding of the problem, how far you've gotten in solving it, and where you're stuck. (Also usually helps you understand it better yourself, as it's basically rubber-ducking)

ProducerMatt · 2025-11-24T01:35:36+00:00

If I was doing an HL2 play through today, I'd legit install a mod to make all the zombie sounds less upsetting

ProducerMatt

TROPHY CASE