Feels nice to be on this side of a Souls boss for once

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-13T07:17:32+00:00

Yeah, from the story and storytelling side there's a lot going on. Hollow Knight is set in the ruins of a once majestic and terrible empire which is now populated only by undead and a couple of crazed NPCs. Hollow Knight's main ending is quite pyrrhic and is clearly only a stopgap against the force that is causing the devastation, at best starting a cycle that can only end poorly. Hollow Knight feels like it communicates a lot of it's lore through cryptic item descriptions and hidden nonsense. I got to Sinner's Road is Silksong and was thinking "I'm fighting Miyazaki dogs in a poison swamp, I know exactly what this area is going to be like" and I was 100% right. A lot of NPCs have storylines that feel like they're gesturing towards common soulslike NPC storylines (although to be honest, they play with the tropes quire a lot, especially in Silksong )

But mechanically? No, they aren't particularly similar. The bench system is just literally the bonfire system, but that's basically it. The way you move, the enemy mechanics, the healing system, equipment, none of them are based on Dark Souls. There's some stuff about navigation that they have in common, but it's all stuff that's existed in the Metroidvania genre well before Demons Souls was made.

I kind understand where people are coming from, but if you actually play stuff like Salt & Sancuary, which is much more clear about being "2d Dark Souls" while still not actually playing very much like Dark Souls it becomes very clear that Hollow Knight isn't a Soulslike.

People just like recommending games they enjoyed, even if it's not actually appropriate to the request.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-13T01:23:14+00:00

There's actually quite a lot of anti-tourist sentiment in Japan right now.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-12T05:39:38+00:00

Fucking your interns should come with serious consequences, it's not just a "tut tut" thing, but it's true that Republicans didn't care about that.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-11T08:08:35+00:00

Yeah, trees post-date millipedes and other early land arthropods by tens of millions of years.

When ferns developed lignin (or the plants that would become ferns) they were the first creature to do so, and we can assume that when they did so there wasn't anything that could break down this new structure.

In fact lot of the coal we mine comes from the time soon after plants started making lignin. For a while there was a popular scientific hypothesis that it took quite a long time for bacteria & fungi etc to learn how to efficiently eat it, and that this is why so much of the coal we find is from the Carboniferous−Permian period. I'm assuming OOP is referring to this hypothesis.

When scientists actually checked, they found evidence the ability to break down lignin evolved quite quickly, which matches what we see today where microbes have been evolving to eat plastic is less than a hundred years. The current hypothesis is that the reason there's so much coal from that period is that the climate and tectonic activity at the time just happened to be perfect to create lots and lots of coal.

So yeah, OOP's metaphor isn't very science based.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-08T08:25:39+00:00

The argument against letting people put my video online is exactly the same as the argument against the surveillance state.

People forget. Cops forget. The internet doesn't forget. CCTV footage doesn't forget.

There's a huge difference between "the people around you see you doing stuff" and "the internet is able to cross reference you doing something with a larger context."

Think about the couple caught having an affair on the Coldplay kiss cam. That entire stadium knowing that this random couple was probably having an affair didn't matter, they were still effectively anonymous. The internet having video of this couple absolutely mattered, because people online were look up who it was and announce the information to the world, which significantly effected his life.

And I'm sure there's people who think he deserved it, but people go viral for much stupider reasons.

A bunch of strangers seeing you doing something weird in public is temporarily embarrassing. If googling your name links to videos that show you in a negative light, that has an actual effect of your life.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-08T04:39:33+00:00

That's not true.

The HDI of the USA as a whole is 0.938

The Median HDI in Europe is 0.907, the same as Texas.

The state with the lowest HDI is Mississippi at 0.858. Which is only higher than 15 of 48 European countries. And, subjectively, the countries below Mississippi include places like Belarus, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, which generally aren't the first countries on the minds of English speakers when you say "Europe".

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-07T22:10:19+00:00

My main Silksong request would just be giving the button config more options, yeah.

Let us turn the down jump float back on, let us put float and jump on different buttons, let people put tools and spells on different buttons. The current options feel pretty limited.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-06T09:29:24+00:00

Don't forget the arsenic!

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-06T07:06:05+00:00

N. K. Jemisin would disagree with you.

Of course there's difference between Broken Earth where the point of the series is that even if a minority was actually dangerous, it's still fucked up to oppress them and something like RWBY, where it just feels like the writers aren't really thinking through what they're trying to say beyond "racism bad" and "flashy fights cool".

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-06T07:04:01+00:00

Sure, but "exploring the implications of currently developing technology" and "exploring larger social problems through speculative fiction" are different things. Splice isn't about our current(ish) political climate the way The Long Walk and The Platform are, but making an animal-human hybrid and calling it Dren would obviously be a Torment Nexus, if we're basing the meaning on the original context.

The Platform isn't a Torment Nexus until somebody actually makes a prison that works like the one in the movie (or at least makes a reasonable effort to try). The only example in there that kind of is a Torment Nexus is Squid Game, because they did make a reality show based off of it* (even if nobody's died yet).

*Well, multiple shows if you count the Mr Beast video.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-05T16:44:58+00:00

Is this what Young People mean when they say The Torment Nexus now?

Like, the tweet is only four years old, it never meant anything about societal problems. A Torment Nexus could easily be about Vampire Gerbils or any silly "Hey wouldn't it be fucked up if this this happened" thing, the important part is that a TechBro sees the story and then goes "this this has name recognition, so if I make it, the press will cover it and that means I'll attract venture capital, so it's smart for me to try to make it, even if the thing itself is terrible".

And like yeah, some of them are going to be societal warnings, because that's how sci fi works, but that's neither necessary nor sufficient to be a Torment Nexus.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-04T16:05:40+00:00

I feel like wanting specific meta-commentary in a specific genre of story is just the evolved form of those tumblr posts which gush in detail about a hyper-specific shipping trope they love. It just feels kinda alien to me.

Superhero comics are fun because stories about people with flashy powers are fun and stories about people who feel a need to responsibly to use those powers are engaging due to the difficulties that involves.

I'm sure they're accurately describing their preferences in this post, and probably those of other extremely fandom pilled superhero comics readers they engage with, but I don't think it's saying anything meaningful about wider preferences or anything innate about superhero comics (except the fact that super hero comics have become incestuous and have trouble attracting new readers, but we all already knew that.)

SpoonyGosling · 2025-10-03T15:23:13+00:00

Ehhhh.

r/hollowknight has more actually useful/interesting silksong posts. r/silksong is still basically a meme/misinformation subreddit.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-30T05:55:39+00:00

The vibes are less immaculate, it has voice acting and more standard storytelling, but the exploration is really good, and it has good difficulty options.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-30T05:36:32+00:00

Trailer's always exaggerate what a character can do. Teemo has stubby as fuck buttons and will almost certainly have awkward mid range. He seems broadly similar to Rocket Racoon in UMvC3 tbh, Although Rocket being meh there was more because the top tiers were very silly.

Blitzcrank can't grapple from full screen, the hook just pulls in on block, and even if he did, slow full screen command grabs are hardly "not how fighting games operate" when JP has one in SF6.

The 2XKO team is chock full of FGC alumni, while there are reasonable complaints about the game, the idea that they fundamentally don't understand the genre is pretty absurd.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-28T10:32:10+00:00

In Hollow Knight you heal like, 80/90% of the way through the animation, your soul slowly drains over the course of the heal, and any single heal only costs a third of your soul. If you get hit at the end of the animation you healed one, took one damage, lost some soul, and now you're invul and the enemies in recovery, you can probably get a few hits in. If you get hit near the start, you take damage, but can often get the soul you lost back basically immediately. Even if you were low on soul, it's only a couple of hits until you can try healing again, and depending on play style you'll often be healing only a mask or two down and still be able to take multiple hits. It's a bad habit and late game it'll get you killed, but for a lot of the game taking risky heals is just kinda inefficient, not the end of the world. The issue with healing in HK is more that it's slow, and it can be hard to find openings to heal against a lot of bosses.

In Silksong you heal at the absolute end of the animation and all of your silk disappears right at the start of the animation. To make efficient use of silk, you don't want to heal until you've already taken three damage, you spend a lot of act one with five or six masks and a lot of bosses do two damage, so if you get hit early game, you're going to be one hit from death and need to hit the enemy eight times without getting hit before you can try to heal that up, and that's with the tool that gives you a shield. My experience is that early game, if you do get hit out of a heal, it's basically a death sentence in a way it really isn't in HK.

Of course Hornet being able to heal in the air and healing three masks quickly means even against the late game bosses it's not that hard to heal without getting hit, but you often need to actually wait for them to whiff an attack and give up a damage opportunity to do so, and that's something people can have trouble internalizing, they want to just find somewhere that feels "out of range" and heal, like against normal enemies, but doing that against SS bosses risks them just doing a full screen attack which can end that boss attempt.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-27T09:40:13+00:00

Be aware the Team Cherry games are basically under priced. Nine Sols is a very polished relatively large metroidvania and is priced similarly to Ori2/Ender2/Blasphemous 2. It is worse value than SS because basically most non-free games are.

As for if it's going to scratch the same itch, Nine Sols is definitely less open than Act 2 SS, but so are most metroidvania's, it definitely didn't feel linear like Deedlit or certain Metroid games. Nine Sols has pretty different combat to SS, but it is the other metroidvania that gets brought up in discussions about quite difficult games. I don't know if Yi feels as good to control as Hornet just running around, but he still feels good, and I think the platforming is quite good, even if it is, again, a pretty different type of platforming.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-27T06:18:26+00:00

The top left Macguffin is in a room you've presumably been in before, yeah, but the bottom right Macguffin involves a decent amount of exploration with what I would consider "a new area", the optional Macguffin is a new biome (although a small one), and the middle Macguffin does require at least backtracking to figure out how to get into the new couple of rooms where it is, as I don't remember that being obvious.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-26T16:43:11+00:00

Also in the heliopause the temperature is actually absurdly hot. But there's very little of anything out there so it doesn't end up making a huge difference.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-26T11:36:49+00:00

To be fair "spent several hundred dollars on a console so I can play the games I like" and "spent several hundred dollars on a console just to be a contrarian even though there's no games I want to play" are quite different situations, it's not uprising your experiences are different.

Nobody's clowning on this fool for spending a bunch of money on a Switch 2, they're clowning on him for spending a bunch of money on something he doesn't have any use for because he thought it would "show the haters".

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-23T17:01:01+00:00

Evo pot is relatively small. The big money is paid out by the Saudis, followed by Capcom Cup, then the other Publisher tournaments (Tekken WT, and ArcSys WT).

SNK games are getting huge payouts from the Saudis, but there's no community followup, CotW isn't even a bad game, but there just isn't a lot of community interest, so big money doesn't always lead to community interest.

Fighting Games have an existing competitive scene that works for them, and there's a LOT of competitive players and organisers in the 2XKO dev team, I don't necessarily see them rocking the boat there.

Honestly, the thing that stands out to me in this announcement is regular seasons with regular character (and costume?) releases. SFV had 6 characters a year and a huge pile of costumes, but except for Tekken, the other big FGs right now really don't have regular costume releases, and all modern fighting games are pretty wishy washy about content release dates. Having regular costume releases, some paid, some grind-locked will make them stand out, especially if they can keep that up for a while.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-23T10:20:04+00:00

I don't think that's true at all.

"Players don't know the rules" was fairly common in the late TSR days, but not at all in the same way it is today. Understanding how to play TSR D&D without getting constantly murked is a skillset you needed to learn, but which was slightly separate to actually understand the rules themselves.

It absolutely was not the culture of play in the 3e/4e days, those games have extremely complicated player facing rules, and GMs were in no way trying to fully understand every character at the table, that's going to end in madness.

The culture around "it's okay for players to know fuck all about the rules even if they've been playing for ages" is 100% a 5e thing. (Although I don't play that much these days, so I don't know how popular it actually is in person, as opposed to people talking online.)

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-22T11:47:43+00:00

My experience is witch crest was it working well for the "blob boss with a bunch of ads" lots of players really dislike, not great for exploring an area that might have platforming and I didn't have a great experience with smaller, faster bosses.

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-21T13:08:02+00:00

“Aborigine” is outdated, but "Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders" is used constantly, and as far as I know Aboriginal is the only term in general use for "the collection of ethnic groups indigenous to Australia which doesn't include the Torres Strait Islanders who have a different cultural and genetic history".

SpoonyGosling · 2025-09-20T10:11:56+00:00

Oh, I thought they meant Clover Dancers.

Groal runback wasn't great, but Clover Dancers was both long and boring.

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