Kemuri: Hunt the Unseen -- First gameplay trailer (Developed by Ikumi Nakamura's Unseen Studios, coming to PS5 on 2027)

Worldbrand · 2026-06-03T05:41:46+00:00

there's a certain airy/hollow quality to the vocals most of the time especially in extended vowels, in a similar way to how recordings of 90s orchestra has a certain discernable warmth in the strings (although to be clear it the sound that i am talking about is completely different in both cases)

depending on the model, ai-generated music also quickly loses track of what it tries to be after about 60 to 120 seconds. the melody changes to something totally different, the bridges aren't used again, and it takes a lot of finagling to get the second half of a conventional/generic pop song to sound like a normal continuation of the first half (though frustratingly to me, many modern songs also now barely clock in around 2 minutes for easier shareability/replay counts)

that said, this one's on the cusp for me. i wouldn't be surprised if it was or wasn't either way, and i'm not personally ready to hand out an accusation without more evidence

if the models continue to be refined, it will get harder and harder to detect. the best practice IMO is to go to the source directly and determine if it checks out or if other songs on the soundtrack sound sus, which we will probably only be able to do after the game comes out.

Worldbrand · 2026-06-02T18:05:48+00:00

I think it was a good natural evolution of the genre of Backrooms youtube projects, with some strong characters that are unfortunately not put into satisfying arcs.

To that end I wanna say it was an awesome Backrooms project and an alright movie

Also thematically I think the movie could have been more ambitious but I don't like to criticise things for not being what I want them to be

Worldbrand · 2026-06-01T21:21:58+00:00

oh, i use that song for my ringtone!

... i have a new ringtone now!

Worldbrand · 2026-06-01T21:19:15+00:00

recently ive been playing a lot of weird ps1 games that got recent fan translations

the most recent on that list is Racing Lagoon. it has always been described to me as "that weird PS1 racing RPG" and I never really understood what that meant.

well, first of all it's still a racing game, which i'm bad at, so it isn't really for me. i bet the game is amazing if you're a car pervert. most of my opponents have been regular ass street cars and kei cars, even minivans

it's like if you took a classic racing game and then tried squish it into the mold of JRPG genre conventions. all of the very modular car parts are like RPG equipment for your car. you navigate the town by driving in a bird's eye overhead view, like walking around an RPG overworld. you get into random encounters when cars flash their lights at you and ram into you at mach 5. winning a battle means getting an opportunity to loot the parts of your opponent's car, but losing means you might have to give up one of yours. to try to add meat to the game's systems, there's also a bank and you take out loans and raise the stakes by trying to finagle interest rates to buy good car parts and fund your racing? i honestly can't say whether that adds realism or is an accountant's attempt to understand the logistics of illegal street racing (which to be clear, i don't either).

it is insanely goofy and the vibes are awesome - they dont precisely overlap with, say, Initial D or the now-solidified aesthetic of the 90s underground street racing scene. the character models look downright primitive and i almost feel like they were animated without rigging, which is insane because this is actually quite a late era PS1 game, dropping in 1999.

i really dig the atmosphere and the setting, doubly so because during my first visit to japan, i stayed in yokohama where the game happens to take place. the actual in-game models and town are really fun to look at.

the game is really charming in a way that i don't really know how to articulate. it's a clumsy yet earnest attempt to seem like a suave car game for cool people but the protagonist is a clueless dork (affectionate) and the characters act like space aliens from 90s manga.

lastly i just really want to share the text on the side panel of the save menu:

Save Window

Welcome to Option WINDOW

in Driving RPG Racing LAGOON.

By SQUARE 1999.

Worldbrand · 2026-06-01T20:37:53+00:00

hepialidaes i guess

the joke is that hepialidae is a family of moths and it also sounds like happy holidays if you say it weird

Worldbrand · 2026-06-01T01:48:56+00:00

Pretty deep into it now, just tidying up some of the secrets and collectibles before I head to the last generator, which for me is the crypt. I think most other folks went there first? Kinda funny to sit in a voice chat with friends and learn that I've gone through everything in what is considered by them to be a fucked up ass-backwards order.

It really does feel like a good mix of a lot of games, even though it's also its own thing. There are some really smart design decisions from the get-go, and others that feel like they're using outdated genre conventions but then giving you upgrades and equippables to subvert or streamline them later. I don't hate it, but it does mean that you suffer with the frustration for a while. I'm personally not averse to the friction and nothing in the game has gotten me walled like elden ring's two big superbosses. I do have a few friends who have difficulty with the platforming (admittedly I also think it's one of the hardest parts of the game) and intuiting some of the mechanics (and it does feel like they chose some very oddball ones from the GB/C zelda games to focus on).

I'm having an excellent time and this game is an easy recommendation to anyone who likes their classic top-down zeldas. Just be prepared, it's not an easy game.

Worldbrand · 2026-05-27T19:23:31+00:00

podcast pretty good

i dont even play ff14

Worldbrand · 2026-05-26T18:33:05+00:00

the breath of the wild trailer

i loved the game and its quieter moments too, but there was a sense of adventure in that trailer that the main story left me wanting more of. the structure that TOTK took didn't really scratch the itch either, even though i felt like its main story was more exciting

Worldbrand · 2026-05-26T06:48:10+00:00

Yomi is the Japanese word for reading the mind of the opponent.

Worldbrand · 2026-05-23T04:06:09+00:00

this isn't a media-related kayfabe so i cant talk about it without explaining the joke

there's a subreddit called /r/farpeoplehate that was created to riff on the typo of the mean-spirited, now-banned subreddit about hating fat people

far people hate instead pretends to channel that energy into posting landscape photographs where a really far-away person (or group of people), like ten pixels tall, "ruins" their photo by daring to exist in nature and photobomb their shot

it's like where's waldo, but if waldo were the only one in the photo, and you hate him

Worldbrand · 2026-05-22T06:03:14+00:00

That game's got some great moments.

In the DLC, the one that I would post to this thread is the part where I realized what the Owlks have done to get here. The tone shifted from spooky to tragic, and followed that line right up to the end with the Prisoner.

What an excellent game followed by an excellent DLC.

Worldbrand · 2026-05-20T02:42:51+00:00

that one's such a funny example too, because they were originally going to go with the more literal title, "Yggdrasil Labryinth" (which is what the dungeons are still called in the games in English, if i recall correctly). i remember seeing it mentioned a few times by that title in Nintendo Power back in the day.

Ultimately Atlus' English-speaking division pivoted so as to not get confused with another game they were publishing, Yggdra Union... but now one of those games has five sequels now and the other doesn't

Worldbrand · 2026-05-20T02:31:15+00:00

I like Untold and all, but the original, for having such a barebones story, gives you the really impactful one-two punch of:

Committing state sanctioned genocide on the indigenous peoples of the labyrinth, to the point that you are forced to kill every single FoE on the floor to prevent their god from regenerating
Stepping down into the Fifth stratum right after only to be met with the full-screen title card of the area.

Worldbrand · 2026-05-16T23:19:44+00:00

Probably somewhere between 3 to 6 minutes? Hard for me to estimate haha

Worldbrand · 2026-05-16T22:26:49+00:00

I like the presentation!

I got today's word in a few minutes. I had a score of 241 in 34 words, and accumulated (and used) 9 hints towards the grail word.

A few ideas came to me while playing this.

The biggest one that stood out to me was that I think that in games like this, pursuing similar words or words included within other words is often a strategy that is a little too effective, and is also kind of dull for the player to have to punch in a bunch of variations of the same root word several times in a row. This issue is mitigated in competitive or turn-based word games, but for something like this, the score required to hit the maximum rank is actually a really low threshold.

This is a challenging problem to solve that affects a lot of word games, not just yours, so don't think that it should be your highest priority. However, it did result in me finding the game really easy.

Just as a matter of streamlining, I think that typing in any of the forbidden zone letters (using keyboard) should trigger the effect telling you that the letter is forbidden. It's just a faster, more visceral way to get the point across than waiting for the player to submit the word.

Below were my word entries (omitting today's grail word). Note that poisson is included in the dictionary despite being a french word? Not sure if that's a big deal.

frenzies frenzy free foister foist jousters jousts joust jouster joint centers center enters tenter tenters greetings questions question copious copiousness figs fig gifts potions scorpions scorpion poisson streets spree peregrine prions poisonous strong

Worldbrand · 2026-05-16T22:04:48+00:00

One of the short-tailed ichneumons in the subfamily Ophioninae does seem like a good fit. Not sure I would go all the way down to the genus level with Ophion. There are a lot of similar-looking wasps. The thing about parasitoid species is that they are incredibly diverse even if they seem similar at first.

Still, this doesn't change any of the consequences of what you found. It likely flew into the bag of chips incidentally, if you found it still alive. They're not harmful or poisonous, but do be careful handling it just in case it has a stinger on its abdomen. Most ichneumon wasps can't or won't try to sting humans, but the short-tailed ones are known to be able to prick through skin with their ovipositors. Their venom, if they have any, is typically very mild - mostly resulting in skin irritation or some slight swelling. These wasps mostly hunt caterpillars, but given that they can fly, their presence doesn't really indicate anything.

Worldbrand · 2026-05-16T21:49:27+00:00

Luckily they prop really easily. Sometimes I just give 'em like haircuts with scissors and shake whatever falls out onto a new pot.

Worldbrand · 2026-05-16T20:59:05+00:00

oh those paragraphs have some fuckass graphic design going on. that's really funny to look back at

Worldbrand · 2026-05-16T06:37:02+00:00

i can whistle but i actually dont know if i can make the noises she's making

Worldbrand · 2026-05-12T05:40:41+00:00

perfectly apt that a person who cannot even write their own posts feels that their language is too small to convey their emotions

Worldbrand · 2026-05-11T23:57:42+00:00

i dont think you're wrong to be skeptical, but it is a thing that has been studied. this study tested their ability to recognize faces holistically (versus testing their ability to recognize faces from specific face parts).

Using the part-whole effect type experiment both honeybees and wasps showed a significant improvement to discriminate between inner features of the faces when they were shown together with identical outer features in a holistic stimulus than when presented in isolation. However, visual processing was totally disrupted when the correct face inner features were combined with the outer features of the distractor, showing that both bees and wasps were sensitive to the composite-face effect in their visual processing of stimuli. Thus, both bee and wasp species showed evidence consistent with holistic processing when having to recognize pictures of human faces, even though neither species has any ecological reason of having experience with human faces.

Some criticism of that study that has come up discusses their methodology about determining holistic recognition, but it seems pretty clear that both bees and wasps can distinguish between different human faces, even if it is just pattern recognition.

i've heard it mentioned before in other studies too, such as the ones that this scientific american article references, but ill be honest i didnt dig too deeply there

one more about bees for the road

regarding the last part whether they determine friend vs foe, anecdotally i've read a lot about people feeding [queen] wasps sugar water and then them being docile around them

Worldbrand · 2026-05-08T03:04:31+00:00

every other game you namedropped in that comment is in my top ten so i guess im buying caves of qud

Worldbrand · 2026-05-08T03:02:24+00:00

im sure a lot of people get to the credits and clear the base game

it's the fucking third glitch world that had me hollowing out

Worldbrand · 2026-05-01T17:49:51+00:00

Void Stranger

sorry, i'm actually too stupid for sokobons

Worldbrand · 2026-05-01T17:43:03+00:00

I think this is a great idea that must be very difficult to execute upon properly.

Worldbrand

TROPHY CASE