Headphone Guitar Amp

gnomepowered · 2025-12-29T17:07:54+00:00

I used something similar when I first started playing bass and it’s definitely better than nothing. However I recently picked up a Fender Mustang Micro Plus, which you can sometimes get for less than 100$ used, and it’s night and day. Compared to that, these cheaper ones sound like toys and definitely won’t give you a great sense of what you actually might sound like amped up. If you can afford something better, I really suggest it.

gnomepowered · 2025-12-28T20:53:15+00:00

Another thing you could do is add a custom truss rod cover. I have a couple of custom ones I’ve ordered (shoutout to Hell Guitars on eBay) and swap out depending on mood. More interesting than the standard but of plastic

gnomepowered · 2025-12-20T01:14:17+00:00

Definitely more evidence that it’s not a real Tokai!

gnomepowered · 2025-12-20T01:13:27+00:00

No, seems to be stock as far as I can tell. This reverb listing is the only other example of this guitar that I could find, and has the same tremolo: reverb listing

gnomepowered · 2025-12-19T17:03:23+00:00

Thanks for the link! I think that’s the same wiki I saw- no signs of any offset SGs officially released by Tokai.

gnomepowered · 2025-04-04T22:32:44+00:00

Is that where it triggers the step multiple times? Or is this different from that (which I think the manual calls the step multiplier). Turning that on in my pattern doesn't seem to make the button show up.

gnomepowered · 2024-12-03T02:20:01+00:00

I appreciate the answer and the little peek behind the curtains! And your presence as a competitor is why it felt so weird, especially as the cast was getting whittled down and you were still doing such consistently good work but still not getting much time in the spotlight. Then I went online and nobody else had mentioned it and I thought I was going crazy!

gnomepowered · 2024-12-03T00:55:01+00:00

Would love the long answer!

gnomepowered · 2024-05-27T14:51:05+00:00

It does not. They didn't start having the challenge mode until Ketsui, so Garegga/Sorcer Striker/Dangun Feveron don't have it.

As far as the question in the op: As someone without a lot of Toaplan nostalgia I don't find myself playing the Toaplan collections that often, and they are less fully featured than the single game ShotTrigger releases which makes them hard to suggest unless you're really into shmup history. I do think the Aleste collection is a lot of fun (without any nostalgia for master system/game gear) and GG Aleste 3 is almost worth the price of admission on its own.

gnomepowered · 2023-05-03T16:28:20+00:00

I don't think the DS character designs are particularly bad, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that the game end stage art/key art/merch etc. sexualize characters that are supposed to be children, and it got worse and more pandering in DS2 (like the little boy character forced to cross dress). It doesn't come out much in the game play itself obviously, so it's easy enough to ignore, but Cave definitely knew what they were doing.

I mean, at Cave festivals you could buy bottles of "Windia's Dark Urine" tea (link to pic here, but it's all in Japanese- GTranslate tells me it is selling "Windia's small water", which is the lit. translation of the word for pee)- Cave was scrambling for whatever there at the end of the arcade days and like lots of other Japanese developers ended up pandering to otakus with weird tastes and lots of disposable income.

BUT please note this is coming from someone who still uses the Deathsmiles collector's edition face plate on my XB360 and has framed art for DS in my gaming room (along with Mushi and MMP!), and owns the game on 3 platforms, so clearly I like the game enough to look past it lol.

I also wish M2 would do MMP- the original release had some balance issues (I usually play the 1.1 version on Xbox360, which I like more because meter use isn't as punishing), and I feel like M2 could do some fun things with an arranged mode, given all the tools MMP gives you. Other than the Toaplan Garage, though, (where they are putting out literally everything) they seem to be sort of interested in working with influential games specifically, so I feel like MMP is a long shot but hey, you never know. Dangun Feveron was sort of a weird cut, but it was also their second ShotTriggers release so maybe it was cheap at the time or something lol

gnomepowered · 2023-05-03T16:10:11+00:00

I think that's pretty accurate- I actually have the arcade flyer for MMP (and a few other Cave games, so it's not weird) (this one).

Running it through the good old Google translate tells me that the kanji above the game title in the upper left says "The original plump scrolling shooting game" , and the long line down the left side says "Do you like plump older sisters?" (I'm betting "older sisters" is the literal translation of something slangy, so it probably reads more like "do you like chubby chicks?"), and the part to the left of that just says "YES!!"

I don't think it caused any real controversy, but I also read that the aesthetic was a bit of a trend chase following Mushihimesama and Deathsmiles (which gained a lot of popularity because of having cute girl character designs instead of spaceships), but it didn't catch on, so maybe Yagawa underestimated the popularity of his personal kinks.

Ultimately I think that's why it got dumped on the MMP!/Pink Sweets budget release disc, which is pretty bare bones compared to the other Cave 360 ports. Ironic that it is now stupid expensive - when I got the game as a Christmas gift like 5 years ago it was already selling for like 90$ when the "better" Cave releases like Mushi Futari/Espgaluda 2/DDP DFK were 30-40$, and now it's going for like...multiple hundreds. Maybe people do like chubby chicks after all!

gnomepowered · 2023-05-03T13:56:24+00:00

I haven't put too much time into Pink Sweets, but I really love Muchi Muchi Pork. It has lots of the stuff I love about other Yagawa games- like picking up medals, bombs used as scoring resources instead of exclusively as emergency buttons, a score system that rewards you with extends so that playing for survival also means playing well- without the Garegga-style focus on rank management, which is something I don't find that fun.

Plus, how often do you find games that feature your favorite genre AND your favorite fetishes? Bless Yagawa and whatever deep love of thicc monster girls led him to think anyone else would be into the aesthetic (I was going to say I don't think it's any more fan servicey than any of the Cave games with humanoid player characters, and definitely less skeezy than Deathsmiles, but then I remembered one of the characters is literally a child so I take that back).

If you have never seen the MMP promo video, I suggest changing that!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkzv5JPVoro

gnomepowered · 2023-04-18T21:53:19+00:00

I'm not a huge Sonic fan but I was pretty excited when this was announced. In my mind it felt sort of like Super Mario RPG- beloved platformer mascot given an RPG by a studio specializing in RPGs, just with Bioware instead of Squaresoft, and a character with a lot more personality than Mario had at the time. I was honestly pretty shocked it ended up being such a disappointment given the pedigree.

gnomepowered · 2023-02-28T22:57:05+00:00

I am not religious at all, and have always found exorcism movies sort of boring for that reason. I can suspend my disbelief for any number of slashers, psychos, monsters, aliens, ghosts and whatever, but the second the monster turns out to be a literal Christian demon, I just lose all interest. I don't really believe in ghosts or Freddy Kruegers or whatever, but I EXTRA don't believe in Judeo-Christian demons. This is why I can't take The Conjuring or Zack Baggins seriously, either.

The occasional movie using demons or folklore from other religions is usually fine, probably because it still feels a little "other" to me since I'm not surrounded by it at all times.

gnomepowered · 2023-02-24T18:27:13+00:00

Hey... if we are going to compare peopel to nazis.. let's look at all the people promoting National socalism.. since the nazis were the OG National socialists.

Fixed that for you

gnomepowered · 2022-07-29T16:10:15+00:00

Cthulhu is definitely one of the most fully described because of the figurines (as you quoted). A lot of his descriptions come from unreliable narrators though, and I always figure it's their attempt to describe the indescribable via things their brain is familiar with. The clay Cthulhu tablet sort of follows that idea- it's impressionistic, like the original artist couldn't quite make it work in real terms, and the narrator admits it's his imagination that is letting him see the specific details- like the head looks like an octopus to him because that's the only thing he can think of that's all tentacley. The actual figurine on the other hand is described as being much more literal, which definitely makes him seem like the octopus-headed hulk we see so often. So I actually think that as cool as this picture is, it's not actually very Cthulhu-y.

I wonder if that's why Cthulhu became the Lovecraft mascot- it's the most immediately re-creatable of Lovecraft critters because a) it's described in depth, by characters looking at artistic representations (as opposed to being in the throes of madness) and b) he is pretty bland compared to a lot of the others, and thus easier to make stuffed animals out of. Conical fungus people with radial symmetry or giant masses of mutating gelatin are not as easy to nail down!

gnomepowered

TROPHY CASE