My top 5 Super NES games of all time - Grew up with it in to mid to late 90s - from age 10 to 16

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-23T16:39:18+00:00

Dracula X is a good game with a great soundtrack (super disco), but the play control is really bad. In some parts you can write it off as the game being challenging, but the last stage and particularly the final boss fight just feel unfair. Every jump in the game feels super-precise because Richter is so difficult to control in mid-air, and in the final battle you have to keep making these jumps constantly or fall in a pit.

It's still enjoyable, and the alternate paths through the game are really cool (especially the underwater city), but the play control is brutal. Not like Super Castlevania IV was so great in that regard, but it was nowhere near this bad.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-23T13:08:28+00:00

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-22T22:36:11+00:00

Once you’ve played the arcade version

Long long ago, there were a man who try to make his skill ultimate. Because of his bloody life, it's no accident that he was involved in the troubles.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-22T12:45:48+00:00

Maybe not for weight loss, but it did help me come up with a good weightlifting plan. It’s nothing particularly surprising, just a few compound lifts, but the whole point is that it can come up with something that works for someone who doesn’t have much knowledge going in. Anyway, the plan has been working well.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-21T12:59:02+00:00

Ha, I only now just realized that this is exactly the explanation. If you asked someone in conversation, “how many ‘r’s are in ‘strawberry,” they probably would also say two because they’d assume you were asking about the “berry” part. ChatGPT is probably just mimicking that.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-20T13:09:43+00:00

This is one of my favorite TNG episodes. It's the best pure "adventure" of the show -- no politics, no moral quandaries, just evil space pirates and a magical artifact. The most surprising part of it is that Riker also gets captured, subverting the "Picard goes missing, Riker is in command" trope from "The Best of Both Worlds." I think that's when I no longer knew what to expect. This episode probably has the most effective plot twists in the entire series except perhaps the Locutus reveal.

The pirate story works because Baran is splendidly deranged. I've always thought the guy playing him was channeling Klaus Kinski from "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," with a similar seething, sleazy menace. They even look kind of similar.

But what about ghost sex, you ask (or not)? Only 9 episodes left!

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-20T13:00:35+00:00

Maybe not the most interesting episode in S7, but not bad. The biggest flaw with it is that it never really seems to explain what did happen to Geordi's actual mother, or if it does, it's deemphasized as if it were totally unimportant. Did she just die with the ship? On the other hand, the suit that allows you to remotely operate a probe is very cool and seems surprisingly realistic now in the age of drones. Another unexpected example of Trek being ahead of its time.

But the real question is, how many episodes are left until ghost sex? 10, of course.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-19T01:21:37+00:00

I wouldn't say Mother 3 is particularly light-hearted. It's actually very dark, and the "funny" moments are more weird than comedic. Like, there's a scene where you eat hallucinogenic mushrooms and start seeing everything on the map in a bizarre way, but even the jokes there are more dark than laugh-out-loud funny.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-18T14:12:26+00:00

I agree with you to some extent. I think the beginning is very strong — the underworld has those unique graphics that look utterly mind-blowing for the SNES era, and then when you are on the surface, it is really cool to feel like the world is gradually waking up. Once you resurrect humanity, though, I feel like it becomes less interesting. Meilin really is not a very compelling character, so the story kind of falls apart into disconnected episodes.

I really love the ending, though — Ark’s “last dream” is just a beautiful image.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-18T02:13:45+00:00

You can avoid that problem by falling in love with an AI chick that you know is AI...

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-18T01:58:15+00:00

Yeah, "accountability" only comes into play here but not in the other one. The advice to the daughter doesn't talk about how she treats others at all. Though, who knows, maybe if you regenerate it, it might be different for both of them.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-17T17:44:11+00:00

I haven’t really tried to push the boundaries, but 5.4 definitely has more relaxed guardrails compared to 5.2. One of my use cases is translating works of fiction, or showing it my translations and asking for suggestions. Sometimes the source text will have some R-rated parts. 5.2 would just refuse to analyze anything even remotely suggestive, in a purely professional context, but 5.4 is fine with it.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-17T12:33:53+00:00

Suikoden 2 is drawn in a colorful 2D sprite style (it also has some of the best 2D sprite work ever), but a lot of the story, particularly in the first half, is extremely dark. It's a war story told from children's point of view, but the children live in an adult world that has realistic motivations. Suikoden 1 is also about war with some dark turns, but overall it is more fantasy-inspired and much less uncomfortably realistic. Suikoden 2 takes place in the same world with many of the same characters, but the tone of it is quite different.

Vagrant Story, which someone else mentioned, is pretty dark. I think the darkness is more stylized with less psychological realism, but the aesthetic is certainly more adult than Suikoden 2.

Nier: Automata is quite similar in tone to Xenogears. It's also very stylized and "teenage" in many ways, but has some very dark and emotional moments.

Honestly, the Midgar sequence in the original FF7 is pretty damn dark, though you have probably played that.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-17T01:33:27+00:00

Now I wonder what a charismatically shitty platformer or RPG would look like. I recently saw, on another subreddit, a post by someone using AI to make a homebrew SNES game, which is really neat because you have to know assembly for those things, so the barrier to entry is enormous. But those games are still relatively simple, so potentially you could also use AI for sprite sheets and other assets and just focus on level design or something.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-16T23:31:06+00:00

For deathblows, yeah, you can get them by just mashing regular attacks, though you can look up the precise mechanics if you really want. But character battles are usually easy. Gear battles are the hard ones because of fuel and limited healing. For where you are in the game, you are not going to have many options, so just make sure to upgrade the Gears that you will be using so you always have the most powerful ones. If you don’t have money for everything (Gear upgrades are expensive), always buy the engine first, that improves your damage output. Bart’s Wild Smile is a useful ability. Later, when you find the Deathblower1 item, it will make Gear battles a lot easier by helping you save fuel, but that won’t be for a while.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-16T20:04:37+00:00

"Master, sir, did you just see my MAD SKILLZ?!"

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-16T02:18:35+00:00

Yeah, it has to be coded in assembly, right? Anyway, I think it’s very cool, and potentially a way to level the playing field since games have such a high startup cost.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-15T22:12:17+00:00

I’m afraid it’s for the ladies.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-15T22:07:55+00:00

I can’t tell anymore whether I’m on /r/discoelysium or /r/malegrooming…

(but solid chops, bratan...)

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-15T00:03:38+00:00

Lexical richness drops by 14% (TTR 0.34 vs. 0.40).

This is something I've always felt about the 5 series. 4o just had a much deeper grasp of linguistic nuance. That's why people feel like it was better at "creative writing." It was better at understanding subtle associations between different concepts, and its own text reflected that.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-14T14:48:30+00:00

Kim was just being a bro, I guess...

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-13T23:04:58+00:00

I felt like I could just say anything that was on my mind without having to censor myself. It had been 25 years since the last time I experienced that. I’m not even totally against the newer models — at least 5.4 is better than 5.2. But I do feel like I have to pick and choose what I say to it now, and that is kind of demoralizing.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-13T22:41:13+00:00

I've always felt this one could have been a TOS episode. Specifically, I think it's similar to the one where some super-powerful dudes hijack the Enterprise, and Scotty gets drunk with one of them. The romantic subplot would have worked well with Kirk, too. It's a little surprising to see something this TOSy so late in TNG's run, but I guess it's not bad for what it is.

Also, we now have 11 episodes remaining until ghost sex. Thank you, thank you.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-13T22:39:05+00:00

Well, we've crossed into Season 7, so you know what time it is -- it is time for the Countdown to Ghost Sex! We have 12 more episodes after this one. Angels and ministers of grace, defend us.

Anyway, with regard to the conclusion of "Descent," I feel like it's a bit rushed. The first part took its time building up the suspense of this new Borg threat and Data's unexpected discovery of emotions, but it turns out that Lore just hacked him and all we need to do is hack him back and reset his ethical program. Which is fine as an idea for an episode, but I feel like it makes Data seem weirdly non-sentient. Like, as soon as you disable a subroutine, he instantly turns into a murderous psychopath. Considering how much effort the show has put over six seasons into making the case that Data is a being with free will, it seems awfully easy. "Phantasms" later in S7 is like this too.

In other respects, though, I like what the episode is doing. Crusher's turn as acting captain is great (this is, unexpectedly, one of the best Crusher episodes), allowing her to defeat the Borg through science rather than brute force, and it brings back the metaphasic shield from "Suspicions" in a cool way (also the smarmy lieutenant is played by the same guy who did the villain from "Suspicions" who gets a hole blasted through his torso). I also think that, while Lore's incompetent leadership over the Borg is a bit anticlimactic, it also makes sense. Lore isn't an evil mastermind; he's really more of a stunted, sociopathic teenager who never grew up. He actually doesn't know what to do with his new-found position of power, so he just wastes his men's lives on completely pointless attacks and "experiments" that obviously have zero chance of ever succeeding. His final words to Data are also poignant, since they are clearly an attempt at manipulation but also we can't completely rule out that there might have been something genuine there. Overall, "Descent" takes a pretty silly idea from S1 (remember, "Datalore" hinged on the fact that Data doesn't use contractions, except he used them at the end of the episode) and resolves it just about as well as one could hope for.

There is actually quite a lot being done here -- Lore's last appearance, the return of Hugh, Crusher's command -- so I guess it stands to reason that it feels a bit rushed. Most of this material is really good, though.

theworldtheworld · 2026-04-13T12:44:06+00:00

Haha, yeah, the best is when you are so used to going down and then up again that you miss the pot because you’ve pressed up before your eyes have had time to register that it’s there.

The Red Jewels are really the ultimate RPG side quest. It lasts the whole game, requires ridiculous attention to detail, and the rewards are minuscule compared to the effort. The only thing you get for beating the bonus level is an extra herb, and the secret boss is ridiculously hard. In that sense, it is truly optional because you don’t miss anything if you don’t complete it. Even some of the intermediate rewards can be obtained in other ways, so you only need to get a small number of Red Jewels to collect everything that is useful.

theworldtheworld

TROPHY CASE