Hey gang guess who's been spending some of their tax refund money on Yu-Gi-Oh

Genuinely we do enjoy just collecting the cards. We bought Quarter Century Stampede last week and we pulled QCSR Danger!? Tsuchinoko which is to us the only card pull to ever matter. Considering getting Bonanza too it seems like a bangin' set I hope they keep doing staple-rare reprint sets this good and the 25th anniversary never ends

But also: the new Orcust support the OCG has got us the closest we have EVER come to actually hunkering down and building a proper deck irl we are so fucking excited

That we read the first VN of Higurashi When They Cry, Onikakushi! Good shit! We have a gut feeling that past a certain point a significant amount of stuff stops being *real* and starts being the product of Keiichi's fears but ooo also there's absolutely a lot of very real spooky mysterious stuff happening

Can't wait to see the way things evolve from here, given it has a hell of an ending

... Now all we need is games...

a friend's considering running an eidolon: become your best self second edition one-shot this weekend, something goofy where all our eidolons are named after christmas songs, and it'll be super funny if it happens. we have a guy planned and her eidolon, "The Polar Express", is a real actual steam train that she cannot easily use in any situation that isn't long distance travel by way of "how are you going to fit a steam train into literally any conflict in a space tighter than wide open area big enough to comfortably fit a train". it could be so fucking hilarious if she gets to use train ONCE in combat

in more video-gamey news: i've been worried that i was missing one of my favorite yearly livestreaming events, the Kusoge Advent Calendar (every day brings a new fighting game that is usually, in some interesting way, shit! it's a great time). turns out my worrying was for nothing: it's not happening this year for real life reasons. wishing tyron the best! instead, chose to read over the write-ups for last year, which you should also do... i really need to drag a friend into playing some more change air blade

wishing y'all well! let's make next year a good one despite it all

i just think you should. the problem with most walking simulators is that it isn't interrupted by halo (game series) trying to kill you in the middle of listening to audiologs, which this one thankfully fixes

more seriously, it permanently altered our taste in world and character building, and opened our eyes to the power of locations as characters in the literal sense (without it being, like, transforming or just being a representation of a place). plus the engineers are like a kind of weird puppy to us

The worldbuilding gears, especially. This game is so richly written in its history, its factions, its places and people, its left-turn-off-reality technology, even the broader concepts and ideas and world mechanics - it's all so well-considered. No wonder it was the original ZA/UM founders' homebrew tabletop setting, you can *feel* that energy absolutely oozing. Makes one want to make shit and go crazy doing it, honestly, or at least see someone compile all the lore scroungeable from all the bits of Elysium fiction available into some kind of setting guide.

(We're in the thick of a long-awaited second playthrough where we're trying to play the detective as a Moralist trying to be helpful to everyone, but also competent to the point of boring (and also with a severe lack of starting INT - the drinks hit *hard*) and trying to get *as much done as possible* quickly. It has a lot more pressure trying to cram it like this, but it's a nice mixup from playthrough one where we didn't 'know'.)

After all this time... finally, we're getting a new TGM.

ARIKA CO., LTD. and The Tetris Company, Inc. signed a license agreement on the New Tetris Game (TGM series).

https://www.arika.co.jp/news/press-release/arika-release_20240927en.pdf

#Tetris #TetrisTurns40 #NewGameAlert #VideoGames #TGM #tgm_series

From Arika's official Twitter.

For those unfamiliar with Tetris: The Grand Master, it's effectively a higher-intensity arcade iteration of the Tetris series descended more from Sega's old arcade releases than the 'main lineage' that led to the Tetris Guideline by which just about every game follows. We're only halfway decent at it, but its incredibly snappy feel, steadily rising pace, solid sounds and soundtrack, etc, etc. - even the grading system that ranks how well you've done that game - make it our favorite iteration of the series by far. This game, TGM4, has been pretty much in Licensing Hell for a decade and a half - most of our life - and we're glad to see it finally exit it, in whatever form it'll end up taking.

While you wait - consider getting the Arcade Archives releases of the first two TGM games, if you have a Switch or PlayStation.