Phantom of Regular Size

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July 10th, 2026

05:06 pm - Pokémon ROM hacks.
It's baffling how like, 99% of all Pokémon ROM hacks are just so poorly balanced; almost all of these hacks feel like they exist solely to fuck with Nuzlocke runners, while ignoring the fact that most people playing these hacks aren't doing Nuzlocke runs. When you give damn near every Pokémon a perfect Super Effective counter to their weakness they otherwise wouldn't have, you're not increasing the challenge, you're just increasing the amount of time somebody has to spend trial-and-error learning your goofy, nonsensical fucking movesets. It's just more grinding and more swapping between teams. I'm not going to do that. As soon as I realize that shit is just massively tilted because some nerd wants to huff his own fumes and fuck with Nuzlocke runners on YouTube, I'm going to drop it and move on.

Like, it's one thing if you want to do that for gym battles, but having that shit on Pokémon just in the wild is obnoxious when you're trying to level up your goddamn Pokémon. You shouldn't have to keep swapping them out for them to gain EXP because they can't survive against Pokémon they otherwise would be able to withstand. It's not making it harder, it's just padding out time.

So, yeah. Pokemon Pure RGB is just another very poorly balanced Pokémon hack. Skip it, unless you're looking for yet another ROM hack that exists primarily to fuck with Nuzlockers and appear in YouTube videos. I'm not really sure where the "purist" shit is coming from, and it seems like several of the "features" mentioned in the most recent trailer don't even work, as far as I can tell.

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May 28th, 2025

06:28 pm - Xenogears
I started Xenogears a few days back; I wanted to play something I hadn't already played 4-20 hours of several times already, and Xenogears was one I played only a few hours of back c. 2000, didn't like what I had played, and then quit. I can see why I quit this game 25 years ago, though. It's really not very fun to play. The plot seems to be OK-ish (not great -- it's obviously heavily influenced by Evangelion), but actually playing the game is just kind of fucking miserable. There are no maps in this game, so all you have to rely on is the compass (which isn't really all that helpful), so I often wind up questioning if I'm going in the right direction or if I'm just unintentionally backtracking; this is not only an issue in dungeons, but also in towns. I've had to reference video walkthroughs on more than one occasion just to get my bearings; the random battles that all take around 2 minutes to complete just make the experience worse. And, don't even get me started on the fucking platforming. The amount of times I've attempted a Big Jump (when you run and then jump to jump further/higher) only to have it not register the jump and I just slide off the side of something is ridiculous.

I don't like this game -- it's not fun. It doesn't matter how good the plot might be, if the actual act of playing the game in order to reveal the plot is miserable, then the plot is irrelevant because the experience itself is awful. The game really just feels unfinished -- it doesn't even have a configuration sub-menu! Want to make the text speed faster? Too bad! You got to use a cheat code. Want to disable the battle animations so you're not spending several minutes in every goddamn random battle? Too bad! I think if this game just had maps, or at least, an automapping function so you can at least see where you've already been, then I'd probably feel a bit different about this game and I might feel more compelled to keep playing. But I don't feel compelled to keep playing. I'm on the Yggdrasil now, and I'm just not interested in wandering around another mess of an area.

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November 12th, 2019

07:01 pm - Hot dogs.

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August 24th, 2019

09:15 pm - Ether

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August 14th, 2019

06:40 am - They're all messed up.
The 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead was never very good, but it's a bit better if you adjust your video player settings to play it in black and white, and kind of adjust some of the levels so the blacks are a bit deeper. It could also stand having its backing soundtrack removed, but I don't think there's any easy way to do that. Tony Todd and his performance is just about all that stands out in that movie -- he has tears in his eyes throughout almost the entire movie.

Also, the house has a sign that says "M. Celeste" on the front of it, which is uhh, not very subtle.