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blazehedgehog · 36 minutes
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Was watching Sean Seanson's "Bad PS1 Games" video, and when he gets to The Simpsons Wrestling, he mentions how some of the game's visuals were forced on the developers by Fox executives and how it killed performance. A lightbulb went on over my head: Duckstation, a very nice Playstation emulator, can fix (or at least help) both of these things. You can overclock the PS1 for potentially higher framerates and use downsampling to smooth out rough edges without boosting the resolution and ruining the aesthetic.
So... here's The Simpsons Wrestling with both of those turned on. It surprisingly has no problem hitting 60fps, and, well, reveals a game that was kind of programmed with a poor framerate in mind, because now at 250% CPU overclock it kinda becomes unplayably fast.
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blazehedgehog · 9 hours
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blazehedgehog · 19 hours
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So, Shadow the Hedgehog. Popular. He has a lot of similarities with Mewtwo, Pokemon's own breakout character. Do you have opinions about Mewtwo in his debut movie? The two characters have similar traits and goals.
I do not really have opinions about Mewtwo, no. I've only ever seen that first Pokemon movie maybe twice, and it was many, many, many years ago. I remember thinking it felt really hamfisted.
I probably thought of Mewtwo in the same way I thought of Shadow: as playing to an archetype. In Shadow, I saw the "genetically enhanced super soldier" type of anime character. Another Sephiroth who navel gazes about his own creation and his creators, and is angry at the world for being made. A guy who was just handed ultimate power seemingly by accident and uses it to carry the chip on his shoulder.
Sephiroth is at least interesting. He figures out he has a genetic connection to Jenova, an alien that crashed on their planet millions of years ago. Jenova acted as a threat to the indigenous life already on the planet (the Cetra), so he begins to fulfill his birthright of killing everything and asserting dominance. I haven't played or even spoiled myself on anything from Rebirth, but I even get the impression that Jenova's genetics themselves may be alive, like she's some kind of genetic virus, and by learning about her, Sephiroth kind of "woke her up" within himself. There's a lot to explore there.
Shadow was a lot less interesting in that regard: He was brainwashed by Gerald into doing evil, because Gerald went insane with grief. The end.
Mewtwo was even less interesting from what I remember. He was a synthetic Pokemon made by... Giovanni, I guess? And I think his whole thing was "I am so strong and cool and perfect that I deserve to be the dominant lifeform of this world, and that's your punishment for making me."
Meh.
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blazehedgehog · 2 days
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As an addendum to this, there's also always the future where I could just not post those kinds of asks. I thought my reply to the Lola Bunny post was funny enough, but the other one, like...
I am of the opinion that if someone is being ignorant, then you should teach them to be not ignorant. There's this prevailing thought that you should never read the comments, you should never feed the peanut gallery, because it's toxic and everybody's stupid or whatever, and I don't believe that. Or, even if I do believe some of those problems exist, ignoring them is not going to solve those problems.
An idiot you ignore is going to continue spreading their idiocy to others. You cure idiocy by teaching people the correct information. Sometimes, you have to be the "um, actually" guy.
Now, this is a slippery slope, because sometimes you get trolls that just want to watch the world burn. Unlike an idiot, you should never feed a troll, because trolls only want attention, and will send you bait in order to get that attention.
My intention is to never drag an argument out on this blog or have too many negative posts in a row or anything like that. But for the one or two assholes I get per year? I think it's fine. Even if the person I'm replying to is too ignorant to learn anything I tell them, maybe other people who read this blog (1000-3000 people a week according to my analytics) will ingest it by example. Though small, that's making something better, isn't it?
I know it can feel frustrating or annoying to see these posts, but it's an overall net positive as long as I keep a lid on it before things get out of hand, which I think is kind of easy.
Between that Sexy Lola Bunny Babysitting ask and that patronizing ask, can I recommend that anonymous asks get turned off? I've noticed a lot of those kinds of asks are "please respond to my Sonic hot take without me having to be held accountable by other people, even in the tiniest way, for having that hot take." Like, I HAVE asked you about some hot takes, but I figure I owe it to you to stand behind them and let you know that it's the same person giving you these hot takes.
While I understand this kind of desire, I do think the weirder or more mean asks are a rarity. We had two kind of back to back here just now, but that's not something that happens super often.
Also 80-90% of these posts are anon. Turning them off would kind of kill the blog.
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blazehedgehog · 2 days
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Between that Sexy Lola Bunny Babysitting ask and that patronizing ask, can I recommend that anonymous asks get turned off? I've noticed a lot of those kinds of asks are "please respond to my Sonic hot take without me having to be held accountable by other people, even in the tiniest way, for having that hot take." Like, I HAVE asked you about some hot takes, but I figure I owe it to you to stand behind them and let you know that it's the same person giving you these hot takes.
While I understand this kind of desire, I do think the weirder or more mean asks are a rarity. We had two kind of back to back here just now, but that's not something that happens super often.
Also 80-90% of these posts are anon. Turning them off would kind of kill the blog.
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blazehedgehog · 2 days
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What do you think about the Sonic Toy Party leak?
(Leak)
The first thing it made me think of was a comment made by Takashi Iizuka a couple years ago, maybe even a survey Sega put out, asking if there was any interest in a Sonic Battle Royale. I think I got an ask about that back then do and scoffed pretty heartily about what a stupid idea that was.
Yep, found it. Ask 1, Ask 2.
It being a Fall Guys clone makes a lot more sense than the type of stuff I was suggesting, but I still stand by the idea that Sonic's many, many, many years late to this party. And hearing that Sega's banking on this being a pillar of their mobile games arm and they're already planning massive amounts of cosmetics and crossovers with other Sega properties is sad.
Also, like, real talk? I just... don't like Fall Guys. Fall Guys is a game I install once every 2-3 years, play two or three rounds, feel how heavy and laggy and awful the controls are, see how the challenges waver between dead easy and impossibly unfair with no in between, get mad at the game and uninstall it maybe 20 minutes later.
I used to think I didn't like Fall Guys because it just needed more content, but now it has plenty of content and I still don't like it. Showing me Sonic Fall Guys is not immediately endearing to me. Especially with how stiff and janky the controls (AND ESPECIALLY THE CAMERA) looks.
I know that's from 1+ year old internal leak, but I'm not super hopeful it's going to be much better, knowing this franchise.
Two: Who at Sega has bad taste in music? This trailer opens with a really obnoxious remix of Splash Hill from Sonic 4, followed by one of the worst Classic Sonic songs from Sonic Forces. I will defend some of Classic Sonic's music from Forces as being kind of alright, but that is not one of them.
Now consider that Sonic Superstars was apparently loaded to the brim with stinky Sonic 4-style compositions before folks like Tee Lopes swooped in and fixed them up late in development. And then just... almost everything to do with Sonic Forces' soundtrack.
Lotta questionable Sonic music going around... Frontiers not withstanding.
Anyway, I'm curious to see what the final reveal trailer looks like, so just sit tight and wait for that I guess.
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blazehedgehog · 3 days
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Ive been told by a lot of people, including close friends and my wife, that they totally thought i didnt like them at first. Which always surprises me. But apparently the emotions in my head dont always make it out to my bod and its very hard to notice
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blazehedgehog · 3 days
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Get a job, save up money, sell some old rare games, move out of your brothers in to a flat share and pay rent like all of your peers do. You were not born into royalty. Suddenly becoming youtube famous enough to not have to live like the rest of us is a teenagers fantasy.
This is one of those asks where I'm sure you feel plenty high and mighty, like you're "telling it like it is", and giving me the "hard truths." You think you know exactly who I am, and where I am in my life, when in fact you know so absolutely little about me that you're not really helping anyone or doing anything of value.
You're just kind of being an ignorant asshole, based on assumptions you've made from the 0.05% you think you've absorbed from a few social media posts.
This is parasocial as hell, my guy.
Imagine a total stranger came up to you out of the blue one day and said, "You know, you're too confident in your own abilities. You should become a logger, that will teach you the value of good hard work." Are you just going to drop everything, buy a chainsaw, and move out into the forest?
The only thing an ask like this says is how little you actually think of me or truly respect me. That clearly I must be so entitled, so blind, so stupid, that this would be in any way helpful on any level. Because clearly, obviously, I've never had a hard look at myself or how to make my own life better. Because I act like royalty, right? The kind of royalty that's had a Youtube channel for 18 years and still hasn't even broken 50k subscribers, clearly. Look at what a big important cool VIP that makes me! I'm sipping champange with Markiplier and MrBeast as I write this! And we're all laughing at you!
And what of you? What does it say of how you think of your own ego that you believe a one paragraph anonymous message is going to shift my entire paradigm and fix every single problem I have? If you thought this would do anything other than generate a frustrated sense of confusion, I cannot even fathom the type of person you might be.
All you've done is embarrass both of us, and you're lucky enough to be anonymous.
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blazehedgehog · 4 days
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How do you feel about ethical AI generation? (e.g. where all data is properly licensed and sourced)
I don't think that's possible. It's literally a pandora's box technology.
Public tools (GigaPixel, etc.) might lean towards more ethical and more legal eventually, but there will always be instances where somebody downloads the source, rolls their own version of the generator software, and feeds it copyrighted and illegal data anyway.
This virus is here to stay. Even if it somehow becomes fully and truly outlawed, it will still continue to exist in the underground.
And imagine something like... okay so, one thing I've thought about personally is that
I'm pretty good at spotting when something is AI generated
I know my way around an image editing program pretty well
So think of a person who generates AI images and knows enough to go in and re-paint just the parts that look a little strange. They fix the weird looking irises, add or remove the wrong number of fingers, take the garbled text and make it legible...
It's still an image made with stolen data, but now it's a lot harder to tell it's AI generated, right? How many of those are out there right now?
I don't think we can escape this. But just because we cannot escape it doesn't mean we should give in and embrace the trash, either. Always uplift real art by real artists. It's more important now than ever, and will only grow more important as time goes on.
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blazehedgehog · 5 days
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Video games used to have hedgehogs that ran fast and collected rings
No Sonic, No Peace
KNOW Sonic, KNOW Peace
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blazehedgehog · 5 days
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Any thoughts on the Hyperdimension Neptunia series?
Not really, no. It's emblematic of a certain brand of anime fan I lost touch with. I've heard some of those games aren't terrible, but it's pretty far outside of my wheelhouse, generally. Literally the most I've ever interacted with the series is...
...
Well now I can't even find the image. It was just some picture of one of the characters subtitled with "I've come here to Nep at you."
But no, most of what I know about that game (read: next to nothing) is from that very first game where, like, Keiji Inafune was a summon. That and the fact there was a Neptunia game where they crossed over with Sega Hard Girls, something else I have little-to-no experience with.
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blazehedgehog · 6 days
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What do you think of Silver the Hedgehog?
He's one of those characters like Shadow where I appreciate him more for how others interpret his character, because I don't want the official version of the character hanging around anymore.
I know people like him, and how they think of him is fun, but he (and Blaze the Cat) are like the epitome of characters that shouldn't still be appearing in stories and only get dragged back out because they're fan favorites.
Except, you know, most of the cast are fan favorites. This was the same problem that lead to games like Sonic Heroes and the prevailing term of "Sonic's Shitty Friends."
Like, okay, sure, we brought Shadow back from the dead. That genie's already out of the bottle, we can't put him back in again. Knuckles is still kicking around because we eventually claimed to have solve his need to guard Angel Island or whatever. Also one very non-canonical anime OVA gave him the line "I'm Sonic's best friend" so I guess that's just true now?
But Silver the Hedgehog has been double erased from the timeline. Figuring out how to defeat Iblis in the present should have nullified the existence of his future, and when Sonic and Elise blew out the flame in the distant past, that would have also nullified the existence of his future.
Similarly, Blaze the Cat hopped from Silver's doomed future into a new alternate future where she became a Princess somehow, and it was supposed to be this very tragic psuedo-death for their relationship. Letting Silver and Blaze freely hop back and forth around the timeline, both to chill with Sonic and chill with each other, actually really sucks in terms of that being an important moment of character growth for them.
What people are doing with him now makes me really enjoy him being this kind of dumb, naive, hopeful guy, but he really does not need to be around outside of "but the fans want him here." And that's not good enough for me, because Sonic fans seem to want just about any bone you throw them, at all times, regardless of the context.
You could bring Heavy and Bomb back and probably still get a standing ovation, which is to say nothing about how perception of Big the Cat completely 180'd over the last 25 years.
We don't actually need Silver. I'm sorry.
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blazehedgehog · 7 days
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Sand Land Demo Impressions
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So I played that there Sand Land demo. And it's... kind of bad? It's complicated.
Imagine if Bethesda put out a demo for Skyrim and it was, like, this tiny sliver of Whiterun, and they specifically put invisible walls up around all the towns and villages, you weren't allowed to talk to NPCs, and you weren't given any quests (and can't start any), so all you were really allowed to do was roam around and do a couple of draugr caves. And not even good ones, either, but just generic draugr caves full of the same generic boring loot that's in all of them.
That's basically what the Sand Land demo is. It's almost more of a vibes piece because there's literally nothing you can do except fight roaming bandits, scorpions, and panthers. There's hints of progression. Beelzebub will call out rock formations and say "we could get up there if we could jump higher", indicating you can come back with an upgrade that lets you get a secret item, but it's not in this demo. Similarly, you run into a radio tower you can repair if you have the right materials, but having spent over two hours in the demo sniffing out every rock, dead tree, and patch of dirt, I can safely say those materials are not available.
If they were hoping to make a good impression, they did not, because I genuinely don't know what you actually do in this game in terms of missions. Sure, yes, I know what combat feels like, but to go back to the Skyrim comparison: would you solely judge the value of Skyrim on how good its combat feels?
At the very least, I can tell you this is yet another Bandai-Namco game where the English dub seems to have been the lowest priority thing on the game development ladder. Phrasing is stilted and overly literal, actors struggle to make the best of bad writing -- if you've ever played something like Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, you know exactly what to expect. And it's a shame, too, because you hear these guys talk a LOT. There's clearly a timer going off every 2-3 minutes 90 seconds to prompt General Rao, Beelzebub and Thief to chat amongst themselves, and even just in the demo I was reaching for the mute button to shut these guys up. It's the same chatter over, and over, and over, and while I assume the full version will have a larger pool of dialog to pull from, it probably will never be large enough.
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blazehedgehog · 7 days
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In RPGs, do you ever pick the comically mean responses in dialogue?
Not very often, no. I'm one of those basic dudes that roleplays in those situations. Either I pick what I'd say, or I pick what I think what the character would say.
And, generally speaking, I just don't like being mean. I have a feeling people accidentally read some of the things I say as being mean, given I tend to be a pretty blunt person sometimes, but generally I want to be liked.
Even by fake computer people that are just some script being read to me.
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blazehedgehog · 8 days
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This literally just happened to me while writing a script for a potential upcoming video
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It wants to change "but it's still got plenty of alternate pathways" to "but it still plenty of alternate pathways"
When this happens I have taken to yelling at Google through their feedback form that I should be able to turn this off (which you used to be able to do) and have it permanently stay turned off (which is currently impossible)
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google docs babygirl you are so fucking stupid
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blazehedgehog · 8 days
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I will never not love fushiki shitpost :3c
I'm glad to hear it. I don't shitpost very often so it's nice it lands when I do.
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blazehedgehog · 8 days
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I WILL CHOKE ON THESE SOUR GRAPES TIL I'M IN MY GRAVE
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I left this open in another tab, meaning to watch it like a week ago. It's an official video published and promoted on the Youtube Studio dashboard, about common misconceptions around their recommendation algorithm and what the truths really are. .
And now, finally watching it, that white haired dude, Mr. "Youtube Liason", is the guy who told me the algorithm ignored one of my videos because "maybe it just wasn't very good."
Famously, and something I will never ever shut up about when given the chance to mention it, I put out a video about Jurassic Park games just before Christmas, expecting it to slot in and do decent numbers, just like all of my other videos do. Since Youtube earnings tend to spike around the holidays, this was going to be how I paid for Christmas presents that year. It was something I'd done at least twice before. Instead, the algorithm completely ignored the video because it was outside my usual wheelhouse of Sonic content.
This is shockingly relevant to the very first topic they cover: whether a single "off-topic" video actually matters with regards to how the algorithm sees your channel, and the general answer from the Youtube technician is "No." You don't gotta tell me.
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When I put my full weight behind a video, it easily breaks 10k views, even 50k or 200k+ views. Some of my most popular videos have cracked the multi-millions!
So when this dude spells out in plain english that the algorithm effectively ignores one-off videos? Yeah, no shit. I'm living proof of that. Across the first two years, that Jurassic Park video struggled to break even 2000 views. Only by paying out of my own pocket for multiple promotional campaigns and constantly complaining about its lack of performance has it struggled to hit just over 5000 views, some four years later. The algorithm knew it was way outside my regular wheelhouse and treated it like poison.
And this liason clown had the balls to tell me "well maybe the video was just bad, sorry bud" only to, two years later, sit down with this technician that spells out exactly what I was knew was happening and was trying to explain to him.
Except now, of course, it's being spun as a positive: "don't worry, a one-off won't hurt your regular content" as opposed to the "we didn't notify anyone about your one-off and it became stillborn" I experienced.
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I have sat down and thought very intently about this Jurassic Park video. Obviously, if I make a stink about its performance, tell people the algorithm made a poor judgment call, I'm going to get patted on the back and comforted that yes, the video is good. Don't worry. The mean old algorithm is just dumb. Right? And Youtube unflinchingly believes in the power of their algorithm as this perfect shining golden standard to drive viewership, the thing that can never, ever be wrong about guys like me.
I appreciate the comfort and support of friends and colleagues and even random strangers who are inherently distrustful of the algorithm. But I also know that feels like an echo chamber.
So then what, do I trust Youtube? Absolutely not. At the end of the day their algorithm still made an unfair judgment call and despite their claims above that any old video can get picked up by the algorithm at any time, my video has never recovered. I've tried more interesting thumbnails, I've spent almost $100 on Google Adsense promotion -- one of which, I should note, was the same week that Jurassic World 3 released, and the other being E3. Both should have been extremely lucrative times to run ads. And I got crickets.
I like the video. I stand by the fact I think I did a good job on it. I remain proud of it. It's as good as any real-effort-content I've put out in the last five years. The echo chamber tells me it's a good video, too, even if I literally can't buy views.
So my only recourse is to sit here and stew in my bitterness towards this algorithm. The shining, ultimate example as to why you should never let a computer make a qualitative judgment call. And I will be frustrated and angry about this until I draw my last breath.
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