Akazora

Ke$ha!! Don't sing that you "wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy" don't do it!!! Ke$ha noooo stooopp!!!

Ginkgo blep, what a pretty and photogenic girl

Now that you mention it, I don't think there have ever been explicitly stated forum rules. I guess just use common sense when making a new post

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Discord images linked outside the app eventually expire, which pic of Ginkgo were you trying to share? You don't have to ask for permission, feel free to post anything within the forum rules OMM: rest in peace Wii U and 3DS servers, you will be missed

As the year comes to a close, I wanted to go through my quick thoughts on the games I played this year (of which there were many). Not all of these games came out in 2023, but I played them all in 2023. (list is in the order I played them, as far as I can recall at least) Resident Evil 2 Remake I technically started playing this at the end of 2022, but I finished it in 2023 so I'm putting it on the list. This game was so good. One of the best RE games I've ever played, second only to RE4R (and even then, they're neck and neck depending on my mood). This was my second RE experience (my first was the OG RE4) so I didn't expect all the puzzles and backtracking and exploration, which was so fun. The RPD is an immaculately crafted set piece, with fantastic atmosphere. The game is genuinely scary at times, and having Mr. X stalk you the whole time was exhilarating. Only complaint is that Leon and Clarie's routes are just too similar, so playing any B route just feels kinda redundant, and I don't think the little bit of added lore justifies all the retreaded ground. Resident Evil Origins Collection 1 was really good. Took a while to get used to the fixed camera angles coming from RE2R, but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Don't think I'd be good enough to beat it at a harder difficulty or with the OG tank controls, but it's otherwise a gorgeous game that's held up extremely well for how old it is. 0 on the other hand kinda sucked. It was nice getting some Wesker and Berkin lore, and Rebecca is second best RE girl, but that item management system can suck an egg. Resident Evil Code Veronica X I played this game for a few hours, but couldn't continue. I'm just so bad at OG tank controls, and I didn't want to get softlocked in a game that's notoriously easy to get softlocked in if you don't know what you're doing. I still wanted the lore, so I then played... Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles This was an okay way to get the Code Veronica and Operation Javier lore. I made @machine play co-op with me and they did not enjoy it lmao. I thought it was okay for what it was. When the action slows down and the characters are just sneaking around hallways and rooms, it's really boring. Because it's on-rails, there's no suspense or tension during these quiet sections, it just feels like padding and a waste of time. Resident Evil 3 Remake This game has its issues, and it's way too short, but I still enjoyed it. It's a shame about the cut content, but the voice acting was great and I liked Carlos as a character. The hospital segment had a lot of potential. A fully fleshed out hospital level in a traditional survival horror game, done in the manner of RE1's Spencer Mansion or RE2's RPD, would go hard. Fire Emblem Engage This game is phenomenal. One of the best video games I've ever played, and dethrones Fates as my favorite FE game (I think, I need to replay Engage to be sure). Gameplay is so tight, and finally feels like the proper evolution to Fate's already amazing evolution to Awakening's gameplay that the likes of Echoes, Heroes, and 3H just couldn't match. Music was good, graphics are top of the line for a Switch game, and I really liked all the characters. The story wasn't even that bad, certainly better than Fates' though I realize that's setting the bar on the floor. Also, Chapters 10 and 11 are peaking gaming. Those two chapters stand as one of the best moments in any video game, full stop. Absolutely world class integration of gameplay mechanics with narrative. Second best game I played this year. Resident Evil 4 Remake What a fantastic remake. I played the OG RE4 in 2020, and I remember liking it but not loving it. But after getting more into survival horror games with The Evil Within 1 and 2 in 2022, and generally enjoying my time with the other RE games I played this year, I was looking forward to RE4R. And it blew my expectations out of the water. It's the perfect balance of old and new, and the new stuff was so seamlessly integrated with the old. I love the new versions of Ashley (best girl, though I will miss the OG's ears) and Luis. And the Separate Ways DLC is some of the best DLC I've ever played. It's about as long as RE3R and it was really cool to see the story of RE4 through the eyes of Ada with both unique areas and the grappling hook. This was a much better way of showing an "alternate perspective" than the A-B routes in RE 1 and 2. Only complaints are the voice acting (Ada, Krauser, and Wesker all sounded kinda... meh) and that they retconned the original Operation Javier lore from Darkside Chronicles. Bioshock I know some people love this franchise, but I think I'm just too tardy to the party. I really wanted to like this game. I gave it a fair shot, but I couldn't bring myself to finish it. I just really didn't like the gameplay (it doesn't help I tried playing this around the same time as RE4R, because the gunplay between the two was a night and day difference), and I didn't really care for the story either. Granted, I did start tuning out the world building after a while because listening to the tape recordings was tedious and everyone in the game is annoyingly long winded and flowery with their language. I don't want to call the narrative "pretentious," because it is an old game and it deserves some slack, but I don't think it's aged well or says anything particularly insightful (certainly nothing as deep as a lot of people suggest it is). I'm sure I would have liked it more if I played it when I was a kid, but it's too late for that now. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I already shared my immediate reaction upon finishing the game, and I've since had time to reflect on it. My opinion on the game has slightly cooled since June, though overall I still did really enjoy it! From a technological standpoint, it's really impressive a game like this even runs at all on the Switch. The new abilities, especially Ultra Hand, are really cool and fun to play with. The Depths was a super neat surprise. The story, while told in an unsatisfactory way, was pretty good. The dungeons were all a step up from the Divine Beasts. But there were also a lot of problems with the game that are hard to overlook. The story was still told via memories even though it would have landed better if it were told chronologically. The gameplay loop is the same as BotW's except with a slightly changed and expanded overworld, and I'm just kinda tired of hunting for shrines and activating towers. The new Sage abilities are a pain to use. There's almost no new music, as most of it is reused from BotW. I get that TotK is a sequel to BotW, which is why there are so many similarities between the two, but there are small, weird narrative inconsistencies between the two games so TotK doesn't even act as a good sequel from a story perspective. I enjoyed taking some days off from work and binging the game, and I had fun at my local GameStop's midnight release, but I was hoping for more from TotK. Still a good game of course; my expectations may have just been a bit too high since BotW was my favorite game of all time when it initially came out. Final Fantasy XVI This is it. This is my GOTY, and one of my favorite games of all time. I've never played a Final Fantasy game before, but I've wanted to play this since the really intriguing first trailer from 2020, and the fantastic free demo. This game affected me in a way that very few pieces of media have. The music is phenomenal, the gameplay is really fun and addicting, the story is really good, and I loved the characters so much. Once I got to the end of the game and it was obvious there was nothing left to do but beat the final boss, I got genuinely emotional. I had grown to love this game's world and characters so much, I didn't want to say goodbye. This game is one of the few that have made me cry (and it was during a side quest, not even the main quest)! This game also takes full advantage of a home theater setup. Most game devs don't bother putting too much effort into that, and for good reason since it's only something a fraction of a percentage of players even have the equipment for, but it's still really cool the FFXVI team went the extra mile for the small population of people who would appreciate their work. The HDR implementation is phenomenal, especially with all the particle effects, bright spell attacks, and gorgeous panoramas. The 3D audio mixing is so good, and during the larger-than-life boss battles when my speakers were firing on all cylinders, it felt like the walls were going to come down on me. The first DLC was fun, and I'm really looking forward to the second DLC this coming spring. Dark Souls I've been meaning to get into the Souls-like genre, and I figured Dark Souls would be a good place to start. I didn't get very far into it, only a few hours, but I think it's just alright for now? I haven't touched it in months, mainly because I've gotten busy and I prioritized other games, but I do plan on returning to it. It wasn't like the game was too hard and I got discouraged from playing it; the game just didn't grip me. Maybe I need to go up against more bosses and really feel the thrill of finally overcoming a huge obstacle, but for now I think DS is just... fine. OMORI I'd heard good things about this game, and was excited to give it a try. It's certainly an interesting game, and overall I did enjoy it, but I didn't love it. I appreciated the story it was trying to tell, and I enjoyed the gameplay mechanics. The characters were charming enough, and I liked the art and pixel work. That's all I really have to say on the matter. Even though I did finish the game, it didn't move me in the same way it moved others. SIGNALIS I had taken a break from survival horror games this year after RE4R, but I dipped my toes back in with SIGNALIS (I'll get around to the rest of the RE games, and the Silent Hill series, and the Dead Space franchise, and Alan Wake... eventually). And boy, what a game. This game came out in 2022, and if I had played it last year it probably would have been my GOTY. Gameplay is just good ol' fashion survival horror, but done extremely well. Story is weird and intentionally obtuse so you can interpret things how you like, but it was still gripping to follow through to completion. The vibe and ambiance of the game are fantastic, and I still come back to the listen to the credits theme every once in a while, because it just teleports me back to that cold, dark, and twisted world. For such a small team, they managed to make something really special. Persona 5 Tactica I only played this game for 2-3 hours to see what it was like, and it didn't grab me enough to make me want to finish it. Persona 5 Royal is one of my favorite games of all time, so I was moderately interested in PST. I might come back to it at some point, but so far I'm not super keen on the gameplay and I'm having trouble getting over the ugly chibi character designs. Xenoblade Chronicles X This was the game that made me want to get a Wii U. However, despite being one of the dozen people who actually owned a Wii U during its lifetime, I hadn't gotten around to playing XCX until just now. Even though I have such good memories of being a kid, rewatching the trailers and imagining how fun it would be to play such a cool looking game, I wish the same could be said about my actual experience with it. While the music is great, the world is huge and sprawling, and the premise for the game introduced in the opening cutscene had me super intrigued, I can't get over the gameplay mechanics. The game doesn't explain things well, there are dozens of hard to read and difficult to interpret menus to sort through, and running around the world just feels clunky and awkward no matter how much I tweak the camera settings. I want to like this game so bad, and I did put in a few good hours, but I don't think it's worth my time. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE This is the last game I played this year (technically I haven't finished it yet, but I'm over halfway done with it and don't think my opinion is going to change). Even though this game got a lot of flak at release, I'm actually enjoying it quite a lot. Sure, it's a Persona-lite, but the gameplay is genuinely fun. The characters are tropey but still endearing, the music is solid, and the writing is occasionally pretty good (especially during the Social Link-like side quests). Also, the Game Pad integration (I'm playing the uncensored version on actual Wii U hardware instead of the Switch version) is phenomenal. It acts as your phone, and throughout the game you're constantly being texted by other characters, and every time this happens the Game Pad vibrates and actually dings like you got a real text notification, and all the texts are displayed exclusively on the Game Pad, y'know, like it's an actual phone. Even though Persona 5 gets praise for having realistic in-game texting between friends, it's even better in TMS#FE (which is a few months older than P5). Each character has their own unique texting style (Tsubasa uses a lot of emoticons and shorthand, Minami uses proper grammar, etc.) and every character has their own set of LINE stickers. Now that's soul™.

OMM: Is "The Nightmare Before Christmas" more of a Halloween movie or more of a Christmas movie?

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[[THIS THREAD HAS BEEN HIJACKED AND IS NOW A "POST SHITTY SONGS OLD ZOOMERS HEARD ON THE RADIO IN MIDDLE SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL" THREAD]] SONGS MUST HAVE BEEN PLAYED ON POP RADIO STATIONS FROM 2008 THROUGH 2015 (+/- 2 years) ANY SONGS NOT CONFORMING TO THESE REQUIREMENTS WILL BE MET WITH STERN DISAPPROVAL AND MEMBERS GUILTY OF SKIRTING THE RULES WILL RECEIVE SWIFT DISCIPLINARY ACTION FROM THE LOCAL NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH **Neighborhood Watch members include me, an old zoomer, as well as @machine, also an old zoomer (we have no actual authority, so post whatever you want I guess idk) Bonus points for songs that... You forgot existed Bring back embarrassing memories Are so bad they're good Would be cancel-able by today's standards Happy Nostalgia-Posting!! ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I'll start with a certified middle school dance classic: