I want to make game dev into a more social thing, but it's hard to find people wanting to talk about engine design and algorithms outside of an NES-specific context. Also a lot of people are very secretive anyway.
I'm glad the Tamagotchi Connection rerelease means I'll have a Tamagotchi I can recommend people that doesn't have big strings attached like "isn't in English" or "is like $100+ on eBay" or "has almost nothing to do"
The Tamagotchi Pix is still easy to get and does seem pretty good, though the color ones seem like a very different kind of experience and also eat batteries fast. Being unable to pause except taking out the batteries isn't great either...
Really funny aspect of giving my Neopet a sword is that it makes some dialog lines almost seem like they're threats. And lines that don't look like threats just seem extra silly.
I like magical girl stuff a lot and I want to get some intuition for how to write it so I can use it in roleplays. I'm guessing a lot of that is just making sure I have a lot of exposure to the genre while also trying to actually pay attention to tropes and how they do things, though adapting stuff from anime into a format that's purely text seems nontrivial. There's gotta be fanfics at the very least that I can look at to get a hint for how to approach that.
@asie I wasn't sure if there would be novels in the genre or not (probably not for any series I'm familiar with?) so I'd have to go looking around. I would expect comics to generally just show rather than describe, though I have seen them just kind of narrate over stuff before.
I specifically feel like there's actually a lot of potential in crossing magical girl stuff together with Care Bear stuff, and that's what https://toyhou.se/7023679.rosy-sky is meant to explore. It's something I'm really passionate about and I want to give myself the tools to really fully realize it. I have two other people who would want to play the role of other critters on her team and I think I could have a lot of fun!
For instance, take a look at this intro, which really feels like it has 80s anime intro vibes and "power of friendship/love" theming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lpeFfAA2LQ
Catching up on MLP: Tell your Tale, and I can't tell if it suddenly got much more "magical girl" in presentation in the second season or if I'm just looking for it now.
They keep repeating character-specific rhymes, accompanied by magical looking effects (that sometimes just fill the whole screen and give it a different background for a moment).
I feel like the combination of Neopets and Tamagotchi Connection v4 and v4.5 satisfy most of the stuff I want out of a virtual pet, which makes it a lot less urgent to try and make one myself, though I still think the ideas I had (revolving around trying to focus the whole thing around companionship, coziness, and directly interacting rather than just picking a menu item) would result in something distinct and very cute, so I still want to give it a go someday.
I went through the whole Altador plot on #Neopets with a guide, and even with a guide it was pretty BS haha. It must have been an enormous pain in the butt to figure out back when it was first available.
My least favorite part was anything that involved clicking on every single window in the coliseum to find the "punch club", which I had to do twice (with one of the two times involving me brute forcing a combination.)
At least the task that involved checking in every minute and doing an action for 10 consecutive minutes was a good way to kill time during a meeting.
I think playing Animal Crossing: Wild World recently changed my perspective on #Neopets and made it more appealing. The site does seem designed to get you to load a lot of pages every day (and consequently see a lot of ads) but with an ad blocker I find it easy to ignore that.
Animal Crossing has its own daily/scheduled/random events, and daily things you should do like pulling weeds, and I realized doing daily Neopets events is kind of like that. I actually really like https://www.jellyneo.net/?go=mysterious_negg_cave even though it's simple.
lol I got a notice from Twitch about copyright infringing music in the Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX stream I did. Interesting to get a notice for that game that but not Frequency or Amplitude, though I'm guessing that having the various instruments and vocals randomly and independently cut in and out is probably going to unintentionally make the songs harder to detect. Though quite a few of the tracks were made specifically for that game.
People have been asking Bandai to rerelease the Tamagotchi Connection from 2004 for years and years and they finally did it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3NDHJZY
It seems like it might be either a combination of multiple old Connection toys (like a "best of") or even a whole new entry in the series? In any case I'm really excited to see what it ends up being!!
Based on the back of the box, I'm getting the impression that this might actually turn out to be some sort of mix between the Tamagotchi Connection v3 and the Keitai Kaitsuu Tamagotchi Plus, which sounds really interesting!
All of the characters depicted are on one or both of those toys, and one of the games shown is distinctly a Keitai one. I also see a note that there's both English and Japanese on the same toy? I just hope it has a pause feature.
So that confirms that this is in fact a mix between the Tamagotchi Connection V3 and the Keitai Kaitsuu Tamagotchi Plus.
I'm going to hope that not including any of the V4/V4.5 features is a hint at maybe doing a V4/V4.5 rerelease later (because those are my favorite Tamagotchis), but even just a V3 release is amazing to see.
It's interesting to think about game console companies having enough weight to affect what features chips have, though it makes sense since they'd be really big customers
@Leezard Thank you! Yeah, I feel like the stuff I tend to focus on might just be so far outside what other people focus on that they don't know what to say.
I'd like to get to a spot where I can talk about game dev, old consoles/computers, the shows I'm watching, the games I'm playing, the projects I'm working on, and the places I'm going, and be able to talk about that with people.
I want to talk to people about Cyberchase and Neopets and Splatoon and the SNES and magical girl media and the stories I want to write.
Some of the early 2000s Cybunny plushes look kind of weird, and I thought it was a case where fans just made better stuff, but it turns out the design itself got changed a year after the plush was made: https://bookofages.jellyneo.net/history/old-pets/?species=cybunny
So it was very on-model, just not the model I was thinking of
Playfully reading too much into how yesterday a Cyberchase episode aired involving a "Super-Snooper Satellite" ("Codename: Icky") and today's episode name ends in "as usual" ("Chaos as Usual")
I do genuinely feel like there's some strong similarities between Hacker and Robotnik that go far enough that I don't think it's a coincidence, and that was a big reason I was interested in watching Cyberchase to begin with (before I realized I just enjoyed the show). But it's also fun to reach for all the minor stuff I can grab that doesn't actually matter and pretend it's additional evidence.
it's funny to look at those "good2grow" juice bottles with the plastic character tops, and among all the Peppa Pig and My Little Pony and Paw Patrol there's Shadow the Hedgehog
@VAdaPEGA is it? I figured that Sonic was more aimed at teens, though I also get the impression that Sega has changed the way they're marketing Sonic since the 90s.
Oh this is a joke about some fans being immature isn't it.