iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

illbleed is a great example of the aesthetic obfuscation stuff because you're actually observing the environment to guess what may be a trap based on its look and what your in-game senses are telling you

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 29/09/2026

going into october with absolutely no horror game prep 😭 I've played 15 minutes of illbleed and nothing else...

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Ephemeral Enigmas @ephemeralenigmas.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

New blog post time! This week's game is Cheese Chase, arcade maze action from Art & Magic, makers of the Amiga owl shmup Agony. You can see glimmers of potential with the focus on turnstiles and manipulating hazards, but the zoomed in camera and slippery movement really let it down: #blog #gaming

ephemeralenigmascom.wordpress.com

Cheese Chase

That’s the unfortunate thing with Cheese Chase. Most of the time, it’s just a bit too much of a pain to play, but when it calms down a bit and/or tries certain gimmicks within more reasonable envir…

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A Certain Scientific Roxy @squigglydot.itch.io · 29/09/2026

Reposting this again for the late night crowd. I'm still unemployed and without income, and I need help affording rent for the next month (and affording to restock my HRT supply -- $700 going toward rent, $200 towards months of HRT.) Anything would help a lot. Thank you. ko-fi.com/squigglydot/...

ko-fi.com

Support Roxy S.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 29/09/2026

a late one for you tonight... monkey ball is one of the most elegantly designed precision arcade games ever made, a game that takes a design staff primed on racers and lets them create economic geometry puzzles, only building towards alien grandeur in their structures at the end. link below!

first few paragraphs: Sega was the master of exaggerated, nuanced physics engines, and Monkey Ball fits that mold to a T. There’s three stylistic inaccuracies that sew Monkey Ball’s unique physics together:

Friction is present as a constant inhibiting force, but in a sense this helps hold the monkey on downward slopes. This gives Monkey Ball a “sticky” quality.

Collisions can and often do pop the monkey up in the air, where speed is uncapped. This, and the fact that the collisions seem relatively elastic,1 make collisions actually a boon for gaining speed rather than a total obstacle.

It’s a common misconception that Monkey Ball has the player control the tilt of the stage, letting the monkey freely roll throughout it. Instead, the player is actually controlling the direction of gravity, offering very similar effects to stage-tilting while also providing essential air control to the monkey.

The three of these combined make Monkey Ball an intuitive, forgiving engine that encourages aggressive play.2 Speed gains are always at the player’s fingertips and rely heavily on environmental awareness. With that intrinsic concentration in the engine, the stage design can then follow suit. Monkey Ball’s stages are focused and brief; many stages have a max time limit of only 30 seconds, intend for you to beat them in less than half of that, and have a theoretical lower bound of only a couple seconds. While the stages are static and encourage memorization, the short length and nuanced physics put the micro-movements front-and-center in comparison to broader routing, and this creates its own form of complexity-oriented dynamism for those who can’t memorize frame-perfect input strings.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 28/09/2026

memetic critique/discourse is normal and not really a bad thing but it does make me roll my eyes when it's couched in the "controversial opinion" or "only a few of my friends and I will really get this" kind of language

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 27/09/2026

working on an article to lead into my instructional articles on state space critique that's effectively about "reclaiming the review" in an era where the term has a completely negative connotation... but I'm struggling to write it bcs I just wanna write more reviews lol

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 26/09/2026

done with first world in saga, I'm sorta getting it...

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 25/09/2026

playing saga... the manual is shockingly good. manuals are a lost art etc etc

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 24/09/2026

tried playing red steel again and the reticle kept resetting, apparently it's because it oversaturates the bluetooth connection to the wiimote with audio for its speaker??? possibly the only game with that issue lol

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Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Kirovs, cow scouts, Einstein, and Rhino tanks! First time got to do one of these pods, and I got to replay a piece of my history with this genre when my dad and I would pick up CDs of old RTS games at garage sales. Think we got in some fun discussion in too. Definitely check it out!

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 23/09/2026

I hadn't played any RTSes since starcraft II was still newish... luckily john and the gang gave me an opportunity to change that! it was really a perfect reintroduction to the genre and a fascinating game both for its campaign and its still thriving competitive scene. check out our episode!

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John @redletterday95.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Our newest episode of Regen is up- this time we're taking a look at Red Alert 2: youtu.be/ppRUlyjN6Gw?...

youtu.be

Is Red Alert 2 our new favorite RTS? - REGEN #005

YouTube video by Regen Podcast

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 20/09/2026

to wrap up my trio of klonoa articles for this year, I've got a look at empire of dreams, another valiant effort by the now production jobbers to keep a namco series trucking. the results actually sets a new standard for klonoa puzzling, and you can read about how in the link below!

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 20/09/2026

re: elevator action there's an lesser discussed inverse to the "this game killed me for no reason" thing that turns into checkmate discourse, which is that those same dynamic systems can also randomly elevate play and give "cheap wins," to say it in an annoying way

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 19/09/2026

must stop scrolling must stop scrolling must stop scrolling

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SaltMarsh @herzogzwei.neocities.org · 18/09/2026

new review posted to the Web Site, on lurruna: the island of towering automatons! i really needed a game like this to knock me out of a bit of burnout with games in general. it helps that lurruna is concise, challenging, and rewarding in all the right ways! herzogzwei.neocities.org/reviews/lurr...

herzogzwei.neocities.org

Lurruna: The Island of Towering Automatons / herzogzwei

A Real Blast

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 17/09/2026

playing phantasy star zero and universe recently and it's making me feel better about "loving" og pso... having every popcorn enemy be pretty beefy and also incessantly beeline in on the player goes a long way towards making it interesting

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 17/09/2026

at the point now where I need to really start rewriting the state space stuff as a series of articles but the scope of it looms so large lol

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raven @deathabyss1979.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

put out a zine at death-abyss.itch.io/whatever-zin... !! "WHATEVER ZINE #1" - a zine about whatever, made in one day, for fun. if you like anime (like ikoku nikki), cool weird music (like the dismemberment plan), or drinking black coffee, check it out!! it's FREE!!!! (and comes w/a bonus poster!!)

death-abyss.itch.io

WHATEVER ZINE #1 by raven

a free digital zine made in one day, for fun, about whatever I was into.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 13/09/2026

been a while since my clear so I went back and re-familiarized myself with the original puzzle bobble! it's arguably the most influential true arcade puzzler of all time (tetris and puyo were pc games!) and stunningly unique on every level. link to my review below!

It’s hard to imagine that Puzzle Bobble arose from nowhere in particular, but none of the post-Tetris random-piece puzzle games that came prior resemble it: it’s match-three, but the board is designed by-hand and drops from the ceiling, crumbling only as the player shoots bubbles into it. One might surmise that, in an alternate universe, a continuous lineage from Breakout and Arkanoid to Puzzle Bobble exists, with some intermediary game that blends the real-time paddle of the former with the match-three of the latter, yet none exists. The key genetic trait retained here are the ricochets, a dollop of the basic kinetics from the block-breakers injected into the more modern puzzle concepts. Puzzle Bobble combines this with a hexagonal grid to create craggy playfields where one can sneak bubbles into crevices.

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faea @faearie.neocities.org · 13/09/2026

Pop'n TwinBee is a somewhat oddball shmup that rejects genre tradition in focus of resource-driven, mechanics-laden chaos. I take a look at the implications of its unusual design priorities and how it slants an unsuspecting format into a lovely co-op experience. faearie.neocities.org/posts/popn-t...

faearie.neocities.org

Pop'n Twinbee, Chaos, and Co-Operation

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low res rodent @ratttz.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I'm very pleased to announce that Intergalactic Puzzle Touchdown will be launching on Steam soon, on October 28th! It's a match 3 PVP puzzler, where swaps represents one of your four downs, trying to score enough to get first down while your opponent blocks! store.steampowered.com/app/4648890/...

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 12/09/2026

monthly paycheck is killing me rn, I've been four weeks without a paycheck since my last job ended and I've still got two and half weeks to go before I get paid 😭

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 12/09/2026

found this cool recent blog post about disassembling kaeru no tame ni kane wa naru (nice to see the code where the program counter lives between bank switches!) for a strange reason: I was erroneously cited for proving its engine isn't the same as link's awakening www.fourisland.com/blog/kaeru-d...

fourisland.com

Reverse Engineering The Frog Game, Part 1

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working on reverse engineering a Game Boy game called Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (English: The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls). I've never done something like this...

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 12/09/2026

only just now realizing that wolverine isn't out yet

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 12/09/2026

was pushing through in falsus but the VN literally put me to sleep😭 it's 8pm but I gotta take a nap...

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RistrettoMike @ristrettomike.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

It took so long, I pulled out the community "Optimal Burst Timings" doc to figure out what starting-burst location would net me an extra sweep. I'm not usually quite that serious! >_< Credit to @aquamarine6623.bsky.social in the official Lumines discord for these graphics. They helped me today!

An "Optimal Burst Timings diagram" for Lumines Arise showing when during the timeline sweep to start a Burst combo in order to net the maximum number of timeline sweeps afterward.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 09/09/2026

2026 pang smiling playing elevator action while my inner 2021 pang is screaming "there's no buffer! this game is bad! where is the buffer!"

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 07/09/2026

first I'm hearing about there being a rent-a-hero sequel for mobile that was shut down after three months and was supposed to feature blockchain integration???

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 07/09/2026

another successful crazy license obtained... you could be next, dear reader!

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 07/09/2026

cloud nothings playing at random hardees near campus 🤔

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 07/09/2026

work has kept me from writing much and I needed a break from the constant game reviews, so I'm offering today a critique of Shinichi Ishizuka's Blue Giant as I promised back in spring. rereading it has really let me fall in love with the art and the minutiae here... link below!

first paragraph of link below: Shenmue understands the inherent arrogance of its protagonist Ryo Suzuki’s quest — in brief moments, tucked away behind a web of other cascading events, it shows the perspective of those left behind by his decisions, who seek to pull him back from the brink of revenge. These perspectives only appear in glimpses due to the weight that Suzuki exerts as the playable character, however. Shenmue’s exploration of minutiae trawls these people’s schedules yet closes them off from Suzuki; the attention to detail only glances beyond human bodies moving with purpose on a map, to canned conversations and little of the world interaction that Suzuki feasts upon. Thus, the ultimate perspective is warped around Suzuki’s quest playing out in your hands, justifying his arrogance. Blue Giant sows the same field — a man on the cusp of adulthood throwing himself towards passion in a foreign city — but it has a far keener eye for the engine that powers such arrogance, that both fuels it and harvests it, those who gain confidence from it and those who spurn it. It grips the arrogance much tighter and assumes it is elemental, feeling it wriggle and documenting every facet of it.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 06/09/2026

edf is the "thing, japan" for serious sam

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 06/09/2026

so blessed to have a great arcade community in my home city... went to the anniversary event for our main import arcade and got to catch up with a lot of people from the scene I hadn't seen in a while

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 05/09/2026

finally getting back into mr driller for real and it's very funny how the mission mode encourages highly choreographed, breakneck play, whereas now I'm having to become much more deliberate and thoughtful at a slower pace in the arcade mode

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A Certain Scientific Roxy @squigglydot.itch.io · 05/09/2026

I have around 20 days to make this goal, and the sooner I can work it out, the better. I'm currently at $420 of my $700 goal. I would really appreciate some extra help, if at all possible! Thank you!!

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 04/09/2026

I'm always tempted to do "game crit needs to stop solely focusing on tearing down the opinions of groups of people" posts on here but that's effectively a post criticizing itself 😭

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 04/09/2026

it's always hard to talk about this because of this memetic critique equating "timer" with "full-game diegetic time limit," which is a pretty weak classification. pikmin and dead rising are not like shenmue and majora's mask

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 03/09/2026

I was given a final project for this intro course I'm teaching and it's based on the voltron reboot show 😭

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 03/09/2026

first week of work obv taking its toll but I'm also sorta undecided about what I want to write about next. might finally scoot back to that blue giant manga review I had talked about months ago

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Ephemeral Enigmas @ephemeralenigmas.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

New blog post time! This week's game is Lone Soldier, an early PS1 title that looks like a 3D run and gun, but is best played with as little running as possible. You could easily call this "Kusoge", but if you're willing to look past the presentation, some silly fun can be had: #blog #gaming

ephemeralenigmascom.wordpress.com

Lone Soldier

I know I said this game was kusoge earlier and it still is in a way I can’t truly deny, but I dunno, I honestly found myself enjoying the experience! It’s definitely not “good” in the conventional …

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 31/08/2025

it's the end of summer... so I've shared some thoughts about boku no natsuyasumi 2, a game that touched me deeply this last month. link below

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John @redletterday95.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Thanks to @birthbydrip.neocities.org for organizing and producing Episode #4 of Regen; this time covering the Dreamcast-exclusive Toy Commander! Give it a listen: open.spotify.com/episode/5Sbi...

open.spotify.com

A French Auteur Casts His Dream... - Regen #004

Regen Podcast · Episode

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 01/09/2026

honestly might work on a metal slug 1cc just out of inertia... it seems to magically appear every time I boot up my mister

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 31/08/2026

and finally, I wrote this review to coincide with the release of our Regen episode on Toy Commander! @reynhester.bsky.social and I take a look at several missions and detail and discuss the variety this game exhibits www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WXs...

youtube.com

A French Auteur Casts His Dream... - Regen #004

YouTube video by Regen Podcast

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