iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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

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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...

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

HotPocketHPE @hotpockethpe.neocities.org · 28/08/2026

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Short little article on Cyberdreams, a 90's Doom WAD themed around Cyberdemon puzzle maps, with a fantastic community MIDI pack released in 2024. By no means perfect, but I found it charming and fulfilling (no doubt helped by its short length). hotpockethpe.neocities.org/essays/cyber...

hotpockethpe.neocities.org

Cyberdreams Review - HotPocketHPE's writings

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 27/08/2026

I've got some longer arcade reviews in the works (puzzle bobble, the monkey balls, elevator action, and night striker), but I wanted to give some love to some older platformer. playing these for score in the early stages recently has helped me gain a new appreciation for their design. link below!

first paragraph: Recently I discussed some of the arcade clubs I have participated in over the last couple of years. Part of the reason I’ve really enjoyed these is that I’ve gotten insight into some games where I haven’t pushed into a 1CC or 1-ALL, but I’ve still put effort into scoring and early-game routing. Today I’ve got three different ’80s arcade staples that fall into this boat: hugely important in their own ways, but not ones I’ve decided to really hone in on for a clear and a full review.

first flicky paragraph: I was shocked going in at just how dynamic and bouncy Flicky is, especially in improvisational scenarios. As a necessary disclaimer: if one had the wherewithal, they could easily chart out optimal routes for each level, as the enemy AI is relatively deterministic. However, doing that across 40 levels (for a single loop) takes quite the time investment, and I was pretty enthused at the more improvisational elements approaching the halfway mark. Flicky collects small, yellow chicks around the level, but instead of disappearing, they trail her in a line, which increases as more chicks are scooped up. The cats and bugs that chase Flicky around scrape off a life upon contact, of course, but by contacting the chicks in the trail, the affected chicks run off and scatter. This creates some nice interplay with the chick depositing mechanic, where Flicky returns the chicks to the starting door (the level ends once all have been returned) with a scaling bonus based on the number of chicks deposited at once. In a routing situation one would solve this, but in freeform play a constant pull between stacking up chicks and returning the current set affects the player. Taking them back “safely” one at a time isn’t necessarily best, as letting the level soak in the background gives time for the full roster of enemies to spawn and centralize on your position.

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Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Of course all the cool old people are dying instead of the actively evil ones.

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John @redletterday95.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

New episode of Regen is up, this time we're tackling the dreamy platformer Klonoa! youtu.be/bRmf1ZGKjdA

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Is KLONOA the platformer of our dreams? - Regen #003

pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 18/08/2026

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spent quite a lot of time this year on outrun 2 sp, both from a scoring and a time attack perspective. over that time, it's elevated from a vibes classic for me to a mechanical totem, up there with any of my other favorites. link to my analysis below!

first paragraph: Players familiar with the effortless gear drifting of OutRun 2 may balk at the idea that it inherits much from the team’s prior Daytona and Scud Race titles, but common DNA threads through each one. Despite first appearances, OutRun 2 relies on the same exaggerated vehicle model: a strict power band, stiff handling at high speeds that frequently understeers, and drifts that linearly drain speed until exited. In the latter case, Daytona used engine braking to initiate drifts via holding a lower gear for a period of time before stabilizing the speed (which correlated with turn angle) by shifting back up. In OutRun 2, virtually every turn is solved with a plink across the shifter buttons, with little time spent in the lower gear. Instead, fine angle control is mediated through countersteer mechanics, letting the vehicle nudge laterally and alter the vehicle rotation angle on the fly. The choice makes OutRun 2 vastly more approachable at a glance, but a major change to the SP version brings back another Daytona mechanic for incredible flavor: slipstreaming.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 14/08/2026

to tie in to my arcade-style article from a couple weeks back, I did a quick write-up of my experiences over the last couple years running private arcade clubs for us to compete and learn games together. if you haven't tried making one, you should give it a shot! link to the article below

first paragraph: I’ve attended MAGFest six times now, and one of my favorite events each year are the tournaments. Regular head-to-head genres tends to monopolize the proceedings – fighting games, action puzzle games, TCGs, etc. – but they also put an emphasis on featuring less common tournament fare, including score-based games! In some cases this may be implemented through simultaneous play (a Typing of the Dead tournament I was in once was structured this way), but for others, the format allows everyone to watch each competitor play through a game superplay-style and mark their scores on a local leaderboard. I loved this concept so much that I started participating in online variants of the same concept with friends over the last two years, and it’s been a rousing success.1 My friends and I have played many more games off the beaten path, gained competency in the “prestige” titles, and explored some score systems that people rarely talk about. Below I’m going to offer a few reasons why an arcade club can be a benefit to your friend group and give some tips on setting it up and maintaining it.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 02/08/2026

any tgm you can play is the best game you'll ever play, and the second game, The Absolute, is perhaps their peak. check out my review in the link below

first paragraph: The first nuance of Tetris that a new player will comprehend is the role of each piece. The unique sides of each tetromino synergizes with particular holes in the stack and affects the future stack’s shape: some flatten, others create peaks, some bridge gaps, others divide. Few Tetris variants stretch what this entails quite as far as Tetris – The Absolute: The Grandmaster 2 (lovingly referred to just as The Absolute Plus, or TAP). A Swiss Army knife piece like the T, at the drop speeds TAP eventually induces, suddenly becomes a death trap if there’s a gap in the stack right below the drop point; likewise, I-pieces and their inflexible rotation quickly ends runs without stacking with it in mind. Tradeoffs form in this environment. Covering holes, while virtually never an issue in the later Tetris Guideline games thanks to held pieces and gentler speeds, has strategic merit here when compared to overextending vertical towers or removing flat landing spots from the stack. A willingness to stomach risk and non-optimal outcomes gives TAP a distinct character.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 31/07/2026

treasure was staffed by complete demons on artistic, programming, and design levels, all with one major flaw: they were all console apologists

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🦇 Hallow-Ina! 🎃 @ina-strangeworld.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

got jumpscared by my custom ffvii logo in my steam library

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Luna Starlight @lunaendlesswitch.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

This is the Deep Space Nine polycule

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John @redletterday95.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Episode 2 of Regen is up- this time we're talking Vanquish: www.youtube.com/watch?v=75Lp...

youtube.com

Regen #002 - Vanquish

pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 22/07/2026

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finally I return to my long-form articles after half a year... backloggd legend drax asks: what exactly does "arcade-y" refer to? in response, I explain my reasoning for three major fundamentals of the arcade style, each of which drives the arcade mechanics we know and love. link below!

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Hyperionux @hyperionux.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Oomf and me matching Toc The Younger

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 22/06/2026

took a little break to get my monkey ball stuff recorded, but I'm back with ace combat (also known as air combat in the states)! I wanted to replay this before I started reposting other ace combat reviews, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it on a hard mode replay. link below!

first paragraph of the link below: Retrospectively speaking, Ace Combat’s1 rough-hewn edges might appeal to those turned off by how quickly the series streamlined starting with its immediate sequel. Starting Ace Combat’s hard mode plops the player into an unmaneuverable tin can that explodes upon contact with a single missile, and the plane selection only incrementally improves its quality from there. Broadly speaking, the most useful planes are split between durable hunks of junk and fragile ships that pivot on a dime, leaving the player to decide between the least bad choice for a given objective. Both of these give the simplistic dogfights and bombing runs a distinct flavor. The former makes downhill approaches a necessity to build up enough speed when avoiding surface-to-air missiles surrounding a drop zone, while the latter turns stray gunfire into a legitimate danger. The decisions here (along with a bevy of stealth planes and other more unorthodox choices) make experimentation with each mission much more useful compared to later titles, which drown the player in extremely useful all-rounders.

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Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Elves are stupid and dumb, why am I the only one in my circles with the correct opinion on this

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Let's Scare Ashcan To Death @ashcan.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

don't have a way to say this that feels as empathetic as i want it to be, but if you feel like you are compromising yourself by buying something with genai/that breaks BDS, that's on your own values. if you want to stop feeling guilty you need to change your morals, your timeline isn't the issue

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fawn 🦌 @deerily.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

>open bluesky >Tupac is alive >close bluesky

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TESTAMENTERROR✙ENJOYMENTERROR @testamentenjoyment.net · 26/05/2026

It's tragic that almost no shooter game developer realized it is funnier to put the conspicuously placed explosive barrels next to the player instead of the enemy, even though this was done in the Ancient Texts of the genre

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THE MIGHTY GALVATRON!!! @mtygalvatron.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Who brought the Sega Rally car to the brewery today?

A white car with green and red decals sits in a gray parking lot. One decal says Castrol on the hood. No, I don't know what the model is. My car identification skills are weak.

Looks pretty cool though.

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Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

This is why I watch sports what the fuck bro

Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Kinda hilarious that Adventures has better Arwing controls than SF Assault

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Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Lakeside and Wipeout 1 Silverstream are like the same track.

pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 08/05/2026

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sorta relates to the "what does arcade-y mean" article I talked about being on the backburner but I worry this post-cag "arcade purist" wave is distorting much of the actual experience and culture surrounding arcades

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Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

This is objectively the funniest thing Nintendo could have done

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Herbert @xxgr1llmast3rxx.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

had a bad start to my run in spikeout and then got juggled by an enemy in a way that I had never seen before in dozens of hours of playing and was forced to turn the game off. he got me

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Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Goodbye (New Sentimentality ver.) - toe Berring Stone - Feed me Jack Song for the Dead - Queens Twice - Feed me Jack (cover) Swimmer - Tricot Little Bubble, Where You Going? - Piglet Strange - Wire Baboon - TTNG What they Do - The Roots Honestly? - AnFootball

Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

In Factorio you are allowed to conjure a design as awful as you want as long as you call it a starter base

Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Hating on celery in the large 2026

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Mr Natural @neilmatheson66.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950) El Capitan, 1925. Coloured Woodblock.

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Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Hideo Kojima shows up to Oracle and immediately the Dodgers embarrass themselves in front of him, can we fly him out to SF everytime we play LA?

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 22/04/2026

while atlus is at the height of their popularity, they've left a good number of their best series behind. this includes the twitchy, brutally difficult trauma center games, which gave the rpg a chance to flex their arcade-style chops. we need a switch sequel... link below!

first paragraph of the text review given in the link below
"Atlus adapts the grisly world of surgery as a timer juggling exercise, with the player managing a main time limit, the drain on their patient's vitals, and the interval until a new hazard spawns. Kyriaki, one of the game's fabricated "GUILT" viruses, best exemplifies this. It appears by creating an incision in the patient's tissue, which bleeds and thus increases the patient's vital drain, and it travels under the tissue surface making more incisions until extracted. Locating one permanently requires detecting it with an ultrasound and then cutting it out of the tissue with the scalpel, after which it will make yet another incision, leaving two net additional cuts to deal with. To kill it, you target it with a laser for a period, with the caveat that leaving the laser in one place for too long will burn through the tissue and cause a hemorrhage. When multiple of these appear at once, you're put in the uncomfortable circumstance of switching your attention between actively adversarial viruses and the injuries both you and they incur. This aligns with the game's spatial aspect: your tools utilize stylus strokes, so the player can optionally bide their time fixing injuries while waiting for multiple Kyriaki to line up for extraction in a single strike. Attempting this without consideration of the patient's vitals often results in a quick death, however, especially in scenarios where killing one on its own leads to two more spawning and overwhelming the organ with incisions. While this sounds like a traditional combat game, the implementation is a stranger blend: small skill-based actions, almost reminiscent of the exaggerated tasks of the *Cooking Mama* games, required dynamically based on the behavior of the virus."

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Ziggy @iskarjarak776.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

The only videos on YouTube worth watching are the 4 hour documentaries on TGM and Sega Rally

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I knew of this one because of CA, but I had no idea Psygnosis published it. Anyways idk why I get the same vibe from those animorph book covers/Xavier Renegade Angel models. 6/10

Backloggd thing. The toughest part about GGC was all the garbage DOS games I had to chew through for certain years but towards the end of the decade there were some heaters. RSG is a new favorite of mine from this year.

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I don’t bounce on this one all the time just for y’all to not know my honest opinion about it 🙄

I haven’t finished eo4 so I can’t form a complete opinion on it but I do fw it. It is on my bingo this year, so thoughts pending.

This game is so crusty where to even begin lol. The factory is one of the most memorable areas for me with how enemies can attack from like several stories and stay aggroed through that distance with like no way to immediately take it off. Microsoft excel skill trees and field skills also like 💀

4/10 game with 12/10 aura. Real talk though this game does kinda stink in places on legendary, like in a lot of Arbiter’s missions and Regret. But it also has Gravemind which is prolly my favorite Halo mission outside of Silent Cart. in CE. Also has my favorite halo multiplayer by far.

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Time to go back to tha old me. Anyways outside of the Kaga Sagas it’s pretty handily the best FE as an aggregate. On the surface very derivative of FE1/3 but I think that structure was pretty strong from the get-go when paired with good scenario design, which Thracia excels in.

I want to write a lot more ab GX. I think people are prone to exaggerating like how much better or worse the handling model is compared to X, as you start getting to master level cups, both games play extremely similarly. The big difference really comes down to track design.