xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 29/09/2026"I have dedicated my LIFE to this corporation because they thoughtfully extended design affordances toward me as a child, but I feel VERY strongly that they should NOT do that for some stupid kids I haven't met and don't plan on having, instead catering specifically to my cohort as we age out!" 020
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 28/09/2026@kylethompsondev.bsky.social's games always manage to scratch my metroidvania itch, but I think #WellDweller might be the first one to visually stop me in my tracks with visual spectacle and composition, wow. These creepy cute vibes and Grimm storybook themes are WORKING! 030
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 28/09/2026Still got #BigWalk on the brain in a Big Way, and we're probably only halfway through?! So much of game design as a craft is additive, for lots of reasons that get reinforced by the iterative nature of something so densely interwoven with the complex technologies that make the medium possible... 120
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 28/09/2026Nope, can't trick me into thinking about what the various Sonic homonculi's fingernails look like under the gloves, can't do it, won't keep attempting to visualize the cuticles, ain't happening! 010
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 27/09/2026Kind of surprised Stellar Blade devs have played the games or might cite them as a source of inspiration? Bayonetta is one of my go-to counter-examples leveraged directly against Eve, who appears to be completely unaware of what she looks like or is wearing... 160
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 26/09/2026Good lord, I'm knee deep in Control Resonant AND Silent Hill Townfall, such that I didn't even notice #WellDweller released?! The Thompson Bros. never fail to deliver on the kind of tightly scoped metroidvanias I crave, so apologies to all the AAA games for a bit here...store.steampowered.comSave 15% on Well Dweller on SteamWell Dweller is a dark fairy-tale metroidvania, full of charming characters living in a wretched kingdom. Play as Glimmer - a tiny bird armed with a matchstick - who must burn the wicked queen to save... 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 26/09/2026You can tell that #BigWalk has Big Impact given the characters are basically sexless but there's still a not insignificant amount of tinker-toy-snowman-lookin porn hitting the timeline... Looking forward to griping bitterly about #HouseHouse getting robbed at the Game Awards this year! 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 24/09/2026Apparently my shiny new pet peeve is AAA fidelity environmental assets with interesting high resolution text/images in third person games with no zoom/first person/photo mode... You've got 4K textures with killer graphic design, but I cannot SEE them?! 120
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 22/09/2026Somehow, Microsoft is coming in WELL below the expectations of a dyed-in-the-wool, "glass half empty" cynic over here. Frustrated, anguished thoughts going out to all the talented developers that believed in what XBox, (yes with lowercase letters in it!) used to represent.news.xbox.comContinuing Our ResetThis message was just sent to Team XBOX employees globally. Team, I’m writing to share several updates as part of the XBOX reset outlined earlier this year. First, we are eliminating 268 roles across ... 110
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 21/09/2026We've gotta stop asking players to make decisions that radically change how they experience the game... before they've actually experienced the game... Surely "Warrior/Mage/Ranger" style class design is massively load bearing thanks to relying on cross-game experiences for additional context? 110
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 17/09/2026Lotta voices out there triple-underlining all the ways in which the game industry has historically set itself up like a house of cards... "Crunch Is Necessary" is right up there alongside "Don't Unionize" and "QA Aren't Real Devs, Just Unskilled Entry Level Labor" 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 17/09/2026As I live and breathe... is this-? Is this some sort of #SuperPrincessPeach spiritual successor?! 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 16/09/2026Stay tuned to GenA- #IGN for all your warmed over, lightly human-edited GTA6 takes, I guess... 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 14/09/2026I've theorized that eventually, most of the surviving brick & mortar retailers will simply have eternal year-round sections for the likes of Halloween or Christmas that get expanded temporarily in turn. 010
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 14/09/2026Was just woken up from a nap by my own laughter, because apparently: "Sephiroth is BACK, and he's Yone'd to hell this time, like straight Sasuke up in this one!" 010
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 11/09/2026Whenever you fire up a remake/remaster of a video game, the little @kirkhamilton.com that lives in your head says, "Eyes On!" 110
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 09/09/2026The Xenoblade games could contain the deepest, most interesting sci-fi plots in decades for all I know, but from out here all I can see is "Team up with new hero SHIMMER, whose breasts have been extruded into a revealing sleeve and IMPRISONED by a series of crisscrossing high tech restraints!" 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 09/09/2026One must hold the mic, (regardless of size) in order to emphasize that you are actively projecting aural aura INTO it; a nearby mic happening to pick your voice up passively doesn't convey PERFORMANCE! Only a held mic could metaphorically be "dropped," (regardless of any intent to physically do so) 110
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 08/09/2026Some sort of art direction "overreaction" thing is recurring, highlighted most in the differences between Link and NPCs like in Twilight Princess, after the world initially rejected Wind Waker's look. It's subtle, but really sort of doing my head in right now, I'm spiraling a little bit... 110
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 08/09/2026Oh no! Hnng... more detail... is more video game... The more detail a texture has, the better it is... Maximalist knurled hyper-greebled surfaces are the ultimate expression of the medium... Human artists should strive to replicate the super-sampled fractally complex style of Generative AI... *dies* 011
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 04/09/2026They tried to develop a Zelda Dungeon Maker again, but this time it came out the other end as a management game where you play as Ganondorf's precocious brat daughter who's stolen the triforce of power, designing bespoke challenges to best the different heroes and sages of Hyrule. 020
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 04/09/2026Okay, that's one of the higher effort and more interesting hint systems I've ever seen! Might have to take a lil' dip into this "Talos Grimrock Portal" business... 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 03/09/2026Wait, what's all this about Nvidia spending billions on FACE HUGGERS? "With this strategic investment, we're on track to reach technological parity with science-fiction corporation Weyland-Yutani by 2093," said president and CEO Jensen Huang... 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 03/09/2026They said the place, they said the name of the place~ Me? Gongaga. 010
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 03/09/2026Oh, wow! A new Dark Souls release on September 29th? Why, that might be earlier even than The Duskbloods! (Make sure not to mention anywhere in the headline or body of the article that it's a graphic novel, there's a good lad!) 040
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 02/09/2026If we magically had access to all the CMS out there, I wonder how many pre-written stub articles we could read RIGHT NOW about "GTA 6 Launching Without This Key Feature Spells Doom For AAA Gaming" "Dark Souls Style Player Messages In GTA 6 Could Have Been A Game Changer" 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 02/09/2026Terrified that the "shell-kick-bounce" tech is beyond me as someone that never got into kaizo Mario romhacks, but THAT ART DIRECTION has me super intrigued nonetheless! 020
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 01/09/2026Watching JackSepticEye play through that first little chunk of #Ontos might turn out to be a bit of a cursed blessing... blessed curse? A Frictional #Soma spiritual successor was already a day one must play in amorphous concept form, but now there's a HUNGER to see/play more. I had an Ontos DREAM.youtube.comWORLD PREMIERE of ONTOSYouTube video by jacksepticeye 120
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 31/08/2026Our Google voice assistant thing that's mostly just for setting hands free kitchen timers and doing conversions recently updated to sound less robotic, and the anti-utility of it is MIND DESTROYING. Like, we'd done it. Clear, natural language i/o! Sounding like a Star Trek computer is a FEATURE... 120
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 30/08/2026A bridge, destroyed by war, whose ghost can be crossed after being summoned by getting what remains of an old air raid siren working in the ruins of a nearby defense bunker... The sound of the bombing runs that murdered the infrastructure forcing it to recall the spirit of safe passage. 141
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 30/08/2026Unfairly challenging soulslike but with a player message system designed for entendre ONLY such that players learn to interpret: "straight jorkin it - heavenly Pound town" ...as... "The middle stalactites are falling trap hazards" 030
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 29/08/2026#TheBesties podcast are my personal nomenclative HEROES for helping to spread the good, evocative name of "Bullet Heaven" and shun the confusing, barrel-bottomed genre title "Survivors-Like" I pray this is enough to jostle other outlets and PR in the right direction, whew; thank you so much guys! 010
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 28/08/2026We're like 90% of the way to a living inside a Black Mirror episode here; if GTA6 turned out to have some sort of psychological reconditioning tech built into it... www.cbsnews.com/news/grand-t...cbsnews.comArmy unit offers 4-day pass to play Grand Theft Auto VI as reenlistment incentiveEligible soldiers must reenlist for a minimum of two years and up to six years. 010
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 27/08/2026Welp, now that I've completed Chapter 2, can confirm that #OfTheDevil is the Real Deal; all the best qualities of Ace Attorney and Danganronpa wrapped up in a speculative sci-fi package and delivered with JUST enough indulgence not to trigger a full eyeroll or "Really? REALLY?!" as is customary. 120
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 26/08/2026Another sign that I've been underestimating the shortening of general attention spans; hearing a single video game being played and thought about for extended periods referred to as "hyperfixating!" 130
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 26/08/2026Nope. No. Absolutely not! I don't like how all that internal geometry gives the impression that Rockman's helmet is actually his skull. I'm sure they'll have "traditional" scenes with his android hair out refuting it, but this makes it look like there's CONSIDERABLY less space in there for it. 010
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 25/08/2026I'm sorry, must have misheard... "Yeet Master?" We're apparently reverse-engineering "Chicken Chaser" from first principles?! 000
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 22/08/2026Kirby-ass soulslike; FromSoft is entering its Sakurai era... So many of the systems and details revealed about #Duskbloods read like a bunch of ideas cut from their other games... immersion blended into a very interesting soup! 010
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 22/08/2026I was JUST thinking about the tyranny of indie game dog petting, and what a MOVE it would be to respond to player attempts with an escalatingly implausible series of canine evasion gags (much as I hate to indirectly channel the spirit of Bequerel...) 251
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 21/08/2026Oh, wow... this sadistic little platformer DESTROYED my Mario-loving arse when we were gifted an old Mac back in the day. 030
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 21/08/2026Dug around and found video of when I discovered you CAN bake misogyny into level design if you try hard enough, (and the Metroid: Other M team SUCCEEDED; the mens side of the restrooms doesn't even exist on the minimap geometry!) 020
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 20/08/2026Wait, so at some point the titular axe got edited out of the poster for So I Married An Axe Murderer, and that stuck all the way through to streaming platforms despite it ruining the entire premise of the image? Was some executive like, "that fake hand's too fake, remove it!?" 130
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 20/08/2026Oh my god, @nthcircle.bsky.social it's ALREADY a legal drama alternating between investigation and court scenes, there's no reason to flash your credentials like this, unless... ...some sort of "test reference," so you can see in real time which streamers share your background, perhaps? 110
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 20/08/2026Apparently it just... doesn't bother most gamers when the thing they're reading word wrap BOUNCES down to the next line as it's printing? I can't think of another reason this bug is so ubiquitous, especially in visual novels, interactive fiction, and other games that rely heavily on reading... 120
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 20/08/2026Oh, hey it's "At Play in the Carceral State" special week 473 over here! 010
xeneth.design @xeneth.design · 19/08/2026Given the way people refer to "SSX Tricky" like it's the name of the entire series and not just the second installment has convinced me that the third entry should have been titled "SSX Tricky 2." 110
