Essence_of_Meh @ Essence_of_Meh @lemmy.world

Don't Think, Just Jam

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Please Bully Me, Miss Villainess!

Still sticking with this one for now as the series started to move beyond the initial gimmick and opened a new significant mystery. Well, I say that but after reading some more the mystery seems to be going in a bit of a boring direction - we'll see how things go in the future, I hope I'm wrong on this.

It managed to regain my attention for now so if everything goes well it should keep things engaging for a while longer.

For Better or For Worse

Book isekai, MC reborn as villainess, yadda yadda... It's the usual setup with the main hook being: MC doesn't want her little sister to marry the male lead because, according to the original story, she'll die to provide him with a tragic background. While trying to prevent this from happening MC ends up marrying the guy instead.

This series has been rotting away in my backlog for a while now and I thought it we be just the thing to avoid doing other stuff I should be doing. It's pretty fun so far, starting both as a full-on comedy (MC trying everything in her power to get rid of the male lead) and melancholy (getting married and shipped off with a guy she'd known for less than a month).

I ended up liking this one way more than I expected to - MC is great and plays amazingly well with other characters, including some introduced as possible villains, only to do 180 on their attitude after spending time with her. Also, the actual romance portion is really nicely done and managed to convince me to something I wasn't really sold on initially.

Also also, the art is great. Both gag and hero panels look fantastic and sell the emotions they're aiming for really well. It's a treat.

That may be the case but personally I find the smaller, personal scale way more impactful than "oh no, someone blew up a planet". I don't care about millions of blobs acting as background, I do however care about what happens to characters I got to know and love throughout the story.

I'm sure people have different views on that but for me personal is where it's at and IBO delivers nicely in that regard.

Here's Ao-kun's Shiny Smily Story, freshly released on the official Hololive channel.

Also, the rest of ReGLOSS released a new cover song as a farewell gift. They managed to record and finish it in 5 days so it doesn't seem like they knew for long either.

Good luck to Ao, hopefully she can recover without the holo obligations hanging at the back of her mind.

True, should've used engaging rather than fun. I blame ping - that's always a good justification, right?

I just started my own rewatch last week (completely unrelated to the anniversary though) so seeing it up on official channel was a fun surprise. Watch IBO people! It's a flawed show but pretty fun nonetheless.

Initial impressions are completely fine, I'm just curious whether to keep an eye on it for the future. Sounds both worrying and intriguing based on your expectations, I'll probably have to look more into it. Thanks!

I honestly forgot that mod managers support Cyberpunk and got used to doing it manually. Can be a pain when something doesn't work but I was lucky enough to not have too much problems with that so far.

At least current patches aren't anything huge like the jump from legacy to 2.0 so it's not like you're losing much staying on the older version.

Cyberpunk 2077
I finally took the time to update my mod list to the latest version of the game as well as grab some new additions because I have no self control when it comes to modding.
I also decided to use this as an opportunity to end my previous playthrough (I did technically finish the game through one of Phantom Liberty endings) and start a new, themed one on a "I hate myself" difficulty. I'm exaggerating but it's definitely not a way to play suitable for reasonable folks.

This character will be a LONG adventure, regardless of whether I'll binge the game or stick to my usual "play for a while -> take a few month break -> repeat" approach. It will also be a very different experience though and that's something I'm really looking forward to.

Cyberpunk might not be a perfect game but boy do I love coming back to it.

Oooh, I love the art style. How is the story?

While I don't have any personal updates for now, I did bring gifts.

PROJECT MIX, the VR bartending VN I mentioned here before has a Quest 3 demo. Give it a shot if you're interested in a Va-11 Hall-a like experience in VR. It also has a PC demo so try it out if you're on desktop instead.

Rose Academy, an upcoming indie mystery novel just released a demo on Steam. It's about a young detective sent to investigate a murder at an elite girls' academy.
Full version planned for March 2026.

Next, we have Livber: Smoke and Mirrors - an indie psychological horror story with a pretty unique art style.
Planned release date Oct. 28th 2025, it has a demo for Windows, Mac and Linux available on their Steam page.

Lastly, JAST USA has an autumn sale until Oct. 8th. Majority of the games are of the ero variety but maybe it'll be of interest to someone.

I played through the whole thing like 3 years ago, I think. It's simple but really fun, especially after getting used to the controls - camera can get a bit disorienting at times though. Worth trying out if you're a fan of arcade style action games.

Thanks for sharing, it was an interesting read!

Yeah but when aiming for younger, less experienced devs (which seems to be a thing at CIG these days, at least to some extent) it might be something that will look interesting to some. Add the fact that the situation in the tech industry in general doesn't look great right now and slightly lower salary might not be too much of a problem when getting a job in the first place can be a challenge.

Besides, pretty much all (A)AAA studios do this to some extent. Sure, CIG is in a bit of a different position due to their financing but it's not exactly extraordinary.

Whatever the case I think that's the smallest of their issues but that's just my personal opinion.

Scenes with the trio were definitely a highlight for me. Interactions with other characters however... I feel like there was a good chance things would get a bit stale in the long run unless author had a way to shake things up a bit. Too bad we won't get to see that.

They did mention a plan to write something in the same universe (or at least reuse some character which didn't make it in here) so there is a possibility we'll get to see some nods to this series. I hope they get another chance to get published.

Dunno if this is real but I don't think it really matters to be honest. Not because people will believe what they want but rather because it doesn't seem to say anything new really. Here are my 2 cents:

• Attractive office spaces are used to catch the eye of potential employees. Is it a great thing to spend money on? Probably not but I'm not sure if the decoration cost of these areas is even remotely close to the money wasted on all the reworks of systems and content made before they figured out a way to design stuff in an inter-operative and complementary manner.
  Just to be clear, I'm talking specifically about bling - cost of building the office is a different matter since they wanted to focus all of their teams in a single space and would have to pay for that regardless.
• Squadron comment is about what I expect from the game anyway. Nothing they've shown suggests that the game is going to be groundbreaking or special in any way - a space opera with star actors Chris always strived for, just with a way higher budget and no one to tell him "no". Should be cool for fans of Wing Commander, I guess.
  Besides, walk and talk segments are pretty much a staple in mainstream games these days so I'd be more surprised if Squadron didn't have any. Can't say I'm a fan of that but it is what it is.
• "Art before design" is another thing we've already seen multiple times in regards to SC content and features. There's so much focus on "what's cool" that "what's practical" often ends up being an afterthought. So much community uproar could be avoided if they started with gameplay and went from there...

While I'm not trying to defend CIG, the loudest voices are usually those who are unhappy about something. We've had a few stories in the past from ex-devs who spoke fondly of both the project and the company. As with everything on the internet one has to take things with a grain of salt. Everything the dude said might be true or it might be some random who came up with this stuff based on the stuff we've seen and heard throughout the years.

Either way, it doesn't seem to change much in the grand scheme of things. Not for me anyway.

Yeah, the spoiler section definitely sounds like a drop point for me. Glad it improves at least - hopefully enough to avoid similar plot points for the rest of the story.

I finished Gal Maid & Villainess: Only Milady's Happy End Will Win!, it was pretty alright. Not the best thing ever or something I'm going to return to in the future but I had fun.
I was initially worried about the short length but I think that was honestly for the best - while the idea was solid, the execution could use some more cooking. I understand that this is author's first published work and I think they did well for that - I hope they can make something even better next time as it was a pretty enjoyable read overall.

I'm also slowly going through Please Bully Me, Miss Villainess!
MC is dropped in a world of otome game as a villainess and forced to act like it. She doesn't like it and tries to do bare minimum which leads to a lot of misunderstandings with the her target, the heroine of the story, who's really into being bullied by MC. Pretty funny and a light read. I'm not sure how much staying power it's going to have in the long run.
I'll stick with it until I'm bored, I guess.

Finally, I've took the time to migrate some of my library as most of the series I read were on comick - didn't get too far though, due to mix of laziness and the fact the many of those titles aren't up to date on other sources. I'll just have to chip away on it slowly as things change.

Sure but there was talk about some kind kind of continuation so I decided to wait for details. Now that I know it'll only serve as a tracking site I can safely proceed as planned.

Welp, I guess I can safely remove their extension from Mihon at this point. Thanks for the update.

Adventure Island (NES) / Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

I mostly picked these two on a whim, when I couldn't decide on what to play before sleep.

I can't really focus on playing anything "seriously" at the moment so I don't expect to stick with and finish either of the games any time soon but they're a good fit for short sessions and that's good enough for now.

Adventure Island was an especially interesting choice as I haven't played any NES games in a while and will have to get used to how they play again. At least it's not too difficult yet.

Ah, my bad. I thought we were talking about both since Berin mentioned them combined together under single community before (I believe it had less with being the same genre and more with the number of members for either of them). But yeah, let's just stick to stuff with at least a smidge of relevancy.

That said, if someone ends up creating a new community for these games feel free to drop me a tip - I'll be more than happy to share it for visibility.