Best Of
Re: RahnalH102's Rather Redundent Renditions of Really Righteous Romps of Risk and Reward, Real-Talk™
A Hat In Time
A Hat In Time is a 3D platformer collect-a-thon game in the vain of Super Mario series, Banjo & Kazooie series, etc, and justly marketed as "cute-as-heck".
You play as "Hat Kid" a time/space traveling little girl on her way back home. Her dimension traveling ship is powered by special time manipulating hourglasses called "Time Pieces".
Her ship arrives at a planet, and due to a very thorough member of the Mafia of Cooks, her ship's supply of Time Pieces gets scattered all across the planet.
She must now explore 5 areas of the planet, plus some time rifts in order to get back her fuel and continue her trip back home.
The games' marketing got me interested in the first place, so I'll let it do the visual work for this review.
No real need to fluff it up. This game is cute, silly, fun, and accomplishes what it set out to be.
Notes:
The controls feel great, and are easy to learn.
There is enough variety in aesthetics, mechanics, and objectives to keep things fresh as a whole throughout the ~15 or so hour adventure across the world.
Different abilities based on one of 6 hats you can wear.
Many badges that alter abilities or gameplay mechanics.
Some badges and other setting are designed with speedrunners in mind.
The camera badge gives you full control of the screen and some other features while it pauses the game. Hand-tailored screenshots.
2 player splitscreen available.
Generally, each area of the world and sometimes different levels within the areas, will have a specific aesthetic theme.
These are made to fit either the setting itself, or to help accentuate the gameplay for that particular level.
Examples: a sepia toned murder mystery on a train, an ethereal dimension hopping romp through ancient ruins, a cheery parade around a city.
3D platforming is generally the name of the game, but some levels will add, alter, or outright throw out the platforming.
Example: On the aforementioned parade level you gotta keep moving across the rooftops lest the troupe of musicians you're leading bumps into you. All the while meeting different objectives to help spice up the show.
There are stashes of items hidden throughout the levels. These usually give you coins that you can use to unlock various goodies.
These goodies include remixed level music that you can swap out, different skins for your hats, and different color schemes for Hat Kid herself.
This game is #HATS, but more for DigiKid rather then BobbyDigi I think.
There are bonus stages called Time Rifts throughout Hat Kid's ship and the various levels.
These are akin to the bonus stages in Mario Sunshine. A core set of these follow their own aesthetic.
There will be one story rift for each area of the world. The aesthetics and challenges will usually be derived from the area they are in. With some story elements for that area hidden within the rift.
Completing one of these rifts also gives you a free roll at those goodies.
There is great replay value potential for this game on the PC. At the moment Steam workshop support is in open beta.
Users can create new time rift challenges, new hat skins, and even more, and keep adding to the game.
In the time I played it, which was on and shortly after release, there were some notable bugs, but I didn't experience anything game breaking.
In fact I miss a bug that caused Hat Kid to roll in place when hopping on the scooter without using any other input first after spawning into an area.
In summary, A Hat In Time is a relatively modern take on the classic collect-a-thon games of the early polygon era.
Diverse gameplay, aesthetics, and characters help keep your playthrough fresh.
It supports modern trends such as modding, speedrunning, and social media sharing.
Whether you've got a pair of rose-tinted glasses for 3D platformers stashed away somewhere, or like platformers in general you'll likely enjoy this game.
Bonus: This video goes over the history and development of the game. Kinda interesting in my opinion.
sgstair 1 Billion points
A very important milestone for the team and sgstair happened earlier in the week. Our second person has accrued 1,000,000,000+ points. This dedicated folder is ranked 249 globally. For the past year @sgstair has put up at least 20 million a month or better.
_k
Re: Let's talk about ASMR!
ASMR is life. I carry 20 of my favorites around on my phone so I can sleep on planes or in new hotel rooms. Some of my favorite ASMRtists include: WhisperAudios, ASMR Blossom, ASMRvelous, Stolentoilet, Poki ASMR, VeniVidiVulpes, ASMR Darling, Pigsbum53, softlywhispered, Bella ASMR, Whisper Crystal, Chelseamorganwhispers, Tingley Wingley, Ariel ASMR, Tiny Little Whispers and Mermaid Whispers.
Thrax
Let's talk about ASMR!
I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested. Decided I didn't care!
@Thrax introduced ASMR to @RyanFodder and I on Mumble a couple years ago, and I've become a big fan! For those who aren't familiar, ASMR stands for "Autonomous sensory meridian response" It refers to that tingly sensation you get down the back of your head/neck when you see something exciting-- sort-of that "I got chills" feeling you get when you watch the new Star Wars trailer, if you're me. Not much scientific research has been done into ASMR, but there's a lot of supporting anecdotal evidence.
Some people find that certain sounds can trigger that tingly ASMR response, which has lead to a large community on Youtube of ASMR video creators. These people create all sorts of different videos incorporating different sounds in order to try and elicit an ASMR response from you. Some of these videos are just lots of different sounds, and others are entire roleplays about different things.
I actually don't really get an ASMR response from any of these videos, but I still find a lot of the roleplays really soothing. I find they're useful in helping me go to sleep-- I'm less likely to be thinking about dumb stuff if I'm distracted by someone talking about giving me a facial.
I thought it would be neat if we linked some of our favorite ASMR videos and artists here! I'm always looking for new people to listen to. I'm pretty picky, though-- I only do roleplays and they can't have whispering, heh. I'm a weirdo who finds that the sound of people whispering makes me panic, which eliminates like....75% of ASMRs, heh.
It's generally recommended that you have decent headphones/earbuds on to listen to these. When I do them at night, I use headphones specifically for sleeping. These are mine and they're pretty okay.
Some of my fave videos and artists:
Jellybean Green is one of my faves. This is a nice short personal attention roleplay that she does:
Heather Feather is pretty well-known and has some great stuff. This is actually just a video of a bunch of triggers, to help you figure out what you like and dislike:
ASMRequests is also very well known and has some great stuff
The ASMR thing has kind of exploded, so the nice thing is that you can find pretty much anything you want to out there, with some pretty impressive production values. Do you want Galadriel to take care of you? Or eat at Bob's Burgers? Are you interested in reliving a gynecological visit? (NO) Anything you want, it's pretty much out there.
Share your fave videos with me!
Re: DESERT BUS FOR HOPE 11: WE STILL DOIN THIS SO GET IN HERE
I dunno man, there's no secret sauce to enjoying this. You like it or you don't. Tons of people go nuts and watch the Awesome Games Done Quick charity fundraiser for a week long and have a blast doing it. I personally don't enjoy that one at all, and would much rather watch a comedy group do Desert Bus. Different strokes I suppose.
I guess the main point for me is that this isn't actually about Desert Bus. The game doesn't matter one bit. I don't even watch the gameplay. For me, the appealing and entertaining hook for DB For Hope is the live fishbowl of people that spend a week doing improv, silly dances, competitions, and everything in between for a giant charity drive.
It probably helps that I'm a fan of Loading Ready Run in general (the comedy group that runs DB for hope). I was fans of them before the first DB, and it was a large part of why I tuned in that first year. But knowing LRR isn't a prerequisite to enjoy this, especially considering a vast majority of the Icrontians that participate in DBfH each year didn't know anything about LRR before they got into the stream.
I will admit, however, that after all these years, there is a large amount of "culture" that's grown over the years. In-jokes, terminology, traditions and all that. If you know, you love it. If you don't, you might be confused by some of it.
What I truly love about it is that it's interactive. You can donate money and challenge the people to do things on the live stream. You can win super dope things in live auctions. There's a certain cultural zeitgeist that goes along with the whole thing, and you get to be a part of it. That's pretty sweet if you ask me. All the while you're raising money for a legit good cause.
UPSLynx
Re: EA, what do you have against Star Wars fans?
Cautiously optimistic. I really hope they go with the Overwatch model of cosmetics instead of gameplay/advantages.
I'm happy enough with this change to put it on my Christmas list this year, where Forza 7 still remains off.
Re: EA, what do you have against Star Wars fans?
https://www.ea.com/games/starwars/battlefront/battlefront-2/news/pre-launch-update
You did it Reddit.
UPSLynx
Re: DESERT BUS FOR HOPE 11: WE STILL DOIN THIS SO GET IN HERE
Reposting this from last year - bold predictions made for this year's Desert Bus:
- I'll be as dlunk out as I am right now.
- Tally and Jer will have a kid, and they'll make a brief appearance on DB11 and that'll be it.
- Jer is sterile so no kid (@UPSkingpin wisdom)
- Tally is a man (@canti said that. he's wrong but I have to write it down for record keeping)
- Bright still gonna talk smack about best time zone.
UPSLynx
Re: DESERT BUS FOR HOPE 11: WE STILL DOIN THIS SO GET IN HERE
There's now a discord voice channel: "Dessert Bust for Nope".
You know where to find me tomorrow morning.
UPSLynx
Re: Overwatch
Alright, since I don't have any official Blizzard word on it, this is purely conjecture, somewhat backed by "data" I've noticed on my end.
I first noticed shortly after the Doomfist update that I felt I was getting a lot fo Doomfist items in Lootboxes. This was also at the time of the "You'll get a lot less dupes" change to lootboxes as well. I also noticed the number of unlocks on my hero gallery were relatively even on all the heroes except Doomfist, so I figured that the loot boxes are likely to give you stuff for heroes you don't have much unlocked on. I continued to observe over time and indeed Doomfist caught up to all the other heroes pretty quickly. By the end of the Halloween event, Doomfist had nearly caught up to everyone else. Afterwords I started getting a lot more dupes again. Jump to today and Moira just came out. Got two lootboxes pretty quickly. out of the 8 drops, there was 6 Moira drops, 1 coin drop, and 1 player icon (also Moira related but since it's not directly tied to her I'm counting it separate.) Before Moira, I had an average of 63 unlocks per hero. She gets added and immediately gets the next couple lootboxes almost all to herself.
So in conclusion, I'm fairly certain lootboxes will lean towards giving you drops for your least unlocked hero. Probably proportionately compared to the others.