arborelia

if you think about the person you were ten, twenty years ago and think "ugh I was so awful/cringe back then" and feel like you should be ashamed of yourself, don't be. you're comparing a more naive version of you -- who was doing their best with the inputs they were given, and who doesn't exist any more -- with the person you are now, who learned from those mistakes (however belatedly it might've been) and grew. if there's such a difference between those points in your timeline that you feel that strongly about it, that just means you must've grown that substantially since then and are doing that much better. you're allowed to be proud of that! live the best life you can going forward and love the person you are now.

Starting in 2020, I began doing a year end award show that I call "The Gobbies". They are a low effort joke of a game awards, based on the joke that my selection of awards has the same amount of authority as The Game Awards does. That is to say, none.

Do any of these awards mean anything? No. But they are all accurate in their own way.

Starting off the awards strong with this one! I'd pull out my index card to read what it is, but Kirby currently has his mouth around the index card, so I believe that we will give 2022's Award For Best Meme Spawner to Kirby and the Forgotten Land!

More cuteness continues, with our award for Most Emotional! Congratulations to Stray, which is a very unsurprising thing. Of course a game about cats would make me cry. I cry whenever I remember cats exist.

Getting into the more negative awards for the year, the biggest one of course is Biggest Shitshow. And god, it wasn't as much as a sweep this year, but it was still a god damn sweep. I know I'm showing the stupid diversity thing in the image, but that doesn't scratch the surface of the garbage they did this year. Many congratulations to Activision Blizzard for winning Biggest Shitshow of 2022. Please stop.

A bit of a twist on my usual awards, this year I'm giving out the 2022 "Biggest Shitshow That Should Have Been Less Of A Shitshow" Award to Pokemon Scarlet/Violet! Look. This game really showcased just how shitty the Pokemon community, and gamers in general, are. It was not that big of a deal that you could make a Wiglett look like a penis. Please stop harassing developers.

20222's award for "Best Music" goes to Tunic! The correct name of this might be "Correct Sound Design" though, because uh, if you weren't aware, Tunic's sound and music is designed with its own unique language. They invented a language in this game, made entirely out of sequences of notes. The fairies say "over this way fox friend!" or something similar when they lead you to them. In notes. What the fuuuuuuuck this game is SO SMART.

If you're curious about this, one of the creators talked about it here: https://twitter.com/regameyk/status/1583200241222053889?s=20&t=ckU15835SjVEsqCxZYndDQ

What might be the most important award of the year, congratulations to Potionomics for winning the "Best Girls (and nonbinaries)" Award! The men are pretty good too, but this game is super cute, you should check it out.

Congratulations to "Lunistice" for my Best Style award for 2022! Look, I'm a sucker for games pretending to be Sega Saturn games. It's my favorite console. But Lunistice does that, while also keeping its own identity and style and OWNING it. Very pleasant game.

And now, the GOTY awards.... The award for "Best Game You Should Have Heard Of But Probably Did Not" for 2022 goes to Tinykin! Have you never heard of it? PLEASE PLAY IT! It currently only has 600 reviews on Steam. It deserves way more. This is also pretty much tied for "Best Style" btw. I love the 2D in 3D world style soooo much, what an aesthetically wonderful game. Also, it's pandering to me, the 80s loving nerd.

So for the GOTY, full disclosure, for five years in a row, I did say my game of the year was Undertale. Because Undertale is, IMO, the best game ever made. Last year, as a joke, I said Undertale was beat in a shocking surprise by... Deltarune. And now that joke is dead. I can't go back to making it Undertale, that's not as funny anymore, and I can't give it to Deltarune! So, I must actually give my genuine true thoughts, and declare a real Game of the Year.

The Game of the Year this year was... one of the best games I've EVER played. It stunned me. I literally screamed out loud when I figured something out, because of how smart this game is. It's one of the most intelligent, well designed, and thought out games. But on top of that, it means a lot, is charming, and like... it's just so good.

The Gobbies 2022 Game of the Year award goes to Tunic. Me too, little buddy. Me too.

Thank you, goodnight!!!

Silver Ball Century is my chronological playthrough of virtual pinball tables, and I've spent the last couple of months going through the 1970s, the decade when everything changed in pinball.

Here's the previous recap with the VODs from the first 9 episodes, covering 1932 to 1970. From 1970 on, I'll highlight a table or two each stream (with clips) that stood out for being particularly good or particularly unusual tables.

Here's the first part of the decade:

1970

VOD

Tables played: 4 Queens, Aces & Kings, Big Valley, Crescendo, Dipsy Doodle, Gay 90's, Jive Time, Mini Cycle, Snow Derby, Stock Car, Zip-A-Doo

Big Valley has multiball and an interesting layout of gates and kickers. Dipsy Doodle (a.k.a. Doodle Bug) has a ball you can activate under the playfield, which bounces around scoring points as long as you can keep the real ball in play, which is really cool but seems not to be a good path to a high score.

1971

VOD

Tables played: 2001, Time Tunnel, Now, Four Million B.C., Skyrocket (broken), Stardust, Klondike, 4 Square, Astro, Drop-A-Card, Mariner, Spanish Eyes

Spanish Eyes is an excellent table. The flipper layout, where the flippers are raised up the table, far apart, and have a big pop bumper in the gap between them, is unusual but a lot of fun.

1972

VOD

Tables played: Flying Carpet, Fireball, Super Star, King Rock, World Series, Jungle, Fun-Fest

Fireball is too fun to ignore, even though the VPX implementation of it is extremely jank. The playfield has a constantly-spinning circle in the middle of it, but it should not be able to yoink the ball's velocity in a completely different direction the way it does. I don't think they've got the physics right, but you know what, that doesn't stop it from being chaotic fun.

Super Star is centered around hitting an entire line of rollovers with the correct angle of shot from either flipper, which is very satisfying.

1973

VOD

Tables played: Pro Football, Jack in the Box, Darling, Nip It, OXO, Triple Action, Dealers Choice, Seven Winner

Nip It is a very good VPX implementation. And in addition to the flippers there's an alligator button, which makes a plastic alligator on the playfield reach out a metal bar and eat the ball, sending it into an alley where you get more points. Nom!

Seven Winner made me realize that Inder, a lesser-known Spanish pinball manufacturer, comes up with fun rule sets.

1974

VOD / intro post

Tables played: Amigo, Dolphin, Far Out, Fifteen, Free Fall, Magnotron, Wheel, Granada, Top Hand, Tropical

Free Fall rewards accuracy and planning with a mechanic where drop targets have two different ways of multiplying their score by 10, so you want to make them line up and get 100x the drop target points.

Zaccaria shows up on the scene and Tropical is a good one. Zaccaria has done wonders for preserving the gameplay of '70s and '80s pinball: first-party virtual versions of all their tables are available for PC and Switch.

1975

VOD / intro post

Tables played: Atlantis, Big Horse, El Dorado, Flicker, Satin Doll, Spirit of '76, 300, Wizard, Lucky Fruit, Red Show

Wizard might be the most complex EM table and it's worth learning. El Dorado is a very satisfying table focused on hitting the right drop targets at the right time. People like it and that's why Gottlieb kept remaking it for a decade.

1976

1976 was the start of where there were enough tables I wanted to play that I had to break them into multiple streams:

• Part 1: Torpedo!!, Blue Chip, Space Odyssey, Aztec, Sure Shot, Old Chicago, Moon Flight, Wood's Queen

• Part 2: Aladdin's Castle, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Grand Prix, Ship Ahoy, Card Whiz, Canada Dry, Space Odyssey

Some of the best EM table designs happened in 1976, at the end of the EM era, which makes sense. Aztec and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy are both tables that I'm excited when I see them, with shots that feel good and interesting risks and rewards in deciding what to shoot for. But perhaps my favorite EM table now is Hang Glider. It feels really good, it looks pretty, and there's a lot going on without unwieldy complexity. This is one of the pinball tables they have in heaven. [1]

1977

• Part 1: Evel Knievel, Night Rider, Hot Tip, Wild Card, Centigrade 37, Airborne Avenger, Aerobatics, Nautilus, Supersonic
• Part 2: Eight Ball, Pinball, Fire Queen, Dragon, Check Mate, Cleopatra, Circus, Combat, Universe

The big names in pinball are figuring out how to shift to solid state and they've got some reasonable tables to do it with. But out of nowhere there's Atari, and they have no EM baggage. They're designing solid state tables right away and they're bold and weird and exciting, and they've got Steve Ritchie designing tables.

That gets us Airborne Avenger, which is certainly bold and weird and exciting. It also makes good use of the widebody table shape (rarely seen before 1977, or after 1984) so it's got so much room for activities.

[1] Meanwhile, the pinball tables they have in hell are Band Wagon (1965), The Wizard of Oz (2013) in a dark corner, and The Walking Dead (2014).

I mean, I'm more of a fan of the Wizard of Oz table than most, but you have to play it in the early afternoon on a bright sunny day in an establishment with large windows. Otherwise it's impossible. For all the flashiness of the video display, they really skimped on the playfield lighting.

always wild to hear the news about someone I vaguely knew as "that frosh" from when I was in grad school, a guy who got really lucky once and could have quit while he was ahead, donated his winnings to normal things, and retired to spend more time with his League of Legends, but instead tried to own the world and is now awaiting extradition from a shitty jail to a different shitty jail. [1]

anyway the Reuters caption writer here lives in a different world than the article writer. The caption writer thinks a "liquidity crunch" forced him to "declare bankruptcy", a thing that would happen to normal companies sometimes. The article writer gets more to the point.

It wasn't a little whoopsie liquidity crunch. "Complete insolvency" forced him to "say out loud that he didn't have the money because he spent it". Just normal crypto things! [2]

[1] they're all shitty but I figured that multi-billionaires would find a way to get locked up somewhere comfy. I guess multi-negative-billionaires can't though

[2] In case my position on all this is unclear, we should work to abolish prisons, but the last people we should abolish them for are people who fucked the world with cryptocurrency.

they let him out when he got to the US. He doesn't have to go to jail with the poor people, he gets to be in comfy house arrest.

imagine if other people awaiting trial got to just, go home and have a nice winter break with their family. or even a winter break with awkward conversations with their family. imagine if this wasn't just a perk for multi-millionaires, or ex-billionaire children of multi-millionaires. wouldn't that be great