AsumSaus on Alternative Communication in Games

AsumSaus is probably best known for their Smash Bros. Melee videos, and it was they who made the terrific video (54 minutes) about aMSa, the Yoshi player who won major tournaments. And hey, we linked to that back in 2023.

They’ve been diversifying a bit since, and their most recent video is on alternative communication in games. (21 minutes) How so alternative? As in, ways to talk to players without talking to them, either via speech or direct text.

They give a few examples. The first is when Blizzard changed the /spit emote so that it couldn’t be used to specify someone to spit on, when players used that means to express disgust over people who bought a $70 paid mount. The second is the piecemeal phrase building system used to leave environment messages for people in Souls games, also known as template messages. And third, canned messages from Smash-style and modded Smash games.

News 6/21/22: Elden Daggerfall Kunio Ring Scrolls Kun

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Kate Gray at Nintendo Life presents Moonstone Island, described as Zelda meets Stardew Valley.

D. Hardawar of Engadget really quite likes Radical Dreamers, that Satellaview text adventure sequel to Chrono Trigger that was presented to the world as part of the recent remake of Chrono Cross.

Chris Moyse at Destructoid mentions that Kyoko and Misako, the protagonists of the popular recent beat-em-up River City Girls, are going to appear in another Kunio-kun spinoff, River City Saga: Three Kingdoms, in which the popular high school fighting characters appear in the Chinese epic best known to Westerners as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It’s not the first Kunio game even to do this; back on the Famicom they appeared in game set as a school play, called (translated into English) Downtown Special: Kunio-kun’s Historical Period Drama!, which is playable in Double Dragon & Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle.

Matthew Byrd at Den of Geek brings us to mind of the Dark Souls 3 mod The Convergence, whose makers are now turning their attention to Elden Ring.

Good news from Jarred Walton by way of Tom’s Hardware: with the blessed collapse of cryptocurrencies, GPU prices are set to plummet!

At Kotaku, Zack Zwiezen notes the indie game Agent 64: Spies Never Die is set to remind everyone why Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were so great.

And Luke Plunkett at Kotaku informs us of the 1996 Elder Scrolls game Daggerfall getting a mod to update it with modern graphics and controls! The post links to a 19-minute demonstration video.

Sundry Sunday: Remembering Unskippable

It’s Sunday again! Congratulations for making it to this late day and week.

Since you survived to this point, let’s relax and look at a couple of episodes of Unskippable, venerable web comedy group LoadingReadyRun’s riff project of video game cutscenes, formerly published on The Escapist.

There are 198 of these in the playlist, so let’s just do a couple for now. Above is the opening of everyone’s favorite embodiment of suffering, Dark Souls.

Probably because of the litigious propensities of gigantic megalithic corporations, their mocking of the cutscenes of the Kingdom Hearts games are not on the list. Since Unskippable is no longer hosted from The Escapist’s site itself, these are survived only by the random uploads of fans. One of those is here, for the HD release of Kingdom Hearts, in all of its manifest ridiculousness: