akabur
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411 - Welcome To My LiveJournal!
🕑 Added 2025-12-15 15:08:31 +0000 UTCHELLO there, bros. A sudden (and surprisingly late) realization hit me recently: my Monday Posts pretty much count as blog posts. Or LiveJournal posts, even. Remember how, in the early days of the internet, completely random people had blogs, and other random people would read and comment on them? This was long before corporations figured out how to monetize everything. Good old days. Anyway, since all I do in my Monday Posts these days is talk about anything but my work, I guess I should accept the truth: my Monday Posts have become my blog posts.
THE GAME AWARDS happened recently, I think. I honestly don’t care about that circus anymore. Although, I suppose I do still care at least a little bit since I’m bringing it up here. Anyway, here’s me doing the healthy thing: accepting that I’m not the target audience anymore and quietly moving on.
NEW LARA CROFT? So a new Tomb Raider game was announced? Or is it a remake? Again, I don’t care enough to look it up. The only reason I’m writing this is because it irritated me slightly to see phrases like “gaming is healing” pop up several times in my news feed—followed by an extremely ugly new Lara. They call it a new unified design. Unified indeed: the middle ground between the supreme design of the original and the modern garbage that came after Underworld. Again, I’m not the target audience, so it’s all good.
PALATE CLEANSING time. The Witch Trainer asset library still exists. It was put together without my knowledge and contains a lot of art assets that weren’t created by me, but I’m still glad it exists. I can’t give you a direct link here in the public posts, but it should be easy enough to find if you’ve never heard of it before. (I’m talking about it because I completely forgot it existed, then somebody on my Discord brought it up, and it made me all warm and fuzzy inside to know that the page is still up and running :).
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. After complaining about this game’s visuals extensively in last week’s Monday Post, I still wasn’t able to keep it off my mind, so I decided to give it a try. I didn’t want to waste my money just to prove myself right, so I downloaded a buccaneer version, put it on my Steam Deck, and (sadly) proved myself right. Since I don’t think any of you have played this game or have any interest in it, I won’t go into the details. Instead, I’ll leave this review I grabbed from Steam (feel free to skip it):
By SHADOW DARWIN "I played the Rune Factory series growing up, and it had a big impact on me... loveable characters, charrming towns, interesting world + character design. There was a veiled mystique in all that was done, there was a draw to the relationships. The subtleties of OG Rune Factory are here made profane. Character design lost all spark. The OG rune-factory aesthetic has been washed out by a Genshinesque excessiveness. Where previously one would look into the personality of a character on screen, here one sees a collection of distractions and absurdities that obscure (but fail to hide) a profound lack of soul."
WINDS OF ANTHOS. One good thing did come out of me playing Guardians of Azuma: it made me want to revisit Winds of Anthos. Last year I quit playing it after about 40 hours because I had other good games to play. I had a good time with it, but its obviously low-budget nature always bothered me. But after playing the high-budget Guardians of Azuma, my perception has changed. Despite also running on the dreaded Unreal Engine, Winds of Anthos actually looks pretty. I mean, the night sky in Guardians is a fucking JPG with a still image of a full moon, whereas in Winds of Anthos not only does the night sky look nice, the moon actually has a proper cycle and looks different every night. If you’ve never heard of Winds of Anthos, it’s basically a low-budget mix of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Harvest Moon. It’s quite an enjoyable game—especially after playing Guardians of Azuma.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE? I hear a new Starship Troopers game is dropping soon. I didn’t do much research, but from what I’ve seen it looks good. I like the whole “retro” look they’re going for. I never liked hyper-realism—that’s one of the reasons it’s so difficult for me to enjoy modern games. The trailer gave me mixed feelings, though. On one hand, it was nice to see Johnny Rico; on the other, it made me just a little bit sad for several reasons simultaneously…
SNOWBREAK! I know nobody gives two fucks about it, but I don’t care! This is my blog and I will talk about what I want! (Thank you for your support, love you!).A new update for my precious SnowPEAK is dropping in a couple of days. The trailer shows off a metric ton of new content as usual, but to be honest I only care about two things: an actual room for Mia and the new main story chapter. Since the last update, Mia has just been wandering the base like a hobo, and that is something I absolutely refuse to stand for!
THE GENIE PIN. Sometime this week (maybe tomorrow) I’ll make a patrons-only post to discuss the fate of the batch of Genie pins MrLazare currently has in his possession. Stay tuned. ^^
THE WORK. I’m finally done with all the preparatory planning and coding stages and can work on the actual content in peace. Very happy about that. I’ll continue focusing on the Skatergirl storyline for the moment. I want to finish it fully before I jump back and work on other things, because when I juggle multiple storylines I sometimes start forgetting plot points and things can get stressful quickly. If all goes as planned, Skatergirl will have two endings (like Azalea did in PT), only they won’t be called Private and Public but rather Sweet and Bitter endings.
AND THAT IS IT. I must say, this was a pretty fun post to write. I only hope I didn’t turn off too many people by gushing over games nobody has even heard about. Thank you for your patience and your support, bros. Truly, you are the best. Don’t forget to leave a like, and if you feel like it, drop a comment — I read all of them, you know that. :) Laterz!
- Aka -
A few links just in case:
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Comments
AKAMAN
Yes, the problem is not the engine is the people who don't know how to use it properly. I 100% agree. Art direction is another lost art unfortunately. -_-
AKAMAN
Yeah, from what I have seen the remastered trilogy is OK (especially by modern standards). I've been eyeing it myself even, but I just know I won't have the time to play it since my backlog is was too long already -_- As for the pins, just hit up Mr.Lazare, he handles that stuff ^^
TrapHunter69
"Despite also running on the dreaded Unreal Engine, Winds of Anthos actually looks pretty" - well, of course XD As a Unreal dev who works with it since 2014, I can say: Unreal is a beast, but unfortunatelly nowdays developers have tendency to think that since it's a beast, they can just enable all fancy settings and it somehow will look pretty. It won't. It will look ugly and have bad perfomance. I remember those articles ~10 years ago saying "if you are using Unreal Engine, you don't need engine programmer". Now you see the results of it. Why you don't see broken ugly games on Decima? Because they don't lisence it freely! Every game made on Decima is made under supervision of Decima engineers. And UE is the same - it's an engine, it's a tool. With FULL control over EVERYTHING. You can (and should) tune look and perfomance to match any needs. But what modern developers do? Right, just slap default cinematic settings (which I don't even like) on everything, enable Lumen and ship it. Ffs. Excuse my outburst XD
Nepurin
Hey, reading you blog about random games is a joy, so don’t worry about it. Speaking of new Lara (I didn’t check it either) there is a sale on Steam so I grabbed the LAU trilogy (which is objectively the best) and my friend got me the 1-3 remastered. I was terrified but it’s not really bad. Also, I can’t believe that in my absence I missed Genie pins, is there anything that can be done has that ship sailed? Have a great week ahead and thanks for reminding me about Peak Trainer asset library because I completely forgot it existed
AKAMAN
I’m really tempted to reply with a wall of text here, but I’ll try to contain myself. The thing about Snowbreak is that I originally came for the fanservice, but I stayed for the story. It definitely depends on personal taste, of course. Also, about 80% of the story is told in a visual-novel style presentation — you’ve been warned. (I’m trying to contain myself, I swear, but I must mention a few key points:) This is a gacha game, but you can avoid frustration by choosing “100% ECHO” for the character you want. That means you will guaranteed get the girl after 100 pulls even if you’re unlucky. You don’t need to spend money unless you want to buy skins. By default the game is censored. You can play it that way at first, but just know there’s a setting you can change to make the costumes and illustrations much more revealing. OK, I’ll shut up now. At the end of the day, if you give it a try, I’ll be happy. ^^
AKAMAN
Nah… Every time I try to record a video it takes forever because I obsess over little things, and if I happen to be talking in the video, then for the next couple of days I keep worrying that maybe I said something wrong. An old-school text blog won’t make me famous on Instagram, but with luck, the old dudes who follow me will still enjoy it. XD
AKAMAN
Nah, don’t worry about it. I’m a professional with many years of experience behind my back. I almost never let fictional characters dictate what I do… I mean, sure, it happened with Princess Trainer when it suddenly became its own game instead of just another combination within Magic Shop. And the same thing happened with Witch Trainer. But after that, the lesson was learned. That being said, I must admit I’m more interested in Skatergirl than in April or Irma at the moment. New shiny toys are always more interesting. But like I said, I’m a professional!!! T_T
AKAMAN
*gasp* And you consider your self a man of culture, sir?
AKAMAN
Hm… I think you misunderstood me. This new Unified Lara looks much better than what we had before. Much, MUCH better. The problem for me is that the original Lara (in my humble opinion) is a million times better still, and I refuse to accept this imposter. But you know, who the hell am I to tell people what games to enjoy? (Unless, of course, we’re talking about MY games — those you are absolutely must play!)
AKAMAN
I’m a fan of the smaller titties myself, to be honest. Although it depends on how they’re presented. I think the more accurate way to say it is: I don’t like it when things start to get vulgar. As for unified Lara — like I said, I see a lot of positive feedback, so I’m probably just in the minority of weirdos. Don’t forget that I also dislike the two games released after Underworld, and those were very successful at the time. The Skatergirl storyline should be fun. Since she’s a side character I can pretty much do whatever I want with her, plus I always enjoy giving a girl’s story arc at least two possible outcomes — and letting the player bear the blame for whatever happens to the heroine in the end. XD
AKAMAN
I hope you have enough food to last you until the spring then. 0_0 I am 40+ and glad that we have the pretty much the same outlook on this XD
AKAMAN
当然可以。把我加到你的好友列表吧。 UID: 11650718
approx
Snowbreak里我300多个大体力药剂已经等不及了新的版本了。如果可以是否能加一下好友一起游玩
Macadam
only thing that i care righ t now is that snow have started to fall here and it's already 60 cm and i cant open my windows anymore... because i live in a attic and my windows are integrated to the roof... -_- as for game awards.. i dont care at all... lara croft, well, she was a cuttie, but i dont care much... and all the rest is meh to me. maybe it's the age (i m already 40) or maybe it's just the world, the time and stuff, but i m less in a mood for something funny... and of course, winter, snow, cold etc.. didnt help much XD
Marshall Iblis
I thought Lara was hot af. Tits weren't huge sure, but she was still gorgeous and I'm more of a fan of small titties anyways. I can't wait for Sk8rGrl. I didn't think April could have competition, but Sk8 is gonna give her a run for her money.
Zach
Nope, I'm just going to come out and say it: I think the new Lara is a step in the right direction. Maybe not a complete step, or a perfect one, but it's at least got the right idea.
Tigrou
I'm more bothered by the grappling hook and how she is using it than by the look of the new Lara.
MrLazare
Skatergirl, Skatergirl, Skatergirl… I’m starting to wonder if I accidentally backed Skatergirl Trainer instead of Reporter Trainer 😉😉😉 That girl clearly put some kind of charm spell on our Akabur. I’m curious about "Sweet vs Bitter endings" , but let’s not forget April and Irma are still waiting in the newsroom, sharpening their pencils and judging silently... On my end, the Genie pins are finally real and sitting in my hands, which still feels surreal. Keep up the good work!
BadSpider
Blog? I hear Vlogs are the hot thing right now, jump on that trend before it's too late xD
MUPLUR
I have added SNOWBREAK in my list ( to play after the current work is done). Never played SFW romance games before. I believe this game will be a good starting. Hope it have good writing as yours
