Candescence

So, perhaps a slightly controversial opinion: I think the non-environmental aesthetics of Minecraft are hot garbage. Like... Absolutely unappealing. The environmental stuff is okay, I guess, but the characters and monsters all look like crap.

Playing Sonic Chrono Adventure again (fangame by LakeFepard, third in the Before/After The Sequel trilogy), this game actually figured out how to make a sword compliment Sonic's regular moves by making the sword have larger attack range, able to hit harder, be able to hit without risking contact damage against enemies with spikes or any kind of contact damage that can damage Sonic even when he's spinning, and hit enemies that are normally invincible all the time or invincible in certain attack states, all but at the cost of 1) not being able to just jump on enemies while the sword is out, making Sonic vulnerable to contact damage even when jumping (providing a risk/reward dynamic compared to regular spinning), and 2) you can't spin-dash (or spin period) while the sword is out, meaning you have to put it away to have access to one of Sonic's core mobility tools. It legit works really well.

So Ian Flynn, now that the Transformers/MLP crossover is official and he's on the writing team, has officially said he's totally down for a Sonic/MLP crossover:

https://twitter.com/IanFlynnBKC/status/1225495576462139398

Been on a Usagi Yojimbo binge. Goddamn, this is one of my favorite comic series ever, Stan Sakai consistently knows his shit, and he knows restraint, even knowing how to utilize entire pages (or even entire issues) without dialogue. It's violent and there's blood, but the latter is in limited quantities and battles are often swift and decisive. There's a reason why the late Stan Lee spoke so highly of him.

And just a reminder, Usagi is now being published by IDW alongside Sonic and the TMNT.

So if there's one big issue I have with Spyro Reignited, is that the walking speed is literally only 8 directions even with an analog stick. Like, WTF? This wouldn't be too bad if the direction for going forward wasn't extremely precise and extremely hard to not move diagonally, and even when moving to full tilt this can screw up your direction and mess up stuff where moving precisely forward is necessary.

This is probably where having a keyboard is actually advantageous over a gamepad (I own a Cooler Master MK850, it's a really dope as fuck keyboard with analog keys). There's no ambiguity with the inputs, and having an analog keyboard allows me to move Spyro into a direction quickly and precisely without moving him very far without having to worry about stick input precision.

Wait, some people actually dislike the visual style of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy? The graphics and visual direction were one of the parts of the original trilogy that aged the worst by far. (Also, I don't have any nostalgia for the PS1 games, so I have little issue saying that.)

Well, there is one thing from the PS1 games that aged nearly as poorly - Spyro 1's "boss battles". Gnasty Gnorc is probably the most pathetic and cowardly final boss of all time, all he does is shoot projectiles and then run away like a pansy for the rest of the "fight".

So while the modding scene for Spyro Reginited is pretty small, what is there is actually pretty impressive. I've played level mods of Savannah Citadel Night from Unleashed and Half Life 2: Lost Coast.

Also there are mods for putting boobs on Elora and Bianca (complete with physics), but that's not surprising to anyone.