I'm super behind on this Backloggery page (mostly because of PS2 emulation and that I'm about to buy that huge itch.io bundle) and I'm gonna stay behind for a little while longer because I've still got some final college projects to finish up over the next week. Speaking of projects, I took a game design course, and as a part of it, I got to work on 2 whole (albeit small) video games! The first game was a group project, as you'll see in its credits, and the second game was a solo project. The solo game was made from a template built from the group project, though almost every visual asset seen in it (minus a particle effect and dialogue boxes) are my own creation! The first game is titled "Saluki-X: The Eclipse" (URL: [Link] The second game is titled "The Sacred Seeds (Demo)" (URL: [Link] Both games are playable on itch.io. So, I did it. I published my first video game! Ah, Yeah! This is happenin'!

I've been trying to get all the orbs in Jak II so I can finally call it , but I just can't do it anymore. I have spent collectively multiple hours attempting to get the gold time on just the first hoverbike race alone and I can't come even close. At this point, I just want to know if there's some glitch method that I can use to bypass completing the gold times for all the races legitimately, tell the game that I've done them, and get all the orbs for them so I can move on (I know that there's some other infinite orbs method, but I'm looking specifically for a way to tell the game internally to check off the flags for the gold time orbs and have all the races considered complete on a programming level without actually doing them). If there's really no way around doing it for real, then I think I'm done with Jak II for the rest of my damn life (OK, that's a little dramatic, maybe some day I'll finally pull it off or something, but I'm certainly happy to just skip straight to Jak 3 without looking back for the foreseeable future). Jak II is not the kind of game I would've ever thought about when thinking about roadblock video games that would forever prevent me from achieving a backlog, but here I fucking am.

Okay, so looking at it again, the up and down of the Kirblimp in the ending is longer than the flat part of the scenery, so that's probably going to be beyond my capabilities, too. I think I'm going to quit while I'm... well, not ahead, but not completely behind. As I said, you're welcome to any of the assets I've created, if you'd like me to send them to you at any time; I have each individual frame of the avatar animation as a separate .png, the entire ending as a gif, and a state for mGBA that's right at the ending, so you wouldn't have to start the game from the beginning to get there. Not sure what other emulators it'd be compatible with, but it's there.

No worries; I didn't expect you would use it, because like you said, it's rough. I think I'm going to take another run at it, and at least try to work on the banner a little, since that might just be a matter of eliminating a lot of frames; we'll see where that leads. I just wanted you to know that I was still working on it. If at any point, you want me to send you the assets I've made, I'll gladly do that, too.

Sorry about the radio silence; I've been trying my ass off to make this work week after week, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing wrong. It kept making these weird pink echoes of the bubbles as they moved, and the program wouldn't let me delete them. So, I tried drawing them pixel by pixel in GIMP. Worked great! Until next week, when it had EATEN EVERY FRAME BUT THE FIRST. Tried again, and it wouldn't even let me draw them this time. Okay, fuck it; drew each frame pixel by pixel in MSPaint and imported them one by one into GIMP. Added the alpha channel, removed the background, but it left some ghosting. Okay, removed that manually. Also didn't work. So, I loaded each frame individually in GIMP, shifted to transparency, exported each frame, then manually imported them into a fresh image. Now, it still has ghosting on the bubbles, but in dark blue instead of pink. This is the best I could do: [Link]

I'll take a run at it; I was going to try again Saturday night, but I'll level with you: I've been in a pretty bad headspace these last two weeks, and it was pretty hard to concentrate, so I didn't get anywhere with it. I've got a plan here, though, and that probably works better than my other plan, which was to just extend the fade to white at the end, which wouldn't have been a smooth loop, but would've been a smoother transition to the beginning.

Also, congrats at finishing Mega Man X8! It's probably my favorite Mega Man game, but part of it is likely that I've never gone through the hell of all those no-damage clears.

One of my greatest gaming demons has been conquered. I finally completed Mega Man X8. To do that, I had to get all of the game's upgrades (which includes hours of grinding in Metal Valley as Axl), all 11 EXF clears (which isn't actually hard, just another thing to do), all 11 AAA Ranks, and most evil of all, all 11 no damage clears. Central White's no damage clear was the last thing I had to do, and I learnt how to map turbo buttons on Steam Deck alongside spending 2 hours labbing the stage to do it. I did grow to appreciate the game far more than in the past, but towards the end of my journey especially, I started to remember why I initially gave the game 1 star in the first place. Another one of the very worst experiences I've yet suffered alongside the likes of Kirby Air Ride.

I'm sorry; I tried my best, but this thing is really fighting me right now. I have Kirby whittled down pretty well; GIMP managed to EAT most of the frames, but I can fix that; the real problem is that I can't erase a few stubborn pixels, so the sleep bubbles keep streaking. I think the best I'll be able to get you this weekend is the banner: [Link] You'll probably have to erase the v from gifv to get it to work, but it's the whole package... except it's really tiny, and I couldn't figure out how to scale it up. I might be able to do it if I find some settings that let me force the output resolution, but otherwise, I'd probably have to manually scale up all 907 frames, if GIMP would even let me do that. In either case, let me know if this is even the right palette; if not, I can always rip it again (I have states saved at all the right places) after adjusting them. This is 2C, but my sister has my old Super Game Boy, so I can't just pop it in and test it to see if 2C is the right one, and I'm not sure if I even played Kirby's Dream Land on an actual Super Game Boy.

I'll certainly try. I took a run at it Saturday, and might've accomplished more, but the whole weekend kinda went sideways on me, and the program I use is user-HOSTILE, so I think I'm going to start over after manually forcing the correct palette, rather than try to manually tweak 40 frames individually. I like these kinds of projects, did a similar (though not animated) thing for Prohallus's page, and I'd also like to up my artwork game, so it's not like this would be some chore or anything. I like to think I'm pretty good with colors, but when it comes to actual image editing (animated, especially), I'm small potatoes. Like, the weird little purple ones you see sometimes. Ironically, I think the banner's going to be easier, because I don't have to trick this thing into letting me use transparencies; I should be able to just crop out the credits and maybe expand the thing to an appropriate size, but the new emulator I've been using allows recording gifs directly from the game, so that's going to cut out a huge chunk of work. I might have to redraw Kirby from scratch, but we'll get there when we get there.

Here's the whole pile of 'em: [Link] I'm pretty sure that's all accurate, since I fixed some errors about a month ago while I was using it for another project. To zero in on it, though, the values you're looking for are
047 040 159
127 048 239
239 136 143
255 192 255

But yeah, I was teaching one day, and the classroom I was in had... I think it was Albert Einstein? It was a painting in the same style as Andy Warhol's famous works, and one of the palettes was almost exactly the same as a Super Game Boy palette - might've even been 1A - and I was inspired to create something, so I went to look up the hex values for all the Super Game Boy palettes and... couldn't find it anywhere. I still wanted the information, so I figured I'd just record it, and post it online so nobody else would have to go through all that (I remember it taking at least a week), which is how a lot of the things I've written came to be, like my work with Esper Boukentai.

And hey, always take care of yourself first! Even though it was a very long time ago, I do still remember the academic chapter of my life, and all that entailed; not fondly, but I do remember.

I'll see if I can make you one this weekend; I wrote the book on Super Game Boy palettes! Okay, technically a flat text file, but I do have a record of all the RGB values of every possible color it uses, and I have the presets grouped together, along with all of their tints and shades. Do you know which preset Kirby's Dream Land uses? At a glance, your page looks about like 2C or possibly 1C. If not, I can just screencap your page and reverse engineer the hex values; no big deal. The sleeping Kirby should be fairly easy, but the credits sequence might take me a bit longer; I'd have to figure out the pacing, number of frames, etc., and admittedly, my own avatar had its animation added by another user here; I just figured out how to edit the colors.

As it turns out, I am! It certainly wasn't what I was expecting, but I'm starting to think it's another one of those, "Oh yeah, old me is a very different person from young me," kind of moments. Not totally sure whether it's that I don't feel comfortable ranking things, because they have to be "right", and if I'm not going to feel the same way forever, it's not worth doing it at all; or if it's just because I've taken more to riding my whims in my old age, but as I worked my way through that lovely final dungeon of Anodyne 2, I started to think about all the other contenders, and also realized that even this game wasn't hitting me the way it usually does.

Also, did you change your color scheme, or does my memory just suck? Really love this particular combo of pink and purple, and it goes great with your banner!

A couple of things,

First, and I can't believe it took this long for me to bring this up, but you can go see me on some archived livestreams over on YouTube. They are both Super Smash Bros. tournaments, one for Melee and one for Ultimate (spoilers, I don't do so well). I appear at the 59 minute mark in this [Link] stream for Melee in a pink shirt, and I appear just before the 36 minute mark in this [Link] stream for Ultimate in a blue sweater. I did win my first set of the day, a Melee pools set against a Samus player 2-0 off stream, but that was my only good result of the day. If you would like to watch me get my ass handed to me in Super Smash Bros., enjoy! In other words, face reveal (but I don't think the mics ever pick up me talking, so no voice reveal I guess(it's deep)).

Second, I got bored one day and decided to rank my 10 favorite video game franchises, so here they are in order for the record book (from most to least favorite): Kirby, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mega Man, Super Mario, Metroid, Klonoa, Panzer Dragoon, Pikmin, Spyro the Dragon, and The Legend of Zelda.

Third, in case you're reading this MotherKojiro, I totally get not really being able to pick one favorite thing that feels definitive(though I must say I've always felt pretty satisfied labelling Celeste as my favorite video game ever made), but I'm the kind of guy who tries ranking basically everything, no matter how different one game (or movie for that matter) may be from the next. That's just my brain being my brain. I haven't worked on it recently, but I have a list in progress where I attempt to rank every single video game I've ever played, at least every one that I've beaten/completed. Exact numbered rankings like that are just kind of my thing, hence my ranking of favorite franchises.

That's all for now.

In case the previous link doesn't work: [Link]

I've made a follow-up to my original "Important Video Games" Google Doc; The "Important Video Games" Google Site! The site can be viewed using this link: [Link] This is a more greatly expanded version of the original idea that I'm far more proud of. However, and as the introduction says, the project is still in a rudimentary state. As such, any feedback is appreciated. Also trying the Shout feature for the first time (I never used it prior because I think every time I looked at it, I assumed it might be annoying, but that's probably me being needlessly cautious as usual).

OK, I just finished one of my little pet projects, at least the first draft of it. I got myself thinking about important video games to play. Specifically, I started by imagining somebody approaching me and asking "What games should I play to experience the 2000s?" Then thought about what games from that decade someone should absolutely experience, limiting the list to just 50 entries. I expanded the idea to every major decade in gaming history, the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s all getting a complete list. The logic for the entries is very broad, ranging from important historical titles, gameplay variety, and just my own bias about games I like(For instance, I chose every first game of the PS2 mascot trio because they are my favorites, even though most people would tell you to play one of the sequels). The fact is that I omitted a lot of games that people will be upset to see missing, and I'm also just one guy using my own logic to determine this. So I present the catalog to you to maybe give me some feedback on(especially helpful input would be mentioning a game that should be present and what game should be replaced for that to happen). The ultimate goal is that somebody who had no knowledge of a given era who wanted that knowledge could play the 50 games listed and be given a solid understanding of the game of the era. That all being said, here is a link to Google Doc I have made of the project: [Link]

As a side note, I myself have not experienced nearly all of the games listed, so I'm partially making it even for myself as a guideline for making sure I play everything important to play. Maybe you all can even get some personal use out of it like I hope I will.

Oh yeah, and one more important thing, games are not included inherently because they are good games. I mean, I tried to mostly pick games that have positive reception, but having positive reception is not the sole reason for a game's inclusion(Otherwise I would have chosen Super Smash Bros. Melee instead of Super Smash Bros. Brawl).

I've been having a hell of a time grinding Rare Stones and Star Coins to purchase all of the Copy Ability upgrades in Kirby and the Forgotten Land for the past couple of days. I love this game but good god why does this have to be a thing?!

Nice job on beating Downwell so quickly! That game is no joke. Even its own creator once tweeted "This game is too hard, what the hell was I thinking". (I think it's just right.)

If you can, I highly recommend playing in TATE mode if you have a monitor that can rotate 90 degrees. TATE mode and a good controller makes it much easier and a lot more enjoyable.

community support on the Steam Deck is really great, and it's just like a lil computer, so I've been able to do all sorts of stuff on it like running games from the Epic Games launcher and running my own games that aren't on steam, hehe! I managed to install directx on it n stuff to get things working and its been rly neat!

hehe thats okay, I still hope you enjoy my games once you get around to them! I can confirm Pizza Time Explosion works great on the steam deck btw c; [Link]

and thank you!! I like the color scheme I got goin this time hehe

Heeey, happy spinny ring day! Mine was just yesterday.

I figured some video analysis was involved, though I couldn't find much that was usable, guess I just didn't look hard enough.
I dunno I think you're selling yourself short. Copying technique is one thing, executing it is another, especially in Air Ride where the requirements are so tight.

How'd your appeal with eBay go? As far as I know reproduction carts are perfectly fine to sell as long as you disclose it, so I really do think they'll back you up if you appeal what was most likely someone reporting you over hurt feelings.

Customers are impatient. I imagine eBay wants sales to ship out immediately to minimize any possible chance of disputes and potential order cancellations, because eBay would then lose their cut of that sale. Customers also don't read, so while I agree that letting the seller declare their own shipping times up front on their listings and store pages would help alleviate some of that, they probably want consistency so that both frequent eBay users and one-off users have a uniform experience. Or something like that; brand consistency.

My main problem with eBay has always been their interface and how it doesn't explain how things work. I don't remember the details, but there was an action I took once that actually opened up an "item not received" case, which hurts the seller's numbers of course, and they hinted at that in their message to me. I didn't want to open a case, I just thought I was asking a question or whatever it was I was doing.

Edit: Hah, simultaneous post, whoops.

Thanks, I think the house will be an overall improvement.

I wouldn't say emulation goes against the Backloggery spirit. Game completion is game completion, whether or not you collect.
If you're looking to sell, there's a "For Sale or Trade" channel in the Backloggery Discord that people have been using to upload lists and spreadsheets of their wares. A number of guaranteed buyers in there including me (maybe not right now, house and all that).
Just be careful and test your plans out first once you have the hardware; I've seen very few people who didn't regret selling off their treasures. While I'm always sad to see a collection liquidated, if you think it's for the best, good luck to ya.

So a couple of things today.

1. Good luck on the house, Macc. Good on ya!
2. It's taken me 5 years to realize that my nephew's birthday falls on the same day as my ring day on this site. What an uncle I am.
3. And yes, 5 years. Half a decade. I've really been here for that long already, huh? Anyway, I'm taking this ring day as my initiative to start making some big changes to my page here. See, I just bought a Steam Deck. I don't know when it's coming, but I'm very excited for it. However that does mean that I'm probably about to transition to full-scale emulation soon. What that means is that, assuming emulation is good for all the consoles I own, especially DS/3DS, Wii U, and the 6th gen home consoles, I will likely no longer own any games to track here aside from: PC Downloads, Steam, Gog.com, Itch.io, Switch, Switch Downloads, and Miscellaneous(for emulation). I haven't decided what I'll do about the Mario/Zelda G&Ws and Genesis Mini yet. I know that having almost full emulation might be considered "going against the spirit" of having a Backloggery page, but I still have a lot to keep track of here regarding the other platforms I'm maintaining. Regarding my plans, step one is going to be to catch up on my Steam games listed here. I'll go from there, starting with at least Mega Man X Legacy Collection, and... I plan on selling off almost every other physical video game I own. Yes, all of them(except most Switch games). As I've already been doing, they'll be removed as I sell them off. I'm doing this because I plan on becoming a dedicated PC gamer with the introduction of the Steam Deck to my library, and I plan on supporting game companies who take the time to port their old games to Steam, emulating everything else that doesn't make its way to modern, supported platforms. I want to vote with my wallet, and fortunately that means I'll end up with a good chunk of change in my pocket. That's all for now.