Sotn and Super Metroid are definitely ones I have in mind when it comes to positive examples. Axiom Verge is pretty darn good, too.

Other decent ones include AM2R, Bladechimera, Guacamelee, the NES’s Blaster Master, and most of the Castlevania/Bloodstained ones.

Negative examples below:

Metroid Dread - I hated the stealth and the qte

Ender Lilies - bosses are meant to happen at exactly one difficulty

Gestalt Steam and Cinder - puzzley enemies that grind movement to a halt, bosses with immunity phases, the stun mechanic for bosses that meant more cycles if you didn’t gain enough meter or miss your shot, absolutely bonkers plot, artificial barriers to character power

Hollow Knight - this is a platformer first and a motroidvania second. No flow for me, thought I understand that so many people love it. Ori feels like this as well. An some point, both were just about not hitting spikes.

Wonder Labyrinth - the aiming

All the Shantae games. I really enjoy them except when there’s bottomless pits. And there’s always bottomless pits.

There were also a few that weren’t bad, just didn’t quite catch me: Vernal Edge, 9 Years of Shadows, Timespinner.

Your freedom ends where mine begins.

You say those words but I don’t think you really understand them. It’s a declaration of negative rights, i.e. others aren’t allowed to do something to you. Freedom of speech is such a right in the US as it requires the government to not infringe upon it. This is in contrast to positive rights, e.g. the right to healthcare where somebody has to do something in order to provide the right to others. Read up at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

What it absolutely doesn’t mean is: I am allowed to take away your rights by doing whatever I want. We’re talking about smoking, but it could just as easily be pandemic prevention measures (if you were antivax or antimask because muh freedoms, let me know and I won’t waste any more of my time), or shooting a gun into the air (others don’t have the right to not have bullets randomly raining down on them /s). My freedom to not get shot (i.e. life) doesn’t end where your freedom to shoot begins. That’s called murder (or manslaughter etc). I’m not saying it’s the same magnitude as smoking, just using an example to make the situation clearer.

Flow. Don’t interrupt me. The rest of this just is about it in various aspects.

Make it feel good to move from the get go. Don’t make progression about getting rid of negative traits.

Combat as well. There’s a trend of making the player halt their progress to handle an enemy in a certain way (e.g. gotta wait for the telegraphed shield drop) and that makes backtracking and exploration tedious. It can be challenging going through the first time, but don’t interrupt me with the same thing over and over. Let me ignore the puzzle/timing element by being overpowered or at least let me bypass it with increased mobility.

I prefer bosses (and terrain) that can be overcome with skill or preparation. Like if you book it to them with minimal exploration they’re hard but not impossible, but if you explore everywhere you can and find everything it should be easier. Don’t artificially keep the player’s abilities capped to make things more difficult. Also, no invincibility phases, please.

I dislike items that only provide access like key cards. Every item that opens up more map should be useful in some other way.

If there’s a plot that is more complicated than can be explained in two sentences (Find the Metroid. Kill Dracula.), please make it good. Have non-cliche characters, plots that I can’t immediately poke holes in, plot that isn’t contained in logs that real people would never keep, and reasonable time frames for world changing events to occur. Those things all rip my suspension of disbelief to shreds. Don’t make me sit through world building info dumps. Let me skip scenes and tutorials in case it’s my second time through.

overqualified

Act. Like. A. Dove.

I thought this was the new CentOS logo.

Some of that sounds like an attitude shift common when you get middle-aged, the not liking loud venues, time feeling like it’s moving faster, etc. But some of it sounds like anhedonia, which is a symptom of depression. It’s most noticable when you stop enjoying things you used to.

There are inventories with symptoms that are used to evaluate, but might be good just to get an idea of what depression and anxiety look like symptom-wise, which can include fatigue and less interest in people. Here’s one called the Beck Depression Inventory and there’s a similar one for anxiety.

If it’s interfering with your life, definitely seek help.

Why the long face?

Fucking Kevin. Told me to my face that he hated me. Of course he was “just kidding.”

Single day. It was work mixing cement with what was in a chemical lagoon for an ink factory. Basically the liquid would get pumped into a mixing machine and then piped over to a nearby site to make a more inert giant puck. Whoever was in charge of ratios was mixing things too thick and caused something to explode in a guy’s face. It wasn’t a big explosion, just enough to get the mixture all over him and into his eyes. I wasn’t really dealing with any of that yet, just starting on tarball duty where anything remotely black in the area around the lagoon was considered escaped contamination and got dug up with a shovel and tossed back in the designated area. This was in summer and we had to be in tyvek suits and rubber boots which both had to get taken off and thrown out in a special way every time you left the area. But seeing what happened to that guy just made me think all this wasn’t worth the risk and I didn’t come back the next day.

As an awkward fellow, having made hiring decisions twice in my life from a vast pool of three candidates each time, I hate sending rejection emails and it’s legally dangerous to engage in any sort of explanation if they ask for one. Mostly I do it so they don’t continue to follow up. At a larger company, I don’t see a way to have the time to do it unless it’s an automated system, in which case I’d advise not applying.

Actually making progress on getting some minis painted. I had an unsuccessful attempt at making a pearlescent insect wing and got glitter everywhere. Going to try a different method this week. Otherwise, the sword bandits, burning undead, and hives are ready for varnishing and the komuso monks and fire wizards are coming along. My painting is adequate, so they’re nothing that’s going to win contests, but I’m glad to have more things painted when my friends gather to play.

Ugh, making a car mechanic appointment has been on my list since October. Nothing’s actively wrong with it, and I’m not due mileage-wise. I just want to make sure it can handle a medium length trip that kept getting postponed due to a few things I couldn’t be away from home for more than a day for a while.

All that and we still don’t know anything about the feet or tail.

And Japan’s love hotel industry.

Could it be a good candidate for federation? There’s already a few naming standards that would allow a bit of a common ground. And maybe eliminate a few of the big points of failure.

If you enjoy Dita, I’ll also recommend Medianoche, especially the duets with Ivory Fox. Here’s one: https://youtu.be/Y9uDfsWnJYc

The article says people underestimate how warm and friendly others are and to join communities. At this point it’s my life, I expect about a third of the people I meet to be complete pieces of shit with an additional third to be people I’m just not interested in being social with. Being part of a community does not change those odds. I’ve been part of one with in person interaction for 20+ years and there are people with repugnant ideas (transphobia, antimask, etc) I have to tolerate to participate. There’s a reason we have the phrase “missing stair”. I started a whisper network in a different community I’m in because nobody, including the victim, is willing to make waves by ejecting a guy that sexually assaulted a member of the community, even people that claim to be feminists. Separating wheat from chaff is exhausting and I wish I knew how to tip the odds into the task being actually rewarding. Even if you find people that you jive with, you have to constantly be working to replace the people that disappear for whatever reason, moving, children, job schedule, divorces, and plain old being dead. I’ve not given up on people or being social, it’s just takes so much effort that I really get people checking out of it.

Here’s a bunch!

Swarovski crystals got discontinued a few years ago. Have you found a good substitute? How sparkly do you make your costumes?

Do you do more solos or group numbers?

What’s been your favorite act you’ve done and why? Same for what’s one of the best acts you’ve seen.

Have you specifically trained your stage presence?

Are there any performers you really admire? Have you gotten the chance to see them in person?

Things got a lot better for me when I blocked lemmy.world. It’s one of the worse instances for the things you’re completing about. If you ever get the itch to return, try a different instance and block .world and see if that makes a difference. Anyway, good luck to you and may you find some peace.