Dan Solberg

The Mario 64 intro scene with a letter from Princess Peach, reading: Dear Mario. Please come to the castle. I'm down bad. Yours truly-- Princess Toadstool (Peach)

CATS from the video game Zero Wing (the All Your Base Are Belong To Us game), saying: "I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is Futile"

Dracula from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, saying to Richter "Get out of my house"

The transportation advisor from SimCity 2000, saying "YOU CAN'T STAY ON TWITTER! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!"

My big project: The Death Generator.
It's a tool for making fake video game screenshots, just fill in new text and it'll give you a (generally) pixel-accurate image back, the correct fonts and everything.

deathgenerator.com

Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.

SotN final boss as Maria

Frame #45700 from S06 -E23 - Battle Sweet Potato-629306

Rondo, my love

isometric view of a classroom full of colourful stacks of books. the students are all standing, seemingly not speaking to each other. it is a full moon.

persona / psx
atlus, 1996

girl standing on a platform in a blue void. she is looking at a crystal.

wild arms 2 / psx
media.vision / production i.g, 1999

boy in green peaking out from the trees beneath an elaborate building with an orange tiled roof

dragon warrior vii / psx
heartbeat, 2000

Frame #65700 from S02 -E10 - Porcini-627709

Nice! So many different eras there so I had to ask!

Which Radiohead tour?

Béla Tarr, 1955-2026 🤍

Chrono Cross ~ クロノ・クロス (1999)

Developed by Squaresoft.

all that for a B

If you’re inclined, it is excellent. I go back and forth on whether I like I better than IV, but V is the best of the first 5 pretty handily for me.

1. Devil May Cry 3 - DMC 1 is cool but a bit spare. DMC 5 is dynamic but overstuffed. DMC 3 is the sweet spot. A great hard-but-fair action game with a high skill ceiling, wide open with options and style to match. It’s the best version of the Dante/Vergil story and the PS2 visuals add to the charm.

2. Final Fantasy V - Here the series figures out how to combine the dynamic story of IV with the more sprawling, open-ended possibilities of the original. I was surprised by this one. The combat is actually fun! I’ll replay VI at some point for comparison, but V just really has it all going for it.

3. Castlevania Rondo of Blood - Perfect encapsulation of what you want from an old school Castlevania game. Hard as nails, but does give you a foothold every now and again. Best soundtrack in the series. Branching paths and secrets galore. Plus flying around as Maria is treat after Richter’s grind.

4. Persona 5 Royal - Great characters in this that often felt narratively underexplored. Amazing sense of style and delivers on some of its big conceptual arcs. But also just too long for what it’s doing. The Royal add-on chapter is neat in its own way but makes for an even more protracted ending.

5. Devil May Cry 5 - Take everything from previous DMC games and put it in a blender and you get 5. It also means it’s a little messy. The mixup of playing different characters in different levels constantly throws you off a rhythm, emphasizing replays for score, which is fun but only to a point.

6. Final Fantasy IV - Having played FF 1-3 the year prior, I really appreciated IV’s leap forward in storytelling and focus. As a result, the game hums like a finely tuned machine and hits all of its marks. Ultimately I felt it was a little too compact and polished for my taste, but still admire it.

7. Devil May Cry - This is one that I did beat back on PS2, but I wanted to play it again with fresh eyes. It still might be the coolest game in the whole series, though others are more dynamic in other ways. Played this time on an easier difficulty since I’d seen it before, but still not “easy”.

8. Castlevania Dominus Collection - Awesome set of games in a cool package, each riffing on the Symphony of the Night structure in different ways. The standout is Order of Ecclesia, which blends old school Vania level structure with SotN map exploration and Aria of Sorrow’s ability collecting.

9. Ghost of Tsushima - Prestige TV as a samurai game. Combat and stealth infiltration are very well executed and fun takes on well-trodden territory. Pretty game, but ultimately stretched too thin with open world structure. I found just about everything on the map and it was probably not worth it.

10. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury - 3D World controls like trash on Switch, which is unforgivable for a Mario game, but partially redeems itself with its endgame challenge levels. Only reason this ranked this high is Bowser’s Fury is an excellent, pocket-size open world platformer.

11. Into the Breach - I don’t think I’m a roguelike person, and when I bought this game, I didn’t fully realize what I was signing up for. That said, the tile puzzle strategic combat is top of the line. And while I see what’s interesting about this in a roguelike structure, I wasn’t won over.

12. Titanfall 2 - I only played the campaign and not multiplayer here, so take that for what it’s worth. Lotta hype about this thing. It’s neat and at times quite clever, especially mechanically. Plays kinda like a demo reel of concepts. Nothing overstays its welcome but also nothing stuck with me.

13. Devil May Cry 4 - Another game in this series with growing pains. Some fun new elements with Nero as the main character but the way they incorporate Dante is a drag, making you replay levels in reverse. Some of the worst pacing I’ve ever seen in a game. Dante looks weird, but the action is good.

14. Devil May Cry 2 - This game is interesting to play in context of the whole series but it’s pretty bad overall. Considering this was a new team brought in from the arcade division of Capcom to make this, the missteps make more sense. Boring combat and bland level design, but Dante looks cool.