🦷👁️Alex Rochon👁️🦷

Got interviewed by my buddy @medwardsva - or, rather, rambled and talked his ear off for nearly two hours, haha.

Thanks to Mike for having me, and I hope you all enjoy listening to us chat!

The newest episode of who's on next is now up this time with the voice of Caine from The Amazing Digital Circus, @alexrochonva.bsky.social

youtu.be/9hl4A4t8r-A?...

All the bloody time.

Yeah. Myles is annoying and intrusive, but after a while he drops off - meanwhile Other M’s story is awful and borderline offensive the whole way through.

With regards to the hub, the comparisons to Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time are apt - it’s not really an open world like so many feared, and you don’t have to stay there long if you don’t want to. Just a neat way to go from Point A to B while occasionally finding some things.

I think this is overall a good game, but it doesn’t reinvent the wheel the same way Dread did for me.

Meanwhile I’m not wholly averse to NPCs or dialogue in a Metroid game as I think Fusion and Dread used them very well, but they shouldn’t intrude in the middle of gameplay like Prime 3 or 4.

Prime 4 first impressions!

-Atmosphere is very strong, comparable to Prime 1 even!

-It’s a bit linear; less Prime 1, more Prime 3.

-Myles sucks, but at times I got the impression the game knows that.

-I weirdly like the open world hub? I like stumbling on cool points of interest.

Amazon's AI anime dubbing fiasco reminds us that voice actors are severely undervalued Amazon recently rolled out bad AI-generated dubs for several anime on Prime Video, demonstrating yet again that voice actors are undervalued.

While this article goes very rightly into the disrespect actors have faced in dubbing, underneath that is an entire ecosystem of abused and rushed freelancers doing the timecoding, adapting, directing, engineering, and mixing who Amazon also attempted to cut.

www.avclub.com/amazon-ai-an...

Screenshot of tweet that says: "giddy up jingle horse, pick up your feet" sounds like something a homophobic gym teacher would say

I can't listen to the song without thinking of

An anonymous Japanese game studio is making applicants draw in front of them during interviews to prove they don't use generative AI 🎮

“Only human creators can produce compelling characters and graphics from scratch”

Sue they ass.

AI's adoption by megacorps is built entirely around force and deception because they know how unpopular it is otherwise.

An individual suing Amazon is one thing: a whole company doing it has sturdier legs to stand on.

I got inspired @alexrochonva.bsky.social

caine dickbutt

GO

Indie animation and game development is here to stay because it MUST be. Otherwise soon enough there won’t exist a sector of the industry willing to tell or support the stories already starting to be snuffed out.

The restaurant, Storm Crow Manor, has references like that everywhere! It’s almost certainly a Final Fantasy nod.

Spotted at a restaurant in my home city @raxdflipnote.bsky.social

There WAS the spaceship at the end of Dread that disappears at one point... some take that to mean some X Parasites escaped ZDR. The X Parasites have a ton of potential for cool alien bosses, and potentially villains or Space Pirates willing to exploit them.

I adore Fusion, too. It's easily got the best atmosphere in the series.

It's more how NPCs are used. My favourite Metroid is Dread, and it's got a few NPCs who were used well IMO.

As for backtracking, I'm more referring to when you end up traversing the same linear routes. I have no problems revisiting areas, though I like having multiple paths there to vary things up.

Dread or Prime Remastered.

I love Dread's atmosphere, surprising nonlinearity, buttery-smooth gameplay, and its excellent boss fights. It feels like Super Metroid, but with a little extra polish.

Meanwhile Prime is just SO goddamn immersive and beautiful to boot.

I do want to see where Samus could go after Dread. The story of the Metroids as a species is done, but with Samus as the last Metroid there's potential for her to just go on cool Space Warrior adventures on new planets with lore to unearth, especially with her new Metroid powers unlocked.

Meanwhile, I'm just glad Kirby Air Riders seems to be doing well. Shit's fun.

I'm sure Prime 4 is fine. But I wonder if they perhaps wrote themselves into a corner by promising focus on Sylux, since that guarantees more focus on the Federation given his history.

Might be time to let Prime go and move onto a new subseries, or a continuation past Dread.

The Federation is always best as a background element rather than something that takes center-stage. I don't want this to be a story about space marines; we have Halo and Aliens for that. Especially not quippy ones.

Open worlds can work, if there are enough things to find in them; they can become busywork quickly, though.

Backtracking shouldn't even be here - even Dread had ways around it.

And the focus on the Federation is baffling - who wanted MORE after their focus in Other M and Federation Force???

Reviews for Metroid Prime 4 are coming in, and they're about what I expected.

The demo I played was good - I'm expecting the game itself to play well.

But it looks like it falls a bit too often on tropes that are antithetical to Metroid - or at least the best of Metroid.

I’d like to think so if my players have stuck with my silly game for this long - thankfully, it’s nearing maybe the final third of the story so it’s still possible we’ll all be together to finish it!

Yeah, basically. Her species takes elements from one or two official things. Meanwhile, her class is a cook, which isn’t an official class in the game; someone made an unofficial cook class, which I used for Pepper.

Basically, she buffs the party with food!

One thing that’s kind of cool about Pepper is that her species and class are entirely homebrewed - and this is the first game of D&D that @bluepaintsea.bsky.social has ever played. To say he caught on fast would be an understatement!

Oh wow!! Who knew?