Mike

BROWT GANG

"Oh Browt looks cool with those eyebrows maybe I'll pick th-omg a Pomeranian! I'm calling him Missile!"

my fanart of fie from trails through daybreak!!!!

fie - trails through daybreak

Screenshot of a PS5 clear save file for Trails beyond the Horizon, with a time taken of 103:16:53

And Trails beyond the Horizon is...done! It's a strange feeling being caught up with the Japanese releases now, I can finally search for trails stuff without fear of spoilers anymore.

I have *so* many thoughts about that ending too, I love this series.

A drawing of Guile from Street Fighter and Guinan from Star Trek TNG in a crouched fighting stance side-by-side, showing the similarity between Guile's hair shape and Guinan's hat shape

Guile... Guinan... Guilenan

Just gonna say since we're already talking about unionizing game writers: hey, maybe let us localizers in on those talks, too, because it's pretty fucking rough out there, even in AAA. I'd probably have three times as many credits if we were unionized and I'm one of the lucky ones with any at all.

A downy woodpecker sits on a spruce on a sunny winter day. "Ahh... Febuary" it says. Close up on it correcting "Febrary" then "Febberary..." then finally "Frebrury"

Ferbruary #oldknees

Fanart of Estelle bright from the Trails series. She is smiling widely and waving at the camera. The lighting is bright and sunny, and there is shrubbery in the background. Joshua Bright is in the background, more faint and less detailed than Estelle. He appears to be softly smiling at the camera too, but Estelle's stick covers his eyes and we can't fully see his expression.

(^_−)☆

Yessssss!! She shines like the sun ☀️

So good. Never ordered a print so fast

I legit fear for the overall game literacy of new junior designers in the coming years for various reasons and a big part of that is just, a lack of idiosyncratic games in many diets that aren't, like, tied to insidious monetization loops.

Let people play games that are weird in honest ways, dude.

The way the press is treating chatbots, like they have agency and they “know” things all of a sudden, crossed the line recently from dumb and obsequious to something else entirely. Treating them as alive and making conscious decisions is an almost religious belief. It won’t age well.

I have no idea how I completely forgot Silksong on my list given the intense joy and rage that game gave me this year. Pretend it's in there above Blue Prince while I go listen to the Karmelita boss music for the 100th time. Amazing year for soundtracks too.

2024 shoutouts:

Stampede: Racing Royale (my poor baby, you deserved better)

Obligatory Tales game I played but haven’t finished yet:
Tales of Destiny Director’s Cut

Other fun games I played this year:

Ys: Memories of Celceta
Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana
FFIX
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor

So, the 2025 games I liked this year:

Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Blue Prince
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
Trails through Daybreak II
Rift of the NecroDancer
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Is This Seat Taken?
Ball x Pit
No Sleep for Kaname Date
Peak

Very weird feeling this time around thinking about my end-of-year lists, it'll be the first time since a friend of mine passed where we'll no longer be able to comment on each other's choices. Fitting there's an Uchikoshi game on mine this year, I wish he'd gotten to play it.

先日30周年だったらしい、めでたい！！(TOP)

◤　ふたりは いつか また逢える　◢
『空の軌跡 the 2nd』2026年発売決定！
┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈
#Switch2 #Switch #PS5 #Steam
🔻ティザーサイトOPEN！
www.falcom.co.jp/sora2/
#空の軌跡 #Falcom

直す/壊す(tov)

Look I didn't see a Jellyfin wrapped meme so I had to go with the alternative

man these are getting too real

discord servers

Sheffield christmas market music moving from Sum41 right into A Spaceman Came Travelling seems like a bold choice, yet very specifically targeted at me

Berseria kicks ass and has one of my favourite moments in the entire franchise but definitely wasn't expecting that one as a remaster choice. 2017 PS4 game and the 2nd most recent mainline entry? You should still play it though, I'll sit here still waiting for Abyss 🙏

a title card from the award nominations video that says: BEST SCORE & MUSIC LEVELED UP BY (SPOTIFY LOGO)

like i am not going to devote a fraction of my brain to being upset for longer than a minute, but this says about all you need to know about the legitimacy of TGA's awards at least as it applies to music

Finally, Gabecube

You Can't Report on Hunger While Taking Bread Off the Table On the proliferation of machine translation in video game outlets covering the effects of AI on labor.

I wrote more words about how it feels to be a translator watching the games press report on AI and labor, coming from a field that's fought these battles for decades. It may look like I'm beating up on one outlet, but it's not about them; I've been trying to write this for me and my peers all year.

(Beartato and Reginald are reading books on Sailors' Wisdom) REGINALD: "Red sky at night, sailors delight." BEARTATO: "Red sky at morning, sailors take warning." REGINALD: "Red sky at dawn, a storm's coming on." BEARTATO: "Red sky at noon, a storm's coming soon." REGINALD: "Red sky at dusk? That counts as night. Refer to previous wisdom, all right?" REGINALD: "Red sky tomorrow fills sailors with sorrow." BEARTATO: "Red sky today? That's prob'ly okay." REGINALD: "Red sky on the ground: you're upside-down." BEARTATO: "Reader beware, you're in for a scare." Oops, wrong book. REGINALD (tossing book away): I'm getting nothing. BEARTATO: Same. (They peed outside. Turns out they were on a boat! The sky is swirling purples and greens with some yellow orange spirals). REGINALD: Curse you, sailors

Sailors' Wisdom

A composite of screenshots for the indie game Nothing to Declare, a Papers Please-like in which cute characters cutely go through airport security and are cutely taken away by security when they cutely have a bomb in their cute bags.

Look, I know I wrote a game called COZY Grove, but I'm starting to think coziness has reached its moral limit blog.giovanh.com/blog/2025/10...

Oh definitely, it took me a while before I managed to get any confidence back that I knew what video games even were 😅 Highest 'swearing:gameplay' ratio I've had in a long time...

Beastfly is a bit of a roadblock, grats man! At least the great music makes some of the pain worth it.

Completion screen for Hollow Knight Silksong. 83% completion with 57h 46m 14s taken

Fun game