Inglorious Basterds was famously a hard movie to end. How do you end a WW2 period piece that so diverges from real history? How do you come up with a believable ending, without throwing away all the credibility you've built up? How do you untangle the knot that you yourself created, without undoing your story and your creative voice?

Well, you stop caring and shoot Hitler in the face with a tommy gun.

Faux retro games hit this problem a lot too, as I would know from experience. Whether you're doing a tribute/revival game or a period piece(No, really, we should start calling games like this 'period pieces', I'm serious. That's what they are.), there is a personal line you have to decide on for how much are you serving the past, and how much is the past serving you. How much do you owe the things you take influence from to represent them, and their item, with care and accuracy. How much do you owe your inspirations?

Lunacid, for its part, would choose to shoot Hitler in the face.

For reasons I don't even entirely remember (just generally musing about old RTSs), I felt compelled to load up Warcraft 2 and just... click around. Then I thought "No, I should play Warcraft 1". In my mind, Warcraft 1 is exactly like Warcraft 2, just without all the ships and boats, but my mind likes to lie to me.

Instead it is some weird Game Gear ass looking game with even less options, road requirements for buildings, and... surprisingly a lot of neutral units(Oh Ogres?? I g...

There was a narrow window for me and jRPGs(I know there is some argument over this term being used to other Japanese RPGs, but as a wRPG hater I only mean this as a term of endearment). From barely being able to parse Final Fantasy 1 by the end of the NES's life, to burning out on jRPGs on Xenogears. I tried to play Final Fantasy IX after that, but by that point I was burnt out and broken.

By the time, Final Fantasy 5 was available as a part of the PSX Final Fantasy Anthology(Trul...

Sylvie's games have become appointment playtime for me. Few games make me feel antsy to get to them these days. Fromsoft and Kojima games are some of the only games where I have at least some amount of urgency(if 'urgency' means 'I'll get to it in a year') to get to. Sylvie cuts in line. This isn't a fair comparison, as those other games cost money, and often more distressingly, time, but even all things being equal, I feel a drive to play her games on par with some of most exciting games I can think of.

I was so excited to see the release of Funeral Song for the Elemental Lords, that despite it coming out 6 minutes before our Monday Super Turbo stream, I was determined to play it. I rushed through me and CaliScrub's weekly FT10(okay it's like 2 FT5s with two different characters but like whatever, it's Ken and Ryu vs Gief), going 10-4(but it was close) in the hopes of playing the game sooner. Once we were done, I shrank down ST into the corner of the screen and got to work.

I find myself a dabbling viewer of Jeff Gerstmann's Ranking of Every NES game series. I appreciate The Science, even if I can't understand a world where Commando ranks higher than Guerrilla War... but science isn't an answer, it is a process, and more important than the exact rankings is hearing Jeff's process, hearing him try to decouple his preconceptions from the game sitting before him. While this kind of objective(Big 2000s internet forum energy) approach is one I find myself trying to get away from, it's still interesting to hear someone older, and with a wider breadth of knowledge, contextualize these games in ways I could not. It's pretty good stuff, though not the point. The point is more that in the last episode I watched, he ran into and was taken back by two crazy, ambitious games, Die Hard and The Lone Ranger.