[throwatdem12311]

My own videogame playing has changed drastically in the last year or so. I used to go from one AAA $80 slop movie game to the next, but lately I’ve been hunting down recent-ish ports and collections of old arcade games (primarily bullet hell shmups but also Beat’em Ups and Run n Guns too) and really diving deep into them and dedicated a lot of trying getting better at them to really test my skill at these games. I never used to play games for score but a lot of these modern ports now have online leaderboards, so I’ve started to try and it’s crazy how much these games open up when you start playing them “as intended” by the developer. Seemingly simple games with few mechanics all of a sudden feel absolutely endless in their depth. These old school arcade developers wanted your quarters but holy man they knew how to design good games. Even simple, seemingly rudimentary, games like Pac-Man have been eureka moments for me once they’ve been blown open for scoring.

DoDonPachi DaiOuJou is my white whale. I don’t know if I’ll ever clear Hibachi but holy hell I’m gonna keep trying.

Watching an LLM play these for my entertainment would just be weird. I watch YouTube videos of world record score plays but not realy for entertainment, more like for study.