15/01/2025
Helo!
We got a smaller blog update today, things have been rather… weird for me lately. I don't know how to explain, it’s like some kind of anxiety but also that makes me tired and with very little energy to begin things? It’s really weird and the most annoying is that this did lead to me being behind on some things I had planned… but this is not the place to discuss this! You need not to worry about me! Come hell or heaven, Pudding will be fine at the end~
Instead let’s worry together about the features for this blog! (Sounded better in my head…)
They are: 100 Isaac Runs Page, Hoyoverse Games and Mario & Luigi Brothership!
Spoiler for all those topics!
Let’s begin!
WEBSITE UPDATES
I Did 100 Isaac Runs and Cataloged Everything!
This is my newest Essay page! You can read by Clicking Here or going to the Misc page!
After close to 2 months of constant work in sorting and webdeving,I have finally finished the enormous task!
I love how it looks as well! There was A LOT of tedious work involved (specially to make those images with all the items and characters you see in the page.) but I had a lot of fun making all the custom assets for the page! I’m far from being an artist or programer, but I did try my best!
I would like to thank Miya for the help with some of the code in that page and for the Miku drawing they made for the page! Please check out their website, the new revamped blog they did is so good!!! (For those wondering “Why Miku??”, I suggested they draw Bethany, a character with twintails in Isaac, but they stuck with Miku instead…)
By the way, here’s a fun fact: that message at the end wasn’t supposed to be there at first!
The punchline was just that there was no experiment and this was all useless. The reason why I decided to include that message at the end was because, when I was doing the spreadsheet, I streamed the process on Discord on a friend group and one of my friends just asked: “Why? Why are you wasting your time with that if there’s nothing to prove?”
And that phrase kind of stuck with me, “Why am I doing this?”. It was while I was thinking about this question that I realized something that I felt was important: I don’t need a reason or purpose to do this, I’m just making this to have a reason to talk about one of my favorite games of all time while making something unique!
Creating for the sake of creating, not for some grand purpose, y’know? Not everything needs a purpose to be created and exist!
I think that’s important at least.
Also, just for the record, I’m not throwing shade at the friend for thinking the way he did. He meant in a comedic and casual way, nothing derogatory, I just thought about it more afterwards.
I hope you enjoyed the page as much as I enjoyed making it! I also want to follow this trend of making Essay pages look like the things and topics I’m talking about, it's fun!
But anyways, Next in the “Making Line” is Phoenix Club Chapter 9.5 and Interlude!
“What am I supposed to do with this dice?”
Beyond this, the only other change to the website was the change to secret words. I made it slightly easier to see by having a brighter color instead of a dark one! It’s much easier to spot something bright in the darkness than something… less dark in the darkness…
The blog code also got some better code that should resize the page according to the content, for real this time!
There was a last minute change that I had to do for the Interloper page! One of the type 5 demo was wrong as pointed out by @ChandlerVidya on Twitter, it was using the same as BEACHDANCE! …If only I noticed their reply earlier… It took me 5 months to fix that even after all the care I took to not commit such a mistake… thanks again to 🐓 for pointing it out to me!
Before concluding this segment, have this Seiko I forgot to show last time:
I made this myself! (Unfortunately, working printers don't exist, so she's a rare Pink Seiko!)
LIFE UPDATES
Hoyoverse Games!
It’s been a while since I talked about these game stories…
That’s for a reason!
I do want to play (well, mostly watch because they are hours long from all the dialogue) and experience them, but something has been derailing my experience… it’s the whole strike VA situation.
My preference towards these games is the english voice acting because they are really well acted and because this game has WAY too much dialogue to read, which gets really tiresome and irritating when they throw all these terms and names at your face. So I'd rather listen to it than reading it. However, due to the VA strike against the BS companies responsible for the voice acting in the game, many of the characters are mute in-game. This is no shade to the VAs by the way, they are doing what’s right to protect their job and talent, my deepest of respect for both the performance they do for these games and how much they give to make these characters feel real.
I haven’t played through a main story quest since Genshin Impact 5.0 and Honkai: Star Rail 2.6 because of this issue. Now I have heard from a friend that the whole story quest for Genshin is mostly all voiced acted (literally just 1 character is not voiced), so I’ll get to playing the whole Natlan soon, but in Star Rail I heard that most of the Astral Express are mutes in the newest story quests… I’m still thinking about what to do. Maybe I should suck it up and just play with the mutes or should I wait more because maybe in the next patch they will add the missing voice lines? Tough decisions. I tried the Japanese Dub for 2.6 in Star Rail, but I just didn’t find it as enjoyable as English unfortunately, it felt rather… flat? I don't know how to explain, it just didn’t feel “acted”. (The amount of reading I had to do was also a big factor…)
But yeah, that’s how things have been, I have hopes that the situation will be fully settled soon, I can only imagine the amount of stress this causes for the VAs and for the Hoyoverse staff having to deal with these stupid companies.
Oh yeah, I also wanted to say this here. I’ll be far more critical of the 3.0 story of Star Rail. Penacony was good at the time, but the later patches and the amount of bait and switches with zero consequences did leave me with a bad taste in my mouth, I hope Amphoreus is different this time around.
Even an Archon needs to rest at some point.
Now shifting the topic from story to gameplay-
I got really lucky during this time in both games!
In Genshin, I have just been expanding and leveling up my entire roster because of the awesome and fun end game content of the Imaginarium Theater! For those who don’t know, that game restricts your roster to just 3 elements and requires a lot of characters because all of them have stamina! You can only use the characters 4 times before they become inaccessible. This is fun because there’s decision making!
Should I use this perfect team for this fight or should I use a garbage team to save the better units? It’s decision making unlike the Spiral Abyss which is just a DPS check.
But back to the lucky part, I managed to Mavuika early and won my 50/50! I have been trying to get Citlali because I heard she’s pretty good with Mavuika but I lost my 50/50 and it’s looking bleak if I’m going to get her or not… but hey, you can’t win them all!
In Star Rail, since we are moving to 3.0, we are going to get a new Trailblazer path. Since I didn’t want my Break team behind to rot, I decided to pull for Fugue, since she is basically a replacement for Harmony Trailblazer. I managed to get her and her light cone in just 100 pulls! Which was incredibly lucky!!!
I have been really happy with the performance of my new Break team and Fugue was of great benefit for my Rappa! My next goal for pulls is to get Jade’s E1 because that unlocks her to so many more teams! (Though I already lost the 50/50 today to Bailu, hopefully I can hit pity before phase 1 ends!!)
Fugue found herself in Penacony! (shock)
And that’s everything I wanted to say about these two games!
ML Brothership!
The game is finally really picking up the pace!
It only took 2 slow seas to do so. I’m at the Brrrning Sea and the story is starting to pick up on the mysteries and fun factor. I can’t wait to see Bowser and how he’s going to change the overall flow of things. Historically, Bowser has been consistently the funniest and best character in this franchise, so my expectations are high.
Oh yeah! I wanna talk about the plug mechanic this game introduces! This is a replacement for the badge system in previous games and I absolutely love it!
Plugs are basically passive effects such as “stunning the enemy when attacking” or “easier parry timings” that you can have 2 active at a time. What's cool is that they have hidden synergy between each other! For example, you can use the plug that does a shockwave when you attack with the stunning one to have an attack that applies the stun in a group of enemies instead of just one! I really like that, the game rewards you experimenting with the system! It’s made even better by the fact that the plugs have charges that when depleted, you will have to wait a few turns to use again, further encouraging you to use different plugs and combinations unlike the badge system which, was fun, but you mostly sticked with the most op combination for the entire game.
The game’s pacing is a real bummer but there’s a lot to like about this game!
R.I.P. to IDLE, will be missed.
And that concludes this segment!
SONG OF THE DAY
The song of the day is Nameless Faces by HOYO-MiX!
This is so good and continues to validate my theory that Hoyoverse is a music company that happens to make games. The trailer was pretty awesome too, I’M REALLY HOPING THE STORY IS GOOD!
So the blog concludes. I rambled quite a bit on this one, hope it wasn’t too boring!
Thank you for reading!
See you next time!
Have a nice day traveler!
05/01/2025
Helo!
Happy new year everyone!
Crazy to think that the last blog post was a whole year ago… 2024 feels like it was 5 days ago…
I hope you had nice holidays! I can say I had a pretty nice one, much needed breaks while eating tasty food… truly the dream! (Don’t worry, I didn’t eat expired chocolate for Christmas like last time! I have learned from my mistakes.)
Sending out the Christmas presents and seeing people’s reaction was very nice for me as well. The art I received in return was also very cute and blessed… tho it's a bit unfair that everyone I know is a talented artist and makes art pieces things I can’t possibly fight back against’ with child level drawing skills… I still don’t feel like I deserve anything I got, but I do appreciate them a lot and I’ll be eternally grateful for these presents! Really, thanks for everyone that sent their really silly arts, they really made my day!
So, in summary, I had a wonderful time with my good friends and ate good food.
What else could you ask for?
But anyways, let’s get started with the first blog update of the year!
This blog’s featured topics are: Looking to the Future, Team Fortress 2 and Mario & Luigi Brothership!
Spoiler for all those topics!
Let's begin!
WEBSITE UPDATES
Back From Hell, Ready to Code!
I spent a long time without touching the website, but now I’m fully back on the groove!
A lot has changed both under and over the hood!
The tier lists pages have been entirely remade, their code was ancient and full of flaws… 2022 Pudding code is real bad… I also added a new tier list of the Games I Played during 2024!
The Error page has been remade as well, with more information and just to be better as a whole!
I finished perhaps the biggest secret I have ever made! It’s a whole silly adventure about you getting out of a mine in Minecraft!The secret is on the Games page, good luck finding it and have fun going through it!
I began work on the next Essay page (you can find those in the Misc page or Clicking here!) about 100 Isaac Runs! It is still a work in progress, but it's shaping up to be a very great looking one!
And lastly, the website has been updated for 2025 while the christmas spirit was locked away in a block of ice, only to return when Christmas comes around. Quite a lot has happened in just a week of work! But what I should be doing is…
Looking to the Future.
And by future, I mean the plans I have for this for this year.
I have not organized everything yet, but I’ll tell you everything I want to do this year:
Phoenix Club Chapters 10 to 14 - these chapters will be more focused on Chie and her struggles, just like how we had Hiroshi focused chapters recently! I have not begun writing these chapters yet, I’m more focused on 2 side chapters before them.
Legend of Dreams - A still work in progress story I’m writing, I want to fully finish this one before putting everything on the website bit by bit! I’m currently 10% in on the second draft.
Sonic Journey - This is the same as the Mario Journey, me going through a big list of mainline Sonic games and beating all of them. This one is sponsored by Mimiya!
Big 4 RPGs - I currently have 4 RPGs in the backlog to beat and I wanted to dedicate time to do them during this year! The RPGs are Mario & Luigi Brothership, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Final Fantasy XVI and Persona 3 Reload.
Phoenix Club MINI - A very simple, gameboy styled, RPG I want to make at some point. In my mind, I plan it to be roughly a 3 - 4 hour experience with simple mechanics and only one playable character. I do have the story of the game in mind, nothing written down yet tho.
and those are all five projects currently circulating in my mind that I want to do this year.
Each are pretty extensive and complicated on their own and I fear I won’t get to do all of them this year… oh and of course I want to do a few other smaller projects here and there. So yeah, hopefully I’ll get to doing all of them this year, but if I had to set one aside… I think the one would be Phoenix Club MINI, since gamedev is a colossally difficult task.
But I suppose I can’t look to the future without looking at the past first.
Last year I promised I would do an exclusive page looking back on everything I did during 2024… that’s not gonna happen anymore. Making a page like that just feels weird to me now… I don’t I can’t really explain why. Instead I’ll just tell you what my goals last year were at the start and if I accomplished them by the end.
There was only one goal and it was simple: Make 3 main line chapters and 2 side chapters for Phoenix Club!
Well, I absolutely accomplished this goal and then some… kind of! I did 9 main line chapters and I’m currently working on the 2 side chapters! So that counts right?
So yeah, I did accomplish the (honeslty low bar) goal I set for myself and only time will tell if I’m going to accomplish the ones for this year… hopefully I will tho! What I can say about it is: 2025 will be a very interesting year for sure
“Those sure are a lot of things...”
Before closing out this segment, I have some amazing Phoenix Club related News to share!
Firstly, the character sheets for Seiko, Chie and Hiroshi have been finalized!
Here, take a look at them:
Scrimblo Bimblo did them and they did a fantastic job!!! I really love how this turned out!!!
Please, please, PLEASE visit their website by clicking their name and spread good words to them, they are so talented and an amazing individual!!!
I’m still thinking on how I’m going to implement these on the main page, perhaps a page dedicated to fanart? Who knows, we will get there when we get there!
Another huge thing is… well… one of the presents for Christmas I received was a 10 page adaptation of the first chapter!!! Done by my great friend Miya! Please click their name to visit their wonderful website!
But also, PLEASE LOOK AT HOW AMAZING THIS LOOKS: Click Here to Read, PLEASE!
Oh and also check these fanarts they made as well during the time:
A cute Seiko!
Seiko in the Final Fantasy Mystic Quest style!
A cute Seiko! (Low Quality version!)
With those wonderful things out of the way, that about sums up everything I wanted to say for this segment! On to the next!
LIFE UPDATES
Team Fortress 2’s Final Comic is Here!
The long anticipated ending to the comics is here! The 7 year long wait is finally over, we can finally have some kind of closure for this whole saga… so how was it? Did it live up to the wait?
Well, I thought it was a pretty good finale! Sure it has some holes when you poke at, but for a fun read, it was pretty good! Seeing all the mercs finally be done with battles and living normal lives was pretty heartwarming too.
The message they were telling with the final chapter is also pretty on the nose, I think that was a big wake up call to many fans of TF2. This is the end.
Sure, the game is still getting the usual slop updates to maintain revenue, which we can discuss to the end of time if that’s good or not (In my opinion, it’s more of a negative), but the people that worked on TF2 have moved on to other things. They don’t want to keep doing it forever, and I get that.
What annoys me is the people saying “OH MY GOD GUYS, TF2 IS SO BACK!! NEW MAJOR UPDATE SOON!!!”
Like, did we read the same comic or is your reading comprehension that bad???
Oh yeah, while we are on the topic, let’s talk more about that Halloween MVM event!
It ended many days ago, unfortunately I couldn’t complete it 100%, December was pretty rough so I was only able to get half way done.
UFO down!
But it was a pretty fun and creative event though! There were many Missions that had actual boss fights and unique mechanics I never thought possible in MVM! Like, a P rank system on a mission? I never expected that!
I had a lot of fun playing it, shame I couldn’t fully finish it.
Giant Enemy Robot Appears!
The Isaacing Continues!
I’m still going through with my plans of getting my third Dead God save file!
I got most of the hard achievements and challenges done, now it’s just beating the many game’s objectives with all the different characters. Right now, my focus is doing Greedier + Mega Satan + Boss Rush + Hush with all the tainted characters to unlock more consumables and mechanics!
Maybe too much Esaus!
Playing the game also helps me come up with ideas for the essay page, so it’s a win win!
Mario & Luigi Returnship!
I picked the game back up after a long time! I really couldn’t focus on anything during December, so the game was basically in stasis until that month was fully done.
But now I have returned to the game, with a refreshed mind and ready to play it to the end!
I did stumble a bit getting back into the groove though, who knew that not playing a game for a month would make you rusty?
Glad to see them back!
I still think the rate that the game gives the Bros. moves is pretty bad and a big flaw… I mean, 12~ hours of game and I still only got 4 Bros. moves? A bit insane don’t you think?
And now for the final segment today: Video Spotlight Vol. 2!
Here’s a collection of videos I watched recently that I liked and wanted to share!
Make sure to see all the videos!
I have a whole batch of very well made and fun videos related to Project Sekai!
DuckyBlue’s music video for the Selfish Princess Cover, Click Here to Watch it!!
I love how these bean plushies and how the music video is edited… so full of silliness, fun and soul… it’s hard not to sob. Also they are genuinely good at making cinematics!
Rice’s animation Miku and the 5 demons (Miku), Click Here to Watch it!!
The many Mikus personalities are so spot on and the animation is so great! Rice continues to cook the best meals despite being named after a meal!
真綾 / Maaya music video for the Konton Boogie Cover, Click Here to Watch it!!
This was posted pretty much on the same day this cover was released and the parody of the original song music is perfect! These factors and more make this video so impressive and fun!
Now moving on from Project Sekai related-
Nyamen Ramen’s absolutely gorgeous OVERSLEPT!! I ANIMATION, Click Here to Watch it!!
I LOVE THIS AND AGREE SO MUCH WITH THE MESSAGE YOU ARE CONVEYING!!!
…
Apologies, I had to get this out of my chest. This is a fantastic animation video made by someone so incredibly passionate and talented about their craft! The message of the MV and on the description is so heartwarming… the sob counter is a 2 now.
(By the way, this is the video that Pudd is showing!)
Murau’s uh… honestly their entire Ragcats series… or I guess Eve if you want the latest video, Click Here to Watch it!!
Another great animator that makes wonderful videos about cat girls that act like actual cats and do dumb stuff that cats do. It’s so fun and impressive that the videos are all done with no dialogue and just sound effects and music! Great stuff!
Punkitt’s video called Fluttershy’s awesome secret, Click Here to Watch it!!
Like a commentor said, this video is absolutely a video that was created 15 years ago on another reality and was brought to our reality with very little warning. (The part after “15 years ago” was added by me.)
You need to watch it.
Tomojang :D’s video on KILLER7- Cut Content was also pretty interesting, Click Here to Watch it!!
I never played or seen KILLER7 before, so to me this all obviously real and actually cut from the game. I enjoyed it!
While we are still on the animation realm, I would be doing a disservice if I didn’t recommend Anomidae’s video called Rat Vibe, Click Here to Watch it!!
Just a girl and rat totally vibing to some good tunes!
(I would like to remind you that this is the same guy that made the Interloper ARG.)
Machinima can be considered some kind of animation… can it? Well, either way Tworrommantesplaygames’s video of All Overwatch 2 Heroes Saying Donut... Yep. was great! Click Here to Watch it!!
So much fun and soul in just one video… NO I WILL NOT INCREASE THE SOB COUNTER THIS TIME! (It already has increased to 3.)
And finally, the final video to recommend is:
Not Albino’s video called RLcraft but Worse, Click Here to Watch it!!
Albino is a recent streamer I found via his Isaac videos and man… this guy is just too funny! This video is the one I probably laughed the most in his whole catalogue of videos!
And that concludes this segment of Video Spotlight! So many great and fun videos appeared during the last 6 months, I couldn’t help but to list them all!
That also concludes this entire part of the update!
SONG OF THE DAY
First song of the year hm… I don’t like a perfect and poetic song to start this year off, so I’ll just pick one of my favorite songs from the game I have been a lot: Isaac!
But more specifically, the Antibirth mod track made by Mudeth called Hallowed Grounds!
Mudeth is just so talented, all the songs they made for Antibirth mod and later to complete the OST were so fantastical. I sometimes even prefer songs from them than the original game! They are that good!!!
And that’s everything for this blog update!
As I said on the website part, I have a lot of projects I want to get to, so hopefully I get to do at least 80% of them!
Thank you for reading!
See you next time!
Have a nice day traveler!
