Ben Reed

@benreedd.bsky.social

130 Followers 618 Following

Retro fighting game player constantly distracted by RPGs and old anime. Very occasionally I put pixels on top of each other and export to .png.

Oguri Cap Independent (automated) training result for a Dirt parent. She got over 600 in every stat except Stamina (the stat I was targeting), which means she COULD potentially spark 3* for any of those stats. But in exchange, she got 3923 SP (in a manual run I usually top out around 2.2K), won 31/33 races she ran (almost all G1s, including several Sprints she had an E aptitude for), and earned 798,468 fans (which is pretty much on par for an average "good" manual Trackblazer run...in half the time of a Trackblazer run...and also this was in Grand Concert, not Trackblazer, which is very hostile for supplemental racing when you run manually). Automation may in fact have won when it comes to making parents in Umamusume.
Revengers of Vengeance: Daktar does a Zangief-style body splash (though her pose is closer to T.Hawk) towards Talon the harpy lady, who sadly kind of sucks. And that's an awful thing to have to say about a harpy with a triple jump.
Revengers of Vengeance screenshot: Daktar (purple hair, tiny dress) victorious over Barko (our favorite wolf man, lying prone on right side of screen). She has her side turned towards the camera and points up to the moonlit sky (lit by THREE MOONS! She beat a werewolf at THREE MOONS!) to proclaim her supremacy.
Revengers of Vengeance (JP: "Battle Fantasy") for the Sega CD. A picturesque lake with a cobbled street. The werewolf(? or just wolf man?) Barko has just beaten the masked armored knight Magnus (the Balrog function) by biting his face repeatedly (not pictured). However, the game has not advanced to the next round of the fight, since somehow I softlocked it with Not The Headbite. Unable to move, frozen forever in time, Barko can do nothing but jiggle in victory until the end of days (or whenever I reboot the emulator, which will be about 30 sec after posting this).
Pyra at the inn with Old Vik the innkeeper (old man in blue with bulbous red nose), fresh off of haranguing Vik over something that was probably at least partially her fault. She looks at the player and says: "BEN, Vik tells me you don't need my help. You do?! I knew it!" You don't even get an impotent "But Thou Must" refusal option a la Dragon Quest. She just injects herself into your party immediately on contact. Pyra is doing her best to make this game all about herself, and I kinda wish she'd succeeded.
Shining in the Darkness (Genesis) screenshot: Gila the armored lizardman and Pyra the red-headed elf girl have an animated (literally) exchange in the streets (street. there's one street) of the hub. Pyra is making a doofy face with hand extended as though asking for money. Gila just has a smug grin on his face, apparently used to being accosted by random elves. Gila: "That's not the way to speak to your elders, girl."
SSR Agnes Tachyon, one of the two top-tier Grand Live cards I'm desperately fishing for with my Summer Gold Ship carat surplus. She is running some race in her iconic labcoat, partially obscured by the sparkles, rainbows, and math that allow her to run so fast her bones are threatening to explode. She basks in her triumph, no doubt contemplating how badly she's going to melt Pokke's brain by retiring immediately afterward.
Pulling on the Agnes Tachyon/Light Hello support card banner for Grand Live. Here's a screenshot of my latest 10-pull which decidedly DOES NOT contain either of those cards: R Fine Motion SSR Nishino Flower R Light Hello (wrong rarity!) SR Matikanefukukitaru (thank you for your service in Unity Cup) R Daiwa Scarlet SR Zenno Rob Roy R Sirius Symboli R Tokai Teio R Sasami Anshinzawa SSR Nishino Flower (again...dangit)
Aoko mirror at Prospect Hill Park, at a pavilion near the summit. Close enough.
City of Boston as viewed from the summit of Prospect Hill in nearby Waltham (photo from last year)
Top YouTube comment on the HOT LIMIT First Take video (original Japanese): これ以上夏を刺激しないでくれ
Screenshot of SGDQ 2026 schedule highlighting one of the Sega CD's (very few) hidden gems: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, based on the hit(?) movie. Two great tastes that go together like peanut butter and hallucinogenic mushrooms: point-and-click adventure (OK) and FIGHTING GAME (versus wild dog! versus landlord! versus Helena Bonham Carter and her alarmingly strong rushdown!). You are in for a shambling treat at 3 AM EST.
Success at the character gacha! I pulled Summer Gold Ship, pictured here at the beach in her black one-piece and sunglasses. She has a big red cartoony water gun holstered on her back so as to squirt her enemies (and McQueen) at a moment's notice. She is giving the camera a thumbs-up as a googly-eyed cartoon squid looks on excitedly in the back ground. But he probably shouldn't be that excited, because this is Golshi, so she'll probably take a break to harpoon and grill him shortly (and charge her friends for his crispy skewered remains, but at a discount).
Raiya Mizazuchi from Touki Denshou: Angel Eyes, who stands the best chance against H.Star of all the other characters, because while H.Star may be a teacher, I'm pretty sure Raiya can't read
Screenshot of the final superboss of Etrian Odyssey: The Primevil, a big greyish blobby Lovecraftian abomination with all the standard features -- huge tentacles, too many eyes, and will occasionally inflict madness on my party in the form of multiple status effects out of an otherworldly sense of whimsy.
Fig. A: Arilus cristatus, the North American wheel bug. A greyish-brown insect with long antennae and a long, sharp beak curved underneath its head. As an assassin bug, it looks scary as hell, and has a nasty (non-venomous) bite, but becomes much less intimidating when you learn (a) it can't transmit the nasty Chagas' disease that its South American cousins can, which always fascinated/terrified Young Me, and (b) it's a whopping inch and a half long at full size. Young Me was convinced that these guys were at least the size of Florida's huge lubber grasshoppers, because he was lazy and didn't actually read about how big they (didn't) get.
Splash screen of Matikanetannhauser swooping in on an ivy vine to save Taiki Shuttle from being swept away in a river. This was apparently an incidental affair for Machitan just having fun swinging on a vine, but she seems awfully practiced at the Tarzan arts to have randomly busted this out. Matikanetannhauser: "Machitan, swooping in!"
Zenno Rob Roy and Taiki Shuttle sit at the bottom of a picturesque forest cliff that they just fell down. (That's an ongoing hazard whenever these girls go on a field trip. Somebody at Cygames must be really into cliffs.) Taiki is excitedly showing Rob Roy the pictures she's taken of their mildly life-threatening adventures through a fantasy forest retreat. They both simultaneously recite a line from the book they just learned they both like, in subtitled romaji: Rob Roy & Taiki: "Tokubetsu ni shoutai shiyou. Juppondo de ii." "Just for you, ten pounds and you're in!"
Left: SNES cart: Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures Right: Super Famicom cart: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon S: Jougai Rantou!? Shuyaku Soudatsusen, released December 16, 1994 for the
In-battle screenshot. My 5 Survivalists have already struck gold on a Chop attempt -- by which I mean a gigantic Survivalist-eating plant, who's already killed one of my poor little chumps. Can their level 2 bow attacks with no protection other than the Tweed they were hired in outdamage this ferocious flora? Probably not, which is why I quicksaved before the chopping started.
Etrian Odyssey 2 screenshot of 5 survivalists, all with Portrait 5 for the Colon Three face. It's going to be a rip-roaring adventure of annihilating the first few floors while going to town on all the gathering spots, only to be unceremoniously undone when I accidentally roll the Owl That Sleeps Everyone on one of the gathering attempts. But life is nothing without risk.
Kyoshi throw part 1: Korra popped up by surprise rock pillar, created by Kyoshi on a whim.
Hawk on top of one of my neighbors' house in Apopka, FL
Screenshot of the Umamusume character gacha pull trailer for Inari One, who just came home. Despite already having one vertically challenged horse-girl contemporary of Oguri Cap with a funny accent and spunky attitude, apparently a random pink ticket decided I needed a new, different one. This one might be in with the mob, a little? The friendly neighborhood Edo mob, mind you.
The St. John's River outside Palatka, FL, on a rail bridge. Slightly cloudy with lots of cypress and aquatic plants visible. Sadly no gators yet, but you better believe I'm watching.
Rust red school bus parked near the Amtrak station in Richmond, VA. Soaked in the blood of lesser school districts.
Chicago skyline by Lake Michigan
Screenshot of Raiya's ending on the Touki Denshou cab. Being the hot-blooded Transfer Student, Raiya has learned nothing from her wacky adventures schmixing cyborgs and middle school girls with Magneto tri-jumps, and has returned to her true passion - homoerotic beef with her rival Reika. You love to see it (but you probably won't block it).
Vampire Savior T-shirt by 5_Stargold. Featuring Lilith and Jedah.
A goose, presumably Mom, and three goslings, presumably Mom Junior One thru Three, in the parking lot of a hotel in Schaumburg, IL. Mom is alert for threats (but then again geese love to throw wings on any pretense) while the kids idly kick up litter in the corner of the curb, looking for amusement and/or something tasty.
"Do you know beetles are abundant and ancient?" "Ancient" is a drastic omission of their evolutionary history, but the underlying sentiment holds: beetles rule.
"Do you know why some bees buzz?"
Shot of the walkway in the pollinators garden, a nice shady little lane flanked by flowering plants.
Promotional brochure for Gatorland in Kissimmee, FL, courtesy of the stand inside the station. It advertises in big orange block letters: "ORLANDO'S ONLY ZIPLINE" ...and then quickly qualifies, in much smaller type: "over gators and crocodiles" A smiling woman in a hard hat is pictured riding the zip line, pleased as punch about the large carnivorous reptiles below her.
Amtrak poster at Orlando Central Station. A full-color manga-style comic in which a redheaded lady in an even more red shirt reports an unattended backpack, an action which earns an approving thumbs-up from the uniformed Amtrak employee in the final panel. Anime is everywhere, even on rails, for those with big sparkly eyes to see.
Rio Hohenheim, a blonde, short-haired woman in a black catsuit with a gun. Rio is the main character of Lifeline for the PS2. Rio's game is (in)famous because its main gimmick was controlling Rio not directly via controller inputs, but using the seldom-used PS2 microphone headset to give voice commands to Rio, who would then interpret them to attack enemies, move around the scene, interact with objects, etc. Unfortunately for the players, the voice command recognition in Lifeline was extremely crude, and without choosing your words very carefully (and sometimes using a word you would NOT expect for the situation), moderating your accent (whatever it may be), and even minding the _pitch of your voice_, Rio would frequently misinterpret your commands and not do what you expected. There's good reason her unofficial catchphrases on the Internet are lines like "So I should run" and "Leave the room? OK".
Screenshot of Amtrak route map on Google Maps. Houston is at the far left with a blue marker on its station. Orlando is visible off to the right in the east, as you'd expect. The most direct commuter rail route between the two cities is anything but. Instead of just hugging the Gulf Coast through the Panhandle and cutting across Biloxi and New Orleans as you'd expect, you have to take a northbound line all the way to North Carolina(!), where you hook back westward at Raleigh and take a very gradual west-southwest route via Charlotte, Atlanta, and Birmingham before finally getting to New Orleans and hugging the Gulf to Houston like you'd expect. The route is so circuitous that I would seriously research whether or not a bus would be faster and cheaper for such a trip; it might honestly win in terms of raw speed AND price point if interstate traffic behaved itself (always a variable in play with the bus or even driving oneself).
The red warrior lady's basic jump cycle (17 frames) is now pretty much complete, as she performs a KOF hop in place. Her legs alternate height, her arms flap, her sword rotates in her hand, and her big fluffy hair bounces as she rises and falls. Ironically the hair proved more obnoxious to figure out than the sword movement, but the timing offset looks better in motion than I expected.
Current Champions Meeting result screen (I won, which is a rare event in this CM). One of my opponents has Cheerleader Nice Nature on their team, which is very impressive given she has been available to train for a whopping 3 hours now. And even a very brisk Trackblazer run to build her would be on the order of 45 minutes assuming no ragequits at inspiration/bad shop/decides to throw at Junior Make Debut. Nice Nature has some strong-ass soldiers going to war for Big Number Three.
Threw a pink ticket at the cheerleader banner for the hell of it and got...Narita Taishin, which is actually a pretty good outcome for a pink ticket, even though I already have her. More Star Pieces to pump her up so that she can make more people very upset on any track where Straightaway Spurt is strong.
Golshi Week has begun again, as evidenced by the Login Bonus screen of Gold Ship looking maniacal and raising her hands like some kind of magical incantation, with which to teleport 564 carats per day into my inbox. I don't care if she's overexposed (granted), I don't care if she stomped your oshi into paste in the last CM (still not sorry), I would take a bullet for this horse. Glory in the highest to Gold Ship!
New Umamusume trainees: Cheerleader Nice Nature and Cheerleader King Halo. As one would expect from the two horse girls, Natey looks extremely embarassed to have been roped into the rah-rah-go-team angle (complete with -_- face), which is not really in line with her typical brand. King, on the other hand, is taking this whole endeavor deadly seriously and throwing her whole soul into directing the power of King Commendation at somebody besides King Halo. Her mother won't be impressed regardless, of course, but the rest of us always are.
WIP pixel art warrior lady jump cycle. She briefly squats, thrusts off the ground with foreground leg, swivels her legs as her jump peaks, and then lands in a squat at the end. Her sword only appears for a few frames because I'm still figuring out how her arms will move, represented in blue as I mock up the motion. Her rear leg also goes blue and then disappears in the final frame, because I'm trying to figure out how to not make it look jank when mostly obscured by her near leg. Already an easy place for an amateur artist like myself to slip up, the use of only 1-2 pixels to suggest the leg is a force multiplier on how bad I could fuck up. But she has to jump, because aimlessly and unnecessarily jumping in action RPGs has always been a tiny joy of my life.
I filled out Herbert's Fighting Game Liker/Appreciator 2-axis chart as follows: The top-right quadrant (Liker/Appreciator) is dominated by the Sailor Moon S logo, taking up most of the quadrant by itself. On top are layered, from top to bottom, right to left: Capcom vs. SNK 2, Dark Awake, KOF 98, Ultra Street Fighter 4, Injustice: Gods Among Us, Granblue Fantasy Versus (very close to the vertical axis, about midway down the quadrant), Guilty Gear Xrd (far to the right, about midway down), Vampire Savior, and Street Fighter Alpha 2 (just above the horizontal axis) The bottom-right quadrant has 3 games in it: Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R (almost top right of the quadrang) Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (almost top left of the quadrant) Street Fighter Alpha 3 (bottom right of the quadrant, indicating that I like it, but complain about it incessantly, which is objectively true. I am extremely tsundere for Alpha 3) Top left (Hater/Appreciator): Street Fighter 6 sits in the bottom left of the quadrant, sitting on top of half of Guilty Gear: Strive, which straddles the Liker/Hater axis. This is the strongest condemnation I'm willing to give a game on this chart, because I'm not looking for games to drag. I don't like Strive, or even watching Strive that much, but I'm not gonna waste time and energy getting mad about it when I could instead just put that energy into throwing my 3rd Aqua Mirage in the past 5 seconds. There are no games in the bottom left, except for the bottom half of the Strive logo in the top right. Again, I'm not really looking for games to drag. SF6 and GGST are mostly just there as points of reference for the games I DO have strong, positive opinions about.
Animated pixel-art mockup of the scene from the quoted post, minus Al--I mean "Sal". The red sword lady is alone in the scene now, but the background is actually animated now. The water in the background sparkles on a crude 4-frame cycle each frame (accomplished by mirroring the sparkles from the static frame), and the grass now oscillates with some unseen breeze on a 2-frame cycle (every 4 frames). The little flowers look like they're dancing. Also, the warrior has remembered how to blink.
Run cycle for the warrior, sword drawn. For when walking slowly to farm aura just won't get the job done.
Steve from Aconcagua (complimentary)
Screenshot of a Daily Sale where I've just made today's standard purchases -- a Nice Nature star piece, a Super Creek star piece, an Alarm Clock (gristle for the Trackblazer mill), and a Pleasing Parfait (grease for the Team Trials/Legend Race/Racing Carnival grinder). Tazuna, caught mid-blink and looking unintentionally sassy, shamelessly glazes me for the same goddamn things I buy every day: "I knew you had a keen eye. That's an excellent pick! ♪" (Does she make the Parfaits herself?)
Umamusume unlock screen for Taiki Shuttle, the most American of all horse girls, as clearly indicated by her cowgirl dress, blonde hair, blue eyes, outgoing personality, thick American accent (localized as Kentuckian, reflecting her RL counterpart's birthplace), enormous breasts, and most American of all, her beloved gun, a revolver that I THINK isn't loaded? At least not with real bullets? I have NO idea how or why the URA and Tracen admin cleared that part of her costume, given Japanese firearm laws.
Screencap of my search result for why.bsky.team on my profile. Sadly, the two of us will never Discourse (oh woe is me), because I am blocked by them, probably by way of the same blanket anti-AI blocklist as everybody else. I just hope their (new) phone is doing OK. It has a hard life ahead of it.
Combat idle stance, with the warrior holding her sword up at shoulder height and bobbing her weight from left to right (which you don't actually want to do when in a REAL swordfight, but years of video games have taught our eyes to expect gratuitous idle motion to prove that the characters can do more than blink). Might end up making an alternate animation anyway just cause this stance might look a tad too "baseball".
Second walk cycle of the same character, without her sword. Her torso and head swivel as she strides. I kept them static during the with-sword walk cycle to make the sword less janky when she stops moving mid-cycle.
Walk cycle of the swordswoman from the first post. She strides casually with her sword at her side, ready to bust out into some Kunio-kun nonsense at a moment's notice.
Upscaled 480x270 game mockup with pseudo-NES graphics a la Shovel Knight, drawn by myself in a fit of boredom. It's a beautiful slightly cloudy morning on a featureless dirt road flanked by green grass and low-resolution flowers. A lone swordswoman in a horned helmet, who bears absolutely no resemblance to the female Warrior from Dragon Quest 3 has a staredown with an assailant, the only other character in the scene. Her adversary is a shirtless long-haired man with a curved sword and a powerful widow's peak, who bears absolutely no resemblance to storied stuntsman and legendary mook-lord Al Leong (as he appeared at the peak of his power in films such as Die Hard and Big Trouble in Little China). His visage is captured somewhat more faithfully in the 64x64 portrait at the top of the screen, next to a health bar that is worryingly low. Also featuring in the background: clouds that I drew myself, and the mountains from the ending of Mega Man 2, which I certainly did not draw myself. But I needed a quick dark element to mock up the far horizon, and there they were.
The grotesque front-on, pillow-shaded pixel-art visage of Junior from Chuck Rock II: Son of Chuck, courtesy of a rip on The Spriters Resource. He's meant to be an adorable prehistoric baby, but his proportions and weird shading make him look like the Nihilanth from Half-Life instead. Yes, I'm well aware I'm that this sprite is from the Game Gear port, not the Amiga version. However, I've seen the "true" Junior and his sprite is no different, save for a slightly different palette and expanded color depth. If anything, the high contrast of the Game Gear palette kinda improves him? Somewhat?
Sluesky screenshot of my notifications: none are shown, just a red popup reading "(!) Forbidden". They are tired of hearing about anime or the horse girls, and I'm not sure which one.
Top X=30 Anime: Urusei Yatsura (TV) (if I had a top 1 this would probably be it; "The Simpsons if it knew when to quit" is perhaps the highest praise I can bestow on ANY TV show, cartoon or otherwise) Revolutionary Girl Utena (TV) Adolescence of Utena Mobile Suit Gundam Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro Princess Mononoke Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer Neon Genesis Evangelion The End of Evangelion (one of my favorite films I've ever seen in theaters; everyone just left the theater stunned and silent, including myself) Space Runaway Ideon The Ideon: Be Invoked Big O Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still Sailor Moon (I tried to leave out long-running series like One Piece, Dragon Ball, etc. but I had to make space for Usagi and pals, they were key to teaching Young Me that liking "Girls' Media" is nothing to be afraid of. Still profoundly grateful for that early life lesson.) Samurai Flamenco (oh, the magical places this show goes) Laputa: Castle in the Sky Porco Rosso Spirited Away Tokyo Godfathers Lupin the 3rd, Part 2 Lupin the 3rd, Part 1 Trigun (TV) (original) Cowboy Bebop (TV) Samurai Champloo (TV) Superdimensional Fortress Macross (TV) Combat Mecha Xabungle (TV) Armored Trooper VOTOMS (TV) Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (cheating because it's based on my favorite book, as well as excellent in its own right) Full Metal Alchemist (2003) (yes, 2003. Not Brotherhood. I apologize for NOTHING.) Air Master (my favorite Problematic Fave, long live Shonen Bum Fights)
Mostly-black screen with an iris out to Seiun Sky looking cheeky as usual.
Host: "Now that we've announced this evening's "best couple," it's time to close out the night!"
Full-screen splash: Seiun Sky looks into Fuji Kiseki's eyes and toys with Fuji's fancy necklace. (Is that a rental? Family heirloom? Finemo handed it out as a party favor?) The courtyard sparkles with lamplight and the INTENSE lesbian radiation emitted by the Three Goddesses statue just behind them. Seiun Sky: "Your dress... looks beautiful on you."