KoopaTV's November 2022 Review Newsletter

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Ew, we're in December.

I am not a big fan of the month of December, so before I have to fully commit to thinking about that, let's review November 2022. That's what this newsletter is dedicated to! Except the very last section of it. That one is looking forward.

November was great. Here's some evidence:

Top Five Recommended Experiences of November 2022

Here are my personal top five recommended KoopaTV experiences listed in chronological order, published in November 2022:

1. HARVESTELLA: From a Farm Sim Fan's Perspective — Witch Princess is finally back to penning articles and wrote about the HARVESTELLA demo from her perspective. She isn't on-board with it.
2. Team Grass-type in the Pokémon Partner Splatfest — Why KoopaTV was on Team Grass in the recent November Splatfest.
3. My Panda Cup Online Qualifiers 2022 Experience — Ludwig played in four Panda Cup Online Qualifiers and the regional qualifier finale. How well did he represent KoopaTV in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate?
4. Farm Sim Mechanics (and Gender) Degraded HARVESTELLA — Ludwig joined in to write KoopaTV's third article with impressions from the HARVESTELLA demo. He was quite critical of its mechanics.
5. Disgraced Game Developer Yuji Naka Arrested for Suspicions of Insider Trading — Yuji Naka is not only a bad guy, but also dumb, and got arrested for insider trading. Ludwig makes fun of him.

Well... it might be unpopular to talk about the Panda Cup at the moment given recent controversy, but it was still a really good article. Pretty much every other article on KoopaTV is also worth experiencing, even if it didn't make this list! Tough list, too.

Best Three Comments and One Worst Comment of November 2022

Checking the latest KoopaTV comments is one of the best parts of every day! While I was physically not available for a brief portion of November (though with the power of scheduling and not writing articles the minute before the day is over, articles continued to be published), y'all kept making comments. It was very nice to come back and see those! Lheticus Videre in particular thought that I was ill due to not being responsive. Well, I wasn't ill then. ...I am ill now, however. (With what? I dunno. But my nearby trash bag is flooded with used tissues.) I'm still writing this newsletter, though. Anyway, let's celebrate some quality commentary:

1. “You know, I can't help but notice that Ludwig waited to post this until Halloween day at the earliest, by which time it was very nearly certain to be utterly too late to act upon this message.” — Lheticus Videre
2. “"And she's right that trained dogs still have an inner feral soul to them that just wants to lunge and chomp on things."
   
   Got a book by Rabbi Dr. Natan Slifkin called The Torah Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom Volume One: Chayot/Wild Animals that says on page 41:
   
   "The Mishna itself records a dispute regarding whether certain animals - the dog and the 'wild ox' (probably referring to the aurochs) are classified as wild or domesticated."
   
   On page 42:
   
   "Dogs are the descendants of wolves. But is the dog a truly domesticated animal, or is it merely a tractable wild animal? the answer to these questions are unclear, and hence form a dispute in the Mishna."
   
   I see you have the answer to their dispute.” — ShinyGirafarig
3. “As someone who HAS begun playing the full game, in fact I just finished Chapter 3 not too long ago...yeah I can see where the demo can give lots of people the wrong impression. One thing I feel it's important to note that while each individual day passes quickly, there does not appear to be any kind of overall time limit, like in Stardew Valley where you got an ending after 2 years. You can have setbacks and lose time, but there aren't really consequences for doing so beyond the short-term.
   
   Also, where you compared the combat to a turn-based RPG, I'd compare the farming aspect to real-time strategy. Time management, learning how to optimize as you go along, is important and that is once again a legitimate reason to be turned off of the game. You're encouraged to think, okay, if I plant these crops and establish these machines, I can have these resources later.
   
   One thing the demo stopped cold before really being able to get into at all is the importance of crops that can be harvested repeatedly. They're VITAL for money when most of what you're planting takes more than 2 days to harvest. But with repeatable crops, most of them, once fully grown, can be harvested every 1-2 days even if it takes much longer than that for them to get to the point where they're producing at all. It's unfortunate that the "cucumble" seems to be an exception to this rule, since it was one of the only crops accessible in the demo that could have, you know, DEMOnstrated this.
   
   TLDR: There's a TON more to this game than the demo shows and it's a real shame.” — Lheticus Videre

First of all, it's part of KoopaTV's nature of having a staff predominantly composed of Koopas that we're not the first to make a story. With some notable exceptions, Koopas aren't known for our...speed. This helps accuracy and steadiness. ...But there is also the fact that having a Halloween article on Halloween makes sense. We have our election article on Election Day, for example. (And there's a run-off election happening next week, so anticipate another election article on run-off Election Day.) Would it be more helpful to have advocacy articles published before you're supposed to do something and not while? ...Probably. But that's something you can give us feedback on.

Putting ShinyGirafarig's comment here means we have two newsletters in a row where I feature her writing about the nature of dogs, a class of animals that I really do not like. And she's right—I believe I do have the answers to the canine core character conundrum! Just this week, there was a story about a dog (allegedly) jumping onto the gun of a Turkish man, Ozgur Gevrekoglu, and the dog shot his “owner”, killing him instantly.

Clearly, we need common-sense canine control. And by “common-sense”, I really mean “ban dogs from civil society.”

As for HARVESTELLA, Lheticus Videre was the writer of the first HARVESTELLA demo article on KoopaTV. He was the only one of the three HARVESTELLA article authors who really liked it, and it seems like he's bought it! While some people out there say that HARVESTELLA as a full game is more of the same as the demo but bigger (the “some people” meant that in a good way because they liked the demo), Lheticus insists that it's easy to get the wrong impression from the demo and that the demo doesn't reflect the pacing of the real game. Basically, he's making the case that the demo short-changed HARVESTELLA and gave people (like the staff) an undeserved bad impression. ...I'm still going to trust my own experience with what SQUARE ENIX decided was a good idea to market the game with, though. But I appreciate Mr. Videre's attempt!

As for the month's worst comment, there was some competition for it that might've won in other months, but this one comment lost out and is the worst one:

1. “Do you squirt or cream?” — Anonymous

I don't know what this comment means, but it has nothing to do with that article and it doesn't give me a good vibe.

KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program Round 47 Mid-Round Leaderboard

Here is everyone with a point value on the KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program Round 47:

1. Captain Stitch — 56 points
2. Lheticus Videre — 52 points
3. ShinyGirafarig — 11 points
4. banana — 3 points

Props to Captain Stitch for getting 6/6 on a KoopaTV Quiz for the first time in his life. They're designed so it really shouldn't be onerous to get perfect scores every time, but... there you go.

By the way, Round 47 is absolutely loaded with goodies. Like... you definitely want to be on the board here. The top THREE people win cash-equivalent prizes of double-digit value, and even if you aren't in the top three, you STILL have a chance to win something via a raffle. That chance goes up the more points you have, however, so please be sure to read up on how the KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program works and try to win it. For your own benefit, really.

Corrections Corner; November 2022

Despite reader vows to the contrary, no one's pointed out any goof-ups or mistakes on KoopaTV's part during November 2022. We're happy to be your high-quality source of infotainment.

KoopaTV Line-Height Buffed

I received feedback a few hours before this newsletter came out that KoopaTV, while “super cool yes Fr”, the site is “kinda hard to read” and they want greater vertical line spacing in-between the lines. They're used to reading school essays where the lines are double-spaced. 2x spacing is absolutely abnormal for websites (and I'd say for essays as well—if you're wondering, in school, I often changed my line-spacing in order to not go over an assignment's maximum page count). KoopaTV's line-height property has been 1.4x, but I changed it to 1.5x because I looked around other websites and what they do. Wikipedia uses 1.6x, for example. The Wall Street Journal website uses 1.588x, while the New York Times website uses 1.875x. GameSpot's articles use 1.5x, and Twitter uses 1.333x. KoopaTV friend Samantha Lienhard's site uses 1.6x.

I figured I'd buff KoopaTV's line-height to go from 1.4x→1.5x and see what happens. This makes pages slightly longer to scroll through, but I'm hoping it should improve readability. Here's a comparison:

I understand that this is very... horizontal, so click on the image to see it at full size and look closely at the difference.

Ludwig occasionally gets emails about new people who subscribe to KoopaTV's actual email subscription feature, which makes the newsletter feels more like a newsletter. If you aren't subscribed...why not...? Do that! And share KoopaTV to your pals, too.


Click here for the October 2022 newsletter (which was last month's, and the one that introduced Round 47 of the KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program).
How did Round 47 end? Check out the December 2022 newsletter here!
Last year's November 2021 newsletter also acknowledged Ludwig's dislike of December.