Newsbytes archive for June 2021

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Contributors this month include 2cross2affliction, dronon, earthfurst, GreenReaper, and Sonious.

Digging up Positivity - Furry charity and good news - June 2021

Your rating: None Average: 4.5 (6 votes)

Welcome to the June edition of Digging Up Positivity! This month we cover some animation, of course charities, and our featurette is a Paco Panda from Mexico. This episode you will have a chance to win a lovely hard cover comic book by him.

How? I will explain near the end of the video together with the lucky winner the Fandom bluRay of the last episode.

2020 Leo Awards winners announced

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The 2020 Leo Awards winners have been announced by Furry Book Review! (Their URL recently changed from furrybookreview.wixsite.com/blog to leoliteraryawards.wixsite.com/blog . This link, and many of the ones below, contain mature content.)

These literary awards are determined by a group of judges who can vote for multiple titles in each category, so it's possible for several works in each category to win.

The winner(s) and nominees are...

Keep on rockin' in the furry world: 'Rock Dog 2: Rock around the Park'

Your rating: None Average: 3.5 (14 votes)

rockdog2.jpg2017’s Rock Dog probably will never make lists of acknowledged “cult movies” published by the more “mainstream” movie press, but you could argue that just helps its cult movie street cred. Once a movie has become known enough to be catalogued and categorized, is it still really a cult object? Rock Dog, I predict, will continue to be largely forgotten in the annals of cinema, or even animation. Only the true, blue fans will remember.

Of course, those true, blue fans are furries. Rock Dog is a cult movie within the furry fandom. Put it another way, yeah, furries like Zootopia. On one hand, it makes sense furries would like it, but on the other hand it’s a beloved movie that was hailed as a classic by plenty of non-furries from it’s release. You can like Zootopia without joining the furry fandom pretty easily, but if you even saw Rock Dog and decided you liked it, you might want to check this furry thing out.

Which is not to say if you didn’t like the original, you have to turn in your conbadge. First of all, that would be gatekeeping, and that’s wrong. But second of all, Rock Dog is by no means a perfect movie. I loved it, but the sequel, Rock Dog 2: Rock around the Park, going to the 2020s equivalent of straight to video (it technically went to various streaming platforms first) makes sense.

Five Nights at Freddy and Systems of Systemic Fear

Your rating: None Average: 3.2 (12 votes)

5Nights.jpgAs it turns out, Flayrah never reviewed Five Nights at Freddy’s when it was released to much fanfare in 2014. But to be fair it never won an Ursa Major, getting beat by a Pokemon remaster in 2014 and Undertale in 2015. What a bullet the furries dodged on that one, huh?

You see, in recent days, the independent creator of the franchise, Steven Cawthon, had his sizable political contributions to members of the Trumpian Brigade(™) picked up by Social Media. The candidates in said brigade typically speak about the subversion of American Values and see people who are outside those “Values” as an enemy. They use this fear to get people to donate money to them.

To highlight this, we see Cawthon’s statement in response to this revelation. "I felt [Trump] was the best man to fuel a strong economy and stand up to America's enemies abroad, of which there are many" he goes onto indicate that he prioritizes the need for this foreign defense over the issues of American citizens' treatment by their own government with, "even if there were candidates who had better things to say to the LGBT community directly, and bigger promises to make, I believed that their stances on other issues would have ended up doing much greater harm to those communities than good"

Basically he is noting that we should fear foreign governments more than we should our domestic one. Which is usually a position that people who are generally left alone by their own government can comfortably have.

Interestingly it is this quote that made me think of the story of Five Nights at Freddy’s in a whole new way. So let’s go down this Bonny hole— metaphorically, you freakin’ furrys!

Game review: 'Tails Noir', formerly 'Backbone' (2021)

Your rating: None Average: 3.6 (8 votes)

Tails Noir (formerly named Backbone; trailer) is a 2D adventure game by EggNut, released on Steam on June 8, 2021, after a five-year development period. I contributed to their Kickstarter.

The style is heavily influenced by noir detective stories, with a dash of science-fiction. Set in a dystopian Vancouver, British Columbia, all the characters are anthropomorphic mammals. You play as Howard Lotor, a raccoon private investigator, trying to find evidence of an affair. To say things do not go as planned would be a vast understatement.

The game is surprisingly short, you can finish it in around four to five hours. After playing it, it felt like it had so much potential, but didn't deliver as much as it could have.

Piti Yindee's 'Fossils' lets the animation do the talking

Your rating: None Average: 3.9 (10 votes)

One may call silent films fossils, but this animation is about digging up fossils, so it works out. (Deja vu, what is that?)

In this short by Piti Yindee, released today, we see a cat and dog digging up bones. Completely silent except for music, it lets animation tell the story of their contrasting means to this end.

Newsbytes archive for May 2021

Your rating: None Average: 2.3 (3 votes)

Contributors this month include 2cross2affliction, dronon, earthfurst, GreenReaper and Rakuen Growlithe.

Claws of Furry - A Scratchy Brawler Game

Your rating: None Average: 2.3 (3 votes)

Claws of Furry Claws of Furry is a game that gives you the ability to play with multiple friends as you scratch your way through four worlds with varying baddies, trying to save your master, who's been kidnapped by what appears to be Lady and the Tramp's Trusty in a mech suit.

As cool as this sounds, this game is not too polished and I would only recommend it for those that adore the brawler genre so much that they have to play every one of them. It may also be good for fans of the old-school Flash game feel. However, in general there are better brawlers out there, with more punch for your buck.

Digging up Positivity - Furry charity and good news - May 2021

Your rating: None Average: 4 (5 votes)

Ah, welcome to the May edition of digging up positivity. Slowly the world is recovering. All over the world we see events starting up again and I look forward to the moment I can travel again and see my friends abroad.

This episode we have several events, both virtual and ‘classic’, raising money for charity, Furry awards, a lot of meerkats and our special featurette is Pawsry, the driving force behind Global Furry Television, a staple from the Asian furry fandom.

But first, lets see what we have done for charity this month!

Zniw Adventure - Point and Click to Walk the Dinosaur

Your rating: None Average: 3.9 (7 votes)

Zniw Adventure.jpgThe adventure genre can sometimes seem a bit prehistoric, but that works just fine when your adventure game is about dinosaurs.

Zniw Adventure, developed by an independent two-person Polish team, hits on all the right nostalgic marks as it tells the story of a yellow dino by the name of Zniw (pronounced Zniff), and her journey to get home in time for her mother’s birthday.

But will this game give the genre new life like a mosquito from Jurassic Park? Or will the game make you wish games like this would go extinct? It will more likely be the former if you're a fan of a good point and click.

"At least it looks good" - reviews decry furry action RPG Biomutant's frustrations

Your rating: None Average: 4 (3 votes)

'Biomutant' mechanical grasshopper Biomutant reviews are out! It's… mediocre. Not great, not terrible:
Eurogamer - GamesRadar - PC Gamer - Game Informer - Rock Paper Shotgun

Perhaps this isn't all that surprising for a relatively new and small development team. But it's a bit of a disappointment after hype sparked by a trailer that dropped in 2017.

Plot-wise, it seems exposition, rather than agency, rules the day. World Tree RPG this is not. Still, it may be your bag if you thought Ratchet & Clank lacked in species — or 'Wung-fu'.

What the hell is 'Helluva Boss'?

Your rating: None Average: 4.1 (17 votes)

Helluva BossKeeping up with Flayrah's decades-long tradition of not reviewing (or even covering) animated shows until well after it's necessary, let's discuss Helluva Boss, a show about the misadventures of four demons from Hell who work as assassins.

I'd say most of Flayrah's audience is well aware of Helluva Boss. It would have won the 2020 Ursa Major Award for Best Dramatic Series, but then Beastars had to be translated into English, so never mind. Flayrah has a piece on Beastars currently planned for 2023. Furthermore, Helluva Boss is free on YouTube, and unlike My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, that's actually on purpose.

Granted there's only one character who is truly furry, and that's Loona the Hellhound. To be fair, she is really furry. On e621, "loona_(vivzmind)" results in over 2000 hits, so that's not too bad. To be less fair, she has the smallest role of the four main characters, to the point where her entire appearance in the second episode consists of her screaming obscenities offscreen. And in the episode that features her for any extended period of time, she's magically disguised as a human for the majority of it.

That being said, I'm still going to recommend furries at least try the series, because it features interesting non-human (if not exactly furry) character design. It has pretty good animation for a free YouTube series, and although it's got a dark, cynical sense of humor, it balances that with a strong moral center. That last one may come as a surprise, seeing as how the premise of the show is that the characters' job is to kill people.

Cat Quest - The Action RPG Purrfectly Distilled

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Cat Quest.jpgDo feline puns make you cat-atonic or drive you to hiss-teria? Then this game is not for you and you can move on. However if you can’t get enough of the purrfect punny feline punchlines, and like going on a dungeon crawling adventure with action RPG mechanics then carry on.

Cat Quest is a very streamlined and slick action RPG with a catty protagonist. Or at least their spirit companion is, as for the hero themselves they are traditionally silent. However, the other Non-Playable Cats (hereby refurred to as NPCs) are loaded with charm, purrsonality, and the aforementioned cat puns.

Game review: 'Monster Hunter Rise' for the Nintendo Switch

Your rating: None Average: 3.2 (6 votes)

Monster Hunter Rise Well, here's one for dronon's list.

Capcom's Monster Hunter franchise has been around since 2004, and the title is self-explanatory. There are monsters. The player hunts them. These monsters aren't particularly anthropomorphic, but feature nice creature design, which furs appreciate, if the popularity of franchises like Pokémon and How to Train Your Dragon are anything to judge by.

And in Monster Hunter Rise, released in March for the Nintendo Switch, there are anthropomorphic animals in the form of the player's companions and helpers on the hunt, Palicoes and Palamutes. The former are cats who perform a variety of roles; while the latter are dogs, not anthro in form but probably sentient - though they are, well, mute. Together, they fight monsters!

From the Yerf Archive