🚨New Episode🚨

My interview with the wonderful Chester Rushing is now online.

We discuss #StrangerThings, #CookieRunKingdom, #Superman, & a bunch of other stuff in this episode.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5hWwFDUGMQ

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2165231/episodes/18326022

Finish the final ancient! This was fun. After I finish some art I own. I get started with Beasts. Do a poll for my patreon and kofi.
#cookierunkingdom #crk #crossover #spyro #au #dragon #digitalpainting #digitalart #Fanart #myart #goldenchessecookie

a couple page dolls of Fig Cookie i made for Cookiesmoosh, my Cookie Run rarepair fanfiction archive (currently under construction)! i actually really like how these came out, but completely forgot to post them!

#cookierun #cookierunkingdom #crk #figcookie

Working on my CRK x Spyro au and here's first sketch of Golden Cheese cookie. Was suppose to post this yesturday for wip Friday but was so tired that I pass out.

#cookierunkingdom #crk #crossover #spyro #au #digitalart #sketch #fanart #myart #wip

Cookie Run: Husky Wolf Cookie’s reaction to Chess Choco Cookie in Cookie Run Kingdom.
#cookierun #cookierunovenbreak #cookierunkingdom #cookiesona #reaction #anxious

Finish the Hollyberry dragon! Have a bit of fun with design
#cookierunkingdom #crk #spyro #au #crossover #digitalpainting #fanart #myart #dragon

Forgot to post yesterday because the power went out but here wip of Hollyberry dragon I'm working on.
#hollyberry #cookierunkingdom #crk #spyro #au #crossover #digitalart #fanart #wip

Collab two of my hyperfixation that being Spyro and Cookie Run Kingdom, into this. I draw Pure Vanilla as a dragon. Maybe I will make a story about it or not.
#cookierunkingdom #crk #spyro #au #crossover #dragon #digitalpainting #digitart #fanart #myart #purevanillacookie

Wip friday! I'm making Pure Vanilla cookie as dragon. Why? BECAUSE
#cookierunkingdom #crk #purevanilla #dragon #spyroau #digitalart #fanart #myart #wip #sketch

💖Eternal Sugar Cookie💖
#cookierunkingdom #digitalart #fanart #kawaii

Eternal Sugar Cookie Sketch wip
#DigitalArt #sketch #wip #cookierunkingdom

Sorry for the wait. Real life problems hit me like a trunk. So I'm just picking up prompts I like. As soon as I saw this one, I knew I had to do Shadowmilk and Truthless Recluse. Went overboard a bit for a simple doodle.
#Goretober #cookierunkingdom #crk #digitalart #fanart #doodle #myart #blood

...And that's not my only #Halloween #costume this year! As usual, @kumapanda has continued her annual trend of redesigning our OCs in Halloween costumes - and this year, the theme is: Cookie Run! So, please welcome: Shadow Milk Jinji!

You can view more costumes on Panda's DeviantArt Profile. The Halloween Costume Closet on my website will be updated with the full set of costumes shortly after Halloween.

#Halloweenart #costumes #cookierun #cookierunkingdom #cookierunoc

day one. I repeat: day one.

#CookieRunKingdom #CookieRun

Cookie for MayaTheSneasel on ArtFight
(I'm almost done posting atacks xd only three more to go!)
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#cookierun #oc #fancharacter #artfight #chibi #oc #fullbody #hat #cookie #cookierunkingdom #candy #cookierunovenbreak #commissionopen #crob #original_character #cookierunoc #commissionart #originalcharacter

Midnight Gaming: Hooked on Gacha-phonics Part 1 - June 6th 2025

[Future EJ here, this is part 1 of a two parter I did covering gacha games, part 2 will be posted later]
Welcome back to another round of Midnight Gaming where the general vibe is downright awful this week. It feels like a lead brick sitting in the pit of your stomach, weighing you down as much as it poisons you. So what better way to deal with the worlds vibes right now than to get hooked on some mobile phone gacha games? In this special two parter episode of Midnight Gaming, i'm gonna talk about 4 gacha games starting with last weeks 2 and then another 2 in the 2nd part. So without further ado:

From 5/25/25 to 6/1/25, I played 2 games past midnight with the first one being…
![media-1]

Cookie Run Kingdom, which is a spinoff of an endless runner mobile game and has gained a bit of an internet presence over the last 2 - 4 years.

Full disclosure, im not gonna cover Raid: Shadow Legends or AFK Journey or any game that i've seen pop up in ads or in youtuber ad rolls. A lot of those games are the exactly what you expect from mobile phone games, even those with gacha elements in them. Originally I had some different games picked out but there were a few issues. One of them was that my phone is a bit old and thus some games are a bit iffy to run on it. Two is that I tried to look for gacha games on steam that I could run on my steam deck but after Wizardry variants Daphne had me follow a guide that involves going into a desktop mode just to fix damn bug that was keeping from playing past the tutorial, I just decided to hell with it and change my picks.

Now I have played some mobile games before, I have Apocalypse Tower and Necromerger, I have Clicker Heroes on here and of course as mentioned in the past I have pokemon sleep. So I have played some mobile stuff before, I know the score with these types of games and what to expect. So its rather….. surprising to find that Cookie Run Kingdom doesnt quite play as I expected.

Now before we get into that lets just cover the gameplay first. CRK is a hybrid of a city management game where you build resources and buildings while expanding your kingdom, and an rpg battle game where your party runs through a level fighting any enemies they encounter with skills they can activate along the way. Thats pretty much the gameplay so to speak, as for the story its about lil cookie people with an intro where some royal cookie folk fight an evil cookie and thats sets up the story of the game, where years after the battle your starting your own kingdom and getting involved with the world politics.

Now with most games of this sort, I expected to be gatekept with stamina limits and lots of grinding to stretch the content out and keep me from binging all of it. All this, plus the whole gacha mechanic where your expected to gamble for jpegs with slightly better stats. So when I say that Cookie Run Kingdom manages to surprise me and be a fair, if not outright enjoyable game should be saying something.

Now why is this? Well for a couple of reasons with one being…

This game is surprisingly generous with its awards when you start out. So much so that a third of your gameplay will be just claiming all the rewards you get for doing anything. You have a battle pass related to building up your kingdom as well one to the current episode in this case the latest chapter in thr beast-yeast arc but you also have several other battle passes for other different things you can do such as going through the story mode, upgrading your cookies, creating resources from your buildings and so on and so forth. At the moment I have 20 million gold, several high rarity cookies and my stamina far exceeds the max cap, I can essentially binge most if not the entire story mode of this game without stopping. You basically end up getting to experience the benefits of being a whale with so much resources and little obstacles to stop you without having spent a single penny on the games store. Now maybe this is just the devs playing the long game strat and letting you get comfortable and invested into their game before pulling the rug and making it much harder to quit the game, but an inquiry on bluesky did seem to suggest that the devs are a bit benign since the game does offer a variety of ways to gain resources, currencies and gacha pulls for free, even in the late game.

Now playing the game doesnt take much doing since other than collecting your kingdoms resources and setting up production and construction, the game part of clearing out levels throughout the world exploration mode and following the story doesnt take much to do, so much so that you can set the game to auto where skills go off on their own and since theres also a speed option that lets you increase the speed to x2.5, you can basically let the game play itself as you watch youtube on a different device, your team of hydrogen bomb cookies clearing out levels filled with coughing babies. Honestly the game is filled with a lot of nice lil quality of life features in the management of your kingdom, which does help a bit since you'll have a lot to do.

See when you level up your castle, you'll unlock some more game modes and activities to occupy your time. You can get a pvp mode in the arena, a boss rush mode where you set a team to gradually take down a boss within a time limit, you have 2 variations of cake tower to climb with your cookie team, you have your guilds you can host/join with guild battles and cookie alliance, you have a tropical soda islands activity where it says you "liberate" the isles to gain resources from but honestly it feels more like your colonising them like a sort of cookie british empire. You can send cookies out on balloon expeditions or venture into the mines, theres special episodes with independant storylines you can progress through. Theres even a club penguin style town square hub where you talk with other online players as your custom oc cookie, where you can hop onto channel 666 and listen to the latest croc cult sermon in the town square.

Honestly though, being generous with your rewards and having a variety of modes to choose isnt going to be enough to garner interest, this is a gacha game after all, you gotta have some real interesting jpegs for anyone to justify wanting them and racking up a credit card bill over. From my general outsider perspective it seems like quite a few gacha games either have rosters full of anime people or they have fantasy heroes or some form of glup shittos to tempt you into gambling….. or its just straight up porn (not complaining, just pointing it out)

Cookie run kingdom however does manage to do a pretty incredible job with the designs of several cookie characters. You have your basic looking yet serviceable characters in the commons, then it pushes up to decent for the rares and then from epic to downright legendary/ancient/beast rarities you get some truly fantastic characters, not just in their design but also their characterisation and writing as well their abilties. Fantastic set of blorbos, worth developing a crippling addiction over. Now you might be asking if I have a particular favourite and I have seen a few people gush over some choice favourites, I have seen Shadow Milk Cookie and I will say that if hes your favourite, then I hope one day you finally get over your ex, instead of replacing them with others like him. Its been 15 years, the onceler aint coming back. Tumblr sexyman aside, there is one cookie that I genuinely like and its motherfucking Prune Juice Cookie.
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This boy, this boy right here. I am enchanted with him. Student of a wizard academy but cant do magic because of his physical disability, maxes out his alchemy to the point of being a damn savant, and gives his potions the most brainrot of names. You know how in morrowind you make and drink stronger and stronger potions of fortify intelligence until you have a few that raises your intelligence by crazy amounts, which you can then drink to make the most busted ass potions that break the game? This feminine man brews those types of potions in thigh-highs and a skirt, gives them names like "skibidi toilet ultramax" and are effective as hell. Love him, A+ character.

So yeah, Cookie Run Kingdom? Definite Recommend for a mobile game, blows my assumptions about what a gacha game waa going to be like and leaves me a pleasant experience. Definitely a permanent stay on my phone. The Kingdom of Crĕmĕpie will live on, with our motto being "Never Pull Out! Never Surrender!".

NEWS ROUNDUP!!!!

Fallout wiki and Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages are merging cause screw fandom.org - If you're an enjoyer of bethesda games, then the newer fallout and elder scrolls games are definatly in your wheelhouse of games you play on the odd occasion. You know when the mood feels right. So you'd most likely be familiar with the fallout wiki and/or Unofficial Elders Scrolls Pages whenever you wanted to look at how a perk functions or on some lore related to a character. Well the site owners of those two wikis have decided to merge together for one reason:

Because fuck Fandom, specifically the Fandom wikis that are taking over search results with thier ad-filled, misinformed trash. More details in the link below:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallout/indie-fallout-wiki-joins-forces-with-the-unofficial-elder-scrolls-pages-ensuring-a-bright-future-for-looking-up-rpg-lore-uninterrupted-by-half-page-video-ads/

Japanese government releases a free minecraft map that showcases their flood control system - Minecraft has definitely had a lot of maps in the past that are made either to recreate historical eras for educational purposes, to act as cross promotion for other brands or even as a form of political activism with that museum showcasing all the censored works and memorials for journalists killed by corrupt governments.

Well now Japans government has recently released a free map for minecraft that acts as a showcase for their Flood Control System, showing how it functions and how it can help manage and mitigate excess water. It is neat to see minecraft being used this way and if your curious, you can go give it a look yourself. I found this bit of news from a post on pillowfort from user Michael_Moceri, I feel its only right that if I find some news from a social media post I wanted to showcase in the roundup that I atleast credit the user I got it from so there you go. And if you want to know more about this map, link is right here:

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/japans-government-just-dropped-a-huge-free-minecraft-map-and-its-cooler-than-you-think/

NEWS ROUNDUP OVER!!!

So yeah, pretty good start huh? We ended up with a welcome surprise to begin with, so you have to wonder what the next gacha is gonna be like….. well.

Its a hard act to follow and I have tried to avoid making comparisons to crk and my feelings for it, wanting to atleast review it on its own terms. But in fairness…. where crk manages to subvert my expectations, this next one more or less met those expectations exactly…. but it still has a vibe and style that makes it somewhat special y'know? Like at first glance it looks like every other gacha game on the market but peel back the initial layer and theres something of interest in here?

Anyways, our second game is Reverse 1999.
![media-3]

So Reverse 1999 is a sort of strategy gacha game where around the time of the y2k bug, the universe saw what the next 25 years were gonna be like and decided to roll that shit back.

Its set in a world where mundane humans and magical arcanists exist with a lot of bigotry from the former towards the latter and now theres a storm thats rolling time backwards to different eras, with 2 factions who are able to weather the effects of the time storm, one being a sinister arcanist-supremacist force and the other called the foundation which is a group of arcanists trying to fix the time storm and set everything back as it was, who you work for as the one person whos actually immune to the time storm.

Gameplay in Reverse 1999 is essentially a mix of visual novel scenes where characters talk, moving the plot forward and the combat which is turn-based and has you launching attacks through cards. Each character in R1999 has 2 cards that can either attack a single target or multiple, apply status effects or debuffs, heal or buff your allies and so on. Every character also has an ultimate they can use if they have full "moxie", which they gain when they cast spells or when you merge cards. Merging cards is done whenever 2 of the same cards with the same level are next to each either and your incentivised to do it either by picking a card in between two cards so they move closer together or by moving one of your cards next to another which itself uses one of your limited actions, which is dependent on how many of your characters are on the field up to a max of 4. You do that until you complete the objective which is usually just defeat all enemies with some exceptions along the way.

I don't have a problem with the combat in this game, I think its perfectly serviceable and a good bit of fun with trying to plan your moves so you can tatically take out enemies and control the battlefield while keeping your team alive, usually trying to merge cards so you can unleash stronger attacks and rack up moxie so your characters can have their ultimates ready. Theres also the whole elemental system in play with elements being stronger/weaker against other elements so you need to bring characters whos attacks are able to do more damage towards the enemies you face. Also theres skills you yourself can do with a limited currency you gain during a battle, of which are different depending on what musical chord you equip, the first you can acquire during the games story lets you spawn a unique card that'll level up one of your cards without using one of your moves. Just be careful when you pick out cards because while you usally can undo your selections, once you fill out those moves the game will then end your turn right there with all the moves playing out before the enemy has their turn. There isnt really a way to confirm to your selection before ending your turn which means if you end up making a mistake it'll just play out with what was placed so you can end up wasting your cards. Kinda sucks but not a deal breaker, just be careful not to use up all your moves before your certain of what you want to do.
![media-4]

So yeah the combat is fine, the story has me staring at the screen trying to comprehend what the hell is going on, is there a major downside to this game? Well… I dont feel too interested in this game to be honest. You have several pretty anime characters, you have an overarching story to try and explain what the point of this game is. You have a limited stamina system, monetization and the gacha system where you turn a spinning wheel in a foggy lake. Going through the chapters within the story is usually conversations broken up by occasional combat, with said chapters gated behind needing to clear out trails on the map that are a mix of combat, tutorial explaing a certain mechanic, a trial which is just combat but with certain objectives to complete or just lore stuff. There is a side activity where you build your own little island to recieve resources but thats it unless you wanna argue that tapping on your characters so that they deliver a line counts as an activity…. it does raise your bond with them though I dont know what that achieves.

I'll be honest, im not interested in Reverse 1999 but thats no fault on the games quality. Part of it may have to do with being so charmed by crk that it makes R1999 a tough sell, part if might be because a turn-based strategy with anime characters just doesnt hold my interest. Now thats just me, YOU might just find this game to be worth playing because I can definitely recommend trying it, I mean its free theres no real harm in trying. The games aesthetics is certainly the one thing that helps give this game some unique identity as a sort of arcane art deco vibes and the characters you can get do look quite nice with some choice weirdo picks too. I did a x10 as my first summon and among the characters I got was a ufo abducting a small cow called alIEnt t who can taunt to redirect enemy aggro to themselves…a ufo you can pull from reverse 1999 gacha…I got a cancer patient named Cristallo who one of their attacks inflicts Radiotherapy on the enemy… yes thats real.

… I got a eastern european poet, a vapourwave statue man in a coat and fedora, a doctor with a raygun, a waitress in a scanty outfit carrying mugs of beer. A later summon got me a talking magical toy horse…a magical talking toy horse you can pull from the reverse 1999 gacha
If any of that intrigues you, if anything about it at all sounds like it might be worth your time then by all means give it a try. Its not going to be staying on my phone but thats down to my personal taste, you might end up liking this game a lot more than I was interested in it and if so, more power to you.

So thats part 1 done, i'm gonna try 2 more games in the following week and give you all my thoughts on them the week after. Thank you all for reading this edition of Midnight Gaming. I'll talk to you all in part 2.

https://cookierunkingdom.fandom.com/wiki/Silent_Salt_Cookie What in Tarnation. 🥹 #crk #cookierunkingdom