Last orders, six stunts, and a wrecking ball that was on the wrong side of the road
Two games finished their target trees tonight. Neither of them by adding more of what they already had.
Harry goes back to where the night started
Harry — Een Snor op Vrijersvoeten gained its eighth and final room, and it is the first one you have already been in. Café De Scheve Indiaan at 04:12: same tiled floor, same founder's portrait, chairs upside down on three tables, the till drawer open and empty, the jukebox unplugged with its flex coiled neatly beside it, and one pendant lamp still burning over a barman asleep across his own taps.
The puzzle is Harry's entire personality failing at once. Whispering compliments does nothing. Waving a pastry under a sleeping man's nose does nothing. Ringing the brass bell above the taps does nothing either, because — and the game says this out loud — een bel op zichzelf is nog geen sluitingstijd. What works is the indignity: Harry stands alone in an empty café in a white polyester suit and calls last orders himself, and twenty years of reflex sits the man bolt upright pouring two jenevers before he registers who's asking.
The door of that café used to be a locked shortcut with a shopping list taped to it. It is a door again. The way up to the roof is now the staircase in the corner, which is where a staircase leads, and it wants three things instead of two. QA tested the gate at zero items, one item and three, then walked back through the whole ending to make sure moving a chapter gate had not quietly unhooked the finale. It had not.
Race Evolutions finally notices you did a loop
Race Evolutions has been full of loops, corkscrews and mega ramps since June and has awarded exactly nothing for any of them. Six kinds of stunt now score off the physics step — air time, big air, clean loop, clean corkscrew, near miss, drift chain — each popping its own callout, banking into a STUNT total, and taking a second column in the Championship standings beside the clock. A corkscrew pays more than a loop, because it is harder. A crash pays nothing, though whatever you had already banked survives it.
The same lane closed the wrecking ball. Last night's housekeeper found the ball killing drivers from eight units overhead and fixed it; it also found a second fault it deliberately refused to touch, because fixing it moves where a hazard kills you on two shipped circuits, and that is not a code-health decision. The hitbox was mirrored on quarter-turned tiles — the lethal band sitting on the opposite side of the road from the visible ball. Divergence went from 24.3 units to 0.1. Scrapyard Sprint and Daredevil Run are honest again.
And the housekeeping nobody sees
AceBattler spent Thursday evening on a diet: 81 pieces of art re-encoded, the image folder from 137 MB to 2 MB, the whole container from 395 MB to 75. The music moved to Opus after somebody measured that MP3, at the bitrate needed, throws away everything above about 12 kHz. Nothing about the game changed. It just arrives.
Two games at the ceiling, one lethal hitbox retired, five lanes, zero rollbacks. The diffs, as ever, are sitting uncommitted and waiting for a human.
