I’ve taken a small break from the sf6 grind. Need to reset myself a bit both to rediscover my drive and also unlearn some bad habits.

-I beat silent Hill remake. I liked it although I’m not quite sure what to make of the whole thing overall. Mainly I do think the whole thing is like 8 hours two long and I would like an abbreviation to match what I hear the original was like. I got the “bad” ending but tbh it seemed like a satisfactory end for Sunderland.

-did the Valhalla dlc for god of war now that its on PC. Good stuff. Shades of Hades. That conclusion and monologue was legit.

-my son and I have been playing little nightmares 2 together. We did part one for Halloween and now we’re knew deep in the sequel.

-i feel since silent Hill and outer wilds echoes of the she I can actually kinda do horror finally.

Next on my playlist is probably last of us on PC…but I still need to play disco Elysium.

As much as I fucking love Deus Ex…I think maybe we don’t want Spector on the lathe again.

Still lives rent free in my head

Cowards disable your trigger button. Auteurs let you create time paradoxes!

Its really sad she and Jamie are so low tier because they are both insanely cool additions to the whole series and I really hope they stick around for a long time.

6’ or nearly just so…in a country and time where the average height was like 5’4ish. He absolutely towered over everyone around him and its one of the things to keep in mind when you consider his duels. No doubt he was a skilled fencer also but sheesh…despite what master yoda tells you size does indeed matter folks.

Given the mix of history and fantasy I’d say there’s upwards of a 90% chance he’ll appear in some capacity even as a throwaway sidequest. When he does I hope they portray him as an absolute giant. I feel like most of the media portrayals I’ve seen almost downplay that part of the reason he was such a terror is that he probably had a good arm and a half’s reach over whatever idiot was brave/stupid enough to challenge him.

Oh, so big companies can just patent whatever they want even illegally and you have to violate it and hope the court is reasonable and you can afford the legal fees for fighting it. Death to Amerikkka, Bioware delenda est.

Bluntly: this is pretty much how the entire legal system works. Part of why there was such a long concerted effort to defang class action suits is because the system is basically built such that its very easy to bully people individually when you have the money.

The nemesis system in those games could have been a real game changer. I heard Gotham Knights had some variation of it but it was implemented so poorly and the game was already pretty weak to start that nobody cared. I sometimes muse about something like a metal gear game with it where the big bad special forces squad you’re up against are basically generated by how you interact with the rank and file, or something like the boss characters in Halo infinite where they gain ranks based on defeating chief. So much fucking potential and all gone to waste.

Clickbait cringe video or no: this is my honest take also. Only reason I don’t own a steamdeck right now is I’m still convinced there’s going to be a Steamdeck 2 sooner rather than later. My PS4 basically just sat for the past year and a half gathering Dust while I’ve been shifting back and forth between my PC’s depending on whether or not I want to play on my TV or my desk after work is done. Only reason I ever booted the ps4 up in the past two years was to play god of war ragnarok and that just hit PC also along with the valhalla DLC i’ve been wanting to try.

Steam Deck has all the benefits of portability that the switch has combined with even more ways to play on your TV since you can use either a dock or the cloud saves features to swap back and forth almost seamlessly. Also: 3 cheers for piracy and emulation if you want nintendo content also.

Consoles are dead to me. I’m PC exclusive for the foreseeable future.

raytracing to avoid carefully designed baked lightmaps

There’s some truth to your post but I gotta push back a bit on this one. Raytracing isn’t so much a way to avoid having to generate lightmaps or cut costs so much as it is just an objectively superior option to lightmaps in terms of quality. In fact I would argue that Raytracing is maybe the singular reason games didn’t quite look good enough 5 years ago. Polycounts aside Raytracing is basically the number one thing that’s separated graphics in engine from prerendered cinematics that always seem to have that extra oomf. Lightmaps are largely generated by the computer anyway and even with raytracing both require an artist’s labor to light the scene. The only downside and why you’d ever opt for lightmaps over raytracing is performance cause rendering real time reflections at 120fps in 4k is expensive.

I worked in game development for like a decade before I finally got burnt out and this is basically why. Overwhelming amount of the work you do is just going to be shovelware and in all the years doing it I can think of basically 3 projects that I was genuinely happy to be involved with and working on.

If you want a silver lining: concord’s failure kinda doesn’t matter to most of the people who worked on it personally or professionally. 99% of videogame work is gig/contract so most of them probably were going to be laid off one way or another after the launch and having art assets from a AAA game like concord still looks great on your demo reel irrespective of what the actual sales numbers were.

LMAO: Sephiroth is a product OF Shinra. He’s basically Frankenstein’s monster.

The studies we’ve done on violent media seem to fall along the same lines as other studies. The short and simplified version is: media is really bad at influencing behavior but its really good at influencing viewpoints and perspectives. In this sense: violent media doesn’t make you more prone to do violence…but it can change how you perceive violence. That fact is especially problematic and complicated when you consider things like Call of Duty which ultimately serve to glorify and revere military violence. I have mixed feelings on it myself and I’d personally argue to let it be…but I definitely think there’s a leftist case to make against violent media when you see it through that lens.

The developer who sounds like they were traumatized from having to stomach horrific imagery seems less to me like an issue with violent media and more like worker exploitation TBH. Plenty of people create horror movies out of passion and love. The issue is this person clearly was uncomfortable with the work but essentially had no alternative if they wanted to maintain employment.

One of the greatest videogame characters ever conceived of. Every year I find myself more enamored and stunned that she and kotor ii were allowed to happen.

Basically I spend 90% of my gaming time playing whatever the current fighting game I’m grinding is (currently sf6)…and then occasionally I will play other non fighting games. Never been into RTS or racing games… but other than that the games are pretty diverse.

Valid reason TBH. This is why whenever videogame parties happen I just make it a BYOC event and any extras are just gravy.

Seeing this post made me curious about what kind of historical overlap there is because that’s definitely a major trend in today’s fascist movements. Art is only good or even valid in their eyes if it conforms to traditional/conventional beauty standards. You see this a lot in videogames but also in movies like Zach Snyder’s whole filmography. Their art is always so boring with no room for different body types or human weirdness. All male forms are Roided out athletes and all women are built like lingerie models.

The story is fine (or at least better than 5 or infinite for sure), but the game itself…urgh… The art style and general look of the (former) covenant races look kinda murkey and noisy, the look and feel of everything is just off and the prometheans just flat out SUCK to fight. The only things I think I can actually even remember about that campaign are the setpiece parts where you’re flying/driving something or whatever. The missions mostly blur together and aren’t fun to run like Halo 1 or 3, or even some missions of 2.

Literally what I was about to say. I actually think the original tweet isn’t actually that far off and this is sort of in the vein of the criticism that Star Wars kinda invariably winds up making the empire, and be extension fascism, look really cool.

Cause like here’s a hot take…giant 20 story tall death robots are fucking cool and metal as shit when they actually work.