Stepos Venzny

The show is so much better written than the Bethesda games that this can only be a positive for them.

Tomb Raider, the original one. Everything I hated about it as a kid when it was new, twenty years later those exact same features made me love it.

I’m a better person than I was in the past because the bully is gone and I am no longer mirroring that toxicity. I’m still seemingly permanently tainted by it but the level is much reduced since cutting ties.

Had I never been bullied, I’d definitely be a better person than I am now.

It’s more about companies getting people killed, less about companies doing a bad job at making video games.

There is no severity of raw capitalism that makes this makes this make sense to me.

Why, when making a game that centers on a judge, is the judge Snoop Dogg? Why, when making a game that centers on Snoop Dogg, is Snoop Dogg a judge?

Whichever angle I’m coming at it from I can’t make any sense of this premise.

Democrats and independents have about reached where Republicans used to be on this sentiment.

The closest destination is two hours away by foot and I’ll be walking down a highway to get there.

Cookie Cutter

I heard ages ago that the animation was something special and then saw it was dirt cheap on sale and grabbed it a while after that but was just never in the mood to start something that looked so frantic. Finally actually started playing it a couple days ago.

For starters, the main character’s animation work really is something special. The snappy movement, the expressive face, the terrible posture, the confrontationally ever-visible underwear.

Everything other than the visuals seems so undercooked, though. The setting is high concept but the plot is a basic “get revenge and save the girl” type deal. It’s one big map like a Metroid game but the levels are as straightforward as a level-based licensed platformer. The combat is trying to be spectacle-fightery but there is absolutely zero complexity to it. And I was just playing it last night and have already completely forgotten the music sounds like aside from, like, there’s electric guitar.

I’ll stick with it longer in hopes that the game around this extremely likable main character develops into something beyond baseline technical competence. I’ve simply never played a game that is so lovingly and expertly made in one specific regard that phones literally everything else in as hard as this seems to so far.

I’m also getting into Death Stranding 2 but it feels like there’s nothing to say about it. First game again but more of it. Weird to see Kojima making so conservative a sequel. Like with Cookie Cutter, I’m really hoping for more from this as I progress. Not to say that they’re equivalently disappointing.

You’re calling people with different visual preferences than you ignorant cultists. Surely that qualifies as you pushing back on personal enjoyment?

You know, filmmakers don’t always like the tech they’re using. Matching their equipment isn’t always the same thing as matching their vision. All art is comprise.

You remember the Hobbit trilogy? That was a pretty famous instance of a director going against the grain visually, giving it a higher than normal frame rate. Looking like a soap opera rather than cinema, as you put it. On purpose. Audiences hated that. He spent more money making it and they said it looked cheap. They could see motion in enough clarity that it looked like they were seeing a human with facial prosthetics rather than a dwarf. It looked objectively more real than a regular frame rate but that proved too real for most.

Now if I were the sort that likes to turn on motion smoothing, do you think Peter Jackson who tried to pioneer high frame rate theatrical releases would disagree with me doing that for his earlier 24 FPS movies, like the good Lord of the Rings? Or does making the motion look more real make the movie more like he wishes it always had been?

Me, I don’t like high frame rate movies either. If he came out and said motion smoothing is the best way to watch the older movies then I would still leave it off. That’s barely even a hypothetical, since he said the theatrical cut is the best way to watch yet I still prefer the Extended Editions.

If he said OLEDs were the best way to watch them, would you stop watching on a projector? Of course you wouldn’t. You like projectors better. Directorial intent is irrelevant.

The correct response to weird gatekeepers who talk shit about projectors isn’t to gatekeep back in the opposite direction, it’s to just continue enjoying what you enjoy. And when somebody asks for advice on their home theater, sing the praises of your beloved projectors. But this long and unprompted argument you just started against faceless masses with accusations that people who disagree with you aren’t capable of forming their own opinions, maybe don’t be doing that so much.

I grew up watching 4:3 movies with monaural sound on CRT screens that were roughly a foot tall and loved movies then no less than I do today on my modern OLED and surround system. Bigger and clearer is nice to have but there’s no reason to stress over what display is optimal.

Better not to piss it off. I patiently eat around it.

This actually happened to me just last week, minus the plate part. Motherfucker could not keep off of my sandwich I was holding, other than to briefly perch on my thumb now and again.

I’m not happy about the situation but I’ve been stung in the eye before and would love for that to be a one-time event.

No, they were totally fair in saying that. As much as Tomb Raider is a knockoff narratively, Infernal Machine is even more directly a knockoff mechanically.

I played it back in the day and it felt terrible to play then, too.

I managed to beat Chibi-Robo and, dang, that story really went some places right at the end. If someone had attempted to spoil it for me one hour before I reached it myself, I’d be insulted by how gullible they thought I was.

In terms of my personal main quest, the game hasn’t explicitly stated that I’m the new husband but he lost his wedding ring and I found it and there’s no prompt to give it back and I can’t help but notice the symbolism.

I’ve always been shocked at the generally positive reception Circle of the Moon gets.

Handhelds that you can optionally plug into a TV to use the TV screen for and have higher specs in that mode aren’t exactly the norm.

I had an economics teacher in high school who warned us that we’re better off at the higher end of a lower tax bracket than the lower end of a higher one, because a higher bracket being a higher percentage of taxation meant you’d lose so much more money that you’d be holding less in the end until you pass the threshold within that bracket where you get back ahead of the tax. An economics teacher.

I’ve tried this, too, and they always self-destruct. Their character growth when you don’t play as them is so tied to them reacting to the player character’s influence that taking that influence away tends to prevent them from growing.

With Shadowheart in particular,

The two exceptions to that rule have been Karlach who right out the gate has got her shit shockingly together for this cast and, hilariously, Astarion who absolutely thrives as his worst self. Those are the only two Origins I’ve managed to beat without betraying the RP of it all.

I’m a couple decades late to Chibi-Robo and it is incredible. They’re probably not going to let me actually steal this guy’s wife in the end but it will not be for lack of trying.