Stepos Venzny

Even though its spectacle isn’t unique anymore, slow-mo on the prince’s stunts still wins me over. It frankly is very cool that he can flip over guys’ heads and run along walls and more games should revel in their own coolness even when it’s not new. I run along walls in new games and the camera doesn’t zoom out to show me how dangerous it would be if I somehow fell and they make me feel nothing.

Also, Warrior Within’s chase music rules and anybody who thinks it doesn’t belong in the game just hates fun.

Dressing up like a clown, at least, is an established James Bond move.

It also found a rise in suspensions and a dip in students’ feelings of wellbeing in the first year after a ban as schools adapted to the change. “Over time, however, disciplinary impacts fade and wellbeing rebounds, becoming positive in subsequent years,” the report said.

So it sounds like the winning play is to not give them phones in the first place. Then you skip straight to positive impacts without going through the negative ones first.

I played it when it was new. Spent hours on the demo alone. Killed a dragon with a stick.

I liked 1 a lot better than 2 but apparently that’s an unpopular sentiment.

The claim Nvidia’s making that you can apply it selectively within a given frame kind of makes me want a game where only one character looks like that so as to emphasize their otherworldly wrongness. A Dishonored game where only the Outsider has it, that kind of thing.

How do you determine that a ferret has tinnitus?

All the ads I get are about getting the foreign libraries in streaming services.

Yeah, “you shouldn’t have to learn how to use a house” makes me think of my mom who never learned to load a dishwasher and, even when it’s pointed out that the sprayers are blocked from spinning, refuses not to fill every cubic inch of its interior. I’m broadly against smart anything but thinking any technology requires no effort on the user’s part is laughable.

If there was ever a difference between being far-right and being disinformation, there isn’t one anymore.

The whole article is fixated on Grok being far right and never seems to care that an LLM is citing another LLM instead of an actual source.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.