Rex
5d ago
Died suddenly after brief illness is such weird phrasing and reporting.
Wouldn’t “old senator found unresponsive after cardiac arrest, dead” make a lot more sense if it was as you suspect?
Rex
7d ago
I’ve got about 30-40 hours left in modded Cold Steel III.
I’ve also been following the slow moving crash of Civ7 on CivFanatics now for past year+. Amazing stuff going on there. It motivated me to reinstall Civ4. I mainly play Civ5 Vox Populi, but for whatever reason I want to give modded 4 a spin now. I found AdvancedCiv mod for 4. A moderate gameplay mod that improves the difficulty curve and does some UI updates. I’m a bit torn though between this and vanilla gameplay. Civ4 is not flawed like 5 is, so ai tweaks being a positive or negative is hard to assess.
I guess my thought process is this: I have 1000s of civ hours over the course of my life. If there is a mod for a 20 year old game that still has an active forum and active development, I reckon they will have it better tuned for my tastes. Better than even peak Firaxis who is still catering to a much broader group than players like me.
Rex
8d ago
I recently had my third child and my much younger brother broke his leg. As a result, I’m spending a lot of time in doctors offices, medical offices, and physical therapy outfits.
For whatever reason I started to notice that every one of these places have these big horseshoe front desks with somewhere between 6-12 women working. They’re generally between 20-60 years old, natural blonde or dye job, mostly slightly overweight or seriously overweight, at least one tattoo, and all of them pretty miserable. These are the working women proles. When people talk about the outrageous healthcare costs, I can’t help but think that it’s all a racket and jobs program. Healthcare companies make a nice margin and get an army of women that toe the line with “public health” and collect a paycheck.
I’m 42. It wasn’t always like this.
I’m saying this all tongue in cheek for Friday fun. But I am kinda curious what people think about the socio-economic-political forces that are driving this.
Is it the same in the UK? In China? I’ve been to a Chinese hospital. That seemed like a lot of young village type Chinese in white uniforms and hats.
What makes these people so miserable? Do people go into this field and turn into this stereotype? Or do the stereotype people get attracted to this field?
Rex
21d ago
You clearly appreciate Doom at much deeper level than me. Playing old doom with obscure new mods. What is it about doom that is so evergreen? I only played the old dooms briefly as a kid. Never really played them to death or mastery. What’s the pitch?
Rex
21d ago
Are all the kids playing GTA online? Maybe. I don’t have info either way. I hear about kids playing fortnight all the time. I can’t say I hear kids talking GTA.
My impression of GTA online is that it’s a bunch of old millennials playing RP, the urban community, and third worlders.
People are talking like GTA is going to do historic numbers. Fortnight numbers. I just don’t see it. From what I hear a million concurrent would be way below expectations. I think it could do a million and be on par with other big games this year. I don’t think it’s doing 50 million sales week 1. Certainly not with the urban community and third world as your workhorse to get some alpha over a normal big launch.
Rex
21d ago
I read this earlier and said, “hmm. Maybe I’m wrong”.
Then I got curious because I had not seen this news that pre order revenue was released. I looked into it. It looks like a bunch of people repeating information they heard in a big game of telephone. The original source is some dude posting info he found in an investment bank (piper sandler) research note that said something to the effect of “46 million pre sale units sold or $3bn rev would not be surprising.”
I’m not familiar with piper sander, but in not a banker (though I do work somewhat related to m&a). But I think it’s uncontroversial to say that these sort of research notes are mere an analysts informed speculation. And they’re usually motivated by something other than “reporting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”.
I remain skeptical.
Rex
22d ago
It’s probably a me thing, but I just can’t get engaged with a video game at this point without tear your hair out difficulty.
Rex
22d ago
I’m 100 hours in to Trails of Cold Steel III with SoftBrilliants Difficulty Mod. Probably another 400 hours to go to finish Cold Steel IV.
One of my all time fav genres is turn based command battle in jrpg. People usually dunk on this gameplay as being retardedly simple and boring. The issue is that almost all developers fail to tune their difficulty high enough - often or requires a mod or romhack to fully shine.
On max hacked difficulty. Every single battle is a puzzle. An inexperienced player will probably wipe on the first 2 turns of any given fight. There is always a certain combination of builds and commands that can clear the fight, sometimes in an extremely elegant manner. Finding that sequence is the fun.
Another great series/run like this is Xenoblade 2 on Max Custom Difficulty. That game has DLC that gives you difficulty sliders. Put them all to max. I reckon most people will find the first boss 5 min into the game unwinnable. But it’s not.
When there are actual stakes in these fights, it’s quite fun. And makes the narrative shine.
Rex
22d ago
Do you play Vox Populi? I find it really is necessary and is the only civ game that is sufficiently difficult after 30 years of playing civ. I tried to get back into IV but struggled to find a good balanced difficulty. And relearning the systems wasn’t easy after being away so long.
All this is to say, i think modded civ is the only real alternative to civ.
Rex
22d ago
I can’t help but watch the conventional wisdom on GTA6 and shake my head.
- GTA6 will sell more than any other game in history
- Rockstar can charge whatever they want and people will pay it
- There is the huge crowd of casuals who only play GTA and they’re all going to buy it
- We won’t have enough PS5s to meet the demand
- There are millions of people ready to spend $700 to play gta
- The most hyped game off all time.
This reminds me of the 2016 “Hilary will win” crowd. People just repeating conventional wisdom and confusing that for analysis
In your case, it’s probably not a bad move given your points on COD and FC.
But as far as GTA goes, I fully expect it to not meet expectations for impact on gaming or sales. 13 years since its last release is more than enough for it to be out of the general zeitgeist. All of the original creators are long gone. Rockstar announced they’ve excised the juvenile and frat house humor. And it was in peak development during the years where developer trends were at their worst - and we are now fully seeing the ramifications of those trends.
I just don’t think it’s culturally relevant to anyone under 20 years old. I played my first Grand Theft Auto as a PC CD-ROM demo from PC Gamer (I think). I played the hell out of that game with WinAmp in the background and Sublime MP3s playing music. GTA3 was every bit of the revelation people say. And there was continuity for nearly 20 years between Grand Theft Auto and GTAV. 6 will just not hit that same way. For a lot of reasons.
Just my opinion though. I can’t wait to see what happens.
I was recently listening to an interview with one of the survivors who was there.
After the ship was hit by a torpedo plane (I think), the ship sunk. Dozens of Americans abandoned ship. The Israeli planes then strifed the Americans in the water with machine gun fire from their aircraft - presumably to kill everyone and keep the story contained.
I always wondered, do people think this is a fake story? Or is it just not a big deal?
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