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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2677 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 5, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Tears of the Kingdom has leaked, so who else has been playing it? I wasted many valuable hours of my life fucking around with the various systems in BOTW, so I am in heaven with TOTK, which goes full garrys mod, letting you build all sorts of ridiculous contraptions to fly or sail or trundle about the place, and with a very intuitive control set up. I been playing the game all week but still haven't beat the first boss, I've spent so much time jerry rigging airships out of camp-fires and balloons, and building go carts out of refuse. I have beat a heap of hinox and lynels though, and some of the new mini bosses like the constructs and shadow ganon.

The new weapon system is quite inventive too - the new evil decays all weapons in the land somehow, making even something like the royal broadsword ineffective trash. It's mitigated however, by the fusion system, with which you can fuse almost any item to your weapon, augmenting its effect. At first this seems to be a compelling reason to chase down tough enemies - fusing the horn of a black moblin to your weapon makes it much more powerful than a regular moblin horn as you'd expect. But as you play around with it you find you can do much more impressive stuff with other items than just up the attack power. Attach a ruby to your weapon and it becomes a wand, or attach an electric lizfalos claw and it will shock enemies. Same with your shield, attach a rock for extra durability, or a flame emitter for a flamethrower shield, or get more creative and attach a spring that pushes enemies away when they attack, or a dazzle bud to blind them. There are some much cooler effects you can set up too, but I don't want to spoil them all.

There's also a new underground area, sitting beneath the main map. It's a lot more sparse than above ground, but there's still quite a bit to do, and some interesting puzzles. There are caves all over the place too - and the presentation of it reminds me a lot of elden ring. Only superficially of course, things like how the caves are tracked and the way the underground area looks, but I appreciate it all the same.

There's still a lot of the trivial annoyances only Nintendo gets away with, like that old 'bad actor' style of cut scenes where people act and talk separately, but overall I'm having a blast. If you have played it, what were your impressions? Just nobody mention the goatse shrines.

That's correct, or an emulator (apparently ryujinx is better at the moment, but yuzu was better earlier in the week so if you go this route grab both). This is probably the best guide out there, a good balance of informative and easy to use - https://rentry.co/SwitchHackingIsEasy - note that you can't hack an oled or lite without hardware mods though (for which you want to go check aliexpress).

Maybe I'm weird but I find it really hard to go back to 30 fps gaming. It looks like a slideshow to me after spending years playing at 60+. Emulating TOTK as yet has a lot of issues with reaching 60 fps, so I'll wait a few weeks/months before jumping in.

You're not alone, 40ish the lowest I can take, especially since my pc is where the bulk of my discretionary income went. 30 looks profoundly terrible and choppy in comparison, and I genuinely don't know how people are so enamored with 24 fps in film, panning shots and action just looks outright juddery.

Goes to show that people will praise a shit sandwich for its distinguished aroma if indoctrinated since birth.

As someone who can't stand 30fps gaming but loves 24fps film, let me just (imprecisely) defend it here.

I'm pretty sure there are ways to mitigate the choppiness from pans, I'm not sure on the specifics. But generally I think it's a limitation that should be worked around as one of the weak points.

The strengths of 24fps film is how the natural blurring of movement in each frame creates the beautiful and subtle impressionistic quality movies have, and that's something that would have to be painstakingly simulated to do in games (and blurring effects in games are pretty bad so I feel like that is a ways away)

Without meaning any disrespect, I genuinely think this counts as cope.

Think of it this way, in a world where 24 fps wasn't the standard, and people without prior exposure to it were suddenly allowed to pick any arbitrary frame rate, how many do you think would choose that value? Not even 24 specifically, but a low frame rate, defined as anything below like 60-100 if it came with little other tradeoff.

Such arguments ring hollow to me, for the same reason as claims that burqas should be encouraged because they're a form of female expression and protection from sunlight also should prompt a raised eyebrow. You don't see the men claiming the latter wearing them themselves, for all the vaunted merits they possess.

I hold it in the same tier as claims that analog audio sounds "warmer" and is thus better (convincingly shown to be entirely the result of noise and scratches introduced from vinyl), or for a hypothetical example, someone arguing that black and white cinema should be the norm because it minimizes distracting colors, and allows the audience to focus solely on the performance.

24 fps is a historical artifact of the fact that film was once expensive, and 24 fps is near abouts the lowest you can go before it becomes outright unwatchable; similar to the reason that hand drawn animation was done at 12 fps, to save costs; with people ending up Stockholm syndromed when the original concerns became moot.

These days, it might be more expensive to shoot heavy CGI at high frames, but interpolation makes that much less of a hassle, especially if done in actual production instead of on a consumer device.

When I saw The Hobbit, I found the 48 fps jarring for about 30 seconds before I happily acclimatized and preferred it, leaving aside the movie itself was crap.

Further, motion blur is a function of anything moving fast, even an object at super high frames can appear subjectively blurred. You don't need the jank of low fps to get it, not that I consider it a worthy tradeoff in the first place.

Cope is far from the most likely explanation. What I have to work with is:

  1. An intense revulsion towards high FPS film and television every time I have encountered it outside a nature documentary, that I share broadly with the film industry and enthusiasts.

  2. Things I have noticed that I like about 24 FPS that appear degrade at 30 and even further degraded at 48 FPS, but also degraded in a different way at 12 FPS.

  3. Finding 60 FPS games vastly preferable to 30 FPS games, despite growing up with games at a low FPS, which I also happen to share broadly with the games industry and enthusiasts (although it's only been more prioritized recently). Also, finding no degradation in 120 FPS or higher.

Empirically I don't think your analogies hold up well. The average record enjoyer does not feel revulsion towards digital audio outside of memes, the black-and-white movie enjoyers, as much as they even exist, don't feel revulsion towards color film. If this is Stockholm syndrome, it's on a far more massive scale than any other phenomena like it that I can think of.

When considering mass psychosis we should at least be curious towards what actually changes with different FPS choices. You say blur is in everything, but I was describing the amount and qualities of the blur, not just from fast movements but practically all movement because it's so low. There's also the ways even TV at 30 looks different from film. Watch Run Lola Run which mixes the two, and try to observe the different effects each have in how you process the scenes. I really think if collectively we act incurious, and if film goes to 48 or higher, film is dead. I watched the Hobbit at 48, I watched an interpolated Game of Thrones episode. Both were just absolutely revolting.

That argument probably is cope on their part. I don’t particularly care about motion blur except where it impacts CGI and 2D animation. I’ll also always take gaming at the highest framerate the hardware can handle — up to a point. One Must Fall 2097 from Epic used slowdown artistically when delivering massive blows.

I sometimes pay attention to my eyes’ super-high “frame rate,” usually when deliberately perceiving a road I’m about to turn onto with a 180 degree span I have to watch for cars. That’s when I realize it’s my brain’s “capture software” that limits me, not my wonderful eyes.

After seeing The Hobbit and Avatar 2, I have also concluded my brain is not wired for >24fps video. It feels like someone left a DVD on fast-forward. I grew up watching cartoons animated on the 2’s and sometimes on the 4’s, and I knew it was done poorly, but that's what was available. South Park hearkens back to that era where the audio was more important than the video. The only sequence in Hobbit which didn’t feel like my eyes were being deliberately insulted was the goblin cave sequence, and that’s because I subconsciously connected it to Fraggle Rock, which was high framerate and set in underground caverns.

However, I would love to watch a re-cut of Hobbit and LOTR with 48-60fps only while someone is wearing the One Ring. It would add to the otherworldliness of seeing the world through Sauron’s tool.

It's not cope, but I agree that would make a cool cut. In my other response I fleshed out my argument a bit and mentioned Run Lola Run which did something similar with FPS switches. It's just worth analyzing why the different FPS makes you feel things differently and the possibility that there are actual reasons 24 has remained the standard and is vastly preferred by enthusiast in a way that hasn't happened for other tech advances, like digital film, CG, etc beyond the incurious "cope" argument.

Goes to show that people will praise a shit sandwich for its distinguished aroma if indoctrinated since birth.

Eh. I genuinely cannot tell the difference between anything above 20 FPS or so. I've played games with as little as 15 FPS back in the day (on a shitty PC), that was noticeable but anything else is all the same to my eyes. Which is quite nice for me, as I don't have to worry about framerates ever.

I don't have it, but as someone who really disliked BOTW I'm curious if you can answer a few questions.

  • Are there actual dungeons this time?

  • Are there more than 4 items in this one?

  • Is there normal music in the game, not just ambient stuff?

  • Is weapon durability still a thing?

  • Is the world a bit more pleasant to go through? In BOTW it was just so boring to traverse, there was nothing interesting between point A and point B - but there was a lot of ground to cover between point A and point B.

To be honest I don't have high hopes that Nintendo did a good job on this game given how bad I felt BOTW was, but I am hopeful to be wrong. I generally love Zelda games, would like to be able to enjoy this one too.

Oh man you are not going to enjoy TOTK. In order it's no, no, there's a little, yes, and sort of? There's more variety and more things to find about the place - the caves in particular, but there's also the underground map so in effect the amount of empty space has doubled. There are a lot more people around though, I've run into way more random strangers who aren't yiga than by this point in BOTW.

And there are a shitload of additional traversal options now - the jerry rigged airships and go karts and so on are available from the start, and the ubisoft towers now launch you into the air so you can use that to travel much further much quicker. And one of your powers this time lets you swim up through the ground if there's a platform above you so you don't have to do nearly as much climbing.

Also, and I know this is battered housewife material but it's true - the durability isn't that much of a bother in TOTK. After Zelda got a haircut and caused the upheaval weapons decayed, but they also apparently bred like rabbits - they are everywhere. I went digging in a cave just before and the sediment appears to be comprised of about 40% rusty claymores, I had 8 lying around me by the time my rock hammer broke. The other thing is that because of the fusion system the weapons themselves don't matter as much as how you use them - even the best botw weapons are shit compared to fused weapons.

As for the LOZ qualities its still shrines and guardians whatever they're called now. I have beaten the wind temple boss now (astel the naturalborn looking antlion creature, cool if trivial fight) and once you do that it's hard to even call the sky gardens pseudo dungeons, they might as well just hand you the blessing.

Disappointing, but not surprising. Thanks for the answers! It sounds like this is another case of "it is a good game but a bad Zelda", just like with BOTW.

I wish there were some more good zeldas out there though. There have been a few released recently, like Death's Door was alright, but it feels very lifeless, no pun intended.

Tunic looked promising.

Have you played it? I grabbed it when it first hit gamepass but stopped playing after about five minutes because it bugged out and I couldn't attack. I've heard that now they've squashed those bugs it's a outstanding game, but it isn't on gamepass any longer and it is too expensive for me to buy sight unseen.

Although I did forget a couple of alright ones - Prodigal and the Blossom Tales games are ok, and if you like Zelda 2, Cathedral and Infernax are fantastic (although Infernax strays closer to metroidvania.)

Nope, just watched a bit of playthrough and thought it was too good to spoil.

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