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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1966 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 13, 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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It's a very primitive kind of fun, but AI-generated "Pixar" movie posters on Stonetoss-adjacent topics keep entertaining me.

Wow. It's been over a year since I posted on the Motte or even Reddit; I came back to find this place is definitely... different. It seems much smaller, a bit more subdued, but possibly better. I know a lot of the reason I stopped contributing then was the Reddity feel of the place. But I remember the Friday Fun Threads were always pretty cool.

Who do you think has been left behind? I'm asking in terms of demographic shifts. Are there fewer younger posters? Hotheads? The general consensus seems to be this place is much more conservative, but I don't know if I've seen that, yet.

The geniuses.

The Motte is still relatively smart. Maybe 125 avg. But I don't think the outlier 150+ folk stuck around . I remember reading some /r/themotte comments and getting the impression I'm in the presence of a 1000 year old vampire. I haven't gotten that feeling as much after the move.

Comments in general are.. more political, more nitpicky, more missing the pointy, etc.

I don't think it has anything to do with the forum getting more "conservative" the smartest people are usually too heterodox to classify anyways. I think its more to do with the lack of dynamism of this forum. Even after we have a website, we don't have the stomach for a bare link reposity? Are you kidding me? We don't have a new user pipeline anymore to keep things interesting (by asking naive but nevertheless amenable to good discussion questions), and we won't make one either.

I do feel like the place has lost a lot of fire in the last year or so, and especially on leaving reddit. I don't mind so much, but only because in my contrarian nature this has made me more fiery, and I think it has otherwise made it somewhat worse.

I almost feel that there are fewer conventionally successful people around nowadays, but that could just be a case of fewer people mentioning personal details. I'm certainly not helping that figure, however.

Focus has definitely gotten tighter onto whatever issue is popular on X, which saddens me. My favorite posts have always been those from the public defender guy about law, or foreigners about their local issues, or other topics I would never have discovered.

Overall though I'm impressed how things have kept on chugging along. I was worried about total death on moving.

Sometimes when I am really tired and want something entirely mindless I just switch on speed running videos and marvel at how much time and effort these seemingly intelligent determined capable men are spending on clipping a wall at a game released in 2003 to save off 750 milliseconds or something. Is there anything else that is such a massive waste of human talent than speed running communities??

What isnt? Sports, chess, literally anything that isnt a paid service?

Sports provide tremendous value as a source of community and social opportunity for fans. I've met some of my best friends through football - even if it added no other value to my life, paying the minor fees involved would be worth it. What's surprising about speedrunning is that it's incredible talent and dedication being put into a prestige race among communities which are mostly tiny and fully-online, and that it's talent that's more transferable to something useful. The physical and tactical talent a top athlete has could maybe be parlayed into being an effective soldier or a good oilfield worker, but that's not a loss to society comparable to having these speedrunning guys optimizing time on Sonic 2000 instead of optimizing some useful process. I guess the equivalent would be that a professional sportsman would be wasted in the Middle Ages when he could have become a knight instead. (And, indeed, some of the greatest knights, like William Marshal, started out as effectively their era's equivalent of pro athletes)

With chess I can agree. The type of person who is into speed running today might had been into chess 50 years ago.

Doing sports is at least actually good for your body and people who go pro are usually not the cognitive elite.

Paul Morphy, the best player ever, has said:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

Talking shit on the internet, maybe?

Is that actually true? Like, it sounds plausible that it could be true, but it also seems plausible that it helps shape culture and behavioral norms, because people are less likely to do things that lead to scorn and mockery. Granted, people probably spend an inordinate amount of effort talking shit on the internet above and beyond its actual value, but there is the potential for actual value buried in there.

Sure, but shaping culture/norms is kind of a blank check. Speedrunners are also providing some sort of influence on culture, either as an impressive form of entertainment or as an ur-example of certain nerdy behaviors.

But it specifically applies pressure against negative behaviors, at least according to the subjective perceptions of the mocker. X behavior is stupid/bad -> Y group of people mock it -> Z group of people care about Y's opinion and/or avoiding mockery in general and do X less or fail to start doing X -> less X exists. If the mocker has good subjective opinions and targets, then this is a net positive since it reduces the prevalence of stupid/bad behaviors. If the mocker has bad subjective opinions and targets, then this is a net negative since it reduces the prevalence of good behaviors that have been mislabeled.

Speed running.... makes speed running look cool? Like, maybe it encourages people to try really hard and dedicate themselves to a task, or peer into the underlying mechanics of games and pedantically look for flaws that they can exploit which maybe increases their ability as a hacker/programmer/anti-hacker? But the most likely outcome is that it makes people more likely to become speed runners. I suppose one could make a similar argument about a lot of hobbies, but a lot of hobbies have depth or broadly interesting components, while speedrunning is about pedantic details and weird edge cases.

Like, if someone has a hobby of using tweezers to arrange tiny colored grains of sand into beautiful artwork, that's kind of cool. I wouldn't do it, it seems like more time and effort than it's worth to me, but if someone else wants to do that good for them, and maybe at the end I'll look at the picture they make. If someone has a hobby of using tweezers to arrange tiny grains of sand into binary representations of the code to retro videogames, that's stupid. It takes similar levels of pedantic effort to perfectly arrange each grain of sand into the right shape, but in the end you have a bunch of dots of sand and the binary representation doesn't do anything because operating systems can't read sand, so it's functional equivalent to a random arrangement of sand. I suppose if someone had some property of their brain that makes this hobby enjoyable for them I'm not going to say they're not allowed to do it, but to me it's boring both to do AND to hear about or watch, while the colored sand piles are boring to do but might be worth watching a little bit. I feel that videogames are more analogous to the colored art sand: pragmatically useless towards survival in the real world but interesting to experience or view, while speedrunning is analagous to the binary representations: similarly complex in function but more pedantic and way less interesting.

All to say that pressure towards making people more interested in speedrunning is negative because it increases the amount of people with boring hobbies, which funges against more interesting hobbies that they could have. And while this is mostly a subjective opinion from me as someone who thinks speedrunning is boring, I think there is some way in which speedrunning is objectively worse than most hobbies, including broader videogaming, although I'm not entirely sure exactly how to formalize, hence vaguely gesturing at it via the above analogy.

Yes but how much of the arguing and shit-talking on the internet shapes future behavior in a good way? It's not just foolishness that meets with scorn. Far from it.

Tru.

The sport of Rock Climbing. As distinct from alpinism, where there's the idea that you go that far to get the view, There is nearly always an easier way to get to the top of whatever you're climbing. While equipment and technique has come a long way, people die doing it every year.

The sport of Rock Climbing. As distinct from alpinism, where there's the idea that you go that far to get the view, There is nearly always an easier way to get to the top of whatever you're climbing.

Agree. But not with the distinction. Alpinists insisted on doing the North Face of every peak, and died in droves for it.

I think I phrased the distinction poorly in my initial comment. Alpinism at least involves skills that are mildly relevant to some kind of theoretically functional task, traveling long distances over difficult terrain to reach a goal. Rock climbing essentially takes a single one of those skills and specializes it to reductio ad absurdum. It's possible to at least imagine a scenario where Alpinism would provide relevant skills, like reaching a remote village in bad conditions or launching an ambush or something. Rock climbers have to go out of their way to find routes that are difficult enough to test themselves, and coming up with a scenario where the ability to climb anything past 5.10 would be relevant is purest fantasy.

The crazy thing to me is the ‘free solo’ stuff where they do it without safety ropes. Pure deathwish, adding unnecessary extra risk to feel closer to the void.

Not crazier than the wingsuit guys? I guess both die doing the thing they love.

As crazy, maybe?

It's the physical counterpart to speedrunning: not aiming to be the best at the thing, but instead defining a sub-goal of doing an easier thing with the utmost perfection.

I'm not sure if you climb much, but it is absolutely not true that you can get to the same view with an easier way. We call these technical summits. Off the top of my head Cerro Torre is famous, near me is Slesse Mountain in British Columbia, in the Canadian Rockies there's Mt Louis, Mt Birdwood, Mt Alberta. etc.

That was phrased poorly. I was thinking more in terms of rock climbing as guys going out to climb a 5.12 route that's sorta on a random cliff, which they mostly drive to or take an easy hike to, which they are seeking out more or less purely because of the technical difficulty of the climbing. In my mind most technical summits are by definition Alpinism, because you had to first journey to the rock face before reaching the climb, with the climb forming just part of a larger journey to the top of the mountain.

What was your first computer?

Mine was a Commodore 64. I remember going to Sears with my dad to pick up the disk drive; finally we wouldn’t have to wait for a tape drive to load a program. It lasted us a good ten years, from Tooth Invaders and Frogger in elementary school to GeoWorks word processing in high school.

Our second computer was a 486-33 DLC: the math coprocessor was not integrated like an Intel 486-DX but was added to the motherboard. It had a Turtle Island sound card I ruined by running a text file through the DOS MIDI player.

Atari 800. I distinctly remember playing Learning with Leaper when I was very young.

I was born in 1988, one of my first memories is my dad reading out Zork on an Apple II while waiting for my suggestions around 1991. Later, I was allowed to use his 3.1/95 computers under his supervision, and with the 95 I was given a full 2 hours of encarta per day in the family den.

I was given my own pc, a Dell with Windows 98 for my 11th birthday, with the understanding that I could only use the dial-up internet service (AOL) when my mom wasn't using the phone. I made point and click games in powerpoint and played a ton of Civ II, and set up a geocities site for my friends to roleplay our favorite action cartoons- DBZ and Gundam Wing.

TI-99/4A, using the TV as a monitor and a tape cassette to save data. I did occasionally have access to some sort of terminal at computer summer camp which was largely spent playing Moon Lander. But there were many, many hours spent typing in BASIC programs.

My first family computer was a 486 DX2 that I think my dad built. I remember him bragging it had a screaming fast Vesa Localbus VGA card. Had some sort of Soundblaster 16 or compatible sound card. Although I remember it having occasional hanging note bugs, so I think it must have been a genuine SB16.

I played so many fucking games on it. My dad installed Wheel of Fortune, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Indianapolis 500. A buddy of mine installed Doom 2 and Quest for Glory. And I can't count how many hours I spent playing the shareware/demo's for Doom, Heretic, Warcraft 1 & 2, Command & Conquer. My sister and I even got goofy with the simple joys of recording ourselves using the SB utilities in Windows 3.11.

I couldn't tell you the model of my family's first computer, inherited from a grandmother who taught yiddish for six decades but apparently wasn't as old fashioned as that sounds and had a leftover 486 when she upgraded to a higher number.

She probably even knew what we were getting 486 of! I certainly can't remember what they were, although I do remember a shareware demo of Doom that's probably the same as you—and I definitely remember those SB utilities, and how much they made me wish our computer had a microphone installed!

The 486 was a great computer for a long time. For a good chunk of time, literally everyone I knew who had a computer had a 486 DX2. And it more or less ran any game that came out from 1993 to 1996. Then Quake happened and the rest is history. Between 1997 and 2000 things moved so fast, a $2500 (~$4000 in 2023 money) Pentium 233 MMX with a Voodoo or a Riva 128 from 1997 could barely play Unreal or Half-Life which came out in 1998, only a year later. You can write off 1999 almost completely except for a smattering of games with long development cycles or games which were still 2D.

You can write off 1999 almost completely except for a smattering of games with long development cycles or games which were still 2D.

Is this a contention? Are you are contender, contending me to contentious discussion? 1999 is the anno domini of video games. We got:

System shock 2

Freespace 2

Alpha Centauri

Age of Empires 2

Planescape torment

Pokemon Gold/Silver

Everquest

Unreal Tournament

Quake 3

Every single one of those sequels refines their base game into its ultimate form - in the 23 years since many of them have had additional sequels, but they never reached these heights again. In many cases they are genre defining too - would world of warcraft existed without Everquest? Probably, but shoosh.

I don't think you understood what I was saying. Look at the previous sentence.

I'm saying a Pentium 233 MMX with a Voodoo or a Riva 128 couldn't play most games from 1999 unless they were 2D, or had long development cycles. Like they were originally supposed to come out in 1998, and they had wanted them to run on 1997 hardware, then they slipped into 1999 instead. I was not saying 1999 had bad games. I was talking about the games you could expect to play on a 2 year old PC at the time.

Ah yeah I misunderstood lol. Thank goodness.

The clause "long development cycles or games which were still 2D" is doing a lot of work here, I think; "refines a base game into its ultimate form" from a creative standpoint is "long (multi-game) development cycle", a product that gets to reuse most of its source code, from a technical standpoint. Everquest still seems like a big exception, though.

I felt trolled too before I read the fine print. Please don't say such a thing! The drones need you. They look up to you!

Yes, apocalypse cancelled unfortunately, I misunderstood.

Oh, this takes me back. I think my dad beat Quake on a 486, or it was one of these pinout-compatible CPUs from Cyrix or AMD, but when Carmageddon came out, it was a slideshow without MMX. I think that Pentium 166 was the third upgrade I actually remember. The first two were:

  • the Sound Blaster card, easily the biggest upgrade in the whole history of upgrade
  • Matrox Millenium video card, because it was a flaky bitch that gave my dad headaches
  • a CD drive

Okay, fourth.

Anyway, the ten years after Quake were insane. In ten years we went from models that looked like this to models that looked like this. Compared to this leap (accompanied by a jump from 66 to 2500 MHz in CPU frequencies), the next fifteen years feel like running in place (cf Starfield and its staring eye models).

Come to think of it, a jump from Doom to Half-Life 2 (1995 to 2004) is even more insane. The latter feels like a modern game despite being 19 years old, while Doom was a living fossil just nine years after its release.

I do wonder what CPU he had in a 486 system to beat Quake. I never had one, but I guess AMD made a 486 compatible CPU that was the equivalent of a Pentium 75?

Then again, I beat plenty of games on enormously unpowered computers. I beat Unreal on a P120 in software rendering. It was a slideshow, but I had cheat codes!

Could've been a DX4 or one of the third party Socket 3 CPUs, I honestly don't remember. I remember he had to shrink down the viewport a bit to make the game playable.

She probably even knew what we were getting 486 of!

Nothing. 486 was the fifth CPU generation of the x86 family (hence "4"), which started with 8086, and 8086 was the first 16-bit microprocessor from Intel, the fourth chip in the totally logically named line of microprocessors: 8008, 8080 and 8085. I think they got rid of "80" around 80386.

My grandma bought me an off-white PC somewhere around 2002. It opened my eyes, I certainly played more than my fair share of games on it, the ones that could handle the absence of a dedicated GPU at least. Had a Pentium 4, 32gb of storage, about 128mb of ram, you know, SOTA. Or it might not be, it's not like I was perusing hardware catalogs at the time.

I kinda feel bad for resenting it so much, at leafy until I found out it was a gift from her, but you tell me how you'd feel if you couldn't properly indulge in your favorite hobby for almost a decade because your parents were convinced that a PC capable of playing games made after 2005 or having an internet connection would corrupt the youth. Ah, the amount of money I hopefully wasted on games I couldn't even run, let alone when Steam activation requirements made me only play HL2 about a decade after its launch. I wonder if I have the Orange Box lying around somewhere, or if I turned it yet more orange by lighting it on fire in my frustration haha.

My dad's work let him bring home a 286 laptop that he let me use sometimes. But my first computer was an AST 486, running at 66mhz if I recall correctly. I remember getting very good at memory management and boot scripting to get all my games working.

My favorite system was an HP pentium II workstation that was a corporate lease return in a previous life.

I don’t remember the first computer, but I remember the first GPU - Voodoo II, quickly replaced by an enduring and fondly recalled Nvidia Riva TnT2 Pro.

One of the Packard Bell Multimedia models. Windows 95. Had the Windows Entertainment Pack for Packard Bell installed (Dr. Black Jack, Fuji Golf, JigSawed, Rattler Race, Chess, SkiFree, Life Genesis, Rodent's Revenge) as well as Hover!.

Played a lot of JumpStart 2nd and 3rd Grade, SimTown, SimCity 2000, Spider-Man Cartoon Maker, Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Pinball, and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness on it. Dabbled with Myst, but didn't know what the hell I was doing as a child.

My brother and I wrecked a spacebar playing Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Pinball

Some kind of 386. Well, it wasn't mine, it was my parents', but that was the first PC we had at home. I want to say my current one is in a ship-of-Theseus way the same PC, but alas, no:

  • the first one was a loaner
  • then my dad cadillacked a 486 AT that we ended up upgrading all the way to a GeForce-based machine over the years, migrating over to an ATX case in the process
  • then in a moment of weakness I bought a made-to-order one in 2004 (I know it was in 2004 because they sold me a faulty GPU, which I noticed in Dawn of War)
  • in 2007 I got my first (big for a recent graduate) bonus at work and bought a new Chieftec case that was built like a tank and weighed a fucking ton and migrated into it. I hated the 2004 PC, so I consider this a new one. Or did I buy the case earlier and only the guts from some guy from nvidia in 2007?
  • it survived and evolved all the way to 2021, when I built a new mini-ITX PC and moved only the GPU and my data from the old one

P.S. The oldest files I have are my IRC logs from when I was in my early teens, so they are almost a quarter century old, coming all the way from the first PC we owned.

P.P.S. I sold the 2007 PC to an ex-colleague of mine who needed a build station last month. He probably thought I was weird about loading it into my car and driving just 500m to his house, but then he couldn't lift it out of the trunk on the first try. I hope it'll keep fooling people and making them look like wimps for a couple more decades.

The first computer that I remember using is a Canon Innova laptop with a beige case, a grayscale screen, and a floppy-disk drive. Lotus 1-2-3 was installed on it.

Is there a good place to get music recommendations based on songs/artists I already like? Youtube hasn't been a doing a great job at that for me and I don't have spotify.

That was Pandora’s big draw, back in the day. I believe it still does a good job.

Try Every Noise. It's focused on artist and genre.

Try https://maroofy.com/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635352)

Also spotify is tremendous value

Been playing through the mass effect trilogy, and wow is it good. The first one actually impressed me more than the second so far, but I'm playing vanguard and finally getting to the point where I can charge into enemies without immediately dying. It's fun as hell.

I bought Elden Ring, but I'm the type of person that won't go back to games after finishing a lot of the time, so I'm working to finish the ME trilogy before I crack that one open. I am just so grateful for how many damn good games there are out there. Honestly if we stopped making games tomorrow I would likely be set for the rest of my life, although of course I'm greedy to see what happens in the next 5-10 years in gaming, heh.

The coolest thing IMO would be AR/VR and seeing how that develops. I'd adore a truly immersive TES game like Oblivion with great story in a VR setting. Any other thoughts on the future of gaming?

I played through it recently, but I found myself quitting halfway through ME3. Mechanically it was fine, if unimpressive. Aesthetically it did nothing for me, but didn't offend me either. I had stuck with it so far mostly because of the extensive appreciation the trilogy gets from others, but here I had to stop because the game just kept becoming sillier. And I don't mean the Citadel Add-On, which is comedic throughout but honestly so, but the rest of it, including highlights of stupidity like Shepard's completely nonsensical speech to Earth's high command in the beginning or The Rannoch Reaper fight.

Not sure what I expected, but in the end I just lost all interest.

As for gaming in general, hm. The future I see is dominated by lots of rehashed trash, marketed to eager and uncritical buyers, on AAA and indie levels both, and increasingly more games-as-service and, above all, mobile games ported to PC.

I'm keeping an eye on the publishers Hooded Horse and Microprose, who both seem to cater somewhat to older-school players.

The future I see is dominated by lots of rehashed trash, marketed to eager and uncritical buyers, on AAA and indie levels both, and increasingly more games-as-service and, above all, mobile games ported to PC.

Really? Even with things like Elden Ring, Cyberpunk, Red Dead, etc coming out recently?

The mobile games take is a bit scary I'll admit. Haven't looked into it too much but I do see kids gaming on their phones in public, which horrifies me for some reason.

I readily admit that Cyberpunk is a rare gem, rough as it is. Elden Ring I never played, but from what I gather it's mostly a continuation of the Dark Souls series under a different name, so while it may not be trash, I would say it's squarely a rehash of a well-established formula. As for Red Dead, again I didn't play it, but as far as I can tell it dazzles with scale and AAA production value but doesn't exactly do anything new, either. My judgement may be off in either case.

But even with those three, how much further does your etc go? Other than them, the biggest sellers on steam are still counter-strike, call of duty, battlefield, EA sports, GTA, DOTA, Starfield, Total War, various MMOs...all extremely formulaic by now. Trash by my snobbish taste, and certainly rehashes.

There are innovative games, of course, but I'd go so far as to say that they're universally indie productions. And with the games market as it is, most of those seem to fail financially, at best subsisting on developer passion and small but dedicated niche audiences. The few that break out and become successful, say Factorio or Vampire Survivors, are immediately followed by an unceasing deluge of copycats.

Really, at present my only hope for gaming remaining at all interesting rather than a form of wireheading is specialized publishers like Hooded Horse. Can't praise them enough. See for yourself: https://hoodedhorse.com/games/

Elden Ring I never played, but from what I gather it's mostly a continuation of the Dark Souls series under a different name, so while it may not be trash, I would say it's squarely a rehash of a well-established formula. As for Red Dead, again I didn't play it, but as far as I can tell it dazzles with scale and AAA production value but doesn't exactly do anything new, either. My judgement may be off in either case.

I think we've talked about souls games before and agreed to disagree, but I'm a complete simp for both of those games so I a) will take any opportunity to talk about them and b) can't let that statement stand unchallenged. As far as video games go, I used to consider Metal Gear Solid 5 the pinnacle of immersive video game design until rdr2 came out, and I considered rdr2 the pinnacle of immersive video game design until I played Elden Ring, although they are immersive in very different ways.

Rdr2 is the perfect balance of immersive sim and action adventure. Whereas immersive sims usually model everything, but 95% of it is pointless, in rdr2 95%of what you can interact with has a point, but because it covers so many different experiences it feels pointless at the start. Like, to mount a horse in rdr you just got close to it and tapped Y, so when you play rdr2 and you have to get close to your horse, highlight it with LT and then mount it with Y (instead of leading it or brushing it or feeding it) it just feels unnecessarily convoluted. But it soon becomes second nature, and when it does you realise it allows you to connect and interact with the world in a much deeper way. Then on top of that you get absolutely pitch perfect gunslinger gun play, with just enough bullet time to make you feel like The Man With No Name, capable of dropping a room full of strangers between blinks, or of humiliating an opponent by disarming him and shooting his hat off. Throw in a story that works great as a Western but also beautifully tells the tale of generation x - torn between the depravity of freedom and the suffocation of modernity - an old cowboy trying to save the people who worship him from the life he simultaneously loathes and glorifies - and rdr2's greatest flaw is that it didn't get a single player expansion.

And Elden Ring is genius. While it is true that it follows the souls formula, it is a pure disservice to call it a rehash, it expands and refines the formula in every way possible, and unlike the souls games it can be made incredibly easy right from the start - go magic build. I have platinumed Elden Ring on the playstation and pc, and the reason I did it a second time was because once the melee combat clicked with me I felt like I'd cheated myself a bit doing it as a mage. The story telling is pretty similar to the souls games - gleaned through archaeology and parsing the subtext in conversations, but in a universe steeped in cosmic horror as much as Elden Ring it works so well! I don't need to know exactly why I have stumbled across the stone bodies of hundreds of people petrified while clawing their eyes out to know I'm approaching a being of incredible power. And the world itself, the environment, is awesome. And I have to say awesome, because it fills you with awe - I want to say beautiful, because it is beautiful at times, but at other times it is purely grotesque, a nightmare brought to life, the very thought of turning another corner filling you with dread.

My theory (which I've probably explained here before, but for others reading) is that it's almost impossible to explain soulsborne games to people who aren't fans of the genre in a way that will hook them, because the real hook of soulsborne games comes when they finally click. When you finally understand how to spot the tells, how to time and lead them, and how to throw them back in your enemies face. Because when that happens the game changes completely. Number One starts playing in your head, you start grinning with half your mouth and saying '-tt-' a lot, all that shit.

But Elden Ring has more than just the soulsborne hook, I swear. It worms its way into your heart and mind so you never want to leave the lands between. It has two best waifus, buff santa, and a blind girl you can trick into eating eyeballs for laughs. I'm gonna go play it again now.

Yeah man I just started playing Elden Ring, and it's amazing. First time going down a well, I was blown away!!!

Oh yeah, I knew it was a special game when I realised the underground levels could be as beautiful as above ground.

You're almost selling me on those games, but you've got the wrong man for subtlety. What you need to tell me is whether, unlike Dark Souls, Elden Ring is meaningfully playable with KB+M.

Other than that, I wonder why the Souls games and Red Dead never held much attraction for me, while they get that much love from you. You've written out the second part, but allow me to have a brief look at the first: I played but never finished Dark Souls - at some point memorizing attack patterns just became boring to me and I felt like it gave me too little for how much effort it expected. I had seen the setting, and sure enough I appreciate the excellent craftsmanship behind the map, but lore-wise it seemed to be all style without substance. You call it subtext-based, but to me it was just vague and meaningless. And I adore westerns, but I just don't trust a big company like Rockstar to tell a good western story. I expect it to be modern cinematic tripe wearing a cowboy hat and a gravelly voice. An overrated deconstruction like Unforgiven, maybe, or even just a tale of social justice given some token masculinity to help it sell. I know you just said it isn't so, and I'll certainly place that on my mental scales, but right now they're still inclined in favor of generous cynicism.

(It also doesn't help that those games are expensive.)

Thanks for explaining your view!

Oh hell no, Elden Ring is a complete bitch to play without a controller. Rdr2 is great though, really customisable but even the default is well thought out.

The thing about rdr2's story is that it is written by gen xers, so it absolutely deconstructs the hell out of everything. So it depends on what aggravates you about deconstructions - if it's any kind of pomo meta bullshit that annoys you, you are going to have a bad time. But if it's the fact that everyone deconstructs everything the same fucking way to get the same pat globohomo message of 'peace and love and consume and victims are wonderful' then you might actually enjoy it, because it's not that. There are elements of that - it's a triple a game, but Rockstar put a lot of effort into working them in as a natural extension of the story, like with Lenny your black protege, and Sadie your female protege.

I know I'm being very forgiving but my rationale is that big companies like Rockstar have to pander to the woke a bit, they are beholden to investors and can't afford to be crucified by 90% of their advertisers (the gaming press). So I can tolerate the diversity bullshit, because they put a sincere effort into making it fit the story and setting. Like I said, rdr2 and elden ring are immersive in very different ways - in rdr2 you feel like you are in the world because you have so much input, whereas in er you get sucked in by the environmental storytelling.

But shit man, if you nailed dark souls so hard you can no longer not see the seams, you probably will bounce off er. It's significantly more refined and there are more systems at play, but if they don't distract you from the loops I know it's not going to be any less frustrating. I do think you should give rdr2 a go though.

I'd say our main point of divergence is that I like vague and meaningless storytelling. I like putting my own ideas into it and especially figuring out what the author was going for.

This is kind of disjointed, sorry about that - this is actually my third attempt writing it because I guess brave really doesn't like android 14 - I can't even change tabs without it refreshing since I updated. Largely I agree with you though and I think we should get a thread about indie games going.

Hah. I don't do long posts on the phone because I tend to fatfinger the back-button, thus deleting it all. Sorry to hear that your digits, too, are too clumsy for your device!

And alright, alright. No Elden Ring for me, I won't be getting a controller, but you sold me on RDR2. I'll get it when it's cheap enough for my slim wallet.

I'd say our main point of divergence is that I like vague and meaningless storytelling. I like putting my own ideas into it and especially figuring out what the author was going for.

Absolutely fair assessment. I for one can't stand that kind of thing - on finishing any book by Gene Wolfe, I have to simultaneously admire his craftsmanship and curse him for leaving me with a giant mess to sort out and not enough information to do it with.

I think we should get a thread about indie games going.

I might do that when next I feel the need to review something. Might be a while yet because my gaming budget dried up. Or I could drag out one of my more readable steam reviews and freshen it up a little. Hell, I'll certainly join in if you start it first. Games are just much nicer than culture war, lately.

Really? Even with things like Elden Ring, Cyberpunk, Red Dead, etc coming out recently?

All these games came out after my AAA burnout. Starting around Skyrim I couldn't make myself finish any major game, and at some point I decided there's better uses for $60 or whatever they're going for these days.

The first one actually impressed me more than the second so far

The second had much better characterization; the first a much better plot. I liked the gameplay of the first (except the Mako parts) equally or better, but IIRC most people disagree with me.

I think Shamus Young (RIP) had the best discussion textbook about the quality changes throughout the trilogy. [edit: probably should have loaded other replies before commenting too...]

I actually liked the Mako parts. Driving around and shooting at big Geth machines (armatures?) was fun. I wish Starfield had a Mako.

Most people prefer ME2 to ME1, but I agree with Shamus Young (RIP): ME2 might be better mechanically, but narratively it's much weaker, mostly propped up by its ensemble cast of cool characters, of which only Mordin and Legion aren't returning from ME1.

ME1 has a unique space brutalist aesthetic, like it’s a very clearly Canadian game, and not just Canadian but from those northern Alberta cities - Edmonton or Calgary - where Winter is white snow and grey brutalist buildings above endless underground tunnels and passages and bridges people use to get around in downtown. Yes, the art and architecture is inspired by Syd Mead, but also by Edmonton’s Alberta Law Courts building, and by the West Edmonton Mall, which opened in 1981 and was the world’s largest until 2004.

It’s a uniquely 70s and early 80s vision of the future, these fuzzy orange screens projected above rough concrete covered in vines and other greenery. It’s also one that was completely abandoned in Mass Effect 2 and 3 (except for the Salarian homeworld to a limited extent) for the white-plastic-and-glass look of Star Trek 2009 and the second and third Star Wars prequel movies.

Yeah the aesthetics in ME1 appealed to me a lot more for some reason. Less slick and utilitarian gray everywhere, more just kind of grungy run down shit that still felt alive and had some character.

Also the writing was just more sparse and there was less comedic relief all the time. Still enjoying ME2 though.

I thoroughly enjoyed ME2 enough to go through it at least twice, but there were lingering odd feelings I couldn't articulate until reading Shamus' ME retrospective - which is probably one of the best long-form critiques I've ever read, and one I couldn't agree with more. Every complaint he makes with ME2's story and tone had me going "Yes! That's why X felt so off or out of step with the first game!".

People focus so much of their ire on ME3's end, but I think it's clear the problems start with ME2. They just aren't as obvious without hindsight and actually revisiting the middle part of the trilogy with a fresh perspective. The first game still feels really special to me.

If it's your kind of thing, I would definitely check Shamus' series after finishing the games! Shame about his passing this year. He was good at what he did.

Shame about his passing this year. He was good at what he did.

What I wouldn't give for him to have been here for the System Shock remake and BG3.

The way I always thought about it is that the character loyalty quests were very good, but the main quest was a giant distraction from the actual ME story. They even had to create a DLC to tie it together with ME3.

Thanks for not spoiling! I'm excited to see where the story goes, it's quite interesting so far.

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