Thursday Next

Done's Souls.

Oh my gawwwd can we keep politics out of music please? (This song bangs by the way!)

I am fucking *pumped* for politics to get boring again.

Quick sketch of my sleepy cat wot I did on my Remarkable 2.

I should probably do the same. How do you calibrate it? It's ages since I did that. It seems to work ok, but better is better.

That whole political wing (politicians and voters) is a cesspool of hypocrisy. They chant "blue lives matter" until a cop stands between them and the capitol, at which point they beat him to death with a flag. GOP say they stand for law and order until their president breaks the law. Reps claim to be about family values and then elect and support a man who cheats on his pregnant wife, and openly insults their partners. They claim to be "pro-life" and then refuse to give the needy food and shelter. I think Dems have their own issues. They can't decide whether to be progressive or centrist and so lose both arguments. Their supporters tend to let perfection be the enemy of the good. They fail to do what needs to be done because they get hung up on what should be done.

Is that Majora's Mask?

Yeah, that's fair. MS ahead of the pack in that sense. Stadia, PS Plus, Epic store is, I think, the norm at the mo.

To be fair, you can "claim" via the app, and on desktop site as well as the PS5 itself. It's no different to the Epic thing really where you have to "get" the game, add to library, whatever, Stadia does the same. It's a bit of a pain, but a low lift really.

I'm also getting back into PSVR. Now I have a PS5, I've set the PS4 Pro+VR up in the home office (I didn't want to set it up in the lounge as i) It has way too many cables and the missus would have my head on pike; and ii) No HDR passthrough on the gen-1 VR box which means either even more cables so I can run a splitter, or unplugging stuff so I can play games with HDR. I'm playing through the last level of I Expect You To Die, and picked up Statik again, and (as Ethan knows) started Star Wars: Squadrons. For any who don't know, I Expect You To Die is a bond-esque escape the room game (the first level has you in a Blofeld-like villain's car, in the back of a plane trying to make your escape). It's really enjoyable, there are multiple ways to solve each of the missions, plus extra things to do to unlock stuff for your home base. Because every scenario involves you being sat down in a static environment, I've experienced no motion sickness issues, which is a boon. Statik is a puzzle game in the same spirit as Portal. You are being held in a mysterious test lab being asked to do things by an equally mysterious scientist. It lurches from Orwellian to surreal. Squadrons is amazing. Really nails the space fighter feeling. My one complaint is that it starts you with controls that are i) Not inverted, which for a flight sim type game is nuts; and worse ii) The left stick controls acceleration and roll, the right stick pitch and yaw. The second preset layout is called "Pilot" and has the sticks set up correctly with pitch and roll on the right and speed/yaw on the left. No idea why this isn't the default and it made me spend the first mission and a half hating the game. Now the bugs are ironed out though, I'm loving it.

Yeah, it is way too small. Need at least 2TB, probably more like 10.

Not a US lawyer, much less a constitutional US lawyer, but my understanding is the 2/3 vote in the senate decides it and he can't run again.

Bloodborne is sexy af. Does Squadrons target where you look?

I don't even get it from a political pov. His term is done and Dems have control of both houses. Why not a) get Dems on-side by doing a bi-partisan impeachment (and collect payback later) and; b) ensure that the next republican president (whenever that may be) is a more predictable, moderate, reliable one? Trump isn't a career politician, he doesn't have the clout of e.g. Clinton around the Capitol. Once he loses the White House he's toast (until next election season), he doesn't have the backing of any of the civilian agencies (except maybe ICE). His base can froth at the mouth all they want, but they can't hurt the reps by voting in Trump again, ever, and there is no way they are going to vote for Kamala or AOC (who would be my bets for next Dem candidate) so the risk minimal. I'm re-reading The Prince, and I'm reminded of this quote: "one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge."

Is Valhalla also RPG-y? Hard-pass if so. I liked AC as an action/adventure game. Not interested in it as an RPG.

Demon's Souls Remake What can I say? Nothing unexpected. I love FromSoft games, so I'll do NG+ to mop up the remaining trophies and then go back to waiting on Elden Ring.

Is it because he is full of the exaggerated swagger of a black teen?

I'm nearly there on my first completion of Demon's Souls. Think I'm going to plat it. I normally find NG+ way easier than NG.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161206/07190336205/game-review-site-says-square-enix-blacklisted-them-to-punish-low-review-scores.shtml here's another one. Most "blacklisting" I have heard of is more in relation to leaks than to scores. But there are definitely lists of "friendly" outlets (and "influencers") who will get the gold-star treatment, in the hope (if not certainty) that a better than average review will result. I mean you only have to watch a release from a big publisher. The first week on metacritic is mostly high, 8-10, then week 2 you see that number trend downwards as less favoured sites get their say. I don't even think that it is necessarily a deliberate attempt to mislead on the part of either journalists or publishers. Nobody is saying "this game is a bit shit, we'd better lean on publications for a better score before we get found out" (or at least they aren't in my presence). Rather, a publication that is given free stuff will generally feel better disposed towards a product, and publishers are more likely to want to work with people where they have a positive history. It's just human nature. You're more likely to be generous to people you like, and people you are generous with are more likely to like and support you. The same goes for reviews of similar games from different publishers. Bethesda can release buggy rpgs and people just chuckle along and say it is "part of the charm" and get an easy 8/9, EA release Mass Effect Andromeda and get heavily criticised and downgraded for the bugs and facial animations with cries of "did they even QA this?" The fact that it is not deliberate does not mean that the "reviews" part of "games journalism" are not marketing though. They absolutely are.

Someone once asked me if there was one thing I could change about the company, what would it be. Easiest question ever. I would not be publicly traded. If you're a private company, then all you need to do is make enough money to pay your staff for long enough to make your next game. As soon as you are publicly traded, you've got so show that you are going to make X times more profit than you did last year, that's what leads to hard deadlines, and therefore crunch and sub-standard products, predatory monetisation practices, mass layoffs, and pretty much every other negative thing the games industry has to offer.

https://www.thegamer.com/game-reviewers-cyberpunk-2077-last-of-us/ "If you think journalism is marketing, you probably need to brush up on your media literacy skills." I work with some people in PR who would be very surprised to learn this... Also... half a decade necro thread! Whoo!

That's fair. What I expected performance wise was: Last gen console: utterly unplayable. Next gen console: Middling to shit. PC version: Ok with some hacking, provided you can live with Bethesda style bugs (npc's going invisible, t-posing, or straight up disappearing locking you out of quest lines). What I expected "game" wise was: Good/great world building, at least one of the shooting/rpg/driving elements to feel a bit shit, and a sense that the package as a whole underdelivered. I don't want you to say anything, sounds like it's living up to/exceeding your expectations, and that's great, I know you were really excited for this and I'm glad you are pleased with what you got to play. I'm not one of those people that thinks every game has to be for everyone (or in particular for me) so it's cool that you like it. This game is 100% not for me, for myriad reasons (I also do not like Bethesda games, partly because their buginess hacks me off) and that is fine RDR2 is also not for me, but I don't doubt that it is a great game. I just think it really sucks for all the last gen people who really wanted this game that it's been such a bad experience for them, and (as you say in your last post) that CDPR should have delayed/cancelled the console version. I think a delay on next gen would have gotten them to where they need to be (if you align your expectations with Bethesda buginess), and cancelling last gen until/unless they could get it in a playable state would have been the consumer friendly way to go. Alas, publicly traded companies gonna publicly trade, so here we are. Anyway, enough of the negativity. How are you finding the game? What's been your favourite part of it?

Oh cool. Yeah I mean, if you mean "What did *I* expect?" then yes, *I* expected a buggy dumpster fire of an experience. If you mean "What did the average consumer, who only really knows that this game is the hot, new shit expect?" then, yeah. A working game at least.

In fairness, if you drop $60 on a game, even if it is a last gen version of a next gen game, I think it is not unreasonable to expect that you can play from beginning to end. CDPR really burned a lot of goodwill by screwing over what is probably their largest player base (next gen consoles are tiny compared to XBOne/PS4) PC might be larger, but it'll be close.

Demon's Souls - Back in Boletaria