Stepos Venzny

Reading how it works, it sounds nightmarish. I only have the myopia so I only know bifocals in theory but it sounds like they’re replacing something dependably consistent with something that’s constantly trying to guess what I want it to do. I don’t like that in any technology but I extremely don’t want it applied to an entire sense.

Put a button on the side that manually toggles between a preprogrammed close mode and far mode then I’m into it.

There’s like an emotional component to it, though. Having lots of options doesn’t necessarily feel like lots of options. Deus Ex and hundreds of gigs of not Deus Ex feels like a yes or no decision, trying one of the multitude of other options being psychically equivalent just turning the machine off. At least in my experience.

Hence the suggestion of a compilation. Multiple other games but connected to each other to form a greater whole. Five minutes of Balatro and five minutes of One Way Heroics feels like ten minutes of not playing Deus Ex, whereas five minutes of Magic Garden and five minutes of Mortol feels like ten minutes of UFO 50.

Deus Ex is great but 55 hours of having nothing to do but Deus Ex sounds overwhelming. Grab UFO 50 as well so you have some low-commitment alternatives to fall back on.

If I were given carte blanche to redesign 3D Sonic gameplay, making it control like a faster-moving Tony Hawk game seems like the way to go. Sort of the middle ground between conventional platforming and vehicle control.

On my seventh attempt, I walked into a store and was told yes when asking if there were any Switch 2s in stock. The young cashier adorably turned to his older coworker and unironically said “Wow, that’s four in one day! You weren’t kidding about these things.”

So anyways the past few days have been a blur of Mario Kart World. The new mechanics are a challenge to learn but they’re a challenge I’m delighted to have and make me feel incredible when I’m using them well, the soundtrack full of remixed classics on par with the best of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s that are just there to fill the empty space between the proper racetracks, and I was not prepared for HDR in the hands of Nintendo’s artists. This game is by far the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on a screen and that was already true before I looked up how to use that shockingly unhelpful calibration tool the Switch 2 has and now it’s twice as beautiful on top of that.

The sole complaint I have about this game is that I’m not enjoying Waluigi’s new voice actor. I can’t hear the pain underlying the mania that Martinet understood was core to the otherwise ill defined character. His animations and his costumes are so fucking good, though, it’s hard to even care that his voice is downgraded.

I have lost so many Baldur’s Gate 3 Honour Mode runs because I’ve accidentally blown up the Zentarim hideout.

Did you know that having a torch equipped as your melee weapon means you’re considered to be carrying an open flame even when you’ve switched to have your ranged weapon out? I just found that out yesterday. Always learning new and exciting ways to explode.

Jeez, what was starting with 3 like?

I finally picked up Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, this being a game that’s been on my radar since well before it came out because I was a big fan of Jet Set Radio Future back in the day. It’s kind of too much like it and not enough like it at the same time? I tried the original Jet Set Radio when that came out on Steam and bounced off it but based on that limited experience I think this is kind of splitting the difference and that’s where most of the frustrations come from. Movement is more like JSRF but level design is more like JSR. And the soundtrack seems to lack that variety of some songs being made for the game and others being licensed that kept the monotony at bay. No “Aisle 10” to slow things down for a bit.

I am enjoying it, though, for as little as it sounds like I am. Movement feels good enough that it’s making me search for combo lines for the sake of combo lines and at the end of the day that’s what’s really important about this kinda game.

Also finally finished Zelda echoes of wisdom.

Never would have guessed going in that that would have the most graphically violent last boss sequence the series has ever seen. I beat it feeling like I was the real monster.

I think the Saturn hole is Saturn.

The Terminator TV show feels the most prescient. They took a chess playing computer and said “This seems to play chess like a human would and that means it’s basically the same as human consciousness. Let’s try to teach it morality by talking to it and then have it run the military.”

Then it spent the rest of the series more interested in Lego Bionicles than Jesus and nobody on the project ever said “You know, maybe this thing that wasn’t at all designed to run the military is a bad fit for running the military.” They were just chilled by its indifference to their values and really hoped they could reason it into being something it’s not by the time they give it the power to kill everyone.

I hope you’re not playing Anniversary Edition for your first time with the game. Getting bombarded with all that Creation Club stuff would not be my ideal first impression.

I got that Blue Prince bug where your data secretly stops saving twice now. I read it’s been fixed but playing the game has a tension behind it now that’s discouraging me from investing too much in it, psychologically speaking, and also I’m hesitant to play anything else on the PlayStation because closing the Blue Prince application on it risks being hit by the bug again if it does still exist.

Which all seems like the universe telling me it’s time to try Baldur’s Gate 3 Honour Mode again with these new subclasses. I’ve made a dragonborn barbarian, planning for him to be a giant that specializes in punching, playing him arrogant and naive. Lae’zel and Wyll feel like good companions for that temperament but I don’t know who my third should be. Maybe stick with a hireling until I get one of the druids? He’s too insecure to tolerate Shadowheart or Gale. Astarion or Karlach would mean having to reclass somebody so there’d be a support role on the team and reclassing the origins never sits well with me.

UPDATE: Things did not go well at the goblin camp.

I saw a video of someone demoing a Skyrim AI mod and it sent him on a quest that didn’t exist because it just made shit up when he asked, despite the AI being fed all the true information about the game.

I’m deep into Blue Prince right now. Not loving all the randomness for this kind of puzzle game but the puzzles and lore are good enough to keep me going. Always a weird feeling to think “I love this, I just wish its core premise wasn’t part of it.”

Final Fantasy VII Remake, when the proper Jenova theme played. Props to the hours of auditory misdirect leading up to it.

“We wouldn’t just play it, of course. That song is too silly for a dramatic scene. But here is a subdued motif to remind you of it.”

“Well we have to play it now because there’s a new Jenova fight but you’re getting the respectable cinematic version.”

“Now the fight’s really getting going, you’re getting the upper hand so time to boost the epicness and heroicness during the climax. Isn’t this song so cool now that we fixed it?”

Then the synthesizer finally kicks in and it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard.

I simply cannot bring myself to care that giant corporations won’t make as much money as they used to by doing a thing I already don’t really like. If this is what the industry’s death entails, why should anyone grieve?

I like open world games when the time I spend simply being in them without any explicit objective is enjoyable. If I’m thinking “I’m bored, where’s the next task?” then there’s a problem. If I’m thinking “I wonder if I can make a boat that operates by paddling instead of using a fan…” then we’re good.

(Tears of the Kingdom’s physics don’t work that way, I’m sorry to report. Thing flailed around like it was drowning.)

Cults have intentions to exploit and manipulate. LLMs don’t.

You could argue negligence here but not malice. It’s more in line with people falling into wells.

If you limit yourself to only going into dungeons that quests send you to, you’ll have a better time. Legend tells it all the dungeons in this whole game were made by one person, so blundering into random ones tends to be really underwhelming compared to Skyrim. While that is charming for me in its own right to wander into a random dungeon and not know whether there will be anything interesting about it at all, all my best memories of this game are of the quests and the dialogue.

I can’t put Oblivion down but I keep scrapping my character. Started as a stealth build but stealth isn’t as fun as combat. Made an unarmed fighter and was very impressed with how deadly I was but ultimately decided new weapons and spells are a fun treat that I wouldn’t get to have and I regretted how wacky I made his face.

Presently I’m doing a melee/magic type and I accidentally made him look uncannily like Wynn Duffy from Justified. He’s less capable than previous builds but kind of sucking at what he does just feels right with that face.