Lurker > Bartzyx

it's an insult, so yes.

Fall Guys what a bad game

My spouse got her PhD and left academia after a few years to do private research. There might be some job for you that uses your degree and you still get to use those academic skills.

Yeah whenever I am in a text thread with my family I get bombarded with texts "so-and-so loved this" and things like that. It's super obnoxious. But I am so used to android that I cannot ever see myself switching to something else. I once had a work iphone and was not at all impressed.

transience posted...

wait, a family discord? that's wild. why not like a text thread? this must be with people outside the house? I'm fascinated by this.

I started it with my parents and siblings (8 of us, all adults now) and their spouses, because half the family uses iphones and those of us without iphones felt left out of that ecosystem (imessage, facetime). It just became this way to keep in touch during covid, as we are scattered across the US and the most remote of us (including me) could not see anyone for years.

My mom barely uses it but we have a channel for pictures of her grandkids that she reacts to regularly. Before this I would often go several months without talking to some of my family members but now we have regular interactions. We have channels for memes, sports, pictures, games, etc. and I think it's helped us grow closer together. It's certainly helped us get through the isolation of covid.

I'm getting to the point where I will soon have an adult niece (she turns 16 soon), which is very strange. I will visit that family in a couple months.

I own a house and work long hours (main job and "side hustle") because I can't stop being productive, and always have some home improvement project going on. I am going to have a kid soon whenever that happens. And then I still find a few hours a week to sit down and play video games on my TV. No mobile games for me, it's couch or nothing.

With the warming weather I'm going to plant my vegetable garden this weekend. The seeds stay indoors until the last frost happens. My newest plant to try is pinto beans which should be interesting. Last year had a ton of success with pepper plants.

My siblings and spouse all play a ton of wordle/etc. and share the results on our family discord. Yes, we have a family discord which I think is something I never would have thought about years ago.

It depends a ton on the make and model. And replacing a few key parts (like transmission) can give the car a new 100k+ lease on life.

I use Bluehost for my sites and I have not been impressed. I will probably switch when my contract is up.

Do you think you will still be doing what you do five years from now?

Badland (PS4)

Badland is a mobile game that was ported to console. It's a simple one button plus one stick game. You control this little flying thing that has to navigate an auto-scrolling level full of deadly obstacles. Not hard to pick up, but very challenging and kind of frustrating at times. It's pretty fair, with only a couple moments feeling like they are too hard, at least as far as finishing the game. There are side missions in each level which might be a bit too hardI went for a few and I am not even going to try to go for all of them.

Devil May Cry HD (PS3)

I came to this game kind of late. Never played any other game in the series before, so did not know quite what to expect. My first experience in the genre was the God of War series, which I see owes a lot to DMC. Some of it is very explicitly taken from it, like the red orbs in both games, or the interconnected world.

Devil May Cry is very rough, but that's not surprising for what it is. It was early on the PS2 and I do not think there was anything quite like it before. The problems with the game are a product of its time: bad voice acting/dialogue, awful camera, and uneven balance. In some ways the game feels like a prototype of later character action games. Some of the attacks you can unlock early are game-breaking if you just spam them. This is not a problem on harder difficulties, because once you get to the toughest one, it doesn't really matter what attacks you use, they all do basically nothing. On normal, it's easy to just kind of forget any sort of comboing or strategy.

But going back to the difficulty, Dante Must Die! was a bit too much for me. It did compel me to really improve my play, but ultimately I finished it by grinding out NG+ items and using them to brute force my way through a few of the hardest bosses. I think with enough patience I could have done it the normal way, but I got tired of it and the items you get are basically cheat codes once you stockpile enough of them.

The style is a turnoff for me. Very "edgy" and every character is totally boring. Dante is so silly. I was happy to finally understand the context of the infamous "fill your dark soul with light" scene, though. It's slightly less nonsensical to me now.

Back to the Future The Game (PS3)

This game seems like an amazing love letter for anyone who loves BttF. There are a ton of callbacks to the films, the developers managed to get a voice actor who does an uncanny impression of a young Michael J. Fox, and of course, Christopher Lloyd reprising his role as Doc does a great job. I like the films just fine, but I'm not a fan by any stretch of the imagination, so I mostly judge this game from an outsiders perspective.

It's a decent traditional adventure game. The story is not as good as the films, but that's not shockingfew games can stand up in that sense. It is good enough. Like most Telltale adventure games, it is split into five episodes, each 2-3 hours long. It does a commendable job at avoiding complicated puzzles or logical leaps, although there are a few spots where it's basically 'try everything and see what works.' I got a little stuck in the Speakeasy sequence with George McFly's picture and the final episode when trying to jog Edna's memory, though those are rare exceptions. For a Telltale game, the performance is pretty smooth.

The game hits a lull in the middle. The Citizen Brown stuff is kind of goofy and not really compelling, and the adventure tasks in that episode are not stimulating. It leaks a bit into episode 4, but going back to the main setting helps a lot with that. The finale also feels a little disconnected from the rest of the game. The main conflict wraps up halfway through the fifth episode and then another thing happens that could have maybe been it's own episode, but is resolved in two scenes. Despite this, I still say I enjoyed playing and it's a fun epilogue to that movie trilogy. If you have not seen the movies or don't like them, I think this one is easy to skip.

inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood (PS3)

I beat this one in a day. It's a stand-alone DLC for Infamous 2 and it's fine. The bat flying power is a cool new thing to use to get around. Might like it more if you are really into the whole Vampire/Halloween thing, but I'm not. It's basically 3-4 hours of more Infamous, for better or worse.

Telltale Games' Poker Night (PS3)

Like all Telltale games on PS3, this is one laggy glitchy mess. It's Texas hold-em with some characters that may or may not make you laugh. I enjoyed Sam and Max but did not really care about anyone else. I do not play poker often so I had to brush up on my skills, but once I got into it the AI is kind of a breeze to beat. Very easy to avoid showdowns, except against Ash, who often busts out right away because he's an idiot.

The game saves after every hand and for some reason that causes the whole thing to freeze more often than not, which really ruins the experience. Either the whole game stops, or it stutters, or the lines glitch and repeat. By the time I finished all the trophies, I had gotten through all the preset conversations and things got a bit repetitive. Glad this one had been free at some point because I can't imagine paying for it.

The free PS3 themes are cool I guess.

inFAMOUS 2 (PS3)

This game is a technical improvement over the first one. Back then, it was pretty normal for games in a series to come out every two years, with each entry just a little different than the last. Infamous 2 is very very much like the first game. The powers are a little different, but the game plays mostly the same. You do story missions that gradually unlock the open world, you do side missions to make the bad guys disappear, and collect little shards to power up.

So whether you think Infamous 1 or 2 is better probably comes down to the setting and story. Infamous 2 features the same kinds of good/evil choices as the first game, but ties them to a couple new characters that you meet. Which character you choose to side with determines if you are good or bad or whatever, and also gives an excuse to tie the good or evil powers to certain elements. It mostly works. The city of Fake New Orleans was not as fun as Fake New York, and the new characters did not really catch my interestKessler was a much more interesting antagonist than whatever the bad guy was in this gamebut overall I think it was a better, more polished experience than the first game.

It helped that I took a two year break between playing them. I actually started the game right after beating the first one, but lost interest after a couple hours and just never got back to it until my PS4 stopped working a few months ago.

God of War doesn't hold up well today, but when it came out it was pretty sensational. The graphics and sound design were incredible for the PS2, and it took the type of action gameplay that Devil May Cry had introduced and polished it up a bunch. It's heavily influenced by that seriesand it proudly wears that influence on its sleevebut it came with much higher production values and was much more user friendly. No more wrestling with the camera, very little jank, many more grand setpiece moments, and a ton of edginess. Early to mid 2000s were all about being edgy. And the spectacular bosses were kind of jaw-dropping, too. If I remember correctly, it managed to hide loading times in the seamless world, which few games were doing at that point.

The problem with it is, it's been done much much better a dozen times since then, including by every other game in its own series.

Downwell (PS4)

This is probably the best game I played last year. It's a simple roguelike but incredibly addicting and very challenging. The super high skill cap made all the hours (maybe 30 total?) I dumped in worth it. Once you can start getting huge combos consistently, the game becomes so satisfying. It's also got a pretty good score that despite getting repetitiverestarts on the first stage happen a lotdid not get on my nerves that much.

Entwined (PS4)

I do not have much to say about this one. It's a pretty boring, kinda artsy, rhythm-type game. The whole game is just rotating the thumbsticks to line up some patterns. Not hard to beat but frustrating to master. I didn't bother doing the 100% on itjust not worth the effort and sore thumbs.

Still catching up on some of the games that I beat last year.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered (PS4)

Another adventure game down. This one is much better than the last one. I played a little bit of the original PC game when if first came out, but at that age I just could not really understand how to get through. 30 years later, the adventure game logic is a bit easier. Still got stumped on a couple places for a long time (the cherry tree was the biggest offender for me), but for the most part it was very reasonable. I had a lot of fun with it.

The voice acting still holds up really well, all things considered. Lots of amusing little jokes spread throughout, and great art. I tried to do Maniac Mansion again too, but I just did not have the patience for that. Turns out there is a big difference between 80s and 90s adventure games. UI improvements probably are the biggest difference.

Deponia

I like adventure games but this one just was not very good. The main character is completely despicable and I know that you're supposed to hate him, but also, most other characters are pretty unlikable, too. The puzzles are mostly logical, but there are a few silly leaps that you have to take which I find pretty common in these games. The humor was very hit and miss, and sometimes a bit offensive. I do not think I would recommend this one to anybody except the most dedicated adventure game enthusiasts.