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A 1970 Corvette

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Posts posted by A 1970 Corvette

  1. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

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    Spoiler

    Not really in any order (I wanted a theme but it’s a terrible one of “weapons from every game that were a lot of fun”) 

     

    Noita - I think this game embodies a lot of things that I love about games (you'll probably see themes repeated a lot in my praise). This game is literally all about knowledge. It starts out seemingly impossible and inscrutable, with your deaths being served up at random and your abilities randomly deciding to be amazing or trash, and as you play you unravel the mystery. Actually, the unraveling of the mystery is one of the most beautiful things about the game: The process of discovery is at all layers of the game. You discover new things about the magic, you discover new things about enemies, you discover new things about the world, you receive tiny snippets of info that tell you what might lie beyond the main path. I still love to play this game, but I wish I could also go back to when it was that bizarre game that drew me in despite making me kill myself in a spectacular way every run. There is just so much to discover in this game and it inspires a sense of wonder when you happen upon something that just makes you freeze up and say "what the fuck is that?!" This is one of the few games I can say is a straight up masterpiece, because there's flaws but those flaws kind of further add to the canvas that is the game in my eyes (noobs who pick up giga saws and instakill themselves casting them may not see the art in it but I do)

     

    The wands I put in there aren't really my best, but they're just some screenshots I had lying around of silly ones. The wand crafting and magic in Noita is so damn good that I'd be happy putting any wand I made in here though.

     

    Team Fortress 2 - My first real PC game and while it's had rough patches the core game is still there (unlike another game I know...). I think the loadout customization and the room for skill expression really are what make this game kind of a rock for me. Yes there are stupid things still in but you kind of have to accept that for a multiplayer FPS game... apparently. I don't really feel like I need to sing the praises that much considering the background of SPUF tbh

     

    The huntsman is my top pick for feeling so powerful and unique to an otherwise extremely lame class and I had a funny screenshot of it being broken due to being forced into a pose it couldn't handle.

     

    PlanetSide 2 - Few people can say that they literally exhausted all content of an MMO... and I'm not one of them, but I absolutely exhausted all content that I had even the vaguest interest in for PlanetSide 2. Even with that I'd say I probably scraped about 60% of everything the game had to offer? It might be closer to 80% depending on your stances on how certain domains did or did not exist after 2016. This game has the most hours of any game I've played, and probably more than the combined hours of my next couple games. I have so much to say about this game, but it's really not anything anyone cares about, not even the people who still play. I still will play a bit here and there but ultimately running out of things was not great for my continued drive to play, or rather my ability to overlook a litany of things that detracted from what I saw as the core gameplay experience (don't get me started on this). 

    This game is a bit TF2-like where I love the sheer amount of customization in playstyle and the room for skill expression. I will say I played the game "wrong" (solo and infantry only) but it was incredibly fun getting good enough to regularly be worth several times my weight in players and basically being untouchable if enemies did not play around me or happen to match my skill level. I think bragging about how good you are in a game as non-competitive as PS2 was is kind of lame, but it's one of the few games I felt like I was in the top players for and when I was playing I generally stood at the top server performance in community stat aggregates. It felt good having reached that level, and though there were definitely better players than me I never felt helpless against anyone. And when I enacted some Dynasty Warriors-tier plays against dozens of players who really all should have killed me it was one of the best feelings in all of multiplayer FPS. Layer on top of that the open world aspect which let you seamlessly jump from fight to fight (and even pick fights where you had more enemies to shoot than friendlies, for instance), and you had a recipe for the kind of game that just became conducive to plowing through enemies for hours on end for me. 

     

    The Punisher with Impulse nades gets the theme because impulse grenades unironically broke the Light Assault class and it was the best kept secret in the meta for a long time.

     

    Halo 3: ODST - I think even moreso than a game like Halo 2 which was basically my life for some of my early years, this one sticks with me because the atmosphere and impact it had. Perhaps the impact was emphasized by the other Halo titles being all epic n shit (in the literal sense) and ODST pitching a more down to earth (heh) story with that amazing soundtrack and very distinct New Mombasa environment, but it still gets me now. I feel like if someone who never played halo games played it now it might not have the same impression, but for me it was the perfect place at the perfect time and I'll always be right back there whenever I play it.

     

    The tacticool SMG is of course what all ODST nerds dream about. They somehow made the Halo 2 SMG cool and desirable. That's quite a feat.

     

    Half-Life - Ironically it holds up better than its sequel (though I love all half life titles other than half life source) due to being before the shift towards more in-your-face storytelling elements and just having no-brakes classic FPS gameplay. This game has all of the things I love about Valve's best games, it has tight, well designed gameplay with good pacing and there's a lot of character kind of baked into it that you might not notice at first but you pick up as you come back to it. I would like to also batch in Black Mesa here which is an amazing remake but the original gets my highest praise. And also batch all the other half lifes in here because it'd be unfair for them to get more than one slot. Except half life source. Nobody likes half life source.

     

    Gluon gun is one that you always want to use but never want to waste the ammo for it. But the game is so much more fun if you just use it immediately and deal with the consequences of it being empty later.

     

    Duck Game - This is an odd duck choice compared to the rest but it's my favorite couch/party game and it's not close. My friends and I have logged a ton of hours in this game and I still love to play it whenever we've got downtime. We've played so much that some of the people who show up less often have trouble playing with us since we've got the game down really well. If you've ever got that friend who annoyingly just always wants to play that one game when you hang out, it's me and Duck Game.

     

    Grenades in duck game are so goddamn fun to use that I'll often throw just to use them instead of other better options. Cooking, predicting, using the right type of throw, abusing cover, there are so many micro-decisions that make them satisfying to use.

     

    Dishonored - This game is just an amazingly executed game for me. I love the way the levels are put together where there are all the different approaches, I love how the powers give you a lot of advanced movement options which are equally as powerful for a ghost run versus a high chaos run. I enjoyed exploring the levels and the bits of environmental storytelling and little characters that you run into within the random areas of Dunwall (I liked the set dressing and side characters probably more than the main plot, not that the main plot was bad or anything). Overall this game just really delivered on everything I wanted from the kind of game it was offering. And the sequel is still really good too but I always kind of have more respect for the original in a series (as is probably predictable at this point from my posts).

     

    That sword you always have is a tacit reminder that you can just start going apeshit instead of savescumming to get a ghost clear. It's way more fun if you listen to it and kill everyone anyway.

     

    Fallout: New Vegas - I am far from a Fallout fan and I have openly mocked this game and other games on this engine for barely ranking as FPS games due to lacking polish that games released years beforehand had in spades… but ultimately my personal litmus test for if I’ll like an action RPG has kind of been how it stacks up against F:NV. It’s just got that thing about it where this shitty desert wasteland that shouldn’t be interesting at all (trust me I’ve been there) is packed with so much stuff and you are fascinated with seeing what you’ll encounter whenever you go somewhere new. I suppose I can say that despite not having a care for the setting/series it sold itself as a great RPG and I got absorbed in it anyway because it was done so well. I usually start checking out of RPGs once the story or gameplay starts establishing patterns and FNV managed to keep me engaged even if the core gameplay was jank at best.

     

    The AMR marks that point where you don't have to be scared of deathclaws anymore and that is just one of the greatest joys. More experienced FNV players might know other tricks you can use far before that but this is the one that I always remember fondly.

     

    Titanfall 2 - This is kind of shaky for me? I feel like there’s big issues where the campaign is great but too short, and the multiplayer is good but has a lot of things that turn me off personally (the titans in their entirety lol), but it always left a lasting impression on me regardless. I kind of see it as the final evolution of that call of duty military FPS lobby shooter genre, because the base gameplay tracing all the way back to games like CoD4 is there but it just has taken all the other stuff that has been injected into the formula and puts it all together into this blindingly fast game. This last slot is kind of in contention with other honorable mentions but I just feel like TF2 was such a spark of something that I really wish caught on more than it did and spawned something enduring, though I know that ultimately it wasn’t really meant to be (even the devs knew it with how they talked about TF3 and how they ended up making Apex). But despite all that the campaign was memorable, Cause and Effect played through the first time is just insane, and the blossoming comedy act between BT and Cooper was a joy to watch unfold.

     

    Alternator was my favorite gun in the MP, it just felt like it hit really hard and was basically all on your aim and very consistent. But I was a noob so people would probably just tell me to use the CAR if I wanted to be "pro"

     

    Honorable Mentions: Deus Ex (kind of in contention with FNV and Dishonored and it’s very close. I feel bad about not having it on there tbh), some games I’m not done with yet so I can’t really put them on any lists but I think they're competitors (cruelty squad, the stalker games), and probably some older console games that I just haven’t thought about due to them being locked so deep in my memories at this point
     

    I should probably branch out a bit shouldn't I? lot of genre overlap looking back

     

    I'll have to try and find some time to comment on others but I spent too much time writing so I'll need a break.

    Silent and Huff reacted to this

  3. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    Fuck man, I've only played one of those games and it was BotW. I agree that the sequel made things a lot more gamey and it kinda undermined things for me. I think I prefer the simplicity of BotW even if it was kinda threadbare once you saw a certain amount of it.

     

    I'll definitely put together my own list for this but it's going to require a bit of reflection that I never bother doing normally so I'm definitely going to make picks, realize an hour later I forgot something, then reorganize it all over and over. Honestly it feels kinda weird to me organizing "real" games that actually have a crafted experience alongside things like multiplayer-only games where it's entirely dependent on outside people even though they're equally valid as games (especially since for me, multiplayer games drastically eclipse the amount of playtime that singleplayer games have all combined)

    Huff reacted to this

  4. Posted

    13 hours ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

    The greatest flaw of this game doesn't lie in any gameplay design at all though: it's in the UI. For some reason, Zelda devs LOVE having long, horizontally-scrolling menus these days.

    god that was my experience with tears of the kingdom that (in part) contributed to me putting it down halfway through

     

    You spend more time fighting the menus than the enemies in that game. I mean it was also a problem in BotW but it was compounded by the addition of twelve thousand new things that you had to sift through or manage in order to not be at a disadvantage

  5. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    I recently played through Echo Point Nova, an indie FPS game where you have a frictionless hoverboard and grapple and move really fast through an open world. For VR enthusiasts it's basically a non-VR Jet Island. It's a ton of fun and it's been a while since I've just sat down and wanted to 100% a game from start to finish (admittedly, it's not a large game, but it's got a decent amount of stuff to do and a fun postgame with essentially a new game + of most of the combat arenas).

     

    That itch of wanting an open world game where you can hit such insane speeds even during combat (and it's kind of encouraged, even, since speed regenerates your bullet time) is definitely something nice. A lot of games with big open worlds have fast movement but it's rare that you fight at the same speed you travel, so it was perfect to be able to have it all at once. It does get a bit broken if you unlock everything from all the side content since there's some wicked OP combos that kinda subvert the movement meta, but you don't need to break those out except for a few of the new game plus arenas (and even then you can probably beat them without cheese). My personal pick was 3x damage in midair when blast jumping, kills regenerate your midair jumps, and a rocket launcher to just maintain an infinite blast jump damage boost with air hops while killing several enemies with each rocket shot.

  6. Posted

    I had a dream that I was on the top bunk of a bunk bed and I wanted to get down but there were babies on all of the areas where you'd drop down. Like I'd look on one side and there's just some toddler hanging there. There wasn't a ladder or anything either.

     

    Basically it's that one comic panel where the bad guy has baby armor. There was no winning move. I couldn't even shimmy down one of the posts due to them being too slippery. Harrowing stuff

    Gyokuyoutama reacted to this

  7. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    I've always had a passing interest in the Dead Rising series (stemming from being the youngest and only getting to watch my brother's friend play Dead Rising 1 and being like "damn the 360 is such a badass console...") but I never actually got around to playing them. I was always keeping an eye on it on sale for that day when it felt like the right time though

     

    Did the PC port of any of them have any jank issues due to being older games? Honestly since DR1 was an early Xbox 360 title I'd almost expect it

  9. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    5 hours ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

    Nothing about the gameplay really appeals to me personally. I don't like hero shooters, or MOBAs, or forced 6v6 competitive queues. Conceptually, Deadlock seems like a game that would have been very cool 10 years ago.

    It's in that space of "if I liked games like this, this one would probably be the one I'd play" but that doesn't really mean much since that's how I felt about Dota 2, a game I basically only played some bot games for and then never felt like going past that

  10. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    21 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

    Did streaming break people's minds to the point where if something wasn't released in the last year, they don't think it exists?

    Yes, I attribute it to the same weirdness as people who complain about ads but don't use trivially-implemented ad blocking.

     

    There could be people wanting "official" versions specifically, but I seriously doubt anyone is like "well I just want to give those doom 1 and 2 developers their hard earned money!"

  11. Posted

    If you told me ten years ago we'd be getting Fate/Stay Night and Katawa Shoujo on steam I'd mainly just be confused, but I also wouldn't believe you either way. So weird to think about, but now we have furry yiff simulator with nazi hats #9001 on the front page every day so I guess the frog has just been boiled enough that random VNs are pretty much normal fare. The more remarkable thing for Fate is just that there's an official translation now, rather than it being on Steam

     

    It might be nice to go down memory lane with KS. I didn't ever do Rin's route

  12. Posted

    I was going to talk about how twitter would be usable enough for at least just following artists if it had a way to just cut out non-art posts, structure the feed in a way that isn't some shit infinite scroll and actually has pages, and lets you have a tagging system that's not just terrible hashtags, but then I realized I described a booru.

     

    I don't even know why I have one as a nobody fanartist, I guess because I haven't bothered looking into places that are better for art

  13. Posted

    6 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

    Damn it, the joke is supposed to be that only one that people recognize is the third one.

     

    Or rather, one particular character from the third one.

    Back in my day bait used to be believable!

  14. Posted

    17 hours ago, Rynjin said:

    Breath of fresh air after I bounced off Jujutsu Kaisen and started thinking to myself "am I just too old for this kind ofshow now?"
     

    The answer's no, JJK really is just a mid as fuck Bleach/Yu Yu Hakusho hybrid knockoff.

    I actually had a reverse moment of this when I started reading the Index novels where beforehand I was like "did I miss my chance to read these when I was a dumb teen?" It turns out the answer was no because those LNs are so "2000s chuunibyou" that it just claws the reader back to that headspace whether they want it to or not

  15. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    This tradition is so broken down that I forgot to do it for the last few years but recently I was in a deep dive of "stuff I've watched" in the past (due to having a mild breakdown at realizing I didn't really like Bakemonogatari that much) and I kinda like using this place to catalogue old impressions so don't mind me I'm just gonna put some "year in hindsights" that I forgot to do for the last... three years.... I swear to god I'll actually keep this up, even if it's solely so I can come back and check when I try to remember what I was doing two years ago, even if nobody else cares. This is all gonna be messy and I'll be sure to return to the image format for 2024, it's more fun but I need to finish this before I die of sleep deprivation.

     

    2021 - This year I barely watched anything which was probably why I didn't do an AotY or any recap of the situation. Given such sparse information, Love Live Superstar wins basically by default (I do really like the show though) and I don't really have any info that can fill out the chart. Superstar did something interesting where there weren't any class separations, nor a school history (sort of at least) which ran counter to the previous love live shows. I think the smaller cast (5 gorls instead of 9) did a lot of favors for letting the characters get more to do. This one is kind of hard to review since it just nails that love live feel without leaning on any kind of legacy characters or throughlines to the original or previous shows (which while Sunshine did it and it worked, you don't get to do that more than once, if that makes sense)

     

    2022

    Spoiler

     

    I actually already gushed about LycoReco, but it's basically the perfect anime original show and it's what I want all of them to be when I pick them up. Something smartly executed, tells a self-contained story, looks good throughout its runtime, and doesn't squander the time it has. Some other winners for seasonal awards were:

    -Winter for "I apparently didn't watch anything at all lmao"

    - Aharen-san for Spring for being a classic romcom premise of two neutron star dense MCs that kept the rom and com side up and didn't run out of steam due to the writer not having a good grasp on how to develop situations.

    -Summer, since LycoReco wins the year, gets love live superstar because if you haven't noticed I am a rabid love live fan and I really do love the second season: the introduction of a new class gave it an actually pretty good dramatic angle of "holy shit, the original season's cast improved so much how the hell are new students going to catch up to them?" and I really enjoy all of the new girls, especially Shiki and Mei who have a very great dynamic. It also didn't neglect the first season's characters, letting them do the classic "season 2 of a love live show" thing where some of them lose their fucking minds for no reason in an extremely funny way (though they also do an actually really good dramatic moment that was set up a season beforehand which I'd say is the high point of the show). A notable mention is Yofukashi no Uta which had a really fun anime adaption and a really damn strong soundtrack. That show gets all the soundtrack-related awards (Superstar S2 gets honorable OP mention though because We Will is a fucking banger)

    -Fall is a split between Do It Yourself!! and 4-nin wa sorezore uso wo tsuku. Do It Yourself is just a well done slice of life with an angle about DIY (shocking I know), but it adds an extra dimension by being in a somewhat futuristic setting where there are drones, AI housebots, advanced 3D printers, etc... While it doesn't go really deep with any kind of "hand work versus technology" motif, the clash with the setting is somewhat interesting as a backdrop to general cute girls doing cute things. 4-nin is kind of in a really weird spot: It felt like a comedy show from tennish years ago (the source could be that old for all I know) in all the right ways. It did a really good job of constantly leaning on the main theme of all four main characters having some kind of big lie they were hiding about themselves, and having a ton of interplay between them all. The absurd elements never go so far that the lies are completely out in the open, but they constantly push the boundaries in ways that you don't really expect. And it just has a lot of good gags. It was probably my surprise of the year, to break out extra awards.

     

    Special shoutouts to the RWBY anime for being the disappointment of the year, luckily I already went on a rant about that. This year was faaar better than 2021 and pretty nice overall, though winter clearly didn't have anything I wanted.

     

     

    2023

    Spoiler

     

    Anime of the year is Skip to Loafer. This show is pretty much a perfect school slice of life / romance story? I haven't completely read through the manga but I have done it for parts the show animated and the adaption is perfect. It adds to an already great story with the animation, and preserves all the wonderful things about it: the well written characters, the good pacing, the interconnecting relationships, just everything. I adore this show and its source so much, and I think the part that really made me realize how it was something special was how it never snubbed any character and just let the audience write them off as "the bad person," everyone is well developed and that throughline that everyone is human and is striving for something good (even if they mess up) is kind of amazing. This would also get Surprise of the year since I picked it up solely as "a simple show that I could watch without subtitles" that completely blew me away once I started it.

    -Winter: Onimai is kind of weird, but it also kind of wins by default since I didn't finish much this season. It constantly ran the border between a story about someone getting a second chance and weirdo shit that comes with gender bender stories. Honestly the parts that stuck with me the most were the stories of Mahiro having a second chance to connect with her sister and I kind of blocked out most else.

    -Spring: Mahou Shoujo Magical Destroyers wins by default (since Skip to Loafer is aoty), though I kind of have this anime in the "bad, but in a good way (?)" section of my brain which is an angle that I don't get often. It's trying so hard to have this weird punk and otaku homage theming which I think it succeeds at, but the pacing and writing is generally schizophrenic. But it's kind of schizo in a very "2000s otakubait" kind of way? It was still bad, but I think just the sheer weirdness sticks with me more than a negative overall impression. This would be both in the surprise and disappointment of the year honorable mentions at the same time.

    -Summer: This one is a tossup between Genjitsu no Yohane and Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta. Yohane is "another love live thing" but it has an extra weird angle of being a fantasy... not-adaptation... spinoff... thing? It's not even about idols, but they do randomly sing and dance a few times? Ruby is a ten inch tall fairy and Dia rides a motorcycle in power armor??? The entire show is actually just a cliche "your childhood pet grows old" type show in disguise? It's kind of weird in that someone not into Love Live Sunshine probably won't really get it, but LLS fans will probably be a little offput in that the characters are noticeably different from the main show.  And Megane show is another romcom but executed pretty well and has a very interesting artstyle due to being adapted by gohands. It's more towards the rom side of Romcom than Aharen was and has a much slower pace, but I think that works to the show's benefit.

    -Fall: KanoKano S2 is a by-default winner... Sort of. I'm currently watching Shy as of 2024 and it's actually pretty good, but I'm neither finished, nor does that count either way, so KanoKano gets it. This show has a really trashy premise but holds it all together by the MC being simultaneously incredibly dumb and also absurdly committed to the premise, and the girls involved having a lot of charm that doesn't give that classic harem pitfall where there's a clear "winner pick" that everyone will take a back seat to at the end.

     

    2023 was probably weaker than 2022 overall but still had Skip to Loafer so I mean that's all you really need.

     

     

    2024 is going to be weird because I really love the Link! Like! Love Live! story, but it's not an anime, but where the hell else do you put it? It really is just an anime on its own, but it has this weird real-time synchronous not-vtuber-but-basically-vtuber streaming angle which makes it a headache to categorize.

  16. Posted

    Fuck me, that first gen of mobile design is something I almost completely forgot about. It has a bit of the Vista/7 glass look with slight bezels on stuff like buttons which was all the rage at the time. When I saved up and got the first gen itouch it really blew my mind with all the functionality it had. I remember testing all sorts of different sites to see which ones still worked with its mobile Safari version and I watched a ton of anime on it (very preferable to watching anime on the shared computer out in the living room)

     

    This is probably an example of "It was in vogue when I first started getting into computers and phones so I like it the most" but man I still vastly prefer the glass aesthetic over most others. Makes me annoyed that pretty much everyone gave up on that for flat aesthetics which aren't pretty at all in comparison. Luckily I'm not the only one so there are dedicated people out there customizing anything they can to reinstate it. I've been trying to find a nice glassy look and feel for KDE Plasma but maybe I'm bad at searching but a lot of the ones I've seen seem to be "completely copy windows 7" which I feel like is just kind of unnecessarily locking into microsoft design language when it's just the aesthetic I want, but whatever. I might be getting too picky and just need to learn how to tweak stuff on my own

    Gyokuyoutama reacted to this

  18. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    51 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

    Of all the stupid things that Wizards has done one of the dumbest is "Let's do a western set to tap into that rich vein of American nostalgia.  Except no guns, because guns would make it too scary."

     

    The gun is central to the mythos of the western (particularly revolvers and the Winchester Rifle).  It would be like doing a set based around high medieval knights without plate mail and lances.

    The entire thing thematically feels like they had a very clear vision, then a corporate committee picked it apart a la RoboCop 2 with "you can't do that" and "put this thing we want in." They even had an acceptable setup to the idea of some plane becoming a wild-west like frontier with the advent of the stupid Omenpath idea meaning people could just walk between planes without being planeswalkers. Except it's not that at all, and from the little bit I learned (against my will mind you) it was just the plot of Borderlands 1 with the current batch of literally whos the writing team grabbed from a hat replacing the vault hunters.

     

    Some creative mouthpieces for the corporate committees asserted that "This was never a western set, it's actually a villain-themed set!" Which I think may only be communicated by the design team naming all the card mechanics to reflect it, and in one case choosing a fucking terrible way to word it (did you know from now until the end of time, targetting an opponent, a permanent they control, or a card in their grave is called "Committing a crime?") and not much else.

  19. Posted

    They've been slipping in that now and then, there was I think one artist that did art for Ikoria that had public-facing furry stuff in their portfolio and there was one werewolf card which I can't find anymore but the art was a bit much. There were always tangentially related characters that had dedicated enough fans like Mirri and Ajani who were both big cat anthros with large roles in various arcs of the story (people probably don't think much of Ajani anymore since the writers did the stupidest thing ever with him as of a bit ago) and have several cards. Those characters were arguably "just fantasy characters" but hey, they never shied away from showing them off, so who even knows?

     

    And yeah this is just how they work now and it causes a lot of stuff that seems really late to the party until you get how they put together their sets and how there's a two year lag, like how they had a cyberpunk set well after the game had really crossed anyone's mind. They tested the water with anime alt arts in a mainline set with war of the spark and then they started throwing them out everywhere once people showed they were into it (I'd argue equally a function of weaboos being weaboos and the mainline art for a lot of the characters not being great but that's a different issue) and after the Lord of the Rings set had some pushed cards and stupid gambling shit with the serialized rings sold gangbusters they saw it as a green light to print more large crossover sets legal in competitive formats (coming soon: final fantasy and marvel). There's probably other examples of a small treatment then getting a bigger spotlight twoish years later but the anime ones are the chief examples for me.

     

    I doubt it was that much better when I was more invested in the game but it all seems really shallow nowadays, the planes and stories are just some paper thin veneer (a cowboy set! a murder mystery set! an 80's horror set!) that they throw that over a bunch of out of control powercreeping cards and crank it out at max speed. To summarize, I've become that "Magic was at its best around the set that I joined and only has become worse since" person. At least my friends all have a cube of random cards we like I guess.

  20. Posted

    39 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

    So wait, MTG is just straight up doing a furry set now?

    But the furry set was Ikoria. Look up the bonders

     

    Joking aside it's kinda skirting furry? In the sense that they're not anthro but kinda just animals doing human things, so more redwall (unless redwall was considered a furry work? I don't know if it is). There are some random promo whale hunter cards of existing characters as animals but it's still not really anthro in that case either.

     

    I'm not a huge fan of the set but it does have a gigantic advantage of actually being a fucking fantasy set instead of the absolute garbage they've been putting out and will continue to put out.

  21. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    There's a ton of romance shows this season for whatever reason. It's not unusual to have several but I swear there's more than normal.

     

    Last season was extremely good though. My Japanese practice paid off when Girls Band Cry had nobody subbing it other than MTL and slow fansubs... Except for that flashback scene where they spoke in a regional dialect that I could barely parse as Japanese. I hope all those people who passed over the chance to localise it see now how it was popular with western watchers even though no "official" localisation existed and have a cry at all the money they left on the table. That show is like Houseki no Kuni where it shows that maybe treating 3D animation like its own thing and not making it look completely terrible by emulating 2D framerates and movements is the way to go, and all the characters are very expressive and animated in a way that I don't think 2D animation could do easily.  Very good show and I'm glad people were into it.

     

    On the lower key end was Highspeed Etoile, which double filtered everyone by having an extremely methodical and slow first three episodes and also being 3DCG (which was serviceable at best, and not actually great like GBC in the same season was), but had a fun plot with a very well executed arc for the MC and their car.

     

    There was also Jiisan Baasan Wakagaeru which balanced out having silly slice of life gags around the premise (an old married couple regain their youthful bodies) with actually pretty heavy stuff about aging and relationships, and I think the best part of the show was balancing the two so neither overwhelmed the other. 

     

    The Blue Archive adaption was forgettable but I basically expected that since the first volume of the BA story isn't particularly hard hitting or anything. Maybe once they get to volume 3 in half a decade from now it'll be worth picking up 

     

    There are others that I probably need to backlog but it was an exciting season and kind of weird that we had an actual reliance on fansubbing again for a popular show which is practically unheard of since Daiz assassinated every old fansubber with arsenic.

  22. Posted

    nuuuu update put in some pretty good maps, though I really don't like megaton. I'm once again owned by Medic getting awesome cosmetics since I'm allergic to Medic play

    1 hour ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

    I can't believe the Gas Passer is finally a decent weapon with some purpose

    I literally can't believe that

  23. Posted

    Man my tablet has all these programmable buttons and a scroller similar to your new one but due to my desk setup I usually draw with my right hand and have my left hand on my keyboard (which is in a keyboard tray right under my tablet) anyway so I never established any of the muscle memory to use the programmable buttons. Which feels a little like a waste, but I guess my current setup works for me enough that I never felt like doing it.

     

    Also 

    5 minutes ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

    I can finally do things like TILT THE CANVAS! Pretty crazy.

    it really is a game changer, I know exactly how that feels. I had a little bit where I drew on a different hardware setup a while ago for just a little bit and tilting the canvas was difficult and I did not understand how often I tilted it until the ability to do so easily was taken away from me

    TheOnlyGuyEver reacted to this

  24. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    Finished up Atelier Ryza 2 today. It was kind of a standard sequel, pretty much more of the first but perhaps a little easier due to some simplifications here and there. I still like the feeling of building out alchemy trees and gathering stuff from the overworlds, finally finding that rare material that you need to unlock a new chain of recipes that you will spend time minmaxing. I felt like the endgame was easier to hit, but I think that might be because it wasn't until the end of Ryza 1 where I learned the tricks to get infinite quality and how to really create S-tier equipment and items, so now I was hitting that way early (which I was fine with since getting maxed equipment helped me more or less ignore the half-action-half-turn-based combat which I still don't like).

     

    I still ran out of things to unlock from the skill tree and had like over 12000 points lying around by the end, and I didn't really bother crafting any of the super high tier usable items because my squad was kind of unga bunga focused... but it wasn't a bad experience overall. I think it maybe went on a little too long, but not so much that I'd say it soured the game or anything. The last dungeon was cool but was also considerably shorter than the previous ones and I feel like the second to last should have been cut down in exchange for dwelling on the last one a little more. The story path is kinda formulaic since you know what you're doing from the start (investigating ruins) whereas in the first one the adventure developed quite a bit as it went on.

     

    HOWEVER, nobody gives a SHIT about any of that, what is really funny is that the game's PC port is a clown show that in a roundabout way doesn't actually support mouse and keyboard despite theoretically doing it. You see, if you don't have a controller plugged in, the game stutters violently every half second or so, no matter what. Big deal, right? Just plug in a controller and you're fine.

     

    Except you're not fine because if the game detects a controller then it DISABLES mouse and keyboard input entirely. Not even for menus or the alchemy system where it could theoretically be good. Unplug the controller and you get a stutterfest. So despite the game supporting keyboard and mouse, the UI having symbols for keyboard and mouse, and it technically all being implemented... You can't do it out of the box. It's fucking bizarre. I know these kinds of games often get bad ports, but this one is not even bad except for this gigantic flaw that seems incredibly simple (just give a toggle for control schemes?!). I planned on using a gamepad anyway, so it didn't kill the game for me, but I would've liked the option.

     

    Also, the graphics effects are fucked, the depth of field setting makes all the cutscenes look out of focus and it hurt my eyes so I disabled it before I even got to the actual gameplay, and I think the antialiasing setting either does nothing or actively makes aliasing worse... somehow.

     

    Overall it's a pretty middle of the road "more of the same" sequel that probably is fine if you liked the characters or the alchemy gameplay loop, the story is pretty much fluff, and it has a really bizarre flaw in its port that hurts my brain.

  25. Posted · Edited by A 1970 Corvette

    2 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

    Some day we will be free of the tyranny of smoke detectors deciding to chirp despite having full batteries and not having reached the end of their life cycle.

     

    Sure if you are lucky a battery swap will stop them, and if not it's not the end of the world to replace them, but the worst part is that after you've done that it's always in the back of your mind that the smoke detectors might not be appeased and could start chirping again for no reason.

    Or you have a friend that refuses to acknowledge it yet keeps an open mic, gaslighting you into thinking it's yours until you take off your headsets and check them.

     

    Luckily I can bring them up since they don't post here anymore.

    Gyokuyoutama reacted to this
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