all-knight-party

Probably five or six years ago when I was around 20 I went with my Uncle and his family to the beach. After we were finished and the sun began to go down, we washed off in our swimsuits in the outdoor showers.

Nearby they had some benches to sit on that were made out of the same concrete as the ground, smoothly sloping up out of it to form each bench. I was walking across one of these waiting for the rest of the family to finish rinsing off, and extremely stupidly walked down the end, down the slope, which, of course, was completely slick wet from being near the showers.

As soon as my first foot touches the slope, I slip backwards, with just enough time before impact to think “I really fucked up, this might not be good at all…”

The back of my head impacted the concrete slope of the bench, and it hurt like a mother fucker, but I didn’t lose consciousness or awareness. After gripping my head and cursing for a few seconds my Uncle arrived at me and found my head to be bleeding, but the cut was not so wide as to need stitches.

We returned to his house nearby and after my head clotted up, i realized I needed to drive myself home, 40 minutes away on the freeway, and I felt… a bit dazed after the impact. I didn’t feel sleepy at all, and after waiting for about half an hour, I decided I had to go home. I felt a little foggy until the next day, or maybe I’m just that foggy now and Im used to it.

There’s a scar where hair doesn’t grow, and sometimes I wonder if my universe forked to keep me alive somehow and I was supposed to just die instead, because it was entirely created by my idiocy and if seems silly I got that lucky. Sometimes I have dreams still where I’ll slip on something and relive the sequence of slipping, accepting the imminent possibility of death, and everything sort of slows down increasingly until I fade to white and wake up.

Fuck, you got really lucky. There were so many aspects of that whole situation that you could’ve died from, even just the ladder.

That’s sad news about the studio. I suppose some people forgot that the original Mass Effect had quite a few issues and it wasn’t until 2 that it got real good, and having that bar set at a payoff that was only possible through three games of narrative choices and carryover was impossible to hit for Andromeda.

It seems like it was cursed with “how the heck do you follow that up?” Syndrome. And sadly the facial animations seemed at the time to be the critical anchor that all the general issues surrounded and were exemplified by.

I hope in the future Bioware steps back from adding those “MMO side quest” style side content they began including for Inquisition, it did really change the feel of the whole game having those there.

Interesting to hear about the first act dragging, I actually think this is a problem echoed by Starfield, whose first 12 hours are confusing as you don’t understand where and how to access the different types of gameplay at will, and it’s too early on in your character’s development to be able to really fully engage and figure out the ship and outpost construction. By then the people who don’t have patience or weren’t interested in the game to begin with have likely already had their opinions begin to solidify.

I wonder if Bioware will try an Andromeda 2 down the line, I think that universe deserves another shot.

How do you feel about/have you played Andromeda? I love the ME trilogy, and I was a quarter through ME2 doing a trilogy replay as well, but then Starfield released. I’ll get back to it eventually though. I haven’t played Andromeda myself, but I feel like it couldn’t possibly be as terrible as the kickback it got on release.

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To be honest, after high school it just either doesn’t seem like most people I know my age are very religious at all either way, or otherwise it doesn’t come up.

I haven’t had anyone give me shit for it, personally, I don’t take offense to online meme bashing, everybody gets it

I’d say I’m agnostic, but my parents also didn’t force religion on me, my dad is Catholic, and my mom is Thai Buddhist, and I view the Buddhist ideology to strive for to be satisfied without material as an honorable goal. I feel as if I believe that attaining that mindset really is nirvana, and I don’t think you need to be particularly religious to think that’s possible.

It’s about time to rewatch Avatar, isn’t it…

That’s an extremely difficult situation to deal with. I’m glad you were able to get some help. It’s very easy to spiral down and sometimes you might feel like you deserve that spiral, getting out can be a real climb.

God, yes, they did such a good job on the show. MASSIVE SPOILERS, but I loved how they handled the scene with Joel and the doctors. They cut it off, leaving it ambiguous whether he kills them or not, meanwhile in the game the player is given the ability to kill them, but is not forced to. It translates that perfectly.

Absolutely. There are a few studios I love so much that I know what they produce I’ll enjoy well enough to find it worth it, and so I’ll watch a gameplay trailer or two to get a baseline understanding of the type of game I should expect, and as soon as I’m satisfied by the premise, that’s it.

I wait for release and explore around the possibilities myself and wonder things, and test things, and get mad that I didn’t realize I could do a thing the whole time, but it’s really just an awesome way to experience a game.

Of course, this only works if I trust that the studio will put out a baseline of quality and expected type of gameplay. If a game is of questionable quality money becomes a larger issue than ideal experience.

Absolutely. A huge reason why soulslikes are so beloved. Through a huge combination of deliberate decisions touching nearly every facet of the game, an ethos is crafted all for the sake of intriguing the player, challenging the player’s mind and physical execution, and then triumphing, with discovery of several forms peppered throughout the way.

The lack of a map, enabled by a well designed and memorable world is one of the best examples for me. Nothing else I’ve played quite matches navigating Dark Souls without a map. You’re in one spot of this large, interconnected, seamless world. You just finished grinding an item in Darkroot Garden, and you want to return to Firelink.

Mentally, a collage of images appears in my mind, laying a pathway, a map of the world, the different paths and elevators I must take to get to where I need to go, and I begin walking, and I follow my own directions. That experience is all over the place in that game, and for all the obtuseness that’s in there, it was still so worth it to commit to that design so hard.

Those people are subhuman and don’t belong with the rest of us. They get a tickbox that says “Select if you were born on the 22nd of the month.” All the tickbox does is send SWAT to the address you entered

There’s also a program free for personal use called Bulk Rename. It has an incredible amount of custom options that the Microsoft power toys couldn’t do, that I needed. Just in case your program isn’t super extensive on the options and possibilities, FOSS is preferred unless necessary

I’d love to live in a world where I could just install everything and never struggle for storage space.

Amen to your final statement. A lot of people forgive family for heinous injustice because “they’re family” or time passed. You need to hold people accountable for their actions and have your opinions change accordingly.

Your abusers committed terrible atrocities to you and I’m glad they don’t even deserve their familial title in your description. I’m glad you have new family that deserve being considered as such.

I don’t think I ever look at anything or am presented with anything that has text on it in dreams, I’ve never been able to try. Even when I go lucid I end up wanting to do something fun like fly or breathe underwater and never try to test the limits of the dream.

Because games are an interactive medium, in an action game, you’re basically responding to visual information on screen, making a judgment, and responding to it by performing input.

The more frames that happen per second, the more information you’re able to receive in the same amount of time, which is why frames are most important in driving games, fighting games, or twitch shooters. Things happen very fast in those games, so having less frames a second puts you at a small, but very real disadvantage.

The visual info on screen also represents your inputs since you control it. In an action game, higher FPS means you see your character responding to your inputs more quickly, which feels perceptibly better.

You can get used to 30 FPS just fine, but certain, mostly action, games are simply better with higher FPS, whether you’re the kind of person who cares or plays competitively or not. Believe it or not even going from 60 to 120 is still a noticeable change.

Ohh yeah, this article. I’ve only personally witnessed about a half second stutter on occasion in the cities, I could probably count the occurrences on two hands with about 30 hours in, but that sounds about right because even Oblivion whose own optimization bottlenecks itself gets “traversal stutter” for me on PC.

Memory leaks are possible for sure, especially since Digital Foundry confirmed there’s still save game load time bloat after a long playthrough.