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Video Games and Gaming Technology (In A Positive Light)

Recently finished Breath of the Wild via emulator, with a mod that makes weapons unbreakable - that issue stopped me from playing the game years back. Enjoyable game with that change. I really appreciated the overall calm and aesthetically pleasing vibe - great art style and music (though I wish there was more music-wise).

Story was barebones and it had some questionable design choices with the open world. Exploration is great for the first 10 or 20 hours but then you realize bandit camps never really have anything worth looting and shrines almost always just give you 1/4 of a heart/stamina upgrade which makes the exploring become rather banal and repetitive. Furthermore the fact that they committed to being able to do the shrines and areas in any order meant that you never really pick up any major puzzle-solving tools past the tutorial. I also really wish they had more interesting themes/environments to the shrines and dungeons. The side quests were a bit hit or miss, some cool ones but a LOT of fetch quests that just net you a bit of money. I did like that almost everything in the game is optional so I could pretty much play until I'd had my fill and then go beat the final boss.

Nice choice of game to casually play for an hour or so to unwind, my wife enjoyed hanging out with it on which was a plus.
I have also played BoTW for about 25 hours and am having a hard time coming back to the game now to finish the story. The dungeons were the best part of the game for me while the weapons breaking is about the biggest controversy the game has. It adds no combat depth and its taxing and takes away the fun of combat. Your mod sounds like a huge boon to your playthrough.
 
I have also played BoTW for about 25 hours and am having a hard time coming back to the game now to finish the story. The dungeons were the best part of the game for me while the weapons breaking is about the biggest controversy the game has. It adds no combat depth and its taxing and takes away the fun of combat. Your mod sounds like a huge boon to your playthrough.

The mod made the game playable and eliminated a lot of tedium/frustration but it also revealed a deeper underlying weakness in the game's design - namely that the vast majority of the loot you find is simply meant to replace the weapons and shields you are breaking in a kind of loot treadmill. It becomes very apparent when you aren't breaking weapons constantly how useless most of the bandit camps, treasure chests etc are. It's busy work that doesn't even make you feel like you're accomplishing something but rather grinding just to stay in the same place.

Plus they totally missed that the whole enjoyment of exploring in open worlds is the idea that you never know what you might stumble across - it's like gambling. When you are all but certain what you're going to find, it's much less appealing. There's some really convoluted and challenging shrine quests that I had zero motivation whatsoever to try and solve for a pithy fraction of a health/stamina upgrade that I didn't even need. To the designers' credit, they don't force you to do these tasks if you're not interested.

I don't want to be too harsh on it, frankly the best parts of the game are simply roaming around and experiencing the environmental design and music, the freedom to traverse is really spectacular. I loved the influence it took from Shadow of the Colossus which was one of my favorite games back in the day. It is also overall very wholesome and uplifting in themes and messaging as is usually the case for Zelda.
 
The early Assassins Creed games teach a good bit about history and architecture. The one set in Florence is probably the best. The later ones aren't terrible. I have played them all through Odyssey (where they introduce gay characters hitting on you as if that would EVER happen casually encountering strangers hundreds of years ago) but considering we are in current year, I just expect everything to be fake or gay and at least the games aren't terribly fake. It's fun wandering around ancient Egypt or jumping from the Duomo.

There were even some cool subversive ideas in the earlier games, like the concept of the Assassins vs. Templars, illuminati pushing the "do what thou wilt, everything is permitted" ideas. There was even a DLC about The Tyranny of King George Washington. I don't expect we will see many games with truly subversive or exciting themes like that. Maybe some japanese titles can still be creative, but it's hard to find out about them and they won't be published on Steam if they are anti-woke / normal.
 
I have played them all through Odyssey (where they introduce gay characters hitting on you as if that would EVER happen casually encountering strangers hundreds of years ago) but considering we are in current year, I just expect everything to be fake or gay and at least the games aren't terribly fake.
Greeks were well known homosexuals. And Odyssey was terrible. Couldn't play more than an hour.
 
The mod made the game playable and eliminated a lot of tedium/frustration but it also revealed a deeper underlying weakness in the game's design - namely that the vast majority of the loot you find is simply meant to replace the weapons and shields you are breaking in a kind of loot treadmill. It becomes very apparent when you aren't breaking weapons constantly how useless most of the bandit camps, treasure chests etc are. It's busy work that doesn't even make you feel like you're accomplishing something but rather grinding just to stay in the same place.

Plus they totally missed that the whole enjoyment of exploring in open worlds is the idea that you never know what you might stumble across - it's like gambling. When you are all but certain what you're going to find, it's much less appealing. There's some really convoluted and challenging shrine quests that I had zero motivation whatsoever to try and solve for a pithy fraction of a health/stamina upgrade that I didn't even need. To the designers' credit, they don't force you to do these tasks if you're not interested.

I don't want to be too harsh on it, frankly the best parts of the game are simply roaming around and experiencing the environmental design and music, the freedom to traverse is really spectacular. I loved the influence it took from Shadow of the Colossus which was one of my favorite games back in the day. It is also overall very wholesome and uplifting in themes and messaging as is usually the case for Zelda.
I can see why people hate the weapon break system, but I personally really enjoyed it. It forced you to try out all the weapons in the game and I enjoyed finding new weapon farming spots, where I knew that after bloodmoons, there would be a decent ownerless weapon just lying there, or a bunch of strong enemies wielding good weapons waiting for me (which allowed for very intense and fun fights against entire enemy camps when my weapons were shabby). I didn't do the rushing Hyrule Castle's black weapons thing because it seemed like it would trivialize the game's difficulty.

I agree that the shrine quests get old fast, and I also agree that the open world lacks content and variety. Luckily, I went into the game 100% blind, so I ended up discovering enough surprises on my own to make it enjoyable, like when I first saw that massive wind dragon rising out of the lake, or when I first found rare mounts like the spirit deer thing, and I would try to take them to the stable to see how the guy would react. I got a lot of enjoyment out of just defeating guardians over and over in order to get guardian armor and weapons from that scientist guy.

My favorite part of BoTW by far was the sidequests, and while a lot of them were boring fetch quests, there were also a lot of fairly interesting ones. The rewards for sidequests were nearly all pretty useless, but I mostly did them because it was fun to interact with the NPCs, they felt a lot more alive than NPCs in most games.

I enjoyed most of the game a lot. I think I completed absolutely all of the content, with the big exception of completing all the shrines or finding all the koroks. Those things I did not do, because I don't hate myself. I never touched the game again, since there was nothing new to see. Well, actually, I suppose I played only the base game on Switch without DLCs, so maybe one day I will play on Cemu at 144fps with all the DLCs and see what I missed out on, I've heard there's a guardiantech motorcycle.
 
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I've been watching (I say watching because that's the majority of what you do when you PLAY this game) Red Dead Redemption for the past few days, and wow, what a perfect analogy for the modern western world.

RDD2 is a beautiful game, but completely boring. It's all style and no substance.
Typically, you spend about 10 minutes just holding down the "A" button while riding on horseback having a pointless conversation with someone and then finally get to a place where you can maybe fire a few shots and kill people (why? who knows) and then back on your horse again.

All hat and no cowboy.

It's kind of like how we have high quality digital music studios that run on an ipad, and can produce high quality lossless audio with tons of digital effects and autotuning, but the actual songwriting and singing and lyrics and melodies pale in comparison to past decades.

Or like how Hollywood special effects are truly incredible, but most films today have awful plots and are full of degeneracy.

Or like how 4K TVs are becoming popular for their high resolution screens, but there's not really anything worth watching.

And like most flashy things today, people seem to love it. Every review I found was 95+ / 100. It *is* very pretty. But the gameplay is bad. Combat is clunky. Plot is meandering and boring. And about 80% of the game you just sit there passively traveling from one place to another through beautiful scenery. Despite being an open world, the plot is forced, and the only decisions you can make are to be good or be evil at the end of a mission (ie do you shoot the survivors or let them go free). Luckily I only spent about $12 on it because it's completely useless for anything except a Cowboy Simulator.

I wonder if Cyberpunk 2077 is equally boring? It's the other recent game that people rant and rave about.

I don't think you're wrong about much of your commentary on RDR2, but I also don't think it's fair. Because RDR2, like the GTA series, isn't really about having depth. It gives you a ton of things to do at the cost of depth, but it just is what it is, and I think people should know that coming in. No game is going to give you everything. IMO RDR2 does what it sets out to do very well. It just depends on if we appreciate what it is that it set out to do.
 
There is a game called "Faith The Unholy Trinity" where you play as a priest and your primary weapon to fight evil is to exorcise with a cross.

It's pretty good and it was made by a guy who was a missionary earlier in life.
 
There is a game called "Faith The Unholy Trinity" where you play as a priest and your primary weapon to fight evil is to exorcise with a cross.

It's pretty good and it was made by a guy who was a missionary earlier in life.
That game is full of demonic imagery, and apparently even actual paranormal audio. Why would you play something like that? It really does not matter very much that you play as a priest and the demons are the bad guys. There's things you should not feed your senses with.

Why is there so much outright demonic stuff in popular media these days? Asian stuff especially. These yellow menaces actually name anime girls after actual, real demons, and extra points if they are the good guys. They do it all the time, it's actually insane, it's exhausting. I can name five pieces of Asian goyslop off the top of my head where this happens, and they are all very popular IPs and not some obscure stuff. They take the names of angels and saints and put them on anime girls too, they are not Christian so they don't care.

Whatever, not like the west is offering anything better or more Christian. These days I just stick to videogames that I know don't have these situations. I no longer watch movies or series ever, I almost never watch anime anymore, I just play videogames (mostly indie or many years old) that I know are of high quality and do not have anti-Christian content, and wait the horrors out. Either glorious Czar Putin will defeat them, or they will finally dominate the world and then come and throw me into a gulag, or maybe they'll just do the gulag thing literally tomorrow, it's kind of whatever at this point, God's will be done.

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That game is full of demonic imagery, and apparently even actual paranormal audio. Why would you play something like that? It really does not matter very much that you play as a priest and the demons are the bad guys. There's things you should not feed your senses with.

Why is there so much outright demonic stuff in popular media these days? Asian stuff especially. These yellow menaces actually name cute anime girls after actual, real demons, and extra points if they are the good guys. It's exhausting.

It is.

I enjoy playing games with a horror element to it once in a while.
 
Finished the original Half Life for the first time a while ago. It's a bit outdated for some people but I'm thankful they updated the game around last year. Some of the guns feel way better to use. Black Mesa has a more polished version of the later levels (Xen), but I preferred the original.

I still really liked Far Cry 1 more. It feels even more outdated (even for me) but the gameplay more than makes up for it. Awkward boss fights sadly.

Also playing Spelunky a ton. Used to play it religiously when I was a kid, bolting it to the PC after school.
 
This is looking awesome



The first game is the only true rpg that’s come out in years, it’s fantastic even though I’ve barely scratched the surface. The world feels real, decisions matter, it completely disrupts how you would normally approach a game as “the main character” when you realise even lv 1 bandits are going to leave you bleeding out in a ditch, because you are just a blacksmith’s apprentice.

When you finally manage to take down one or even two enemies it’s so rewarding. The fact that you have to learn to read is brilliant, and I absolutely loved it that I broke my character’s ankle when I foolishly traversed through a town like I would in an Elder Scrolls game, jumping down some steps to get to my destination quicker.

If I had a PC this would definitely be on my list.
 
The next Assassin's Creed game is set in Japan and features female and black Samurai. The Japanese are not impressed. This is D.O.A.

Hopefully, the imminent failure of this game will bring down Ubisoft.




Meanwhile, Ghosts of Tsushima has come to PC and is supposedly a good port, and a brilliant, proper samurai game. Everything the Ubi game is not. No race and gender swapping.
The only downside is that MP requires a PSN account. I would stick to SP, anyway.






Activision is massively ramping up the DEI in the COD series. The emails have gone out to all the dev teams. It would not be a bad thing if this GAE promo series got wiped out.

 
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Not wanting to be outdone in the Self-Immolation Olympics, EA is putting advertisements into Battlefield.

 
Not wanting to be outdone in the Self-Immolation Olympics, EA is putting advertisements into Battlefield.


This is what greed gets you. Psychopaths who will ruin franchises so their bank accounts can maybe get a bit larger

It's a bizzar concept but hear me out. Just make a good game. It will make its own profits....
 
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