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#mattshuku
blazehedgehog · 2 years
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Can you imagine a scenario where Epic screws up Fortnite so badly that you stop playing it? Barring external factors (like LIFE, or another game naturally taking its place at your table) what would they have to do to bungle the game so hard that you uninstall and stop playing?
Primal (Chapter 2, Season 6) was pretty close.
All throughout Chapter 2, Fortnite has been adding more and more RPG mechanics. Creature mobs, quests, currency, NPCs, the works. Primal finally bit the bullet and added a crafting system.
The most prominent guns you'd find were super weak "makeshift" guns that were all busted. They had trash accuracy and did very little damage. You had to go gather materials to fix up "makeshift" guns in to something better. You had two upgrade paths:
Use animal bones to turn makeshift guns in to Primal guns, which were burst fire, but had crazy wide bullet spread. Or, use nuts and bolts to turn makeshift guns in to mechanical guns, which were the normal suite of Fortnite weapons and usually favored accuracy (comparatively, at least).
The problem: Fortnite loves their shotguns. Epic loves their shotguns. If you went the Primal route, a Makeshift Shotgun converted to a Primal Shotgun, which fired two slugs at once in rapid succession and erased anyone that was within ten feet of you. If you went Mechanical, you got the most popular Fortnite shotgun of all time: the Pump Shotgun.
Why is it popular? Because a good, clean shot with the pump does 170 damage, when the maximum health you can have is 200. If your target was anything less than full on health and shields, a pump shotgun would kill anyone in just a single blast. Because, generally, there are "tiers" of health:
You start with 100 health by default, and healing items generally come in either large or small. Small healing items have caps on how much they'll heal you. Bandages heal you up to 75hp, and small shield potions heal you up to 50 shield. Meaning the most common health states are:
Fully Bandaged: 75hp total
Default Health: 100hp total
2 small shield and bandaged: 125hp total (75 health, 50 shield)
Default health and 2 small shield: 150hp total (100 health, 50 shield)
Default health and 2 big shield potions: 200hp total (100 health, 100 shield)
Of the five states, 125 and 150hp are the most common. This means that on average, anyone with a pump shotgun can kill most players in one well-aimed shot. They tried to balance this out with the "pump" action itself -- after every shot, you have to rack the gun, meaning that if you miss, there's a non-trivial pause before you can fire again. But Fortnite is not exactly a game with footsies, so if they miss you the first time, chances are they won't miss twice. Plus, if you have two pump shotguns, you can just swap back and forth between them and skip the pumping animation.
And since this was Primal, "makeshift" shotguns were everywhere. It wasn't hard to have two pumps at once, it just took time.
Gathering materials was awful. In a game where you want to be ready to shoot within five seconds of hitting the ground, it made you vulnerable for up to a full minute while you scrounged up what you needed to make any gun worth using. It made tournaments in to a nightmare, because tournament players would have to settle for makeshift guns that were borderline unusable.
Those who engaged with the crafting system turned it in to a race to see who could craft a shotgun first, and they often dominated the rest of the players in a match.
It was a disaster. The worst season Fortnite I've ever been a player of. And this was after two or three seasons that were what I would describe as "lackluster." Adding currency, NPCs and roaming enemy mobs really screwed with the pacing of matches, where you'd have these long stretches during mid where you wouldn't see any other players for 5-10 minutes. And then Epic introduces the Primal season, where there's so much pointless busywork you need to do that I'd often forget about basic things like staying in the circle, because I was focused on scavenging crafting mats or doing a bounty or taming animals or whatever. It was terrible, and it made me legitimately furious.
I know it may not seem like it to you, because you endure me talking about Fortnite in our Discord pretty much all day every day, but the amount of Fortnite I played went way down during Primal. I had been in the habit of doing ~5 Battle Royale matches a day, but when Primal started, I could only stand doing one or two before I'd get pissed off at the game and put it down. It was way too tedious and difficult to be enjoyable. It felt like Epic was trying to turn Fortnite into Rust or something.
The game must have shed tons of players during that season because Epic course-corrected hard in the second half of Primal. They nerfed the crafting system in to oblivion, rebalanced the loot distribution and weapon damage to help draw attention away from the pump, and turned it in to kind of a "best of" where they brought back tons of favorite guns from past seasons (the flare gun, combat shotgun, etc). They also started doing all of these events and things to "bring back lapsed players" as if to say "No, don't go, we fixed it!"
But if Primal ended the same way it started? That might have been my moment to tap out. But it didn't, and Primal was followed by one of the best seasons of Fortnite I've played: Season 7, Invasion. You could pilot UFOs, there were big cool rail guns, it was great. Epic seems to have learned a lesson and has kept things pretty normal since then.
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blazehedgehog · 3 years
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I was looking for RTX mods for games like GTA5 and found a one that looked rad, but it was effectively pay-walled behind Patreon to get access to it. I recall running into this with a Minecraft mod several years ago as well. What is your opinion on game mods that do this?
Note: it was pay-walled for $10, and supposedly will be released for free whenever it is "done".
I mean, I dunno. I’m definitely of two minds.
Mod creators have existed since the beginning of time and they’ve always worked for free. Which is cool! These people are doing things just because they want to do them. It’s a good way to build applicable skills for game development and there’s always been this kind of graduation process where you go from being a modder to a real-actual game developer. Because being a game developer pays money.
And that system is great. It was a sign of the true mega-fans. People who were so dedicated they took matters in to their own hands and did it themselves just for the love of the game and the love of the community around it.
But the internet and the gig economy is changing everything. People are learning they don’t have to “graduate” to an actual game developer if they don’t want to.
And that can lead to bigger, more robust mods, sure. The line between “modder” and “professional” can be blurred in some really interesting ways. Like, for example, take Cemu, right. The Wii U emulator. That’s an incredible emulator and it runs games very well! Arguably a lot of that is because they make $3000 a month on Patreon. It’s easier to justify working on the emulator because it’s bringing in money, and that attracts other talent looking to make money as well. And it leads to a very high quality emulator. I can often emulate Wii U games better than I can PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube stuff. Sonic Colors at 60fps in Dolphin is a struggle on my system, but 60fps in Breath of the Wild using Cemu is almost flawless. Cemu is magic, and it’s undoubtedly thanks to their Patreon. Horizons have been expanded.
But then you get what happened when Bethesda opened the real-money mod shop in Skyrim, where a lot of mod authors that were doing it for the good of the community flipped over and started charging for their mods. Where they’d have version 1.7 be free, but they’d release version 1.8 and you had to buy it. That kind of thing.
That really wounded the mod community and set a nasty precedent for what could be possible. It introduced a new side to people who would rather make a fast buck. It’s corporatizing something that was normally done for the intrinsic benefit of “because I want to see it” instead of “because I think I can make a lot of money from it.”That shifting of the moral goal posts can lead to uncomfortable directions.
(Understandably, the modding community reacted very negatively to that, and Bethesda turned paid mods off.)
It also calls in to question what games themselves are even charging for, developmentally-speaking? Is $10 for a shader pack really worth it when you could buy a whole entire complete game for that price? Depending on when and where you bought it, you could be spending $10 on the game itself and $10 on the shader mod for that game. That value feels a little out of whack, doesn’t it?
I don’t know how all of this shakes out. I suppose it all depends contextually on whether or not you feel its worth it. I personally wouldn’t spend $10 on a shader pack, but I did buy PPSSPP Gold back in the day because it was $8. I’ve come close to buying Redream.
But those are also emulators. There are a bunch of games across multiple genres I could use them with. They are a platform.
I’m sure a lot of work went in to the RTX Shader pack but also it’s just a shader pack and $10 for that feels a little steep. Going back to worth, PPSSPP Gold cost me $8 and Redream Premium is $5. Both of those cost less than that shader pack and offer more utility.
I dunno if that shader pack is such a good deal. Just because you can paywall everything doesn’t mean you should.
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blazehedgehog · 3 years
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Did you watch LGR's retrospective on Doom 3? Does his take on the game make you reconsider your feelings on the game per your steam review?
They don’t, no. (A tweaked version of that review is also available on bltn.net)
Doom 3 is what I would classify as a very expensive game. Money gets you talent, but talent in itself is not necessarily quality. People with lots of talent can still make bad things.
So you look at Doom 3, and its lighting technology still looks very impressive, even now. Atmosphere is cohesive and done well. What little music Doom 3 has sounds pretty good. It has a very nice quality of production. But in that way, it’s a lot like a lame summer blockbuster movie.
It’s Wild Wild West. It’s the Ryan Reynold’s Green Lantern movie. It’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Talent on top of talent on top of talent wasted on something that’s ultimately junk. You can sit there and be like “yeah the dinosaurs still look great and I love Chris Pratt” but it doesn’t matter unless it all fits together enjoyably, right?
Doom 3 wants to be an action game, it wants to be a horror game, it wants to be Half-Life, it wants to be System Shock, but it also still wants to be identifiably Doom. And some of those parts just don’t fit together, or they don’t fit together the way Doom 3 wants them to.
You can break it down and appreciate its individual parts, and in isolation things like the flashlight make tons of sense. But when put together and experienced as a whole, it just doesn’t work. Monster closets make sense as a “gotcha!” in a hardcore action game, but not in a horror game with horror game mechanics where ammo is limited and you get locked in to long reload animations.
LGR even complains about this a little bit in his video -- not the reload animations specifically, but he mentions how much it sucks to get cornered by enemies with huge knockback effects that mess up his aim. That’s Doom 3′s horror game mechanics clashing with the back half of the game ramping up the action.
Doom 3 is a lime, banana and pickle smoothie. You may like limes, you may like bananas, and you may like pickles, but you don’t want them all at the same time.
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blazehedgehog · 3 years
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Thoughts on the game Road Redemption?
The idea of doing a Road Rash spiritual successor has a lot of merit, but the moment they said the words “procedurally generated roguelike” I was out.
Early Access versions seemed really rough and clumsy, but I watched someone play a little bit of it, like, a year or two ago? And it actually looked pretty good. Seems like they cleaned the game up a lot for it’s 1.0 full release and it’s actually pretty fun, now.
Playing a little bit of it just now, I guess the thing to keep in mind is that because it’s a roguelike, there’s way more emphasis on combat. You could punch dudes and stuff in Road Rash, and they could punch you back, but this skews closer to just being a beat’em’up. Opponents will match your speed and you have to parry/counter them. There’s still races and stuff, but there’s more emphasis on beating up your rival racers.
The roguelike stuff seems to be more about the game’s progression system. You gain EXP and money to buy gear and fill out a skill tree. The “procedural generation” stuff seems pretty light, where it’s more about having a twist on some races, like having friendlies you get penalized for attacking, or having to take out a specific target, or whatever.
But that’s what I gleaned from literally doing one run. Seems pretty alright, but I don’t know if it scratches that exact Road Rash itch, even though that’s how it was pitched. But I think I like it.
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blazehedgehog · 4 years
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Do you feel like dinosaurs are severely under utilized in video games? What video game has the best use of dinosaurs? I was discussing this with a friend and he says Dino Crisis has the best use of dinosaurs - and the more I think about it the more I'm inclined to agree. Sure, Jurassic World Evolution technically has "better" dinosaurs in it, but Dino Crisis uses their dinos more effectively-I suppose trespasser could rank if it wasn't so janky, but I can't really think of other games that rank.
It’s funny, because since you sent this in, a new dinosaur game was just announced called “Second Extinction.” But, honestly, it doesn’t look that interesting to me -- it’s reminding me a lot of Primal Carnage, which started its life as an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod called Jurassic Rage. It was basically just a wave-based survival game against dinosaurs and... it LOOKED really cool in screenshots, but it was really boring in practice.
They tried to add a mode that turned it in to Left 4 Dead But With Dinosaurs but even that wasn’t great. Half the problem was there wasn’t any bot support at all, so when the servers emptied out the game was basically unplayable. That, and even in the Left-4-Dead-esque mode, maps were still arena based.
Anyway, Second Extinction gives me big vibes like that. That and it reminds me of Evolve. I’m probably being too judgmental this early on, given it was just one trailer, but something about what was shown in the trailer is causing my interest to bounce off super hard.
But yeah, this is something I’ve wondered a lot, over the years. There was a period of time in the mid 90′s where Jurassic Park made dinosaurs in to the biggest thing on earth and yet even back then, there weren’t a lot of games that had dinosaurs in them. You had a few games based on licenses like We’re Back and Jurassic Park, and you had, like, Radical Rex. And that was it.
Dino Crisis was good! Turok was good! Carnivores was good! But somehow these games never sparked a wider interest in making games featuring dinosaurs. Even pirates, which I’d consider to be a body of work that was also strangely absent from games, is starting to come in to its own thanks to games like Assassin’s Creed Black Flag and Sea of Thieves.
I guess that’s the thing. There are dinosaur games out there. Your Ark: Survival Evolved, there’s an original dinopark tycoon game hitting Steam soon called Prehistoric Kingdom, there was Dino D-Day. But none of them ever feel right, you know? None of them feel like any of those three games I mentioned in the previous paragraph. It never feels like it sticks, or hits the right notes, or something.
I think about Trespasser a lot. Especially lately. I wonder what a modern Trespasser remake would be like. What it would play like. A few people have made attempts, over the years. There was one I was following probably a decade ago that vowed to remake Trespasser in Crysis that looked visually incredible but never made it to the point where there was any gameplay.
A modern version of Trespasser would probably just be a survival game, right? Like The Long Dark, or Miasmata, or Green Hell, where you’re stuck somewhere and have to forage for food and shelter in between solving the larger mystery of what’s happening in the story.
I also think about how Trespasser struggled to have “real” gameplay. They had a physics system, but all they ever got to use it for was puzzles involving stacking boxes. They tried to get in to having really complex artificial intelligence states for dinosaurs, but I’m not so sure that’s beneficial to gameplay. Does it really matter if an imp from Doom is happy or sad? Is there a visual language within the game that communicates that to the player so they can use it as a tool to influence encounter dynamics? If the answer is no, maybe it doesn’t need to be in the game.
And I remember reading a quote, either in the post mortem I just linked or elsewhere, that said Amblin (Spielberg’s company) didn’t want to make a game where you were killing dinosaurs indiscriminately. They didn’t want Doom But With Dinosaurs. The whole point of Jurassic Park originally was to NOT treat the dinosaurs like scary monster characters. They breathe, their eyes dilate, special attention is paid to their weight, things like that. He was really trying to make them feel like real animals, with animalistic behaviors. “T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed, he wants to hunt! You can’t just suppress 65 million years of gut instinct.” etc.
But I think Alien Isolation really hit on something important. Now, really, it was just building off of what was originally discovered in Slender: The 8 Pages, but it’s that vibe of being stalked. You were prey.
And I think that idea would fit in really, really, really well with Jurassic Park. A big focus of that series is how velociraptors are intelligent hunters. And that was even kind of the best part of Jurassic Park for the Sega Genesis, right. They went to great lengths to make the raptors in that game in to more than just disposable enemies -- they had a range of movement on par with the player. If you jumped in to a vent, the raptors would crawl in to the vent behind you. They were surprisingly intelligent and hard to kill.
So I think you could probably adapt the Alien Isolation formula to work in a Jurassic Park setting really easily. Dealing with a single pack of raptors could be a whole hours-long ordeal, and right when you’ve gotten rid of the last one, maybe you run in to a T-Rex, or some other threat that then begins chasing you for the rest of the game.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and Capcom will move on to a Dino Crisis remaster at some point.
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blazehedgehog · 3 years
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What are your favorite and least favorite stages of your production cycle for a typical youtube video?
My favorite is capturing video, easily. Because that’s just playing games, or messing with my camera, or whatever. Tinkering with toys.
Least favorite is editing audio. Trimming out all the breaths, mainly. The one video I didn’t do that on, and it was all people complained about. So I have to do it, because apparently I can’t control my breathing when I read from a script. And trimming out breaths... depending on the length of the script, that could take an hour, two hours, maybe even three hours.
There’s software out there that will detect and trim breaths for you, but it’s part of $800-$1000 video editing suites and I tend to have a pretty breathy voice anyway, so it’s probably not even an option for me. Just gotta do the work.
That and just, like, finishing up in general. Because here I am, so close to being done, so burnt out on working on this video, and I gotta sit there and make a thumbnail, write a description, setup Youtube cards, end screens, tags, import my script for closed captioning, add it to relevant playlists, and once all that’s done, you have to think about social media. I’ve started cutting specific trailers just to post on Twitter for important videos.
It’s that thing where you render out the final video and you start to breathe a sigh of relief because you’re finished, but you’ve still got hours of work ahead of you.
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blazehedgehog · 3 years
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Will you buy the Colorado DLC for American Truck Simulator?
That’s not the worst idea.
The problem is I feel kind of done with American Truck Simulator. The game’s goals are sort of whatever you make for yourself, and for me that goal was “buy my own truck.” Which... I did.
And owning your own truck in American Truck Simulator kind of sucks! Because now it’s like, you have to worry about gas and how much damage your truck takes because those persist across jobs. If you drive other people’s trucks for a job, you have a margin for error because the person you’re running the job for covers expenses. But your truck is your responsibility.
But, then, what else is there to do? I guess after a point you can start hiring drivers and start your own trucking company but the game doesn’t seem to provide a super clear path to doing that. Buying your own truck is obvious, because it’s like, there are dealerships all over the place and you can browse their stock. Starting your own trucking company... I never even saw an option anywhere on how to do that, I just remember there being a button to hire drivers to work under you that was greyed out.
American Truck Simulator also kind of sucks because it’s like, they spend all this time building out this huge detailed representation of the United States, but if you follow the GPS then you’re basically taking the same highways over and over and over. About the time I drove through San Francisco, on the same road, three times in a row, I was starting to get tired of it.
If I own my own truck then I can just go joyriding but then any tickets or damage or whatever comes out of my pocket and that can get expensive.
And with no storyline or anything to follow, I just don’t know if that game has anything left to give me. I played it for 26 hours, which is frankly kind of lot. But I don’t know what else there is for me to do there besides drive around Colorado and be like, “yep, this is Colorado.”
(To be fair, I did that for ATS’s rendition of Nevada and they actually have some of the actual streets here in Carson City modeled vaguely faithfully, to the point where I identified a couple landmarks -- so maybe Colorado would have something I’d recognize. Doubtful, though)
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blazehedgehog · 4 years
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Per the discussion you weren't awake for in Discord - How do you feel about open world racing games (Forza Horizon, Burnout Paradise, etc) vs "traditional" racing games that take place on closed tracks (PGR, Gran Turismo, etc)? Do you know of any games that successfully blend the two, giving you both an open world to explore as well as a progression of closed circuit tracks to unlock and race on?
In general I don’t really like them. They feel like a compromise so the developer can have lots of track to race on without having to worry about environment variety.
Instead of making a bunch of city assets and putting them in to one “city” track, you make a bunch of city assets and have a whole city zone, and depending on how you draw routes through the streets, you could have 5, 10, 20+ track variants out of that one area.
But that’s treating track design almost as an afterthought, and that’s kind of how it feels to me. There’s way less effort in creating interesting looking tracks when you’re pushing for quantity over quality.
The argument could be made that real race tracks aren’t beautiful. You have places like Sonoma…
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…or Sebring…
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…or Laguna Seca…
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Where they are basically just asphalt, dirt, and grass. In theory, open world racing games have more landmarks because at least you’re in a city, or whatever.
But here’s what I know: I miss the days of Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2, or Beetle Adventure Racing, or Ridge Racer 4, where scenery kind of mattered. Hot Pursuit 2 has you race around an active volcano in Hawaii, through a forest fire in California’s redwoods, and in the ruins of Greece. Beetle Adventure Racing takes you through jungles, snowstorms, deserts, casinos and castles. Ridge Racer has more typical race circuits, but it still manages to make things feel varied and interesting with smart art direction.
Meanwhile, I think of games like Need for Speed Most Wanted, Midnight Club, The Crew, or Fuel, and I think how bored I get of those games. Even Burnout Paradise, for as fun as it might be, still pales in my mind compared to Burnout 3.
The only open world racing series I think I really, genuinely love is Forza Horizon. But Forza Horizon also uses that scale to its advantage, I think, with events that “normal” racing games couldn’t really do. Like, chasing trains, or airplanes, and having all these weird vehicle types. In general, there’s just a lot more to do in Horizon’s open world than there is in other open world racing games. You’re always earning currency for driving well, even if you’re just driving to the next event, you know? It’s keeping you engaged.
Because for most open world games, the only engagement you have outside of a race is to maybe find some scattered collectibles (boring) or to learn the street layouts. And usually, once I have my fill of driving around the open world, that’s when the boredom starts to set in.
But Horizon gets it.
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blazehedgehog · 4 years
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Any thoughts on Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neil, and Laura Dern reprising their roles for Jurassic World 3?
The more I am required to interact with the Jurassic World movies the more I begin to hate them.
Spoilers ahead for the first two Jurassic World movies.
The first Jurassic World was an okay movie, I guess, at least I thought so right after I saw it. But the more I chewed on it, mulled it over in my head, the less I began to like it.
The original Jurassic Park had its problems, but they were only problems I ever noticed after reading the book. Alan Grant’s characterization, for example, was all over the place in the movie. In the book, he’s supposed to be this luddite cowboy out in the desert, and they touch on that in the movie with him being “bad with technology” but I feel like they really smarten him up a lot otherwise. But the movie still had so much heart, and personality that it didn’t really matter.
Jurassic World didn’t have that. It’s a dumb movie, full of dumb people, making dumb mistakes, and not in the “oh no, my hubris!” way, but in kind of the crummy horror movie way. No, don’t run up stairs, you’ll be trapped with no exit. The whole near-future angle is also dumb, with all of the holograms and the weird explorer balls. It makes the whole thing unreal in a really bizarre, unnecessary way.
Instead of being smart, and cool, and “near-future”-istic like the first movie, it’s bland science fiction in the worst way. They may as well have added flying cars. And there are no real characters in that movie, just archetypes. You know who all these people are the moment they appear, you know their story arcs, because they aren’t humans. They’re cookie cutters. It’s a thin line to string you along to the next CGI dinosaur attack.
Nothing about it feels human or believable. It’s the sort of monster movie Spielberg was originally trying to avoid making.
And Jurassic World 2, Fallen Kingdom, takes everything awful from that first movie and ramps it way up. The movie barely even feels like it has a story; I believe I’ve described Fallen Kingdom as feeling “like a two hour movie trailer.” It’s all these little sequences that seem like they are designed to be chopped up and posted on Youtube.
The worst part, though, is the fan service. The first Jurassic World had some fan service, because characters end up stumbling across the original Jurassic Park visitor center, now run down and reclaimed by the jungle. Also the ending to that movie is essentially a big tribute to some of the most iconic scenes of that first Jurassic Park.
But Fallen Kingdom goes extra super hard on that stuff. It straight up remakes multiple shots from that original movie, 1:1, verbatim. It repeats lines from that movie over and over and over. It’s desperate to make us appreciate how much it loves Jurassic Park instead of trying to be its own movie. And it’s INCREDIBLY embarrassing.
The whole movie is factory-made for fanboys to gush over but it’s really just a hollow, vapid, pointless waste of time. It was birthed out of a boardroom by executives wearing five-figure suits looking at marketing charts.
It’s like the worst version of the sequel syndrome we used to get. Back in the day we’d get something like Ghostbusters 2, which recycles almost all of its story beats and humor from Ghostbusters 1, and people would go “Ugh, that’s a bad movie.”
But now, you wait 10, 15, 20 years until it there’s a sufficient bank of nostalgia, and suddenly making something like Ghostbusters 2 starts looking more like an “inspired tribute.” They aren’t recycled gags, now they’re references to things that make me feel appreciably younger, when things were better, and therefore that makes it good!
That’s what those two Jurassic World movies are in a nut shell. Cheap sequels rebranded as pop culture idolatry.
And very recently, like just two weeks ago, they released a brand new short movie that aired on TV to show what happened to the world after the end of Fallen Kingdom while setting up this third movie. It’s called “The Battle at Big Rock.” Essentially, dinosaurs are growing in population all around the globe, and some campers in California nearly get killed in an attack.
And just, like, the gall of this short. You get the impression this is leaning in to a “Planet of the Apes” direction, that because dinosaurs are back, humans as a species might be at risk of being overthrown on the food chain. And just the whole angle where it’s this scary carnivore attack but they play up the kid being the hero is really weird. And wild dinosaurs don’t even make sense in the context of what happened at the end of Fallen Kingdom anyway.
It feels like its pretending to be important and intelligent but it crumbles to dust under even the smallest scrutiny. The whole Jurassic World franchise is fraud.
The fact they’re bothering to bring the original cast back for Jurassic World 3 says everything I need to know about where their priorities lie. At best, it’s going to be another movie that breathlessly worships Jurassic Park, referencing all of its iconic lines, referencing all of its iconic scenes, and having no identity of its own besides “dinosaurs are cool and scary and also I guess it’s the future?”
At worst it’s going to pull a Star Wars and bring the original cast back just to kill them all off in weird, unsatisfying ways, because ooh, the drama! All of your favorites are dead! Take that! NOW we’re deep and worthy of your respect!
But all it’s going to be is more fanboy drivel. A franchise to sell shirts, and hats, and toys.
Jurassic World can jump up my butt.
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blazehedgehog · 4 years
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top 10 games of the decade?
This has been going around a lot, and honestly my problem is I don’t keep super close attention to what games came out in what years. So 2009-2019? What came out in that time period that I’ve played? I have no idea.
At best, we could use the new Steam interface to sort by release year, which gives a rough picture of some of my gaming habits, at least as far as the PC is concerned, but it tells me nothing about consoles or portables.
So let’s start narrowing down a list, I guess, of games I played a notable enough amount of time (and maybe even finished) to even consider for a list like this.
I’ll link it, because it’s kind of big.
So… narrowing that down to ten. Hm. I won’t number them, but:
Metal Gear Rising: Revengence (2013) Platinum Games’ finest hour, as far as I’m concerned. It’s typical Metal Gear absurdity cranked to 12. It’s hard to believe Hideo Kojima considered this a canonical piece of the Metal Gear timeline because it’s just so knowingly silly and over the top. It’s also Peak Platinum Games as far as having an intensely good-feeling combat engine goes. Just, all around, an outrageously fun game.
Sonic Generations (2011) For a brief moment, the world agreed: maybe Sonic could be good again? It didn’t last, because of course it didn’t, but even though I personally consider Sonic Unleashed a better game, I can’t rag on Sonic Generations too much, because it’s still a surprisingly well-rounded, enjoyable game, and still the best 3D Sonic game of the last 10 years.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) Any game I put 300 hours in to over the span of a year is probably worth putting on a list like this. Zelda games were getting so stale and Breath of the Wild effortlessly shakes off all the rust and dust and just goes hard on reinventing everything in such a smart, elegant, enjoyable way. Everything works together so well that it almost doesn’t feel fair for how effortless Nintendo makes it look. Like you handed them a rubik’s cube and they casually solved it in record time while everyone else is over in the corner still trying to line up the first two green squares.
Forza Horizon (2012) I like racing games, but I got really tired of racing games that take themselves too seriously. You either had the endlessly repetitive street racers of Need for Speed or the clinical blandness of games like Gran Turismo and Forza. Horizon came along and made me love Forza for finally injecting a bit of fun personality in to this series. By wrapping a shred of real humanity around all of this car culture stuff, it all clicked in to place.
Super Mario 3D Land (2011) Super Mario 3D Land kind of reinvented what a 3D Mario game even was. There was always a sense with Nintendo’s 3D platformers that they were kind of holding back, or at least designed in a certain way to help players stay oriented in 3D. To me, 3D Land, felt like finally ripping the training wheels off and getting back to 2D-style level design… while still being a 3D environment. Maybe my favorite 3D Mario game.
Super Mario Maker (2015) Nintendo finally gave us what we wanted: an official Mario level editor. It’s missing a lot of features you’d really want, but the fact that it exists at all still feels like kind of a miracle. And for as backwards as some things about it feel, enough of it is modern enough that it kind of doesn’t matter. You can make and share Mario levels! With your friends! Officially! That’s amazing!
Doom (2016) Controversial opinion: I think iD Software made more bad games than good. More mediocre games, at the very least. After Doom 2, the only game of theirs I’d say even approaches good was Quake 3 Arena, and even then, I’m not so sure that game was what I was really looking for, then or now. Doom 2016 is not only the comeback story of the century, but it blows the doors off of everything else so well that I didn’t even really care about how bad the game’s ending was. That’s just how good the rest of the game is. Doom 2016 succeeds where Quake failed, where RAGE failed, where Doom 3 failed. It’s “just more Doom,” but in the best ways possible.
The Walking Dead: Season 1 (2012) I have a lot of adventure games I’ve never finished. I finished The Walking Dead Season 1. This is the game that saved Telltale Games. It got me to watch part of the TV series. I felt emotions while playing this game that I don’t think any game has ever made me feel, before or since. I have a distinct memory of seeing these guys get an award at the VGAs, and as they came out on stage, they played the “Alive Inside” theme and just hearing that music again was like a lead weight in my chest. Even now, years and years later, it’s… heavy, hearing it again.
Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) The first, and possibly only, truly “good” Batman game. I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the sequels to Asylum, but I don’t think any of them reach the same highs, from what I understand. This game put a lot of people, and things, on the map. A good, multi-directional combat system (so good that games are still referred to as having “Arkham combat”). A fully 3D Metroidvania that wasn’t necessarily an actual Metroid game. Reuniting the voice cast of Batman: The Animated Series. It’s not a perfect game, but dang if it isn’t still great.
Mario Kart 8 (2014) I debated on saying this was a tie with Sonic Racing Transformed, but that wouldn’t be fair, I guess. Mario Kart 8 is hands down my favorite Mario Kart, I’d say. It’s absolutely gorgeous, it has tons of tracks, and at least as far as the Wii U version goes, it’s actually balanced and fair in a way you don’t normally expect from a Mario Kart game. While I still love Sonic Racing Transformed greatly, there’s no denying that Mario Kart 8 is far more tight and polished than that game ever will be.
Honorable Mentions
Sonic Mania
Freedom Planet
Super Mario Galaxy 2
Bayonetta 2
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze
Dishonorable Mentions
Rocket Knight
Turtles in Time: Reshelled
Sonic Lost World
Parappa the Rapper Remastered
Yooka-Laylee
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blazehedgehog · 4 years
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Bring me a sandwich with eggs... and ham.
AND THE WATER’S BOILING
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blazehedgehog · 4 years
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is xmas_nipperhouse the best map? or is it THE BEST MAP?
I liked cs_rhs22 personally. I assume “serious” Counter-Strike players probably hate a map like that, though, given it’s all triggers for spooky sounds that would give away your position to anyone within earshot. But for funnin’ around with bots or non-serious online matches it was great.
I also have a weird softspot for de_wallmart. It’s a terribly under-detailed map, but there’s something very nostalgic for it in the same way we have nostalgia for nipperhouse. It’s also becoming something of a relic, back when Wal-mart was just a normal department store and not a warehouse mega-mart.
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blazehedgehog · 4 years
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If the devs really do remove the controller option from console in SRB2.2, couldn't you or someone else mod the game to add it back in - and potentially even improve how they work?
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That may already be happening as I type this.
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blazehedgehog · 5 years
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With the Cyberpunk reveal, how do you feel about the Keanu Reeves renaissance (The Keanu Reevessance?)?
I won’t, but if I were to ever become famous, I hope I would handle it with such grace as Keanu Reeves. He seems like a genuinely nice dude, and I’m glad he’s being recognized for having more range beyond “airheaded california surfer dude.”
It’s funny, you say “Keanu Reevessance” but I’ve heard more than one person actually phrase it as the “Keanuissance.”
An article I enjoyed reading a few weeks ago that I would recommend is “Why We Can’t Stop Watching Keanu Reeves, 30 Years On”. It deals exactly why he’s become so captivating lately, and it’s because he’s kind of the antithesis to the current Hollywood man. Basically, he’s vulnerable, calm, and mysterious in a way nobody really is anymore.
And I think that’s nice.
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blazehedgehog · 5 years
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"Is there a way to make FL look more professional and not like Garage Band?" - Things this dude needs to hear: 1. Garage band is pretty amazing for a free piece of software. 2. FL studio's UI is objectively WORSE than Garage Band - Garage Band is basically a lite version of Logic, and is the closest thing to a "professional-looking" interface as you're going to get. 3. What does "professional looking" even mean? If the UI isn't getting in the way of you creating, who cares what it looks like?
That’s kind of what I was getting at towards the end of my response, yeah. What does “professional” even look like in his context? If he’s learning FL Studio was part of a college course, what prior expectations does he have the way the software should look?
FL Studio definitely has a unique look of its own, where it eschews typical Windows interface stylization in favor of having something that could charitably be described as a “funky Winamp Skin”
But, like, so what? It works. And, personally, I think it works pretty well. It’s probably a very early example of that thing Apple loves to do in its interfaces – “skeumorphic” design. Instead of designing something like it was a piece of software, you design it with the flourish of a real object. Instead of volume being a number you input on a keyboard, you make a graphical volume knob that you “turn” using your mouse.
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Fruityloops wasn’t the first program to do this, but it may have been one of the first pieces of software to do it on such a large scale. That’s why it looks the way it does, because it’s trying to look like actual racks of audio hardware:
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I mean, jeeze, you have a keypad with fake wires coming off of it. Volume sliders with graphics of actual hardware wedges instead of just the flat block Windows normally gives you.
Though I will take umbrage with “FL Studio’s UI is objectively worse than Garage Band” because Garage Band just looks like FL Studio’s pattern editor but with bigger buttons.
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I guess you could say it’s a little more readable because all the fonts and knobs are bigger, but Logic Pro is also similarly compact like FL Studio.
ANYWAY don’t be weird and judgemental about things you don’t seem to actually have experience with is the basic point in all of this. You aren’t going to be more or less cool based on the visual style of your software just so long as it works the way you want it to.
A paint brush is still a paint brush regardless of whether or not its handle is engraved with fancy symbols or if it’s bought at a hobby store for $5.
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blazehedgehog · 5 years
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You write a lot of shorter reviews for games on Steam - have you ever considered turning those reviews into short videos? Videos that would only take a handful of production days to put together? You have a pretty deep-well to pull from, and could even dip into movies since you've written a lot of those as well. I could see why you wouldn't want to like... derail your motivation to work on long-form stuff, but it could be an efficient way to repurpose those reviews, and create more video content
This is definitely something I’ve thought about in the past. Or, more specifically, strictly why my Steam reviews and IMDB reviews typically turn out shorter than a typical video review script these days.
Believe it or not, it’s not really intentional. I mean, on some level it definitely is, but I think it has more to do with how you enter reviews on those sites. On both Steam and IMDB, you get these tiny little boxes to write in.
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That cramped space really makes it feel like you don’t have a lot of room to write, which is further reinforced by the fact both IMDB and Steam cut long reviews off and automatically hide them behind a “read more” tag.
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There’s definitely a sense that you have to keep things short and to the point. Nobody is going to read a 2500 word review on these places. There’s not enough space, not enough features.
Also, at least as far as IMDB goes, those end up shorter because I’m bad at talking about movies, on top of IMDB punishing you a little bit for talking about spoilers. So I tend to be vague about specifics.
When I write a script in Google Docs, it’s a completely different sort of feeling. There, I can stretch out. I’ll often just start writing and then look over at the page count on the side bar and realize I’ve already written 4+ pages without even trying.
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That combines with the elephant in the room: Youtube favors longer videos. They don’t really track individual “views” anymore as a measurement of popularity, it tracks “watch time.” In other words, how long people spend on your video.
When you view your analytics, the first metric it shows you is watch time. In order to monetize your account, you must have a certain amount watch time coming in to your videos every month. When Youtube punishes your account for copyright strikes, they temporarily cut off your ability to create videos over 10 minutes. Long videos and good watch time are the YouTube economy.
So that’s how it goes. On Steam and IMDB, I keep things short because I figure nobody will want to read long things on those platforms, and I feel constrained by their limitations. On TSSZ and for video review scripts, I tend to write until I run out of things to say because I have the space and the means to do that. And on YouTube especially, I feel downright encouraged to pursue my longwinded tendencies.
It’s just… longer videos are also exhausting. I have a poor work-life balance, and that’s when homesickness and depression aren’t factoring in to my ability to maintain a consistent output. I’m going as fast as I can, and I don’t know if I could really let anyone else fill any role for me to speed things up. I certainly can’t pay anyone to do that, either.
On the plus side, I do think I’ve put out some really good videos this year. Good things come to those who wait, I guess.
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