video games and music sure are neat… i am currently “moving” this account to kbin.run

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • 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.









  • 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.