Games

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 Signs that I really liked a game: when I’ll buy it on another platform.

Resident Evil 0 was probably on sale when I bought it on Steam. Mostly, I got it because it would be the most like what I grew up with: the original Resident Evil, dual shock, and director’s cut editions. While I had very mixed feelings about Resident Evil HD, since it invalidates everything I remember: I really enjoyed zero. Haven’t cared too much for most of the series since the original trilogy, and had never played zero.

Thus, seeing it on Xbox sale for $5…no brainer. The only real negative from my time with it on Steam was how hard it is to actually hit the giant ass bat monster….lol

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 Passing thought: spending thanksgiving morning knee deep in the dead, playing doom. Unsure if I’m getting old, or just have really good taste in how to pass time waiting for downloads to finish 😆

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

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When encountering it on Xbox, I found the first entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan a superb adventure game. Enough so that after finishing it: I pre-ordered the second entry on the spot. I can understand why they targeted Halloween weekend as the launch for The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope. The game has a rather gruesome opening prologue before meeting up with the survivors of the bus wreck. It’s content is kind of ideal for Halloween, and I’ve been looking forward to it all month.

My Halloween plans pretty much were eat cake, and play Xbox. ‘Cuz even I need a day off once in a while, lol.

Early on Little Hope feels like things are a bit less heavy on the Quick Time Events (QTEs), given the shift from holy crap, pirates! Over to demons that go bump in the night as the main threat to your lives. Didn’t expect the twist at the end to make such crystal sense of everything that happened, but it was well executed. Whether intentional, or just my own attitude, it made the feeling of having had enough of the demons confronting the characters, and opting for more a aggressive approach: seem rather appropriate to the story. How it impacts the significance of characters surviving, well, made me feel a little less bad about missing a QTE and losing one on the way to the house. Some aspects of the gameplay may take advantages of people who paid attention in Man of Medan, or just be ready to oopsie you the same way over; it’s hard to tell.
Sounds like there are plans for a third game in The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes. I’ll probably be nabbing that when it comes out. Definitely a very fun game series.
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Baldur’s Gate 3 devs built a testing AI. Then, they tried to defeat it.

That is kind of neat, and likely worth the effort as it grows more capabilities for abusing the game.

Television, novels, and comics tell us one day the super cool A.I. will be super smart, and may or may not try to kill us all. Personally, I think the future looks more like a series of special purpose constructs aimed to help us with specific tasks. That’s the super-cool A.I. I’m looking forward to, because I’m probably going to be dead decades or centuries before we see anything like Cortana or Jarvis, lol.

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Not sure that my emergency action plan has changed much since I was a child, aside from the rise of LED bulbs and that my phone can speak an emergency alert for tornadoes. But I’d like to think warning times have improved over the last couple decades.

Officially hunkered down. All the things near shelter point. Etc. But based on the radar and the weather, I’m thinking if I was going to die by tornado tonight I’d already by dead. Just the same, I’d rather it be a shorter trip if I find myself grabbing dogs and taking cover.

And then there’s the part I find more mixed.

Decided while I was at it: fresh underwear. Not unusual as part of my getting ready for bed. But not a horrible precaution for tornadoes either.

But then I pictured hanging from a tree branch by the elastic, narrowly saved from being gone with the wind. Because my sense of humour is rather twisted and easily amused. For some reason: this made my mind flash to a scene in the old visual novel: Family Project. Soon after the middle aged woman,  Masumi is introduced into the story: she tries to commit suicide by leaping off the nearest bridge. The main character ends up saving her by her panties, and putting the elastic to the ultimate test, in what’s a spectacularly hilarious scene (if terribly embarrassing for the character). Personally, if I was in that predicament, I’d be keeping that pair for good luck, lol.

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XBOX SERIES X AND S: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEXT-GEN OF XBOX

I kind of like the contrast these two machines offer.

That the Series X targets 2160p60 is pretty straight forward. Having a matching Ultra HD Blu-Ray drive is nice value, much as my original One’s Full HD Blu-ray drive or my PlayStation 2’s DVD player was handy on the wallet.

So in essence if you wanna have the biggest horse power: buy the Series X. If you just wanna have fun or save money: get the Series S.

Seems the Series S basically targets Full HD televisions. Enough oompth to for a 1440p60 target should make anyone’s 1080p HDTV happy whether the resources are pumped into eye candy or only milked for PC monitors in that resolution. You’re not going to find tons of consumer oriented 1440p QHD television.

My main curiosity, I think will be what difference the differences in compute power bring.

Especially as time goes on and on, and games take greater advantage of modern hardware. The focus on the hardware being more like a feature profile has been a positive for the One/One S and One X bit. I expect that it will continue with the Series S and Series X, however long the earlier consoles remain good enough for general gaming. I like the idea of “Xbox games” that scale to your console more than I like the idea of “Generations” and backwards compatibility. Even more so given the relationship to Windows.

Given the goal of being cheaper: cutting both memory and the optical drive make sense.

In all the years that I’ve owned an Xbox One: games on disc have been a waste. Literally, I have had more use for 3.5″ floppy diskettes in the past decade than I have for the buying video games on Blu-ray disc. When I’ve done so: without failure it lead to downloading all the freaking stuff anyway. In effect making the disc little more than a resellable license key, but at least optical discs (probably) make better frisbees than floppies.

Rather the value I’ve had out of the console’s optical drive has been purely video related. I have two Blu-ray drives. One in my desktop PC that I use for ripping content, and the one in my Xbox one that I’ll occasionally use to check the discs. Most times I just rip and later stream to my Fire TVs via Plex.

When it comes to the whole resale and used games front, I don’t think having to put a disc in the drive is worth that for me. Rather I think some system for linking license keys to an account and some kind of cross signature verification between your logged in device, and Microsoft’s servers, would be a better move. I.e. chuck the disc, unlink the key from your account and trade or sell it to a friend. Screw the damned optical disc. Having to download 20 to 100 gigs of shit is inescapable at this point, so you’re basically screwed if popping a Blu-ray in is the only way to get your game on.

I think I’ve had the original model Xbox One since about 2015 or 214. In all of that time the options for getting games on disc or used, surely hasn’t saved me the cost difference between the two new consoles. Hell, subscribing to Game Pass has probably saved me more in the long term than the used games market has saved me since 1993. Yes, I’m getting old.

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 Greedy Fool; noun.

What happens when you reach the end of Central Processing, and instead of rushing through the exit: decide to wipe the last Blinky off your tail before it can chomp your neck off.

And then you realize you just swapped Chaingun -> Rocket Launcher instead of Chaingun -> Shotgun, and blow yourself back to the starting point.

Yeah. Not quite my brightest moment ever. Well, I’m sure the look on my face maybe. On the upside the Spectre didn’t survive the blast either.