Bartimaeus

I remember watching some long-form essay video on someone playing Shadows of Amn for the first time and them marvelling at how dark, dirty, and chaotic Athkatla is, and how it made it really feel like this wonderfully lived-in and organically constructed city, especially relative to most other games' cities - even much more modern games. Environmental audio and visuals alike definitely play into that, and I sometimes think about that video when I consider how attentive and perfectly at home I feel with certain games' environments while feeling completely out of sorts and not thinking anything of or even really paying attention to those of other games. Some games just do a much better job of creating a believable illusion, and it can be difficult to quantify. From what I've played of BG3, I can't say that the game really quite gets me in this way even to the standard of BG1, and note that I love and obviously think a lot more of Shadows of Amn.

Some people should not speak on camera, good lord that video was intolerable. On a side-note, you should really manually go into turn-based mode before pickpocketing anybody - makes running away hilariously easy if you get a full turn of movement before the "I've been stolen from!" timer starts to run*. Upon seeing how broken pickpocketing was, I immediately implemented a "I can only steal enchanted and quest items from NPCs where there is no other apparent/satisfactory method of obtaining them" rule, because just stealing everything is incredibly lame and boring. (e): *Also, you can steal multiple items if necessary/successful before that timer starts to run. And also, the character can't move around while you're in turn-based mode. Overall, it just...doesn't make any sense not to be in turn-based mode.

I'm imagining taking this idea to its most extreme logical conclusion: a future where all the Democrat voters run the Republican primaries, and all the Republican voters run the Democrat primaries, with each group voting for the absolute worst candidate possible to try and outdo the other side to make their own look more palatable. Cue everyone wondering why all our candidates are always so bad. Well, that seemingly happens a lot of the time anyways, but it'd be even worse.

can they remake bg3 in the infinity engine instead

I've run into two weird bugs repeatedly (at least five times each) so far: 1. My controls get "desynchronized". Essentially, I will click to move somewhere, and instead of my character moving to where my cursor is, it goes somewhere else completely different. When this happens, it's not just that one click, but rather all further attempts at doing anything (including even using the hotbars and menus) are busted in this manner, and there is no apparent fix except to restart the game. I wasn't able to determine the how/why of this happens, but it may be something to do with minimizing the game, I'm not entirely sure. 2. The timestamps and order of my saves get muddled. My latest quick saves will suddenly start to have wrong and much earlier timestamps, and the game will place them many slots below the one prior to the bug starting to occur (maybe as much as 20 or 30 slots), and thus quick loading will load the old quick save instead of the new quick save. Making new quick saves does not help, the game must be restarted to start getting correct timestamps again (which will make new quick saves appear at the top of the list and be preferred for quick loading once again).

It was honestly already a problem in primarily text-based games like even BG1/2, but it gets even worse when you throw in fully voiced dialogue*: there are going to be significantly less options to choose from due to the expense of having to voice what NPCs say back. So you get a lot of bland and/or mildly window dressed dialogue options that will work to get the same responses. There's definitely a lot of dissonance for me as well, as I'm playing a baby-faced Dark Urge Cthulhu-warlock, who I kind of imagine as being Elizabeth Bathory, and trying to navigate between "I'm fantasizing about tearing off and eating that person's face right now", "hello, I'm Mr. Krabs, and I like money", and "oh, the poor widdle bardy bard needs some help writing her sad little song about her dead master :'(" can be a lot of whiplash. I want to try to roleplay as my character, but I don't necessarily want to play Stupid Evil and murder everyone she meets. I feel like you almost have to imagine your own responses that at least sound more suitable for whatever you're trying to play, rather than what's literally written...but that basically takes you down the path of a kind of meta-gaming, as now you're thinking about dialogue options as "what do I want to happen" instead of "what should I say", and that's not great. Of course, I know how it would take an utterly ridiculous amount of just writing (never mind voice-acting!) to really cover all one's bases, which is probably a point in favor of always playing a very generic main character that you view simply as a narrative tool rather than a real character. I mentioned a while back about it being very difficult to take roleplaying seriously in these kinds of games, and this has always definitely been one of the big problems with it. *Mind you, I'm still of the opinion that semi-voiced is much better than fully voiced. I like characters having voiced lines to give them their unique flavor while also indicating their particular style and tone, as well as using voiced lines for dramatic punctuation and whatnot, but I prefer being able to go through dialogue at my own speed, which having everything be fully voiced is a huge impediment to. And I'm not going to sit through and listen to all of this idiot bard's entire dialogue tree, but constantly skipping all of their lines feels pretty disruptive and dissatisfying as well: semi-voiced a la the Infinity Engine games made for a delicate bridge between those two competing issues rather effectively.

My hatred for bards has expanded well beyond the simple confines of gameplay at this point: I despise the general concept of a bard and the type of character that plays them in of itself. When I clicked on the class during character creation and saw my character play the ridiculous animation in their foppish clothing, it instantly rekindled my forgotten loathing. It surely doesn't help that every time you run into one in these games, they're the absolute most annoying people that you naturally want to shove off the nearest cliff. Well, a little more than "want" in my case, considering I actually do it. There should be some kind of satisfying crunch sound for if someone dies from fall damage: what better music indeed than the succulent symphony of a bard's spine imploding into dust?

It was for the greater good. All bards are bastards.

I keep playing about an hour at a time and feeling like I made zero progress because there are far too many little things to do. I, too, am looking forward to less dense parts of the game. Though I am also playing the Dark Urge, I haven't done too many evil things. But true to my word, I did toss some awful bard that was torturing some squirrels(?) with her terrible music right off a cliff and she died upon impact, though she landed right in front of a bear who sniffed her and then went back to catching and eating fish. Yeah, I don't blame the bear for not wanting any part of that either. I rather appreciated that nobody else seemed to notice or care, which is just how it should be when it comes to murdering bards.

When we were leaving San Diego back in...I want to say probably 2007, a large section of the county was being evacuated due to fires. It seemed like a huge fire at the time, but I was only in my early teens at the time, so looking back, I'm unsure how big of a deal it actually was relative to what's been going on in recent years. A few years later, we left the state entirely, and I can't say that I miss the constant fires. Love the ocean and the climate (minus any droughts) and the beauty of the state, but I am content with instead being on the shores of one of the Great Lakes instead, particularly as I find the speed of life to be more to my liking than what I experienced in California. But...especially seeing pictures like those, it's hard not to miss it nevertheless.

Makes me miss California and the forested mountain just beyond my backyard.

Crystal Skull isn't horrible...for the first 45 minutes. Sure, most of the action looks pretty sloppy, it's a bit of a shock to see a significantly reduced Indiana Jones doddering about, there's already too much CGI, the nuke-refrigerator scene is kind of dumb (though that's really more just symbolic of the film feeling wholly silly and unreal in both tone and style - you can immediately feel that trademark George Lucas-ian lack of restraint even though he's not actually in the director's chair), and maybe Shia LaBeouf with his little tough boy act is a bit off-putting...but otherwise, it's not totally lost by that point. Most of the dialogue is fine, the motorcycle chase scene is pretty decent, and they're doing a funny thematic thing with Indy kind of turning into his father along with some other stuff... Alas, there turned out to be a few other issues with the film thereafter. I'm curious to see how much I hate Dial of Destiny.

They sure took their sweet time in making a second season. I watched the first season, but it was a "I kind of enjoy it but I also kind of hate it" thing.

Fun (or at least I thought so) discussion between GN's Steve and Intel's Tom Peterson on a new tool and associated measures that should help identify bottlenecks between CPU and GPU in a more transparent manner, and possible expansion into even identifying specific causes of bottlenecks (e.g. too high resolution textures), which could be used by end users (and hopefully developers) to better optimize settings. Discussed at a mostly low level that should be understandable to all of us here, I would think. I don't really know that much about the whole "let's make a frame" pipeline, but they simplified it enough where I felt like I got the basic idea at least.

I treated They Live very seriously when I watched it, and so I thought it was pretty awful. If I had known in advance that John Carpenter explicitly intended for it to be a scathing but humorous criticism of 1980s capitalistic America and its conservative politics, I probably would've enjoyed it more. Alas, the lack of context and my own inability to read the room doomed it for me. Perhaps worth a re-watch at some point. Man, I can't even handle one Bruce, never mind a whole bunch of clones.

The Forgotten Girls, written and obviously heavily referenced by the author for the first article, is a fairly enjoyable read - it's mostly an autobiography on the author growing up in dirt poor Arkansas and how some relatively innocuous desires and choices during her youth allowed her to escape that life while dooming virtually everyone else she'd ever known during her childhood in the face of rural America being in terminal decline. If you enjoyed the article, you'll probably enjoy the book, especially as it weaves in narratives and themes with the intertwining of poverty, politics, and religion.

From what I've played of the game so far, it's pretty much fine. Which is infinitely better than I expected, and way more than I get out of almost anything AAA-released these days. If I get farther into the game and my mind changes, I'll let you all know. I mean, I always do, don't I?

The Matildas have lost to the English, and my interest in soccer has never been lower.

I've been so trained by most other poorly designed games to think that failing something, even something completely out of my control such as a literal dice roll, always makes me feel like I need to go back and fix it. It's difficult to break out of that programming, but you're absolutely correct: succeeding at everything all the time because you made all the correct decisions is just...kind of boring and dissatisfying. If we lived in an ideal world, we'd have more video games that do a better job with this sort of thing, but we don't. I think this is some part of why my interest in a lot of 'traditional' video game gameplay has really waned over the years: I'm tired of learning systems that ultimately just come down to making 'correct' decisions, finding out what works isn't fun and what's fun doesn't work, and endless min-maxing to make the gameplay as painless as possible - while most everything else is background noise at best. It's old, it's stale, I don't care or want to engage with it anymore. Just want games that attempt novel experiences, games with compelling worlds, stories, and characters, and maybe possibly even be able to make choices without nearly so much objective value tied to each choice making me feel like the vast majority of possible choices are stupid/wrong... BG3 is by no means perfect for any of that, not even close, and I think it's pretty wild that it's currently sitting at #1 all time for PC games on Metacritic, but I can say that it seems like it at least tried, and that it does actually feel like a proper attempt at a game instead of some kind of money-making lab rat simulator, and that's better than what I can say for almost every other AAA game I see these days. Hell, the game was even released on GOG right off the bat...

Lmao: "We didn't sell it, we auctioned it." What a dip. If nothing else, at least the GN video accomplished in getting Billet Labs getting compensated for Linus stealing and selling their stuff - Linus magically remembered they exist after weeks of ignoring them two hours after the GN video released.

I feel having content you don't want to engage with is or at least can be a positive, not a negative. I do not want a sixty hour long game full of repetitive and homogeneous content that everyone who plays will rotely go through because making anything but the obviously correct choices is just plain stupid (if there even are any real 'choices' to be had in the first place, seeing as games almost never have any real choices beyond some mild window dressing before the game railroads you right back down the same path everyone else has to go). That kind of thinking flies pretty hard in the face of the literal meaning and spirit of "role playing game", and I'd rather have a 30 hour game full of variability and interesting content and options that makes second playthroughs actually worth bothering with in the event of not wanting to make the same exact choices that you did during the previous playthrough. Heck, look at what KP is saying regarding failing his rolls and just rolling with them: failures in a game system like D&D can and should be used as an opportunity in of themselves to create interesting and different content/situations. This complaint is also kind of hilarious given that BG3 is pretty darned inclusive in terms of making sure that certain character types and builds do not ever miss out on much content - so long as you explore, talk, and engage with the game enough to find alternatives. Like, there were literally just multiple posts complaining about how way too much is available to everyone! Then again, I prefer my games to be on the short and sweet side, and I don't mind making hard choices so long as I feel like I understand those choices. The latter can be frustrating when not handled properly/clearly, I will grant, but otherwise... (Also, see Undertale for a great game with radically different situations, content, and writing depending on how you play it, and which I would contend did the most interesting thing that I've ever in any game ever in terms of handling this idea with its alternative route - even if there was relatively limited variability within each of the two main routes due to the indie scope of the game.) Everyone's stats having odd numbers when odd numbers contribute absolutely nothing to their effectiveness is basically hard encouraging you to respec everyone, which I think is kind of stupid. But the way stat distribution in 5E is handled appears to be rather lousy in general, so I guess it's whatever.

I'm really torn between doing things how I normally do and being an utterly psychotic murderer. I snapped a totally helpless woman's neck for no reason and the rest of my party silently looked at me in horror with "what in the absolute hell is the matter with you...and are we also in danger?" expressions and it was kind of amazing, but like, it's really hard for me to stick with such egregiously insane choices.

The vast majority of GN's videos are around 200-300K views where they simply cover news and products; the more controversial videos reach higher numbers. If you don't enjoy GN videos, you probably only know of the more controversial videos. It's a pretty natural kind of selection bias for someone who doesn't care for or follow something that happens to most of us. Like, I don't ever hear about Will Smith's best days or anything good he does, only the big negative crap ever reaches me, so it just reinforces my dislike of him...but really, that's not particularly fair to him. But what am I gonna do about it, actually go pay attention to that bozo? Hell no.

Well, I've always just hated him as a presenter, but it's nice to hear why I can be a hater for better reasons than that.

That's usually an AMD issue. ive never heard intel being bad about amd, but maybe u right intel's badness transcends (corporate) borders