Bartimaeus

"Even if Trump is elected, nothing will change," said the stupid bastard.

Interstellar (2014). You know, if I had remembered that this was directed by Christopher Nolan, I probably wouldn't have had it on my watchlist for like the past six or seven years. It's not as dumb as Gravity, but...ergh, I just get frustrated with Hollywood films like this where it seems like the fate of the human race is hinging on some interpersonal character drama that just feels kind of overwrought and phony. Like, I know the basics of stories and character emotions and the human experience will all stay the same no matter whether it's between two characters in a dark cave or a trained crew of hundreds on a spaceship hurtling towards a black hole, but...but really, that's why it's all the more frustrating when it feels like something takes a big swing and an equally big miss. I had a pretty similar experience with that 90s Jodie Foster film, Contact...but at least there, you've got Jodie Foster starring instead of Matthew McConaughey, which helped a lot.

Not directed at anyone here: The constant refrain of people saying "I hope AMD/Intel are able to compete with Nvidia because Nvidia is the worst" is truly hilarious when it's also always paired with those exact same people refusing to ever buy anything except for Nvidia. Neither AMD or Intel are going to compete at the top-end any time soon, so either A. get used to not owning the top-end GPUs or B. get used to waiting months for the honor of being able to pay thousands of dollars to Nvidia for a GPU that's hardly better than the previous gen. And here come the tariffs...

Cyber City Oedo 808. Don't let me sing, don't let me speak! My English sucks, it really stinks! What's up with Japanese songs using utter nonsense English, anyways? I might've asked this at some point already...but honestly, you'd think that if you were going to include words from another language, you'd make sure they were meaningful and/or at least make sense first. Uh, anyways, this show is just 80s junk, don't watch it. The story's premise is that three HARDENED CRIMINALS (who definitely come across as being cool rebels just like writer intended) get a second chance at freedom...if they arrest enough other criminals. Or just kill them, I don't know. My greatest regret about 80s anime is how much dumb sci-fi and fantasy nonsense they made for male audiences. I mean, something like The Matrix is clearly aimed more at a male audience, but it feels like there is some thought and intelligent ideas behind its story, characters, what it's trying to say, its style and editing, visual design, and how everything ties together. There might still be some problems, there might be some specific design choices that I don't really much love, but there's still some good stuff there that at least makes it more than watchable cinematically speaking. With something like this, it's like the visuals are fine and there are high production values by all means...but there's really just not much sign that any intelligent life was involved in its making elsewise. This show's idea of a good turnabout for a character is introducing them and immediately being like, "Remember when we were partners? Those were the good old days, I wish we could go back to them... Anyways, I'm betraying you for a bunch of money. ...Oh no, I can't betray you, I'm pathetic!". Blargh, dead a minute of mindless action later. Wow, such character, really stirs the heart. Oh, this was directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. I should've expected this: just about everything I've seen from this joker has been somewhere between disappointing and awful. The one exception is...oh, speaking of the Matrix, one of the shorts from the Animatrix, Program. That one was pretty good, but it also, like, didn't really have anything going on writing-wise beyond just the basic premise, which probably explains why he didn't manage to totally bungle it.

My understanding is that while this is true for trademarks, it is not true for copyrights. I think Gromnir hammered us a few times on the difference between them over the years.

Unless you live near a MicroCenter, which is U.S.-only. That's basically the only reliable way to get your hands on one right now.

Yeah, I personally don't particularly mind if a game has DRM for a few months to half a year - even if it's Denuvo. Mind you, I'm not going to buy it while it has Denuvo, but I understand its use for that initial release period, since initial release is supposedly where games lose the most revenue to piracy. But I very much like to see games eventually get a DRM or effectively DRM-free release. I prefer GOG for its actually fully DRM-free approach, but basic Steam-wrapping can be disabled by pretty much anyone if they look up how, and that's what's typically used for most singleplayer games on Steam. Ubisoft is one of a few companies that seem to never remove Denuvo from their games no matter how old the games in question get. I wouldn't play, much less buy, any Ubisoft games in the first place, but it's nice of them to to enforce that I don't.

I see a "2010 GOG Edition" version as well (the only other GOG release for this particular game), but the one under the list I posted above is shown as "2024 GOG PP Edition" and has separate versioning (i.e. the 2010 release's final version is notated as 2.0.0.9 from about 5 years ago, while the 2024's is 1.0.1.0 from a few months ago). What "PP" might stand for, I do not know, and Google doesn't seem to give me any relevant results. "GOG PP Edition" is a funny name, though, which has to count for something. Given that there was a previous GOG release, it probably shouldn't really be included in these results, though. (e): Oh, duh, "PP" is the "Preservation Program" GOG started not that long ago. It's basically their own souped-up version of the game that's supposed to ensure that it can be run on modern operating systems. So yeah, definitely shouldn't be included. I wonder how many like that are in my list...let's check: four. They are RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, Caesar III, SimCity 3000, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Okay, so not as many as I expected, doesn't really affect the results all that much. There are more games in this Preservation Program than that, but those four were apparently the only ones that changed significantly enough to warrant the separate/distinct release year notations from any previous releases GOG might have had of them. Yeah. If nothing else, I would not want to see what these lists would look like for Steam, as I'm sure the GOG lists must dwarf the Steam ones.

GOG launched approximately 358 games whose initial releases were in 2024 (...I say it this way specifically to exclude games whose initial releases on other platforms or consoles were a previous year, but then released in 2024 on GOG). They are the following: I sorted them by popularity, hence why it starts with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and then proceeds to almost immediately descend into games you've never heard of. There were approximately an additional 229 non-2024 games that were launched in 2024 as well. Again, sorted by popularity. Some more mainstream titles there, albeit older games. Anyways, doesn't mean anything with regards to your point, I just wanted to check for my own curiosity. Specific to Obsidian, you can see Alpha Protocol near the top of the second list!

Bloodborne with the new GPU (7800 XTX and the 16 GB of VRAM necessary to play this game at a high resolution without the emulator exploding, bite me Nvidia). Consistent 60 FPS (with the patch to enable it) on 1440p, most of the biggest playability glitches have been fixed since I last tried this...it's go time, baby. Everything was going fine for a couple of hours, until the emulator crashed while I was loading an area: rebooted the emulator, and when I started it back up, the main menu music wasn't working anymore. Huh, weird. Loaded into the game, still no sound...and when I tried to attack an enemy, it crashed. Restart...same thing: no sound, attacking enemies causes a crash. Apparently, my save got corrupted during that crash, and wiping my save game data fixes both the no sound and crashing issues. Maybe I'll let this emulator bake for a few more months after all.

One thing I'm going to miss about the past four years of the Biden administration was how precious little anybody had to say about it. This is day one and I'm already getting bombarded by friends and family with all of the old nonsense that I'm trying to avoid. It's like everyone is terminally addicted to Trump, one way or another.

School was cancelled because it was -51 F (with wind chill) this morning. BACK IN MY DAY...well, back in my day, I think they would've cancelled school for -51, too.

Thanks for the recommendation, my nieces and I enjoyed it - though we all started to lose our minds a little after the 30th production company logo at the beginning.

I've never seen even a single second of Lost and I only have a vague idea of what it's about, so the details are completely lost on me: what I said is more a general commentary on the average person's inability to consciously discern and relate the specifics of their ire with media. The average person. You know, the person when they don't like a popular blockbuster movie, they just say "the CGI was bad". Despite their shortcomings and general lack of media literacy, average people nevertheless shape a lot of the popular narratives around media, and they sometimes also write hilariously stupid imdb reviews that should make you fear for the future of Earth and the human race. Mind you, there are certainly times where I'm not completely sure why I do or don't enjoy something as well, but I at least try to be conscious of that.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024). There's something about the three OG shorts that I don't think anything else will really ever be able to touch in their charming simplicity, good pacing, and small but tight cast of characters...but unlike the Chicken Run sequel, this is still pretty good. Maybe not Were-Rabbit good, but I liked it better than A Matter of Loaf and Death at least. I think I would've preferred a more original story without the Feathers McGraw tie-in (he's right there in the movie poster, this isn't a spoiler), but it is what it is.

Sounds like it could be another example of viewers not truly knowing why they didn't enjoy something but knowing that they didn't enjoy it, so they latch onto whatever reason they can and public perception runs with it and subsequently snowballs out of control. It's probably just more fuel to the fire if the actual problems started cropping up way earlier but the majority of viewers failed to notice until the very last second, so they feel like it got dumped on them all of a sudden even when that's not actually the case.

While over a third of the voting population couldn't even be bothered to care enough to vote in the first place. Yes, I'm afraid that we get the representation that we duly deserve.

Yeah, I used it to play through the game with a friend across the country, their new netcode worked surprisingly well and we had fun. Speaking of netcode with old games, I tried playing through Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition sometime ago with a friend, purely for the more modern netcode, and it was an absolute disaster, with endless glitches and desyncs that required reloading constantly. Really great, super fun, thank you Beamdog.

(Ignore the messed up colors/lighting, someone that was not me didn't know how to take screenshots of an HDR source.) I don't know about great, but I guess there's some hints of retro design there, even if it kind of looks weird and off-putting to me...and then, we also have this... Modern anime literally scares me.

Frame generation is hilarious to me: you get fake frames that make the visuals seem smoother but actually introduce input lag and make the game noticeably feel and perform worse despite the artificial smoothness. It's brilliant, except that it's total garbage, but hey, at least a bunch of dummies get fooled by it and think their games are better with than without it. Perhaps even more comical is that as the higher visual fidelity that 3D graphics are able to achieve, it inversely becomes easier and easier to notice that animations simply aren't able to keep up. Nothing like pumping all the pixels and ray tracing in the world into models, textures, and lighting, only to be immediately let down by forever wonky animation work that make the whole effort seem hardly worth the bother.

A couple years back, I played the DevilutionX re-build of Diablo 1 (it's very faithful but has some engine and QoL improvements, you can even transfer saves between DevilutionX and the original game), and I tried playing a Sorcerer for the first time: I'd only ever tried a Rogue or Warrior before then. Felt like I was playing on easy mode, the Sorcerer is so much more powerful than the other two classes. Given that I only ever played Sorceress in Diablo 2, you think I would've tried it at some point already... Let's take a twenty to thirty hour game and stretch it into a hundred hour game while diluting and piecemealing out everything fun and interesting that you could do or find in it. I love open world games, they're the greatest.

Not sure if here, the Politics thread, or the "What Are You Reading" thread is most the appropriate place for this.

Mouthwashing. Neat visuals and cool story, but literally half (or maybe even more) of the game is a dream sequence, and the other half is told out of order. 6/10, which is just barely a "pass" for me, coulda been a lot higher if not for all the nonsense. I am once again asking that indie game developers, particularly horror ones, learn how to develop and tell stories, themes, and characters without the non-stop use of dream sequences. You can do it, I believe in you, even though you keep proving me wrong.

Casablanca (1942). I hadn't watched this for like, twelve years, and it was just once at like 1 in the morning with my mom near Christmas on some TV broadcast. I thought it was great back then, and now, re-watching it...it helps me realize how much dumb writing and direction I sit through in movies that don't get anywhere even close to 1942's Casablanca. This is a movie where I don't really care that much about the subject material, the locale, or even particularly the characters or themes, but I sit through it and I have a great time regardless. And my goodness, the whole movie goes by so fast, and it's really hard not to wish that similarly excellent movies could be consistently made every year - even better if they're about things or people you're a little more predisposed to care about. It's kind of the anti-Citizen Kane for me, which I find to be borderline unwatchable despite the two of them being released within a year of each and both being hailed as all-time dramatic cinema. A man after my own heart.