Keyrock

Two Worlds 2 was perfectly playable on release. Fair enough, my bad, I didn't get Two Worlds 2 until much later. I do remember the first Two Worlds was a horrible mess on launch. Anyway, there are tons of issues being reported on the Steam forums about Raven's Cry. I've been quite lucky with the only major issue being an autosave bug that causes the game to completely lock up often times (not always) when autosaving. It's easily enough worked around by disabling autosaves (manually saving has never locked the game up for me). The game is clunky and low budget as hell. The dialogue in it is bad, really bad. Lip syncing is way off (I'm guessing because it was synced to Polish rather than English originally?). This is nowhere near a AAA title. Still, I'm having a lot of fun with the game. I love how much of an ***hole I get to be. Many conversation options break down to these options: a) Be an ***hole/threaten the person b) Threaten the person more forcefully c) Kill the person on the spot. That seems spot on for a pirate. Also, the game is nearly worth the money for the sea shanties alone. They are so vulgar, so deliciously vulgar. Edit: Just played the game some more. The main character is even more of an ***hole than I initially thought. I'm talking EPIC LEVEL ***hole with roughing up women and smacking around and threatening to kill helpless dudes, it's freakin' fantastic. Don't get me wrong, I don't condone those kinds of actions, but I am playing a pirate and it's refreshing to play an antihero with seemingly no real redeeming qualities, rather than how games always try to make the character likable and have him have a heart of gold inside (that might still happen here, but not so far). Hollywood had pretty much always tried to paint pirates as good people with good hearts trapped in a dirty world, struggling against what they must do and wanting to do the right thing inside, when in reality pirates are ****ing scumbags and murderers. Hopefully this game sticks with what I've seen so far, because it's really refreshing playing a complete scumbag. The SJWs are going to have a field day with this game if it doesn't fly completely under their radar. I hope it doesn't so they can all **** their collective pants about a pirate being portrayed like an actual pirate and how awful that is and Reality Pump not giving a **** about it, if I know my countrymen like I think I do. We don't give a **** about your feels. Cry to someone who cares.

You really love survival games, don't you, LadyC?

Aesthetic will almost always win over resolution/fidelity for me. Just look at Nintendo. They put out some of the best looking games out there and do so on a console that is objectively weaker than their competitors. How does Nintendo do it? They are very good with coming up with a really good, pleasant aesthetic that both masks the lack of horsepower of their system and looks terrific. Another example is Jagged Alliance Flashback. That game uses a fairly simplistic aesthetic with less detailed more single toned blockier shapes (e.g. faces have very few features, no mouths), and highly saturated colors. I feel this works really well for the game (and the tropical setting) and the game looks really good, even though, by fidelity standards, those are early 2000s graphics. It does go on a case by case basis. Sometimes it fits a game to have as realistic as possible graphics, and obviously fidelity helps a lot there. Going with a more cartoony, 8-bit, comic book, Aztec wall painting, or whatever aesthetic isn't always the answer. Going with a strong aesthetic is, however, a good way for a smaller developer without the resources to pour into cutting edge graphics to overcome the lack of fidelity in their games and still come out with the game looking really good.

Cheap flavored malt liquor (I'm talking cheaper than Four Loko), it does a liver good.

The one effect that developers use that's clearly overdone most of the time and nowhere near realistic, but that I do like, is light shafts, god rays, that sort of thing. It's quite rare in real life to see god rays as pronounced as they are regularly in games, but I think that it looks really awesome, so developers should feel free to continue overdoing that effect as far as I'm concerned. On the what I'm playing front, I'm holding off on Dying Light for a bit. There's a bug on Linux making it impossible to secure safe houses (other than the ones that are part of scripted events). I thought I was just doing something wrong, but it's a problem on all Linux machines. This isn't a showstopper, but it does hamper gameplay at night to a significant degree and I'm at a point in the game where I'm about to do some night missions. The first patch fixed some Linux stuff, but that bug remains for now. Hopefully it's fixed soon. I scooped up Raven's Cry. I'm not a fan of either Two Worlds game, but I scooped up the game for several reasons: 1) Reality Pump is a Polish studio. I can't help but give studios from the motherland more extra chances than I would otherwise. 2) I love me some pirates. 3) Day 1 Linux release. 4) I desperately need an RPG to tide me over until Pillars of Eternity. So, the game is a pirate RPG set in the real world, though I've yet to meet and real historical characters. So far as I can tell, there is no magic, it's real real world (except with a fictional story and all that). The game features normal on foot stuff, ship combat, trading, and crew management. I typical TopWare and Reality Pump fashion, the game is buggy and obviously unfinished at launch. Some characters are completely missing voice acting (I don't think they were meant to), the sound mixing is way off in certain scenes (luckily there are separate volume sliders for voice acting, sound effects, music, etc., so it can be worked around), animations are pretty stiff and hilariously bad at times, the environment looks decent but character models look like they're from 2008, dialogue is hilariously bad, the story they drop you into at the beginning has a bunch of stuff happening and they do a really bad job of explaining why (until after the fact and even then, it's not explained well), and on foot combat is pretty clunky. The game is a mess right now. With all that said, I'm kinda liking the game so far. The game has a weird, low budget, clunky charm to it and there is a lot to do, even if some of it is implemented in a less than elegant way. I kinda like how the character you play is pretty much just a straight up ***hole. In many games this might work against the game, but you're playing a pirate, you're kind of supposed to be a scumbag thief and murderer, that's what pirates were (and still are). The naval combat is far slower and less graceful than in AC: Black Flag (that was my favorite part of Black Flag), but it's serviceable once you get used to the controls, and I like how they don't physically show you an arc for where your cannon shot is going to go, but instead you need to adjust the cannon angle by your own judgement watching where the previous volley went (did it go over the ship or come up short?). There is a fairly basic trading system, buying and selling goods with different prices in different ports. I haven't played enough to see if the prices fluctuate and if they do so randomly or using a real supply/demand economy model (hopefully it's the latter). I like how you have to keep your crew paid and happy and how hiring different officers gives you bonuses/penalties in naval combat. Also, the game has sea shanties in taverns, and not nerfed sea shanties, but real, proper, dirty, sexist sea shanties, the way sea shanties were meant to be. As an aside, your character's name is Christopher Raven and the name of the game is Raven's Cry. They went with the every cheesy action movie naming scheme. "They kidnapped his daughter and killed his wife. Now there will hell to play when former Navy Seal Henry Stone returns for blood and hard justice in Stone's Throw."

I've read it that motion blur is supposed to be something or other more realistic. I still don't understand how. It's supposed to simulate the effect that you naturally get when your field of vision changes rapidly, like turning your head really fast. The problem is that I've yet to see a single game come even semi-quasi-remotely-esque to replicating the actual motion blur I experience in real life if I change my field of vision rapidly. The motion blur in games always, and I do mean ALWAYS, feels extremely unnatural. I think no developer has been able to contain themselves to allow the effect to look natural. In real life, at least in my experiences, the effect is extremely quick, I'm talking microseconds, and it's virtually unnoticeable unless you're actively thinking about it and looking for it. When a developer adds the effect they want you to notice it, so instead of making it super quick and subtle, they clobber you over the head with it and maker it last 1000x as long as it does in real life, hence why it feels so ridiculously unrealistic. That's my theory, anyway.

That might be the best Clueless Gamer yet.

For as much as I love Nintendo, they pull some really draconian scumbag **** sometimes that more often than not just winds up being them shooting themselves in the foot. Most youtubers won't even touch Nintendo games because they don't want the headache of dealing with their bull****. I'm not sure if Nintendo is aware that they are cutting off their nose to spite their face by doing this and effectively murdering any chance they have at getting free advertisement for their games. Nintendo is insanely cautious and protective of their IPs, very much to a fault.

The dyed hair is a sign of individuality. After all, doing the same thing everyone else in your circle does is the epitome of individuality. The glasses, I assume, have to do with vision problems. I'm a dude who wears glasses. In my case, I assume it's from all the masturbation, at least that's what I was lead to believe when I was younger. Then again, I still haven't gone completely blind, in fact my vision has slightly improved recently, and I've been known to crank one out on occasion still, so I don't know if the masturbation leads to blindness hypothesis hold up.

I'm definitely curious about how it turns out. I have no intention of getting it any time soon since it's episodic and I'm not keen on getting anything episodic until all the episodes are released.

I'm shocked SVU is still on. I've watched the show in the past, mainly to ogle Mariska Hargitay, but that was a loooooong time ago, and even back then the show had been running for a long time. Kind of funny how radical feminists have tried and very much failed to drag several words through the mud and get them stripped from the collective vocabulary and the only word they have managed to successfully drag through the mud and make people want to remove from the collective vocabulary is "feminism". Sucks for the moderate, sane feminists that are still out there trying to make sure everyone gets a fair shake in life without any special favors, but there is some delicious irony to how things turned out.

*cough*

In honor of Raven's Cry releasing tomorrow (WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE)

More Dying Light. The game is quite fun, and with filmgrain off it looks so much better now. I like how when I get agility level ups, the game becomes closer and closer to Mirror's Edge. Combat is still mostly meh, like in Dead Island, but you don't have to do nearly as much of it, if you don't want to. Also, you can pull off hilariously awesome moves like dropkicking zombies into spiked barricades. That's right up there with Fus Ro Dah-ing fools off cliffs in the goofy fun department.

The insane amount of chromatic aberration in all those UE4 demo Oculus Rift images makes me dizzy and a little bit sick, and I've worn glasses most of my life, so I'm used to chromatic aberration, though not generally at such absurdly pronounced levels. Is the effect that noticeable when you're looking through the rift or does it just look that pronounced in split images? Also, is it just as pronounced in that demo or does that happen in all the games? Because if the effect is that strong looking through the rift I doubt I'd last 20 minutes before either developing a vicious headache or throwing up.

Now if we could just get rid of the horrific chromatic aberration. Both filmgrain and chromatic aberration are 2 trends that need to die a fiery death as soon as possible. I drives me nuts that developers keep cramming this crap into games.

In a related story, I'd like to announce my availability for mo-cap work for Cyberpunk 2077.

I like to imagine that this was playing in the background during those mo-cap sessions:

Sadly, it has been revealed that The Witcher 3 does not have 16 hours of sex scenes as falsely reported earlier in The Guardian. http://nichegamer.net/2015/01/it-took-16-hours-to-record-all-of-the-sex-scene-mo-cap-for-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt/

Which line in the ini? I'm really enjoying the game btw, hopefully I won't end up overpowered as most of the fun comes from surviving. I think you have to unpack one of the data files then change something in one of the .scr files in the unpacked archive, then pack it back up. I plan to do this myself when I get home as I'm not too keen on the film grain effect. Edit: Here is the Steam Forum post on how to go about disabling film grain.

It looks like I got off lucky. Some more snow fell late last night and early this morning. In other places it never stopped and just kept going until this morning. The further east and the further north you were the harder you got hit it seems. I live in Hartford, which is pretty much right in the center of CT. We got off easy with only 13". Manchester, where I work, got 19". Mansfield, where my boss lives, got 22". Thompson, which is in the extreme northeast corner of the state, got over 30". Some places in Massachusetts got 3 feet.

Dang, Dying Light went from easy to insanely difficult right quick. I gotta go to an area that's ridiculously packed with zombies. The regular ones I could avoid, but they have virals there, several of them, which are recently turned zombies that are ridiculously fast, can climb, and jump around like monkeys making them hard to hit. Worse yet, I gotta hit them like 15 times with my crappy weapons to put them down for good. I desperately need a better weapon but I can't afford one and I haven't been able to find a halfway decent weapon anywhere. I think I'll need to abandon this quest for now and scavenge around a safer area for a while, because I got no chance in the area I'm trying to get to now. I can kill one or two virals provided I can fight them one at a time, but half a dozen is way too much for me to handle right now and I can;t just run past them because they're pretty much smack dab in the area I need to get to. I do like how after the first couple quests, which a very much scripted and will happen at certain times of day regardless how quickly you get there, the time of day runs freely and you can decide on your own whether to try to get something done while sunset is approaching or to play it safe and go back to a safe house to sleep until morning.

So far, yes. The story definitely has me interested, but I'm very early in. We'll see if it can keep me interested.

I'm playing Dying Light. As is, sadly, expected, the game has some bugs and issues at launch, but they can be worked around, most of them, anyway. There is noticeable stutter, ghosting, and a weird issue where sometimes characters' lips don't move when they speak (other times they do). The stuttering seems to be across both Windows and Linux, I'm not sure if the other issues are Linux specific. The stuttering can be gotten rid of by simply turning off Steam Overlay. I don't know how the two are connected, but turning off Steam Overlay solved the problem, so whatever. The ghosting I solved by turning on AmbientOcclusion. It's not in the settings menu on Linux, I turned it on in the config file and the ghosting magically disappeared (or it's a coincidence or placebo effect, small sample size and all). The lack of lip movement I have not been able to solve, but it;s not a showstopper, it just makes some conversations look weird. I'm playing the game at 1440p maxed out except antialiasing off (I don't notice jaggies anyway) and motion blur off (because I hate motion blur). The game runs fine other than the lip movement issue. I haven't thrown the FPS counter on it (don't think I can without the Steam Overlay or using a 3rd party app), but I'm getting a smooth playable framerate and haven't noticed hiccups. It's a very pretty game. The lighting effects are pretty spectacular and the texture quality and character models are all quality. The game plays like a better Dead Island with a greater emphasis on mobility and evasion. During the day most zombies are pretty docile. They will come after you if you get close and they spot you, but they can be easily distracted and you can get away from them quite easily. I'll fight zombies if I have an isolated zombie or two, or if a quest demands it, but if there's a pack of them, I just run right past them. The game has a free running system. it's not quite as smooth as Mirror's Edge, but it is adequate. Generally speaking, during the day, if you climb up on a rooftop or on top of a bus or van, you are untouchable as zombies can't climb. Everything changes at night. When the sun is about to set, it's a mad scramble to get back to either the tower or a safe house. If you get caught outside during nighttime you are in a world of trouble. There are super strong, quick, agile zombies that only come out at night and they will hunt your ass down and they will murder you. Maybe at higher level I'll have the skills and means to fight them, but right now if I'm out at night and I get spotted I'm all "F this ****, I'm f'n out of here". Running from the zombies at night is a pretty pulse pounding adrenaline rush. They are just as fast as you in full sprint, maybe even slightly faster, and they can climb. There is a risk/reward mechanic where all experience earned (you get experience for not just fighting, but also doing free running) during nighttime is doubled, so it;s a good way to get stronger, also a good way to get killed. Anyway, I'm liking the game so far. The gameplay during the day is mostly laid back since zombies are so easy to escape, but I like the fact that you generally don't have to fight them if you don't want to. Gameplay during the night will get your heart rate up. It's freakin' intense. I'll post some screenshots once they sort the Steam Overlay problem out. Without Steam Overlay I can't (easily) do screenshots, unless there is a screenshot utility in the game itself I haven't noticed.