majestic

Oi, I even forgot to mention: to make matters worse, the Freedom Party are Friends of Putin (tm). For real, I mean, they have a pact of friendship and cooperation with United Russia (i.e. Putin's party).

Just came home from voting (we have general elections). I am not looking forward to the results, which will undoubtely lead to a nationalist-conservative government. There may or may not be a time period where the conservatives are "trying" to "negotiate" with other parties only to "fail" because everyone but the Nazis were "unreasonable", and for the "sake of the country" they now need to basically swallow the "bitter pill" and form a coalition with them. For the good of the nation and stability, as it were. Which is hilarious because so far every single time the Freedom Party was part of a government, said government imploded and dissolved well before the legislative period was over. You know, basic conservative logic: better to destroy what there is than to give the plebes half a breadcrumb. Not entirely certain why the people keep electing a corrupt cadre of politicians who only look out for themselves and their own, but it probably has something to do with "rapefugees" and "civil war with knives" and whatnot. The right-wing and nationalist parties already stated that they are going to finance tax cuts by dialing back refugee support and reducing the needs-based minimum income that we have. See, the funny thing is, overall, these amount to like 2% of our budget. The tax cuts they want amount to something like eight times as much. Mind, not that you get the idea that their proposed tax cuts would benefit employees, lel. No, no, for the employees and the common people they're planning to reduce secondary labour costs. Which, you know, are something the companies pay on top of the wages. Conservative logic: both the tax cuts and reduction of labour costs will trickle down to the actual wages. Trickle down economics is something that will work if only tried often enough, yes? <Insert something witty about Einstein and the definition of insanity here> Which brings me to the glaring problem our center and left-wing parties have: they cannot for the life of them, just once, be more populistic. The people, as it were, spurred on by media, do not want to hear about how it is going to be legally impossible to repatriate Afghani citizens. They want to be told that it will be done, by breaking the law if need be. That is dangerous territory, I agree, but if you leave that path to the Nazis then there's much more danger yet to come. And just in case we're once again believing the Freedom Party that they are not Nazis because they said they're not, just now there were some high ranking Nazis singing a SS anthem at a funeral, with every party reacting to it, calling it an outrage. Except for the conservatives, who just stated that this just shows that the Freedom party's leader has contacts to right-wing extremists (no, you blathering conservative idiots, that is the party, not just the party leader - the one you already want to form a government with just so you can stop worrying about dealing with parties who want equal rights for the disgusting homos and trans people). The Freedom Party is of course not bothered by their party members attending a funeral where SS anthems are sung, no, they're bothered that a whisteblower leaked the video just before the election. One really needs to crack down on whisteblowers. Can't have that. Who films people at funerals doing what comes natural in their grief. *sigh*

"Nobody has any intention of building a wall." -- Walter Ulbricht

Lower and mid tier GPUs might as well stop existing in the (not so far off) future as integrated graphics become more and more powerful. If you stick to 1080p at slightly lower settings, you can already make do with Lunar Lake or Strix Point, and those are laptop CPUs. Well, unless Intel walks back on their ARC support and kills the rest of the team in the wake of their layoffs.

The spec difference between the 5090 and 5080 is bizarre. kopite7kimi is usually right though, so I guess that is what we're getting.

The game has an achievement that triggers if you look up 2B's skirt by creative camera movement. It is not enough to just do it once. They don't want the achievement to trigger on accident.

Dark Souls, which was a replay. I replayed on Steam after trading my Switch cartridge for a Steam key with a friend. First of all, in spite of doing a whole lot of grinding to find out whether one can make do with the Greatsword of Artorias if you waste all the stats for it (short answer: yes, but it is not worth it, outside of making it really easy to beeline for the Rite of Kindling after starting a new cycle), it only took me half the time to achieve everything in the game, compared to Dark Souls 2. Which is to be expected, Dark Souls is a lot smaller, and on new game cycles a lot of the game can be skipped. The achievements and the game systems were also designed to waste a lot less time compared to Dark Souls 2 while playing offline, but between completing all Dark Souls, Dreck Souls 2: Scholar of the First Suck and Sekiro achievements, one thing has become abundantly clear: FromSoftware has no idea how to design interesting achievements. They are all just either related to playing the game, achieving all possible endings and looking for equipment. Contrary to the usual edgelord opinion, achievements can be interesting, the ones in FromSoftware games, so far, were not. I think I might have found the reason why Dark Souls feels better to play - for me - than Dark Souls 2 did. The recovery animations are a lot shorter. One can - more or less - smoothly transition from an completed attack animation into a roll in Dark Souls, while in Dark Souls 2 there is a recovery time between finishing the attack and being able to roll away. Combined with the boss attack patterns of Dark Souls 2, that makes it a game of baiting out an attack and punishing it or dodging through a combination and then get an attack in. While Dark Soul's combat cannot be called fast paced and frantic, it feels a lot less slower than Dark Souls 2's: the bosses have more openings to attack and their movesets are not employing as many two or three hit combos. I got lucky in my early game, getting the Black Knight Halberd right at the start, and while that meant playing most of the game semi-naked due to the rather hefty equipment load requirement of the Black Knight weapons, it never limited me to hitting an enemy once and having to prepare a roll because the follow up attack would just end with me being hit. Now, having played the game again, and a couple of times at that, and having listened to lore videos while playing to break the monotony of the grinding and replaying the more annoying parts of the game, I can say with some confidence that, lore and story wise, the only two really interesting parts are not related to the player's quest, which will always be the quest of someone else you just happen to accept because you have nothing better to do with your time anyway. I am, of course, talking about the two NPC related quests in the game, of which Solaire's might be less involved and harder to miss out on, but is the better one, so it is fine. There's some personal tragedy in Siegmeyer's quest, plus some statements by Sieglinde that make you question what happened (girl, what exactly do you mean when you say you have to kill your father again?) but the two outcomes of Solaire's quest are simply fantastic. He either finds his sun, and loses himself, or you help him fail his quest by finding the Sunlight Maggot first. It is the consequence of Solaire failing his quest that is most poignant and which elevates it: he becomes disillusioned and depressed because he did not find his sun, which is what he became an undead for, out of his own volition. He then can be summoned to fight Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight Cinder, and he's so ludicrously strong that he can basically solo the boss for you. Not only can you summon him to fight the very lord he worships, but his rage is strong enough to overcome him without much of your input. Not that Gwyn isn't more of a jokey fight, I wonder why people complain about Nashandra and Aldia in Dark Souls 2 being a boring pair of bosses to end the game with. Gwyn certainly is not much better, even if you do not or cannot parry him, you just need to stay close to him so he misses half his attacks without you having to do much, so is that sort of complaining coming from players working their way backwards from Dark Souls 3? So, anyway, back to Solaire, I found his personal story to be really on point. Was it all lies? Why, yes, it was, although that does not come out as much in Dark Souls, I suppose. It is a part of the game that was made retroactively better. Still, and there we are back at something I already wrote about, at lenght, is how much Dark Souls did not live up to the hype for me. The story is not that great, and while it is undoubtely genre defining in the sense that there is now a "Soulslike" genre, I am not sure if the combat system alone is what defines a whole genre, and even that is blurred with additions like Bloodborne and Sekiro. It is a "difficult" dark fantasy third person action adventure game that just seems to have come out at the right time. I put difficult in quotes because replaying the game just cemented my opinion. The game is not that difficult, outside of a few areas that are not really well designed, and gimmicky fights that are more frustrating than fun. Yes, I'm looking at you, Bed of Chaos. Then there's the issue that Dark Souls falls apart after the first half. Everything that comes afterwards (well, and in the case of New Londo, technically before, because it is possible to complete it before getting the Lord Vessel, as long as you're willing to kill Ingward for the key) is just terrible, with the worst offenders being Lost Izalith and the Tomb of Giants, which one could easily consider to be contenders for the worst areas in any game, period. The forced death to Seath and the run through the Crystal Caves would be high on the list too, if Seath wouldn't be so easy. Well, once you have cut his tail. Cutting his tail is the worst. It is even worse than the Kalameet tail cut, which is annoying becaus you basically have to bait it out, but at least one can bait it out. Seath can just move in a way that makes it impossible to hit his tail - for long, long stretches of time. Now, well, I cannot say anything about the state of gaming back in 2011. That was a time when all I did was play MMORPGs. Maybe Dark Souls really was the moment that brought actual difficulty back to games. Maybe that was Demon's Souls already, and maybe all of that was just Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, both games that were a much greater success than Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. As far as my experience goes, it certainly would not have been, because the game is just not difficult enough to count. Lastly there's the dopamine release and adrenaline rush aspect of the game. I understand that being stuck at Ornstein and Smough for a longer while makes one feel really good once the challenge has been overcome. I just did not get if from Dark Souls - but also not from Dark Souls 2 or Sekiro. Having to fight a boss, solo, for a handful of times to understand its moveset and find counters is nothing next to having to deal with your raid group and having difficult raid encounters lasting up to fifteen minutes. Pulling them over, and over, and over, and over and over again. Not five times, ten times or even twenty. Hundreds of times, in the case of the really difficult ones. I realize that does not apply to a whole lot of people, given the MMORPG population that usually partakes in its most difficult content, but, yeah, this is relevant for my experience. Insofar, well, Dark Souls is a good game with a terrible second half, but with me not really being interested in the world, unlike in Hellpoint, I can say that Hellpoint, while being the much worse game in terms of combat and movement, was still the better experience for me.

I seem to have a thing for tea parties, huh? The tea party in Noir was my favorite bit of the series too. That was a really good scene, at least until Rei just dissolved into goo to drive home a point which retroactively ruined it for me.

And neither do all that well with current AAA games at 4K. The 4090 at least is usually enough to run 4K natively without having frame drops that hurt the experience. They're passable 4K baseline cards if you either do not turn on all the bells and whistles (outside of esports, how does anyone justify spending that sort of money on a GPU then?) or if you accept DLSS as part of the gaming experience. The current versions work quite well in 4K. It is a rather simple decision, albeit a painful one: if you really want a GPU that will last you the next five years for 4K natively, you can either shell out the money for an RTX 4090 now, or wait to see what the 50 series brings. If you can live with DLSS, you can probably make do with a 4080 Super. They're actually available at MSRP, at least here. But, in that case it might pay off to wait for RDNA4, the current rumors have it that it is going to offer 4080 like performance for only a fraction of the price. However, those rumors likely come from the same source that said RDNA3 is going to wipe the floor with nVidia's 4090 and that Zen 5 is going to offer a 40% increase in IPC, so, yeah, well... you shouly probably take those with more than a grain of salt.

Yeah, who knows, they might have learned a thing or two and released the DLC only mostly broken.

A collections of things coming out soon. Looks like F*ck You, It's January is now F*ck You, It's Every Month!

You know, for a moment I thought you're talking about something like this: https://hopfenhöhle.de/en/

Well, and then you benchmark a bunch of games, and factoring in the also existing - but less pronounced - gains on Intel CPUs, and Zen 5 CPUs catch up by ~2%. Of course there are outliers, but they exist on Intel too, whatever the update does, it certainly boosts Jedi Survivor performance by a lot. Funny how that goes. Anyway, nothing really new to see here. The 7800X3D remains the top pick for a gaming CPU. I'm really interested in the upcoming 9800X3D's performance, the larger cache will show if there's a bottleneck situation that is holding Zen 5 performance back.

Rings of Power, season two, episode five. This episode is a microcosm of the lore problems this series has and their effect on how much one can enjoy the series, at least from the point of view of someone like me who enjoyed reading The Silmarillion and generelly likes Tolkien's world building more than his actual writing. The episode itself was not bad, although the ongoing storyline with Galadriel is somewhat silly, but at least it is no longer mind-bendingly terrible like it was in the first season. Charlie Vickers is doing a good job as Sauron Annatar.

I think that might have been the second Taylor Swift song that I have listened to, after Shake It Off. Goes to show perfectly just how ignorant of pop music I have become in the past 15 years, which is pretty much exactly when I joined a new team at work and no longer had any colleagues who listen to the radio while working. At a first listen I do not particularily care for Blank Space, then again, it is also rather far from what I usually listen to, so that is not entirely unexpected.

Well, you're in Houston. I mean... not to downlplay your hot summers, but your summers were always much hotter than ours. I'm on the same latitude as Victoria, BC (well, almost, at least). Now, it's a bit warmer on average than in British Columbia thanks to a bunch of fun climate factors like the Gulf Stream and Sirocco, but a month with 30+°C almost every day followed by a 30° drop in temperature within a week is not what I signed up for.

The weather's been "fun" these past few days. Last week we still had a record heat wave and a ridiculous (for September) 35+° in the shade, now much of the country looks like this: Lower regions run the risk of being flooded. The region where I live is going to be fine as the Danube is unlikely to rise a lot, while there are significant rainfalls (read "significant" as in three times the amount of precipitation of a normal September - over a single weekend), all the major tributaries are in alpine regions. While the snow's causing havoc on the trees and bogs down traffic, at least its a lot of water that is not immediately added to the rivers and lakes. No, nothing wrong with the climate, nothing to see here. Fake news!

Well, uhm, this might be one for the "so bad it's good" category.

It does not really help to be aware that you can parry everything that does not show you a red kanji warning on screen, you have to fully accept it or you will not have fun for the entire time you're playing Sekiro. The game is not designed to be played like Dark Souls, and for the most part, dodging attacks and waiting for openings to strike not only takes much longer, but it is also not fun and in plenty of instances flat out impossible. In Sekiro you have one viable way to play the game, so engage it on its terms: stick close to the enemies, attack them relentlessly and when they counter-attack, parry. If they do a perilous attack, counter that as appropriate. If they try to get away from you, chase them down. Isshin doesn't tell you that hesitation is defeat for no reason. Everything else in the game is meant as support. It is fine to use the fireworks to stun beast type enemies, that is what it is meant to be used for, but it should not be your winning strategy for the entire fight. Sekiro has the arguably tightest controls of any of the FromSoftware games, and you can even smoothly cancel your attacks into a parry if you find you have overextended yourself. Compare and contrast that to the lumbering but yet floaty behemoth you play in Dreck Souls 2. The actual problem of Sekiro's combat, and that is certainly a valid argument if one values variety and options in combat more than refinement of its chosen core aspect, is that the game expects you to play it in one specific way, and if you do not, you will just be miserable. The Guardian Ape is also one of the best animated bosses in all the 3D games I have played, and its second phase is world class trolling, unless you got spoiled ahead of fighting it. I am also always rather surprised that people have trouble fighting it after getting past Genichiro(, Way of Tomoe), but my experiences with these type of games is always vastly different than those of most other players.

Rings of Power, season two, episodes 1 to 4: Anyone who has read my posts know what I thought about the first season: a train wreck in every way. Terrible acting (and really weird casting choices), terrible dialogue, terrible dialogue delivery, boring shots, badly paced, ludicrous action scenes and no respect for the source material. The latter in particular was pretty bad, putting in all sorts of fanservice that should not have been there (Hobbits, Gandalf arriving almost 3000 years too early) as well as heavily compressing the timeline, as the reign of Ar-Pharazôn was 1600 years after the creation of the rings and the Elven rings were not the first crafted. Anyway, in the first four episodes of the second season only two of these problems seem to be left over. The action scenes are still ludicrous, but at least they were short so far, and it is impossible to fix the timeline in Rings of Power. Everything else is much improved. I can't say that I enjoyed watching the episodes too much, but at least I no longer want to claw my eyes out and pierce my eardrums while watching the show, outside of a few scenes with Elrond. Which is an impressive improvement. The showrunners and writers are still the same, after all. It is not enough to make it worth watching for anyone who isn't @Hurlshort , and it will forever remain built on a rotten foundation. But, as strange as that is, I at least no longer hate watching it. So far. It has still plenty of episodes left to completely fall apart.

The "problem" with the thrusting swords in Dreck Souls 2 is that the the Stone Ring adds flat additional poise damage per attack. Sure, any ultra greatsword has 50 poise damage, and a rapier for instance deals only 10. But the rapier can hit 5 times while not expending much of your stamina in the time span it takes to swing your sword, for the 50 poise damage alone, never mind the additional 150 poise damage from the ring. Only weapons that can knock down enemies are more useful in shutting them down (i.e. great hammers). Then there's the flat bonus of the Ring of Blades per hit and the Leo Ring's increased counter attack damage. It's silly that a rapier does 500+ damage per hit on a boss without having the time commitment problem that come with the slower attacks of larger weapons, meaning you can be more aggressive, can get way more hits in, and the attacks barely cost any stamina. For some extra fun you can use a poison infused Black Scorpion Stinger with Sanctum Knight Gauntlet and the Rat Crest Ring. It's enough to poison anything that is not poison immune in four hits. One-handed you can get your enemies poisoned in a second and a half. It also does good overall damage. Lastly, there's a reason most invaders you still see active in the game carry buffed Ice Rapiers. Although I have no idea how people could possibly enjoy pvp in these games, but apparently they do.

I, too, was playing a game someone else in this thread is. Luckily for me, I'm already done. I am talking about Dreck Souls 2: Scholar of the First Suck Edition. Joseph Anderson, in one of his videos, came up with the concept of Gary, a fictional game developer responsible for everything in a game that is only designed to waste the players time. A prominent member of the German World of Warcraft community did the same earlier, he called the developer Malte. Since Malte is a much worse name than Gary, I'll be using Malte in this post. Steam says that I have played the game for 149 hours, with a lot of that time spent on dealing with Malte's contribution to the game. And I mean a lot. Brave Undead, but why didst thou adventure on this much? Well, because I cannot help myself, and I wanted to finish the game before ranting about it. I know that it Dreck Souls 2 considered to be the black sheep of the family and that it is slightly disliked even in the toxic wasteland that the FromSoftware fandumb is, but with them being how they are, one is better safe than sorry. But seriously, screw this game, I am never going to touch it again. From what I have gathered, Scholar of the First Suck is like a Kaizo variant of the original Dark Souls 2, which apparently has much better enemy placement, and also features a lot less enemies. Alas, as that is only one minor part of the whirlwind of misery that playing Dreck Souls 2 is, I cannot see the original being much improved - eh, or rather, the Kaizo edition much worsened - by throwing more enemies at you. But, luckily, not all was bad. I appreciated the intro sequence that explained a bit about the lore of Drangleic and gives your character a personal stake in proceeding, something which the first Dark Souls sorely lacked. I never found it in myself to give a rat's ass about the Undead Pilgrimage in the first game and still enjoyed the game based solely on the combat and other gameplay elements, as well as the level and world design. It could have been better, because the game opens with the promise of a cure for the Undead Curse, which simply does not exist, and never will exist - cannot exist, considering what the curse is implied to be - and as a recurring player your character's motivation is suspect right from the start. However, well, at least your character cannot know that, so, well, there is that. Sadly, that is about the only thing that is better than the original Dark Souls. Do not mistake that for thinking that the storyline of the game is good, because it is not. It is a retread of Dark Souls, with the exception of adding a character that acts almost as a villain in the form of Nashandra, Queen of Drangleic, the woman at the heart of many of Drangleic's woes (because it is always them wimmin who corrupt the pure hearts of men ). Like in many such games, I bemoan the fact that I could not give her what she wanted. Having the Abyss corrupt the last embers of the First Flame would have elevated the ending of the game to a point where I would have liked it. Alas. I would be remiss to mention that it gave me one of the heartiest laughs this year in the form of Aldia's dialogue. Indeed. As your character has zero agency in anything that transpires and is basically just a puppet for whoever comes along and needs something, it was rather funny that Aldia would be so blunt. Instead of writing an essay about an old game where everything has been said already, my biggest problems with the game are the systems Malte designed, which seem to be all of them. The changed controls from the first game (turning feels much stranger, locked on attacking in different directions, the frequent misses in combat when an enemy is between the seemingly eight ways your characters can face), the encounter and enemy moveset design where there is basically only one difference between the enemy types, which boilts down to dragons and everything else. Just look at the bosses and regular enemies. They all have the exact same moveset, with slightly different animations. The most prevalent of which are the double swing with an optional third attack and the forward lunge. Whether it is the Pursuer, the Smelter Demon, Fume Knight, Aava or Vendrick, really, that is not one of the dragon bosses in the game (and the Royal Rat Authority which plays like a dragon encounter, just without the breath attacks). The only standouts here are the otherwise ludicrously easy Covetous Demon encounters and in part the Duke's Dear Freja, although even that is more often than not a two attack combination with her legs, and a forward lunge. Some enemies shoot projectiles or beams at you, but that is it for variety. It meant that I was able to defeat most boss fights first try (I played NG without summons, as evidenced by Lucatiel's and Benhart's achievements being almost the last ones to unlock, outside of the spells sold at Drangleic Castle in NG++), the longest of which took like five, which was, funnily enough, the blue Smelter Demon. It went down after I switched my equipment, which, ah, well, is something that I do not like to do in these type of games. Continuing with the worst issues is that with the reworked stamina, and the silly adaptability changes (Malte's brilliant idea to make the base dodge roll in the game have less i-frames than the fat roll in the original game unless one invests in adaptibiity was a fantastic change, *chef's kiss*), the game turned into a third person action adventure game with turn based combat. Bait enemy attack, dogde, parry of tank with shield, hit back while you can. Rinse, wash, and repeat. The turning controls seem to have gotten worse, locking onto enemies makes it sometimes impossible to hit them as your character appears to able to face only in eight directions. Being locked on, one has to let go of the thumbstick to get a somewhat tracking attack out of it, or manually aim in the direction the enemy is standing, for no real reason. If you want to create some distance between you and the enemy, it is necessary to let go from the stick long enough, otherwise your character will just whack in whatever direction you were going. Maybe that's the reason why the dodge roll with lower equipment loads is so long. To make sure you're far enough away from the enemy to have to step back, so you can hit. Only Malte knows. The controls are floaty and sluggish, and felt much better in Dark Souls, which I played on the Switch (and that has only 30fps, compared to DS2's 60). Then the game has no built-in offline mode, which is just baffling, and the scripted invasion encounters are ridiculous to the point where I just began carrying a great club to repeatedly stun lock them with the heavy two-handed attack. I guess it would be possible to approach those like actual pvp against cheaters (as they all have unlimited stamina, spell casts and equipment load), but why bother if you can just stunlock them dead. Weapon balance is also something that seems to be a lot worse, but perhaps I never noticed these issues in the original games. But when your oversized ultra greatsword +10 takes five seconds to wind up an attack, eats up half your stamina bar and then deals 20% more damage than the one second attack animation of a rapier (at a much, much lower stamina cost) then something's seriously wrong. I played most of the game with the uchigatana sold by McDuff, which was a nice weapon to use, with a decent balance between speed and damage, and a rapier. I wanted to like (ultra)greatswords, or great axes, or anything large, but... wrestling with Malte's gameplay decisions is bad enough without gimping yourself. Good riddance, Dreck Souls 2. I shan't be installing you again. Upgrade a great club to +10 (you can infuse it, if you want, but it is not necessary). Unlock the Brightstone Cove Tseldora campsite bonfire and join the Covenant of Champions. Equip the Symbol of Avarice (Jester's Cap if you don't have the Symbol), the Gold Covetous Ring +2, the Sanctum Knight Leggings, the Watchdragon Parma and the Prisoner's Tatters. Start from the bonfire, go to the right and behind the tent in front of it, enter the first tent of the enemy camp. There's an enemy standing inside. Walk up to him, back"stab" with your great club, which should kill him. Another one comes running into the tent, smash him with the heavy attack until he's dead. Leave the tent the way you came in, go right to the fire where an enemy is standing. Backstab that one too, and one other comes running. That is four enemies killed in the span of a minute or so. Go back to the bonfire. Once you're comfortable doing that and can pull it off without dying, pop a rusted coin every five minutes. Grind until you have your 30 sunlight medals, which will take a long while. Do not attack the enemy by the fire first, the one from the tent will come running. Enemy aggro is weird in this game. That route avoids all the archers, and at worst you might pull a pig, which just dies all the same, and you're never in danger of dying, as long as your heavy two-handed attacks connect. It is so not worth trying to set up the archers in a way that you can kill them too. They'll be dealing silly amounts of damage and can shoot through tents. Sell excess Falconer armors to Gavlan at leisure, or just throw them away. Worst grind in the game, really, the Mad Warriors were farmed much faster in comparison (with the Unveil miracle).