Stepos Venzny

If I were given carte blanche to redesign 3D Sonic gameplay, making it control like a faster-moving Tony Hawk game seems like the way to go. Sort of the middle ground between conventional platforming and vehicle control.

On my seventh attempt, I walked into a store and was told yes when asking if there were any Switch 2s in stock. The young cashier adorably turned to his older coworker and unironically said “Wow, that’s four in one day! You weren’t kidding about these things.”

So anyways the past few days have been a blur of Mario Kart World. The new mechanics are a challenge to learn but they’re a challenge I’m delighted to have and make me feel incredible when I’m using them well, the soundtrack full of remixed classics on par with the best of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s that are just there to fill the empty space between the proper racetracks, and I was not prepared for HDR in the hands of Nintendo’s artists. This game is by far the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on a screen and that was already true before I looked up how to use that shockingly unhelpful calibration tool the Switch 2 has and now it’s twice as beautiful on top of that.

The sole complaint I have about this game is that I’m not enjoying Waluigi’s new voice actor. I can’t hear the pain underlying the mania that Martinet understood was core to the otherwise ill defined character. His animations and his costumes are so fucking good, though, it’s hard to even care that his voice is downgraded.

I have lost so many Baldur’s Gate 3 Honour Mode runs because I’ve accidentally blown up the Zentarim hideout.

Did you know that having a torch equipped as your melee weapon means you’re considered to be carrying an open flame even when you’ve switched to have your ranged weapon out? I just found that out yesterday. Always learning new and exciting ways to explode.

The pockets are nets.

Shower curtain with pockets. Never again will you knock bottles off of those inadequate shelves.

Jeez, what was starting with 3 like?

I finally picked up Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, this being a game that’s been on my radar since well before it came out because I was a big fan of Jet Set Radio Future back in the day. It’s kind of too much like it and not enough like it at the same time? I tried the original Jet Set Radio when that came out on Steam and bounced off it but based on that limited experience I think this is kind of splitting the difference and that’s where most of the frustrations come from. Movement is more like JSRF but level design is more like JSR. And the soundtrack seems to lack that variety of some songs being made for the game and others being licensed that kept the monotony at bay. No “Aisle 10” to slow things down for a bit.

I am enjoying it, though, for as little as it sounds like I am. Movement feels good enough that it’s making me search for combo lines for the sake of combo lines and at the end of the day that’s what’s really important about this kinda game.

Also finally finished Zelda echoes of wisdom.

Never would have guessed going in that that would have the most graphically violent last boss sequence the series has ever seen. I beat it feeling like I was the real monster.

I hope you’re not playing Anniversary Edition for your first time with the game. Getting bombarded with all that Creation Club stuff would not be my ideal first impression.

I got that Blue Prince bug where your data secretly stops saving twice now. I read it’s been fixed but playing the game has a tension behind it now that’s discouraging me from investing too much in it, psychologically speaking, and also I’m hesitant to play anything else on the PlayStation because closing the Blue Prince application on it risks being hit by the bug again if it does still exist.

Which all seems like the universe telling me it’s time to try Baldur’s Gate 3 Honour Mode again with these new subclasses. I’ve made a dragonborn barbarian, planning for him to be a giant that specializes in punching, playing him arrogant and naive. Lae’zel and Wyll feel like good companions for that temperament but I don’t know who my third should be. Maybe stick with a hireling until I get one of the druids? He’s too insecure to tolerate Shadowheart or Gale. Astarion or Karlach would mean having to reclass somebody so there’d be a support role on the team and reclassing the origins never sits well with me.

UPDATE: Things did not go well at the goblin camp.

It’s not unusual to say something less controversial than what you wish you could say, so it tracks that someone who wants to say “I’m a boy” would say “I’m a girl who isn’t girly” in a time where the truth is presented as less of an option than it is today. It’s not that trans guys and tomboys are the same thing, it’s that the same label can be either true or a euphemism when applied to different people.

What gets me about the original post is it looks like it’s saying I as an unambiguously masculine man could wear a dress and be called ma’am by a stranger and when I respond “I get why you’d say that but I’m actually a man wearing a dress” then there’s an expectation the stranger might respond “don’t be ridiculous, that’s not a real thing. You’re obviously a trans woman.” I just don’t see this kind of scenario playing out.

It is possible to crossdress/be gender non-conforming without being trans

I’ve never heard anyone suggest otherwise. Who are you having this argument with?

I saw a video of someone demoing a Skyrim AI mod and it sent him on a quest that didn’t exist because it just made shit up when he asked, despite the AI being fed all the true information about the game.

Is this a show about medieval fantasy time travel and I’m just not getting it?

The three main perspectives it follows take place at different points in and over different amounts of time but each one is internally completely linear and then they all end the season at the same point as each other. Basically, the less you’re making an effort to follow the plot the easier it is to follow because keeping track of the interconnectedness distracts you from the straightforward character stories.

This isn’t me trying to convince you to go back, to be clear, I’m just hoping this will give you some closure.

I’m deep into Blue Prince right now. Not loving all the randomness for this kind of puzzle game but the puzzles and lore are good enough to keep me going. Always a weird feeling to think “I love this, I just wish its core premise wasn’t part of it.”

There are a bunch of adorable space critters that you’ll think are that when you’re watching the movie, and they certainly were marketed and merchandised like crazy, but they’re actually there due to the unwanted presence of adorable Earth critters during filming. They couldn’t shoot the scenes without including these birds that lived where they were shooting so the solution they came up with was CGI-ing weird faces on them and including some close-ups to make them look deliberate.

I’m comfortably above average but comfortably below genius, not entirely sure whether that fits your personal definition of high so it felt worth clarifying.

In school, it meant that learning was something I could do with no actual effort. Without studying and without doing homework aside from what I did at my desk to pass the time before class started, I had as strong a grasp on the subject as the students who did and comfortable grades. Then when I started college, that passivity suddenly didn’t work anymore and I had no idea how to cope with it. I never actually learned how to learn, formally speaking.

Emotionally speaking, that whole thing was awful. It sucked when it was easy because I was so bored, it sucked when it was hard because I was so frustrated. I actually failed out of high school due to low attendance at the very end, then tested into the local college without a diploma because I still knew the material even with the problematic attendance, then got suspended from college due to now-for-the-opposite-reason low attendance and never went back. There was also unrelated shit going on, to be clear, but this that I’m describing was not a small part of my overall psychological state.

As an adult, it doesn’t mean much of anything. While it’s a bit easier for me to learn things than it is for the average person, the ease with which I learn things doesn’t matter anymore because it’s largely happening without other people’s direct involvement or on any kind of schedule. On the occasion there needs to be an actual work training lesson I attend, it’s something that only happens for a day and enduring a single day of tedious education is so very achievable compared to it being my entire life.

The biggest impact these days is that it makes me hate Aaron Sorkin.

Final Fantasy VII Remake, when the proper Jenova theme played. Props to the hours of auditory misdirect leading up to it.

“We wouldn’t just play it, of course. That song is too silly for a dramatic scene. But here is a subdued motif to remind you of it.”

“Well we have to play it now because there’s a new Jenova fight but you’re getting the respectable cinematic version.”

“Now the fight’s really getting going, you’re getting the upper hand so time to boost the epicness and heroicness during the climax. Isn’t this song so cool now that we fixed it?”

Then the synthesizer finally kicks in and it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard.

I simply cannot bring myself to care that giant corporations won’t make as much money as they used to by doing a thing I already don’t really like. If this is what the industry’s death entails, why should anyone grieve?

I like open world games when the time I spend simply being in them without any explicit objective is enjoyable. If I’m thinking “I’m bored, where’s the next task?” then there’s a problem. If I’m thinking “I wonder if I can make a boat that operates by paddling instead of using a fan…” then we’re good.

(Tears of the Kingdom’s physics don’t work that way, I’m sorry to report. Thing flailed around like it was drowning.)

Cults have intentions to exploit and manipulate. LLMs don’t.

You could argue negligence here but not malice. It’s more in line with people falling into wells.