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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • To be fair, the character designers for Highguard cooked way harder than the character designers for Concord.

    Highguard’s roster has good color separation, decent color palette, and strong silhouette design, making the character designs more appealing.

    Concord had issue with each of these. Poor color palette, sometimes non-existent color separation, and silhouettes that were decent on some characters but too similar between other chracters. Concord’s character designers also mistook being able to use texture variation in place of color separation, and that only really works very close up, as far away the texture goes away and its just a fast blob of the same colored pixels. Unfortunately, Concord’s characters were very unappealing, and they required entire redesigns to correct them. Essentially, it was too much work to try to recover, and would have made more sense to completely start over.

    Highguard is a lot better off then Concord, even if it needs more work to improve. And I doubt we will ever see as monumental a disaster as Concord ever again.




  • Probably a result of living in a highly judgmental global society that would rather form an immediate opinion, even if it is objectively wrong, than spend the time to actually investigate what the facts about something are.

    As an example, some people say that any person named in the Epstein files should immediately be jailed. I feel this is a wrong opinion, because any person can be named in a conversation that they aren’t party to. I could, for example, start talking about Mr. Rogers, and he is technically named in my comment. But some people say that the name just being in my comment is enough “evidence” to jail him forever. Rather than spending the time it would take to realize I was only saying “I liked Mr. Rogers’ show on TV,” they want an immediate resolution despite however wrong or inaccurate it would be.

    Investigation and research matters, and we live in a global society that villifies this ideology in favor of forming immediate and often wrong opinions about things they spend almost no time actually investigating.

    I mean, I remember a time where you were expected to not be able to win a game in a single sitting, and in fact, you might not get all the information about a game in the actual game. We had to read manuals for tutorials, maps, and story exposition. Try releasing a game nowadays that does that and you’re going to get slapped with a 1/10 because people nowadays have less patience than a goldfish.

    Personally, I primarily blame legacy news outlets and social media for this. But I digress.



  • I love both (personally like Quake 2 better) and consider Quake 2 to be “Quake 1 again.”

    Though the visual tone of the game changed, it was still a fast paced action shooter with an identity that was different enough from Doom to be called “just Doom again.” Many improvements were made, but at its core it still felt like Quake. It didn’t feel like I was suddenly playing Mario, or even another shooter at the time like Turok, Heretic/Hexen, or GoldenEye.

    I guess I am trying to say I understand what the headline is trying to say, but it doesn’t really do that good of a job.


  • IMO, a good sequel doesnt have to change too much to be good, and is usually close enough to be called “more of the same.”.

    A good sequel is good because of its similarities to the first. Otherwise you end up with Zelda 2, which is widely regarded as the worst of the Zelda games because it changed so much (outside of a small but very vocal minority that liked it). Many movie sequels also try to change too much and end up suffering because of it. Return to Oz was an interesting movie, but I wouldn’t ever call it as good as the original. Aliens and Terminator 2 are both similar enough to their respective originals while still having minor tweaks that led to a good follow up.

    So in the sense of a sequel, Overwatch 2 isn’t the worst, but I think it changed too much from the original and suffers because of it. And Blizzards decision to overwrite the original obviously plays a big part in many people’s dislike of the game.






  • The combat doesn’t suck. Morrowinds combat is good, you just don’t understand how it works when you are new to the game.

    The weapon swing animation tells the game to roll Attack dice, just like in a Table Talk RPG like Dungeons and Dragons. Then, if your Attack Roll (with modifiers like current fatigue, weapon skill, etc) beats the enemy’s Armor Class (with modifiers like their current fatigue and enchantments, etc), its a hit. Otherwise, its a miss.

    The one thing Morrowind could have done better with combat is communicating the feedback to the player better. Because the game can get the result of the roll immediately, it can then change what animation plays back to the player, so rather than always playing back the same weapon swing animation regardless of result, it should instead choose different animations based on the result. Missed? Play an animatiom that looks like the player missed. Hit? Play an animation that looks like a hit. Hit but damage was blocked? You get the idea.

    Perhaps it would be helpful if the game displayed a UI dice result to better communicate this, who knows. I like the game better without floating damage numbers, but they could be helpful to reduce frustration of new players that don’t understand how the game works.


  • Investors are not required to form an indie studio. They are not required to build a fun game that makes a lot of money. Indie studios do not require massive injections of cash. Most indie studios are formed on what is available to the team collectively. It isn’t something that is easy, it takes effort, but it is not impossible. Most indie studios are initially formed with like, less than $20k USD in total investment. Many are just one guy with a budget of $0.

    It is more likely that the amount of money that an investor would realistically need to give is considered too small to be worth the PR, but too big to just give away in a whim. Enough that one or multiple studio members could easily take out a personal load to invest into the studio without needing a private investor.

    Now, if those people are demanding multiple big six+ figure investments, then they aren’t trying to form an indie studio, they’re trying to form a AAA studio that is publisher independant. Which is an unreasonable ask.




  • I hate this. Not because it exists, but because it reminds me how old I am, lol.

    I used to know people that would all join up for Quake II, CounterStrike 1.5/1.6, and Diablo II LAN events, but it’s getting harder and more expensive to travel these days. Playing online just isn’t the same for me, so I won’t be joining, but I do hope that the community continues to thrive and remain as drama-free as it can.



  • Goddess of Victory NIKKE.

    I try to be careful where I play it because the character designs are pretty uh… well the characters have huge personalities, usually. That’s not why I play the game, but I recognize some people have more of a problem with that than others so I try to be respectful about it. Also, NIKKE is a mobile gacha game, which a lot of people dislike. So I would say it counts as a guilty pleasure, although I don’t really feel guilty for playing the game.

    For me, I don’t really spend money on it. Except for their two collabs with Neon Genesis Evangelion and one collab with NieR, because for me it is literally the law that I pay at least a little for IPs I really like. I am not a Whale (Richard Nixon impression lol), I am not even a Dolphin(?) I think I am called a Minnow. Whatever they call a basically F2P player that spends so rarely they might as well not spend at all. Besides, I have played for 3 years and only spent $60 total, I think that’s a pretty good deal so far.

    Anyway, I like the gameplay. I realize to some people this might sound like I am saying “I read Playboy for the articles,” but hear me out.

    When I was younger, I really enjoyed going to arcades. In the tail years of the arcades, newer games started to pop up, among them being lightgun games. I really enjoyed playing Time Crisis and Lethal Enforcers, and later on playing Silent Hill The Arcade, Alien, Terminator, and others. It was fun while it lasted, but now arcades are dead and game developers don’t really make those kind of games anymore. Beside my home arcade cabinet where I emulate the older games (and get a worse experience because I have neither the pizza grease and cigarette smell, nor the different shaped controllers), I don’t have new options for lightgun games these days. Then NIKKE came out and the gameplay was close enough for me that I felt that same fun of a lightgun game. I enjoy my time with the game mostly because it reminds me of the fun I had in actual arcades with lightgun games.


  • Personally, I emulate anything that I play on a modern display and run that straight through HDMI, or DisplayPort depending on what the display accepts.

    If I am playing something older, I usually have a working console for it, but if I don’t I still emulate it. If I have a working console, I plug it into one of my CRTs via composite (RCA) as that is the input my CRTs accept and the most common output on consoles of the time (like HDMI is today). If the game I am playing is on a console that I have that no longer functions, I emulate it and output via HDMI to an RCA adapter and plug that into one of my CRTs. This has some delay but it is not noticeable to me.

    Sometimes I have fun playing modern games on a CRT in 480p with the same setup. The graphics look really good since I can max everything out with a good framerate, but the text and UI is basically unreadable, even with max UI scaling in most games. They just don’t make them with low resolutions in mind.