Justin258

(Fair warning – I’m using the generic, overarching term “classical music” and not the specific term for the specific period referring to specific things.)

I have only occasionally listened to some classical music. I liked Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I’ve liked some other stuff here and there. More than anything else, the thing getting in the way of me listening to classical music is trying to figure out which performance of a thing to listen to. If I suggest that someone go listen to Heart’s Dreamboat Annie, something I’ve listened to a few times recently, all I have to do is say the name of that album and you know where to look. Meanwhile, there are a zillion different performances of any given classical piece and any of them might have a different flavor or might be flawed in some way or, as in the case of Bela Bartok, there's a "suite" version of The Miraculous Mandarin that is missing the last third because of controversy in the early twentieth century or whatever. And I have always found looking up classical music to be an exercise in "am I listening to the right one?" instead of just enjoying whatever performance I happened to find.

So do I have anything significant to say about this specific piece? Yes! I did enjoy it! I kind of roll my eyes when metalheads compare their favorite genre to classical music, but as a metalhead, I tend towards the proggy side of things at least in part because I really enjoy music that rises and falls and rises again in intensity and frequently changes feel. And I’m sort of in the same headspace with this. This is a piece of music that’s always doing something interesting, I feel like I could listen to it a hundred times and find something new to appreciate and enjoy and then do the same thing a hundred more times. Like everyone else, I love a good catchy rhythm and fun melody, but something like this can stick with me for years if I listen to it more than a few times.

I didn’t comment in the thread about what new music I listened to this year because, uh, I’m bad about listening to new music these days, I’ve got a rotation of stuff and that’s what I listen to and I rarely add anything new. I want to change that in 2024 and it seems like I should put some more stuff like this on my palate. I suppose I just gotta pick a classical piece and listen to whatever first performance I come across and find more if I’m really interested in that piece.

I'm somehow always still a little bit shocked by the dislike for Doom Eternal. I bought that game, played it, had a fucking blast, thought it was the best combat loop in any FPS ever (and I still think that), and then I got online and it seemed like roughly half the people who played it were incredibly disappointed.

And I get why... but, for me, that combat was incredibly satisfying. It was also incredibly demanding. It's worth noting that I don't find "crush everything with little challenge or difficulty" to be a power fantasy. If you're never on the edge of death in a game like Doom Eternal, it's kind of just boring. Somehow Doom Eternal found a way to make it feel like you're always on the edge of death and you're still making it through, and that's so much more satisfying. I don't feel a power fantasy unless whatever I'm fighting is also powerful.

One of the primary complaints was "you have to use certain weapons on certain enemies", which isn't true in the base game. You basically have infinite ammo, just chainsaw whatever meatbag is closest to you, and use whatever gun you like - anything's viable, though some guns will be more difficult than others (aside: you might not be able to stick to one single gun for the entire game but... you're not doing that are you? Certainly you're switching things up at some point!?). Except when it comes to the Marauder, which ruins all three or four scenes he's in over the course of a ten to fifteen hour game, and in the DLC, which actually forces you to use certain guns with certain attachments on certain enemies in a way that genuinely was frustrating. The Cursed Prowlers are an especially shitty enemy.

Marathon 2's shotgun pair is great and would probably be in a very close race for "best video shotgun" if it weren't for three things.

First, as fun as they are to use, they never felt as effective to me as the Super Shotgun in Doom 2. Durandal has the animations and the sound on par or better than Doom 2, sure, but they don't seem to cause as much damage as the one in Doom 2.

Secondly, they also chew threw ammo absurdly fast. I've always enjoyed using them, but I also always remember feeling like I was out of ammo before I was done using them. That's probably the biggest killjoy, actually. I have run out of shotgun ammo in Doom 2 but it seems like you're never far from more.

Thirdly... have you played Trepang2?

Bonus point - the first FEAR has a shotgun with 12 rounds in it, reloads nearly instantly, ammo is plentiful, it does real good damage, and it's useful from the time you pick one up until the game forcefully takes it away from you at the end. I'd personally also place it above Marathon Durandal's shotguns.

None of this is to say that Durandal's shotguns don't deserve more respect. They absolutely do. I just think they fall just a tiny bit short of the tiny handful of games with a Doom 2-tier shotgun.

I'd agree that the Xbox did have a really good turn-around. However, two things.

First, I feel like purchasing all these studios hasn't quite paid off in the way they thought it would (and the way everyone else thought it would). They haven't really had a "prestige" game in the same way that Sony has. They don't have a Last of Us or a God of War. I think that game was supposed to be Starfield, but... did you see the meme going around of Starfield winning a made-up "most 7/10 review scores" category? I feel like that sums up the reception to Starfield pretty well. Halo Infinite's multiplayer is in a really good place now, but its single player (which I personally loved because grapple hook) received a lot of criticism. Is Grounded low-key the most well-received Microsoft Studios game of the last few years? Since Ori and the Will O The Wisps?

Second, I don't think that's necessarily what matters to Microsoft at this point. This observation has been made before and Microsoft has said it themselves, but Xbox is better thought of as a service and not specifically a games console. Which is cool and all, but that doesn't seem to be quite panning out either. Phil Spencer can say this all he wants to, but are consumers buying it? Does average Joe see his Xbox Series X as just one avenue to access the Xbox Service, the same way a Roku is one avenue to access Netflix, or does he see his Xbox Series X the same way he sees his PS5? As a console for playing exclusives that, honestly, haven't blown the gaming world away in a long time?

I'm not trying to disagree with your point, I agree with it, Phil Spencer and modern Xbox teams have done a lot to bring back that goodwill the Xbox brand once had. I just don't think we can have this conversation without the addendum "but also they seem like they've still got a ways to go".

I don't know what this bit about Ground Zeroes is, but "man reminisces about pulling his eyeball out and eating it" is going to be awfully hard to beat.

This is the least of Redfall's issues.

You're not the only person bothered by this. It seems like Dark Souls and its ilk are regularly bashed for not allowing the player to truly pause the game. You can pause and mash "save and quit" very quickly, but anything more complex than "push the menu button" when you have a suddenly crying child or someone else needing help truly is too much, or if you just want to get up and stretch your legs for a bit.

In the case of something like Redfall, I can't think of a good reason for being unable to pause when playing by yourself, but I get the sense that "playing by yourself" really is just "a multiplayer server with only you in it", which is likely why you can't pause.

Can you embed the photo in your post?

I thought it would be an interesting experiment to put my PC in the closet next to me. There's not much in there, it's got plenty of space to breath, I could just have a few really long cables running out of the closet over here to my desk, it would look real neat, it would be real quiet, etc. I figured my PC would run a little warmer, but I had some wiggle room there.

My PC never shut itself down or anything while in there but when I opened the closet it felt like opening the oven. It wasn't actually that hot, but it was pretty hot, and my PC parts definitely were running over 90C after playing games for a few hours.

I cracked open one of the doors and that helped some, but it was still too hot in my opinion. Later I left the doors wide open and that solved the heat problem well enough, but then the cables were messier than ever and the noise from the computer wasn't being dampened at all (it wasn't all that loud, but honestly having the room dead quiet while playing games was so nice).

So I wound up taking it out of the closet entirely and setting it back up at my desk.

What I'm saying is, if you're willing to leave a closet door open, you should be fine, but if you want to put your PC in a closet and leave the door closed, I think you're making a mistake.

I disagree with the idea that some Nintendo games aren't as complex as other AAA games. Visual splendor and technical complexity aren't the same thing. Remember that a processor has to process everything happening in a game, not just all the pretty graphics, and sometimes that can get pretty complex or difficult, and sometimes in ways you don't expect. Tears of the Kingdom, in particular, is kind of absurd when it comes to the number of physical objects and AI running around that have to interact with each other.

With that set aside, let's focus on several different factors. These have been touched on in this thread already, to some degree, but I'm going to bring them up anyway.

Firstly, they made the hardware that these games are running on. Not only did they make the hardware, they need the games made for that hardware to be in tip-top physical shape. I don't have any inside baseball on Nintendo's inner workings or anything, but I'd bet every dollar I have that the hardware and all of its quirks and issues and any tips and tricks are all documented in excruciating, precise detail. All of that documentation wouldn't mean anywhere near as much if Nintendo didn't have a team, or multiple teams, of people who are there solely as consultants on the hardware for developers. People whose entire job is to help developers figure out how to do something specifically on the Switch's hardware. Third party developers designing for multiple systems are often only trying to sell a game, not a system, and thus they need to get that game out ASAP - they can get a game out, get an initial surge of sales for that sweet, sweet revenue, then fix it as time goes on and get another surge of sales when the game is finally, you know, finished.

Secondly, Nintendo needs these games to sell hardware. Game launches are still big events for Nintendo, so when something finally comes out and people get to play it for the first time, some of those people will want to buy a console with it. Tears of the Kingdom got a special edition console, and I bet a lot of people bought a console when they bought TOTK (or Mario Odyssey, or Fire Emblem, or whatever else). It wouldn't be anywhere near as big an event if Nintendo games didn't work at launch. It's important for them to spend the time and money and energy necessary to make sure this launch is good and not marred by angry internet people spreading the word that their game is a buggy mess.

Thirdly, Nintendo has a reputation. No, really, there's a joke-post above that is just the Nintendo Seal of Quality and that's funny, but also it's one hundred percent true. Despite all odds, despite bucking all trends of growing technology and 4K TVs and 60FPS games and so on and so forth, Nintendo remains one of the most valuable names in the world, and their games are exceptionally well-respected by virtually everyone. There are people out there who will eat up anything, anything, that Nintendo puts out, in pretty much the exact same way that there are people out there who will eat up Studio Ghibli stuff, or Disney's animated stuff, or how any major media group has people who will just stick by it no matter what. There are people who have been buying Nintendo stuff since the 80's and will continue to do so until they die just because it has the name Nintendo on it. Having such a fanbase is incredibly valuable, and likely a major part of the reason why Nintendo has been able to just keep on trucking outside of industry trends, doing whatever they want to do.

Fourthly, that reputation allows Nintendo to have its choice of anyone, anyone, to work for them. If they find someone fresh out of college who is very promising, they can just offer that person a job and almost any one of them would immediately grab the opportunity and hold it like it's a lottery ticket. When you have the best of the best working for you, you can do incredible things seemingly without effort while everyone else struggles to achieve half of what you achieve.

And, finally, finally, the last answer is simply "good project management". Nintendo has been doing this for a long time. They know how to manage their projects. I said above that they probably have absolutely incredible internal documentation of their hardware, their tools, their resources, etc. - they almost certainly have equivalent documentation for how to manage a years-long project involving dozens or hundreds of people, like Tears of the Kingdom or Mario Odyssey.

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None of this means that Nintendo cannot fail, by the way. That 3D Pokemon game on the Switch was regularly the butt of jokes all over the internet for a long time. It might still be, in certain corners. They've always had recent failures, and not just commercial failures but also critical ones, and ones where their fanbase has been collectively disappointed and angry. Still, most of the time, you can buy a game from them and get a high quality, finished product that doesn't need months or years worth of updates to work like you expected it to at launch.

I think this video is worth watching

Basically, this guy plays a demo of a game where all of the NPCs are driven by AI's and they respond to things he says to them.

How do I feel about this? Well, if every NPC in Starfield had some sort of massive LLM hanging around that they could draw character traits from, it sure would make that world a little more lively and interesting. Generally speaking, we've gotten pretty good at procedurally generating worlds and somewhat OK at generating interesting things to fill them with, if we could procedurally generate cities and fill them with characters we could make something pretty interesting. Of course it won't be a replacement for hand-crafted stories and characters, procedurally generated worlds have already proven that they cannot be as good as hand-crafted ones, but it could still be a useful tool.

Another game worth considering is an early access game called Shadows of Doubt, a 3D world that generates crime scenes for you to investigate as a private investigator. I don't know exactly how AI driven it is, but it does randomly generate individual characters that all have roles to play in its world.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt/

Asking people to mark their spoilers for Quake II is something that got a chuckle out of me.

I have been playing the PC version of this off and on, between games and while shooting the shit on Discord. I had a lot of fun with the original campaign, but I think Quake 64 is kinda meh and I'm really not keen on the original two expansions. Machine Games made Call of the Machine, though, which I haven't yet played but which I hear is good. Still, I'd tell you that the original game is the star of the show here by far.

One of the things that has ensured my continued fun even when Quake 2 is at its worst is the quick menu "Compass" tool. I like old school shooter level design when it feels clever and fun and does a good job of leading you along. I don't think I like it so much when I get stuck pixel hunting for something I missed, or when the game has no map and I can't remember how I got here because I was busy murdering things. The Compass tool ensured I never spent all that long wondering where I should go. As a side effect, I didn't find all that many secrets while playing, but that's more a problem with self-control than with the game - taking a few minutes to look around can be good for you. Still, I never really got all that bored or annoyed with the game...

...with one exception. There's a fast melee enemy type that takes a lot of bullets and deals a lot of damage. It can jump and slam the ground next to you in an AOE and frequently I felt like there was nothing I could do about it except reload and dump more lead into those guys. Maybe I just suck at Quake 2, but these guys became my immediate priority over all other enemies in the game whenever they appeared, and this jump-slam AOE attack is by far the most annoying thing to deal with in any of the games.