thoughts and prayers in advance for @exodus trying to play stalker 2 on the steam deck
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i liked unicorn overlord. i liked the horsies. the story was kinda dumb though. it was cool to tinker and create these weird configurations where a unit that sucked for ten hours all of a sudden is really strong.
metal slug tactics was an immense bummer to me if not purely on a performance basis, but it didn’t help that every run more or less felt the same.
dragon age is one of those kinds of games im just out on forever i think, I skipped baldurs gate and prob won’t be hanging with these big western rpgs. anime 4 life i guess.
coming away with these two episodes thinking, wow, i was a good current events gamer this year.
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I was cracking up at all of the floundering around at the end of the episode and then Ash is able to bring everything home even though she’s the newest member on the show.
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Also, wasn’t the first Dragons Dogma held in pretty high regard by the show overall? I was surprised that the new game didn’t get mentioned on either 2024 recap episode. Although, I didn’t play it in 2024 either! (And actually I’m still making my way through it right now and trying to avoid much discussion of the game until I finish my first playthrough)
My thoughts as well. The first game has such a great personal narrative about acceptance. For the second one, they opted to ditch meaningful narrative in favor of shinier graphics.
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25 : Tomb Raider I•II•III: Remastered (01:11:57)
To be fair I only got around to finishing the first game but I had a really good time with Tomb Raider. It did take me a while to get used to the old control scheme. Though when I did the game really clicked for me. 3D games are so standardized at this point and I had a lot of fun experiencing this old take on what a 3D game could be.
Also, Tomb Raider also scared me as a child. I remember trying to play it on the Sega Saturn and couldn’t even get through the first room. I just chilled out in the mansion.
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I’m playing Tomb Raider Remastered now since it got in a bundle on Fanatical. I’ve played the first one a ton back in the day, but I’m on my first proper go at TR 2. All those gun-toting enemies make it significantly worse than the first, but it’s still got a lot of interesting levels.
Those AI “enhanced” graphics are super bad, though. I’m sticking to the originals (they capped those to 30 fps for no good reason, but thankfully there’s a mod to fix it), only switching over here and there out of morbid curiosity how it messed up this or that texture.
My favorite so far is this one, where it turned some amorphous tech instruments into a giant phone keypad (in between a bunch of other nonsensically sized instruments):
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That’s hilarious. I’ll never understand the use of AI upscalers for retro games that look this good. The SNES Final Fantasy games and Chrono Trigger all got it and it made all of them look terrible. Especially those weird high res character sprites. I swear the suits at these companies must think people won’t play their old games without enough modernization added but they seem to completely miss that pixel art and chunky 3D have become as ubiquitous (in videogames) as any established art movement. We don’t modernise art deco stuff. Why should we modernize pixel art?
Chrono Trigger still looks as good today as it did in the 90s and I’ll die on that hill.
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AI upscaling as used here feels like the latest advancement in a profound misunderstanding of art design in games. It reflects a belief that what the original art needs is more precision and then it will be more real. So, rather than appreciating an instrument panel suggestive of an industrial space, or at least having an artist deliberately put something in that fits the setting and looks sharper, AI output has to make it a thing. We lose two things in the process: any sense in the output, and the idea that art can suggest a thing without precisely depicting it.
That idea of upscaling through vividness doesn’t come from AI. It is a longstanding fantasy, certainly evident in the Star Trek holodeck making a novel (it’s usually a novel, isn’t it) realish with a minimal amount of human input.
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Dude is this real lmao
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think he swallowed his dip. Happens to baseball players lol
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being down so bad you just instinctually reach for the groin
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Having now discussed this with many sensible people on the internet (lol) it seems this may actually have been a photoshop texture replacement. Maybe an AI did it! But also maybe a human without context did it. there’s a stock image here that looks like they cropped and lifted: @zackzwiezen.com on Bluesky
It remains very funny though
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no I’m pretty sure it’s real. It’s a known phenomenon
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For a second I thought you were talking about the umpire video
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Imagine that in movies, too. I had that with a silent movie.
I love that the umpire:
- chooses to walk ONTO the field to do this
- keeps doing it
- grabs his crotch during the process
(maybe I misunderstand the lines there and this is actually off the field)
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you’re right he does walk out onto the field of play yeah. You do have to readjust the cup sometimes so can sympathize with him there
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Dude seems to be having a really bad day. Crotch grab in solidarity.
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