Randomly Mine: April 28th, 2019

Butts

To this day, I’ll occasionally get a comment from somebody viewing my Mass Effect 2 Years Later piece, saying that my idea for reserving Miranda’s obnoxious butt shots to those romancing her was the smartz. I don’t think it’s that outlandish or intellectual, it seems kind of simple to me that two people who are overtly into each other will overtly appreciate their appearance. But then I remembered, there’s really only one game I’ve played that does this, and sadly it’s a Kojima game. 

Metal Gear Solid 3 shoves knockers in-front of the camera at the same-time their owner introduces herself, and yet what would normally be considered poor taste is made better by one minor alteration. You have to press R1 to see this angle, I.E, this shot only happens because you made it happen. Which is why I made the point I did in Mass Effect 2. When controlling a character, role playing, you should be doing/thinking/feeling as much as that character does as possible without becoming Ready Player One. MGS3 doesn’t stare at this female character’s bust, Snake does, because of the person playing as Snake. Ideally, ME2 wouldn’t be staring at Miranda’s rear, but Shepard and in-turn, the player.

Actually I forgot to mention this, ME3 does follows up on my idea in Kaiden’s romance.

But then again, who saved Kaiden?

Indy

During my Childhood, Vancouver had this wonderland called Playdium. The brand still has a full-arcade in Ontario (I cannot communicate how jealous I am), but has long since died out here in Canada’s Westside. Being someone that almost exclusively played racing games at the time, the main-attraction were the SEGA Machines that had hydraulics, triple screens, and for their Indy 500 game, full-scale Indycar replicas.

All I came here to say is that I need one of those in VR… I need it.

NEED IT.

Life Tour

Speaking of VR, I had quite a unique experience with it the other day. Project CARS 2 was finally installed onto my machine (phenomenal game btw), and I competed with a friend who also had the game in VR. The competition steadily escalated from GoKarts to V8 Muscle, but by the end of the session, we were touring around California roads in old Ferraris. Not competing, just driving. Taking breaks in pull-over stops when one of us needed to dip out for a brief moment, and listening to him go through nostalgic journey, having lived in the area this road was modeled on.

In this environment, despite driving through a blurry textured approximation, I was wishing for the game to register head movements, hand motions, or packing in the environment with civilians, vehicles, and scenery. Despite the environment being total vacant, purposed built for racing, strapping two screens to your head suddenly made this brief journey far more immersive than it had any right to.

The significance of detail for VR isn’t found within the world, but what you can do in it.

Tax Simulator on Steam

…When? Or did I just miss it?

Tier List (Launchers)

I just finished all the audio for my latest video about Launchers for your Launchers, all that’s left is the footage. Though as I’ve spent a lot of time with these pieces of software, I’m going to personally list all of them with quick pros and cons (I’m skipping Arc & Bethesda, as I don’t even remember what they were like).

Origin: I despise this launcher. The amount of games I’ve had to redownload in their 80gb entirety because the software can’t recognize the installed game within the very folder that’s marked has surpassed the number of fingers I’ve got. It drains more resources than any other client I’ve used, looks terrible with an ostentatious sheen, and horrendous UI that has me jumping between the library and store without meaning to. I genuinely can’t give a single pro for this program, and I’m not being facetious, it is that bad.

 EPIC Games: This program has a couple dozen games and yet performs like its running all of them simultaneously. I do appreciate its simplistic and clean appearance, but feel like half of people’s frustrations towards the software would vanish if the damn thing didn’t perform like a rusted bicycle. 

 Uplay: I’ll never forget buying Assassin’s Creed III and watching Uplay spend 10-20 minutes installing it because it had to download and install each patch one by one. Though, it has admittedly gotten better and I’ve always appreciated its coins rewarding little in-game bonuses. It’s such a minor thing but goes to separate the client from everything else.

Battle.Net: Continuing what I said about EPIC, Battlenet's the counterweight. It’s just as if not more restrictive than other clients, but because it’s buttery smooth and sleek I don’t hear nearly as many complaints about it. Genuinely, it might’ve been my next favorite client to use if it wasn’t for the downloads, that for some reason just slow constantly. At least I don’t need to change languages to continue them like I did with War Thunder's.

Steam: Valve’s software needs to be given credit. As much as people may despise Steam fanboys that spread misinformation, I think it somewhat discredits Steam’s impact. Valve invested in the PC when everybody believed consoles would make them irrelevant, but as people jumped in thanks to a far more accessible market in Hardware and Software, Steam was there waiting for people. Steam’s biggest problems for me are its random bursts of jank, it doesn’t have the optimization of Battlenet, though that’s probably due to how much it lets people do.