Leaning into it
In contrast to several recent expensive AAA flops – corrupted by the dour influence of blue-haired “story consultants” – an unabashed shoot-em-up leaning into the Starship Troopers theme has been the surprise hit of the year so far. Helldivers II.
Seriously, watch the trailer. It’s funny as hell, in a fascistic sort of way. Is there a word when someone is tongue-in-cheek, but really sort of means it, too?
The motto of the studio is “a game for everyone is a game for no-one”. Sadly, it’s probably not a game for me.
It’s a co-op you play online with up to three friends, and all my friends are frail, elderly Englishwomen. I don’t think I can get them on board. So anons it would be, then.
Also, it’s hard. I avoid any game that requires good reflexes and not completely losing your mind under pressure, especially online where I’m likely to play on a team of anonymous 14-year-old boys. I got a lot of poop kicked out of me before I learned that lesson.
“Managed Democracy” – still chuckling.
April 3, 2024 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 4
Tea time’s over
I had a wonderful Easter. I spent the sunny hours – of which there were many – sitting in the garden watching the new lambs gambol.
I spent the less sunny hours – of which there were also many – wearing my magic spectacles and playing games in VR. Specifically, the Hogwarts game. Yes, I got the plugin working that makes non-VR games into VR.
It’s an astonishing piece of work. I’m not a fan of the books, which were derivative as hell, but the visuals and the scale of this thing are amazing.
There’s a sort of giant junk room in it that contains thousands of individually-modeled items – I know they are because they animate as you walk past them. That’s the room in the picture above, but it’s many times larger. There weren’t any loading screens, either. How they fiddled the memory management for that, I do not know.
It should have been Game of the Year but wasn’t because JK Rowling.
Sadly, though, I have to run it at the game’s lowest resolution. In VR, games have to render three times: once for your left eye, once for your right eye and once for your monitor (I think there’s a way to turn off the monitor render, but I haven’t found it yet). My five-year-old rig coughs and wheezes at the prospect.
April 1, 2024 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 1
Git offa my land!
The latest howling controversy in gaming has been over a consultancy firm hired onto gaming projects to make them more woke. It turns out their fingerprints are all over several recent big-budget flops.
I won’t go into it. Gamers make up a tiny number of my readers. It just made me think what a tiny, underrepresented identity group I belong to: old lady gamers.
As far as I know, it’s just me and Shirley Curry. (Seriously, check Shirley out. She’s an 87 year old grandma from Ohio who plays Skyrim. She’s a hoot).
And I was thinking how *I* wasn’t bitching about my identity group not being represented in video games. And then I thought hang on, that would be kind of awesome.
I can see a crabby old lady NPC with a sniper rifle who shouts at you and plinks you from a great distance. Kind of like Bette Davis in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. Which, if you’ve never seen it, is the most fantastic old horror film featuring an enormous cast of famous scene-chewing old hams. It’s all Oscar-winners and low-budget gore.
Only in 1964.
It was originally supposed to star Joan Crawford against Bette Davis. Check out the making of for some hilarious behind-the-scenes drama.
When I was a kid, we watched it strictly for the “head rolling down the stairs” scene.
March 27, 2024 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 11
Oh, swell
When I tried to shut down my headset this afternoon, it fired up a long firmware upgrade. It updates about every six months. I didn’t think any changes would be immediately apparent, so I looked up the release notes and – whoopee! – Horizon Worlds avatars will now HAVE LEGS.
That’s those guys up there. I’ve said it before, a big part of the incredibly low uptake on Zuch’s metaverse is that everything so goddamned ugly. The man has to be face blind.
I’ve only gone to his shared worlds a few times. They’re painfully stupid, too. Bunch of Weebles wobbling around mumbling to each other. What do you say to a lumpy pastel stranger? The occasional kid bumping into someone repeatedly to simulate sex (this got so bad they had to institute adjustable personal boundaries).
Kids. The last thing on the planet earth I want to do is interact with somebody’s children on the computer. Jesus, Zuck.
The ugly isn’t due to hardware limitations. There are restrictions on what you can do, sure, but most of this shit is bad design, plain and simple.
Having delivered myself of this rant, I’m off. Have a good weekend, everyone!
October 27, 2023 — 6:43 pm
Comments: 6
Tense moment
So I’m using my thrusters to float down a corridor coated in pulsating orange biomass while carrying a power cell (those blobby things eat power) and I’m just getting to the part where you have to make a hard right or get a faceplate full of lethal alien goo annnnnnd…the power goes.
Not long. Just long enough to shut everything down. I love Lone Echo, but there’s no manual save and I’m not sure how much of that I’ll have to redo. Am pissy.
Counterpart to yesterday’s Tabasco post, this guy experiments with making Sriracha. Fermented chilis, just like Tabasco, plus garlic (which you will know if you eat Sriracha) but also brown sugar.
I wasn’t aware of the taste of sugar, but then I rarely it it directly. A squirt into a mess of soup does the trick.
October 26, 2023 — 6:31 pm
Comments: 5
I’m going to have to do it, you know
The Meta Quest 3. I’m going to have to have one.
Not for the mixed reality – I want VR to get away from my lousy housekeeping – but because it addresses pretty much all my complaints about the Quest 2.
A faster processor. Bigger, brighter lenses. Higher resolution. But most important, the 3 has pancake lenses.
The Quest 2 had Fresnel lenses. Yes, like lighthouse reflectors. I guess it’s a way to cram a lot of glass into a thin package, but the visual result is sometimes called the screen door effect. You can imagine.
It’s not awful. If you wanted to try VR for not a whole lot of money (in VR terms), I understand they’re kicking out supplies of the Quest 2 for cheap(er) and I really would recommend it. But, you know, when you spend hours mining tritium in a teeny cockpit, those visual quirks can wear you down.
But it will have to wait. I put aside money every month into a technology account. I’ve got it. I just can’t quite talk myself into handing £479 to Mark Zuckerberg.
October 17, 2023 — 7:29 pm
Comments: 3
Now you’re just screwin’ with me
Six more community awards on Steam. This is hilarious.
Made me scrutinize my 26 friends. I see Skandia Recluse hasn’t logged onto Steam in 11 years. Gosh.
Worryingly, Ermine hasn’t logged on in 50 days. That’s not like him at all. Dude played enough Skyrim to apply for citizenship. Surly, you okay buddy?
I haven’t played any games in ages, myself. It’s summer. I’ve spent every minute I could sitting in the garden.
But now that cold weather is coming, I have been checking out digital amusements again. This VR experience is mildly hilarious: “A virtual reality project in Spain allows visitors to experience the episodes of daily discrimination suffered by lesbians, gays and transgender people.”
Headline: “12 minutes in the skin of a victim of LGBTphobia.” The illustration shows a woman sitting passively in a chair, so it’s – what? Twelve minutes of people walking past giving you the stink-eye?
Okay, the T I’ll give you – they probably get treated to lots of hairy eyeball in a typical day.
But how does anybody know you’re LGB unless you’re doing the naughty right there in front of everyone? Eh. Maybe it’s applying for home mortgages from bigots or something. Sounds riveting.
September 27, 2023 — 6:40 pm
Comments: 6
Thanks, can I get you something…?
Erm, I got an award. I guess users buy them for each other on Steam. I got a Mad Scientist. Thanks, Mysterious Stranger. Can I buy you one? I’ve got literally 40,000 unspent points on Steam.
Feel free to friend me. I don’t do the social aspects, but it gives me a little thrill of community when the popup tells me what y’all are playing at the moment.
Roger Whittaker has died. He was 87. Remember Roger Whittaker? I’ve tried and cannot find the exact Roger Whittaker infomercial that is seared into my brain, but this one is close. Except it’s missing the one that goes “there’s a boat down in the harbor…”
Good job advertising, I guess, because other than these late night ads, I never heard of the man.
September 18, 2023 — 7:22 pm
Comments: 12
Ew.
Ew ew ew. I mean, I knew this would be one of the first things anyone did with VR, but I didn’t expect it to be offered to me as part of my regular Steam recommendations. Right to my face, in front of the cat and everything!
If you can’t read the text:
VR HOT is a VR adult experience for creating and interacting with dream partners (m/f). It gives you the opportunity to explore your most intimate desires in a non-judmental surrounding. VR HOT offers a virtual environment and a construction kit for dream partners and the interaction with them.
I found a guy doing YouTube gameplays, but all he seemed to be doing was changing the model and the outfit and stumbling around a depressing hotel room with his arms outstretched like a zombie.
To be honest, I didn’t listen to the audio, I just scrubbed through the video. I find gamesex unbearably cringe.
You may (or may not) be pleased to know there’s a wrinkles slider, so you can make your dream girl (or guy) super wrinkly!
April 4, 2023 — 7:15 pm
Comments: 4
Mystery solved
One area where we have consistently gained ground in the culture wars is guns, which slightly puzzled me. I was playing my latest VR game earlier and the penny dropped – when you play first person shooters, love of guns is baked in. Guys who grew up with this stuff (and that’s most of them now) will never be afraid of guns.
This game, like most, features guns that exist in the real world and the more you know about them the better your game. I’ll bet there are guys who have learned squillions playing games like this. I’ll bet if I went to the range today, my shooting would have improved.
In VR, too, you aren’t entering keyboard commands, you’re using your hands to eject the magazine or release the safety or pump the shotgun. You’d have to want to try it for real. Have to.
Oh, this is a weird little survival-horror game called Into The Radius, and it’s happy to hand me my ass all day long. But not tonight – tonight I’m having to run a Zoom conference : (
November 10, 2022 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 4