doublepepperoni

"Basic foundational principles of life"

I hate how all these nerds sound like mini Jordan Petersons

Edit: Damn, this dude is all over the comment section for this episode

is this a rhetorical question or do you just simply think plp started calling things "fascist", deconstructing the family unit and pushing gender polymorphism and sxxual escapism for no reason at all?

Who deconstructed the family unit

Between Kuja from FF9, the protag from Vagrant Story with his assless chaps and the male protag from FF12, Square was very fond of barely-dressed dudes in the late 90s and early 2000s

The game here is Threads of Fate, a 1999 platformer/light action RPG from Square. I'd never even heard of it until I saw it highlighted in one of Sean Seanson's videos. Visually, it's pure late 90s PS1 Square greatness, with gorgeous and colourful graphics, with the character models looking especially lovely

The soundtrack is very nice as well as expected, and playing this I'm once again reminded of how much I love the sound effects in PS1 Square games. Instead of samples, every single sound is some type of synthetic chirp or warble from the PS1 sound chip.

It's practically joever

Also nice Ancient Aliens reference

I'm continuing The New Colossus and Super Spesh is a stock kooky alien conspiracy theorist character straight out of a Roland Emmerich movie. I'm not sure if this character archetype really fits the 40s/60s either- it feels out of place. His likeability wasn't helped by the conversation where BJ told his pregnant partner that he was dying being comedically cut short by Spesh getting out of a bathroom after taking an extended shit

That was basically a MCU comedy beat

In my previous post about TNC after playing the first level I said I thought the tone was more campy than in TNO and that's definitely been true so far. I just finished the New Mexico level where you get to walk around an American town as a Nazi parade is going on, and while in TNO the stark horror of a permanent Nazi occupation of Europe was treated mostly seriously, the vibe of the New Mexico segment feels closer to Fallout with Nazis. I'm not saying TNO didn't have goofy gags and light-hearted moments in it too- it absolutely did. (Also, Wolfenstein has Nazi moon bases, man-eating robot dogs and laser guns, it's not fucking Schindler's List) I just think that the comedy was more subtle in the first game and I'm a bit salty because I really liked the Half-Life 2 vibes TNO gave me

Still a good game though

It's incredible what a single animator can do on their computer these days. The models, animation and how they're integrated into the original footage is amazing

Also, sidenote but why are all the new dinosaurs in those Jurassic World movies so fucking ugly? Lack of feathers and other inaccuracies aside, they all look like gnarly video game monsters. The old designs were also embellished or inaccurate but you still got a sense the filmmakers tried to make them feel like actual animals

What we have here are screenshots from TimeSplitters 2. On the left is the GameCube version running on Dolphin and on the right is the PS2 version running on PCSX2, both upscaled to 1080p.

You might notice the lighting being slightly different, but if you look closer, you can also notice something funky going on with the graphics on the upscaled PS2 screenshot:

When you use the hardware renderer to upscale TimeSplitters 2 in PCSX2, you get headache-inducing ghosting that's persistent throughout the entire game. Note that this is with PCSX2's default game-specific hardware renderer fixes enabled, and to be fair, it looks even worse without them on. You can get rid of the ghosting if you enable manual hardware renderer fixes and set SkipDraw to 1. This gets rid of the ghosting but it also gets rid of other effects, like the radar screen:

I assume there's some kind of depth of field effect that gets broken when upscaled. Unfortunately, plenty of PS2 games have similar ghosting issues. Depending on the game, you can use SkipDraw or enable cheats that disable whatever specific filter or effect is causing problems, but it's usually at the cost of breaking something elsewhere

Why did the PS2's Graphics Synthesizer have to be so weird

I watched one video debunking archeological conspiracy theories and now Google thinks this is what I want to watch

I fired up TimeSplitters 2 for the first time in like two decades and immediately went at the aiming controls

Firing from the hip, there's no crosshair on the screen, which would be fine, but instead of a zoomed-in aiming mode or iron sights, aiming your gun roots you in place and gives you this light gun game-like pointer crosshair. Usually, aiming in an FPS game decreases your sensitivity to make it easier to make finer adjustments but this is the opposite. The crosshair is essentially a super sensitive mouse cursor that you control with a stubby little thumbstick, and it feels terrible to use.

Halo had been out for almost a year by the time TimeSplitters 2 came out so why didn't they just crib Bungie's homework

I quickly went back and checked TimeSplitters: Future Perfect and sure enough, it just had a regular Halo-style crosshair as the default, called "fixed crosshair" in the options, with the old control style called "moving crosshair." I guess by 2005 Halo had established its control scheme as the de facto standard for console FPS controls

The only mention of Sweden in Wolfenstein: The New Order is just to shit on them for collaborating with the Nazis and for subjecting the Sami to horrible race science

Also at this newspaper clipping about the Nazis nuking New York:

"This final act of violence may have saved millions of lives that would have resulted from a land invasion of America," said the German leader in a press statement following the announcement.

I wonder what the writers meant by putting these words in the mouth of Adolf fucking Hitler

The fucking flush

I finally started playing through the Machinehead Wolfenstein reboot series, and TNO at least is pretty great so far. It's incredible that the game turns 11 this year when in my mind it's still a fancy next-gen title

Speaking of which, it is starting to look its age. I'm usually not one to complain about graphics given that I regularly play games that are 20+ years old but even I noticed the flat lighting and rough textures that feel like something you'd see on the Xbox 360. 2014 was pretty early for 8th gen so I guess it makes sense for it to look a bit transitional. Alien Isolation came around the same time but I remember that game looking much more impressive when I played it some years back.

I do love how absolutely despicable every single Nazi character is in this game, just completely irredeemable assholes. I just hope the game's not going to turn out too annoyingly liberal

I just finished playing through Tormented Souls, a mostly okay indie Silent Hill/RE clone and went to look at the unreleased sequel's Steam page, and also regrettably the Steam discussions, which are probably the worst gamer cesspit outside of like, 4chan.

The "nudity for story purposes" from the first game being referred to here was a cutscene where you could see the main character's boobs for like 15 seconds. Those 15 seconds of gratuitous polygonal nipples seem to be the main thing gamers took away from the entire 8-12 hour experience

Here's some enlightened discussion from the same thread

"In the trailer Caroline appears to have drastically shrunk in her chest area? Could you good sires please fix that?"

There are also several threads where upset gamers vent their anger about the main character wearing pants instead of a dress in the sequel

The dress is the main costume? I really like the dress, makes her feminine and there is not a Lot of main protagonists using one.. so its stays or no?

bring back the dress or no buy

Also, a woman should look feminine and not like a metal band singer guy in IKEA. Not to mention that beautiful and feminine women are one of the most basic cornerstones of the genre. Not to mention that any kind or any hint of wokeness these days results in a "0 sales" figure and a "never buy again anything from these" attitude towards a studio.

Nah, developers decided to go with a more boring design. Sorry, Did I say boring. What I meant to say was "MoRe ReAlIsTiC" Wouldn't be surprised if the developers ended up making a bunch of dumb woke arguments as the reasoning. Frankly, kinda sick of this attitude in gaming in general. I bought the first one, not going to buy this one.

I remember the forums for the first game were full of cucks complaining about the dress, this is their fault.

PS: Keep the awesome hip sway she had! It was hypnotic!

I had a feeling the character design would be made to be more boring and generic this time around, looks like I was right. They literal just put a hobo jacket on her. Lame...nothing can just be fun anymore. Everyone so concerned with "It LoOkS mOrE rEaLiStIc"

The only thing that drew me to the original was a feminine looking protagonist, which you don't see from the west anymore. They must feel like they'll sell more copies if the sequel looks like everything else though.

There is a contingent of gamers that will buy games just to look at female character models they find hot. What type of game it is or even if the games are any good is not a concern. I just can't wrap my head around being that horny

Now this is puzzle design

For context, I'm playing Tormented Souls which is a 2021 Chilean indie game that uses the classic Resident Evil/Silent Hill formula. It's got some decent puzzles too but then you have ones like these where you're just solving random pictograms. I get many of the puzzles in those old games were pretty arbitrary too but a bit of theming goes a long way. How's this fit a Victorian mansion turned hospital