Endgame Viable

Weekly news and observations. In The News In surprise news, Trion acquired Gazillion’s assets. It’s not all that surprising, actually. After their implosion, I would think Gazillion was selling everything at a deep discount, so why not pick up a whole library of a competitor’s source code? Trion also seems to be trying to turn themselves into something like SpatialOS, which, again, why not? It sounds like they’ll be renting out the technology they already use and maintain for their own games. The gaming industry is more about building game engines now than building games anyway. It’s turning into another record industry, where the artists (the game makers in this case) are the least important part. (Note: That might be a cynical viewpoint.) (672 words.)

To the dismay of I’m sure most people on the Internet, I could write for days about how much Dark Souls pitches exactly into my wheelhouse as a game (mixed metaphor used intentionally because it’s funny), but I’ll try to keep this post focused on just what is different in the PC version of the Dark Souls Remastered edition. In short: There aren’t that many differences. But there are some. As a caveat, I haven’t completed the entire game just yet. But I’m pretty close. I have just three bosses remaining at the time of this writing: Kalameet, Manus, and Gwyn. I’ve spent over 50 hours in the game now and I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the changes. (1368 words.)

I’ve been playing a lot of Dark Souls Remastered lately, which requires playing on a controller. Technically you can play the game with mouse-and-keyboard on PC (and it’s even easier in the Remastered edition) but the control scheme is completely alien to any other mouse-and-keyboard game, and it takes a lot of getting used to, and it’s just not worth the effort for one game. Even the controller scheme takes a fair amount practicing and learning, even if you’re used to using controller. (915 words.)

Weekly summary of news and observations. I should really copy and paste a standard template for this opening because I have to type it from memory every time and I think it subtly changes every week. In The News There’s been some hubbub about the World Health Organization’s gaming disorder classification. The WHO added “gaming disorder” to the “International Classification of Diseases,” and every gamer who has been on the defensive about that kind of thing since the 90s got out their pitch forks and torches. I personally think any gamer who is actually honest with themselves can probably remember a time when they made a choice to play a game instead of doing something more important instead, so denying that a “gaming disorder” could exist to the point that it impairs a person’s life seems silly to me. Of course someone could hurt their life by playing too many games. I think in this case it’s largely an argument over semantics. Addictive personalities and compulsive disorders are definitely a real thing, but whether you’re addicted to gaming or something else is probably irrelevant, so I imagine the objection here is singling out “gaming” as more of a trigger than anything else. (712 words.)

This is an amalgamation of an old draft from March 2017 that I never got around to publishing, probably because I never found a picture for it, and some new thoughts because the subject came up again this past week. My keyboard, stylistically distorted purely for artistic effect, not at all to mask the dust and dirt that showed up because of the side lighting angle. (2366 words.)

In The News I have to retract last week’s applause for Valve’s Libertarian stance on content. I started to write a blog post about this, but Wilhelm said everything I was going to say. They completely and comically reversed their “no filters” stance and replaced it with “we’ll take down whatever we personally don’t like and call it trolling.” It’s the right move from a business and PR perspective, probably, but whatever respect I had for what I interpreted as a principled we-trust-the-customers-to-decide stand last week is now completely gone. I certainly never would have bought Active Shooter, but pulling that game while leaving thousands of other murder simulators on the store could not be any more arbitrary. (1088 words.)

I watched the Square Enix showcase but it left little impression on me. Unlike seemingly everyone else, though, I liked that it was just a series of trailers and videos, and not one of those awkward live presentations in front of a confused audience. I just feel like in the year 2018, we should have evolved beyond the 90s-Steve Jobs-cult-of-personality-walking-around-on-stage phase of our lives. Although the guy from Bethesda talking about Fallout 76 actually was pretty entertaining. I’ll make one exception for him I guess, if I could remember his name. Everybody else sounded, though, like a corporate robot talking about PowerPoint slides, graphs, and charts, and sucked every bit of fun out of the games they were supposed to be excited about, because it’s so, so obvious that it’s just numbers on a spreadsheet to them. (1499 words.)

Fine! I’ll write something about the E3s and whatnot. I’m not a big fan of these kinds of game conferences but I actually sat down and watched some showcases this weekend, because really, who among us can honestly say they’d pass up a chance to write snarky tweets and ruin people’s fun on the Internet. I missed most of the EA show on Friday. I started watching right before the Anthem gameplay footage, which was followed by approximately 20 continuous hours of FIFA gameplay. (895 words.)

News and observations from the past week. I keep thinking I should write real posts about stuff, but I’m having a hard time finding anything that interests me enough to write more than a few sentences. Dark Souls Remastered. It bugs me but also amuses me that the featured image I put in these posts doesn’t match the title. (660 words.)

Join me as I re-watch The Expanse, Season 1, to try to find out where the show went wrong for me. Summary I’ve decided that I’m just going to quote Wikipedia’s brief episode summaries here, instead of spending all of my time writing my own summaries. The point of these posts is to explore what I think of the episodes, not retell the episodes. The Big Empty was written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, and directed by Terry McDonough. I am noting the writers and directors, by the way, to see if I notice any patterns in which writers or directors create the episodes I like or dislike. (1630 words.)