one-armed dwarf

Looks like a boring move, wouldn't recommend using it

I will say I looked at that stream a bit and I don't think twitch actually conveys how beautiful the game looks in motion tbh. Like it's more specifically how the visuals just sort of flow in when you're galloping around on the horse which stood out to me last I played it. The weird thing about Witcher 3 in particular though is that's exactly the impression I have every single time I play it on new hardware. PS4, PC, this current PC, it's sort of an evergreen game, even if there are noticeably dated aspects of how characters move and look (but frankly, the animation work is still impressive enough by how carefully blocked and framed everything is, for a 2015 video game)

I don't recommend doing things like this, playing Witcher 3 with ray tracing, cause the more you do that the more this type of game's visuals will end up ruining everything else for you. Novigrad just looks insane. (I never liked the hairworks stuff in this though, always looked like bits of silky string or something)

There are 14 chapters, chapter 12 triggers the point of no return after a while.

Tonally, I think the game has a weird MCU problem where it doesn't let moments breathe, it has to move onto another big action set piece, smothering the previous moment's impact. In fact I'm certain they use those films as a model, it works well enough with the character interactions, but the overarching story not so much That's as much as I can get into that without spoilers. While I think individual character moments and interactions are better, and the world and lore very well realised, these games have pretty poor storytelling unfortunately cause while individual scenes are fun, none of it considers how the whole thing hangs together when these moments get juxtaposed. Rebirth is less a story than it is a extremely flamboyant FFVII theme park musical Disneyworld thing, which is fun in its own way but it will never threaten the original in that regard.

Surely that is Cloud. Unable to read social cues, particularly wrt interest shown from women, hyperfixated on boring minutae like the rules of a card game and Junon's capacity as a military bulwark rather than normie shit like a good place to eat, keeps repeating what other people say ('reunion')

Well if you want to really treat yourself, make it a double bill with The Act of Killing

Zone of Interest (2023) - I got it on Apple TV, but I think it might be on other streaming services. This is by Jonathan Glazer, director of Under the Skin which if you've seen is a very visceral film which eschews standard narrative forms. So does this film, the trailer gives you the idea of what it is tbh. It's about the family of Rudolf Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz, trying to live a normal family life while people are being incinerated at industrial scale over the wall from their house, the chimney always visible above the gazebo (no amount of vine coverage can reach that). I think the film should be seen without knowing too much beyond that, so I'll just say a lot of what the film is is about how is uses sound and juxtaposes it with visuals and character performances. It's not subtle about it either, it doesn't want people to leave a screening without having got the message and its relevance to modern events. Because of that imo you should watch with headphones, or a proper sound setup (not a flatscreen TV's speakers), and without a phone in hand. It is mainly about

I'm only here for image quality improvements, basically nothing else. Let me see Cloud's face if I'm playing in performance mode

Well on that note I recommend that maf tries to play through FFXVI so he can discuss something Game of Thrones adjacent with his PT who he struggles to strike up a conversation with. Dazzle him with the spectacular tale of Clive farming 5 rancid rat arses in the wilderness for 5 hours until the next spectacular Eikon battle occurs I actually do think Square should revisit an earlier battle system for XVII though, in fact I think Rebirth shows good evidence of how improved a game can be by iterating on past concepts (iterating on Remake). Like, try out XII's system again, or X's.

The RTX mod is someone just injecting the library in to play around with it, it's clearly deducing some things wrong when it applies a reflect surface to snow There are good RTX remasters, I contend that Half Life 1 RTX is the best one of them. Takes a lot of artistic liberties, but recasts the game as a modern looking horror game. It's clearly not the same thing, but it's a remaster which is clearly much more authored, and it's important to take that into account IMO when judging these videos cause this is more of a 'proof of concept' that RTX can be inserted in Tomb Raider in the first place, hence the inaccuracies and strangeness That said I generally agree that we should just embrace these games as they looked, with all their imperfections, and treat these as a fun alternate take

FFXVI is a game of insane highs, terrific characterisations, and lows that threaten the Mariana trench with characters so boring they make you want to go on lexapro That said, I think they had the right idea with the game, a clear break from recent tradition with a mesh of both western styles and Japanese (to me it felt less like GoT specifically than it did a flavour of the Ivalice games with some more adult themes in line with something like GoT). But man, the MMO team have a particular pattern of pacing a story and it sure as hell was boring enough when Realm Reborn did it. Generally speaking, the sentiment on the game is fairly negative, unfortunately though that means the game isn't given much credit for the really good things it does (I think its boss encounter design is super underrated, and it does a great job of mixing in new gimmicks with its control schemes and ways of negotiating combat, you can see the convergence of the team's different experiences with MMO raids and character action), but it forms part of the overall impression of where this series currently is. Blacksmith Blues XVI edit XIV is definitely the most popular current FF I'd say, and did bring new people on board, but brought them on board to FFXIV in particular cause MMOs are just such a different thing. Like it's a social outlet for some people, you almost can't compare it on the same level, and even at that the game is going through a bit of an attention drought as people leave the game post-Endwalker. Funnily enough in the same position as MCU post-Endgame

There's a bit of a thread on atm about sales of AAA games and layoffs, fwiw it's looking like Rebirth might be one of the worst selling Final Fantasies in a long time in Japan in particular. It sold around 260k copies launch week and around 25k week 2, which is less than XVI did (which was apparently a disappointment for Square iirc) The other thing though is it's apparently the second best selling PS5 game in Japan in its launch period, which certainly doesn't make the PS look like it's doing very well when it comes to selling software. But beyond that, it makes you wonder if Square have a different perspective now on turning a nearly 30 year old game into a trilogy of installments. Or is Final Fantasy just a series for old people at this point. imo, it feels partly like a belated impact from a lot of FFs which failed to really excite people, going all the way back to FFXIII. People make fun of FF people constantly fighting about the modern ones not being good, but at least those people/we show up to every installment. While at the same time it's not really conducive to growing a younger audience. Sad thing is though that Rebirth is the highest quality they've hit in decades imo, it's an outstanding release by them but if people aren't interested then it's hard to do much about it

This debate reminds me a bit of when people were comparing The Marvels to Godzilla, the latter of which just won an oscar for visual effects but the budget difference between these two films is enormous (in the opposite direction). It seems like cost of living in the US must be partly a factor though.

In 8 hours, Al Swearengen has a few fucking words to say about Dragon's fucking Dogma II

The combat makes more sense if you approach it like it's a RTWP system, like Baldur's Gate, or more appropriately Kotor perhaps. Though even there it's quite different cause you 'speed up' your next turn yourself with the actions you take in between ATB, where it's honestly a bit more of a Dark Souls thing (when is it safe to do my charge up attack). Rebirth is deeper than Remake but also more permissive, more attacks give you hitstun armour and can be animation cancelled with other actions, so they do allow you to play more 'brainless', but that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can also use the free 'synergy' skills to move characters around, they basically teleport to you to do the teamup moves so you can exploit the ways enemies commit to attacks and fuck around with them like that. In general though this game is an excellent balance of the number crunching, status effect considering, party composition balancing aspects of a good Final Fantasy game. I would actually compare it to something like FFXII (Zodiac Age, not original), or FFXIII, in terms of how rewarding it is to think through that stuff. It is definitely the best playing one in the series and goes a long way to helping me not-quite-forgive-but-overlook the parts of the entire package that don't work for me. Here's a fun one for Aerith's wards, OCH, radiant ward makes her spellcasting invincible, dragon does no damage when it hits her But you're not wrong about sidequests, that its what this game is, but I think its systems carry it really well. But you kinda have to be into the way they work.

Cait Sith isn't bad, but he's the hardest one to optimise. His summon moogle and dive off moogle move returns ATB but it's hard to establish ATB with him in the first place without materia/synergy skills. So he loses momentum really easily, but if you know when to use these two moves (ride and dive), then he can keep pretty high uptime, if not then Cloud, Yuffie and Aerith have good synergy skills with him to get him going again. He has cool tricks though, like if you hold the stick in a direction after doing the moogle mount attacks, he will do little side twirls and things to avoid damage so if you have the timing down there you can keep pressure up. You can use the moogle as a tank and use the cat as a very low mobility but still powerful caster (pretty hard to do without Aerith's wards I would say). He has cool party wide buffs, but they're random. He can cast spells while walking around on the moogle, the only one that can do that. He can have a huge luck stat, so massive crit damage and he can boost luck for others if you're all rolling crit builds. Most importantly, he has a scottish accent. But mainly, it's his crits, he can fuck things up if he gets one. Red microphone is his best weapon I think, even though it only has two materia slots, cause you can add 200 luck onto him while mounted. But generally the idea is randomness/volatility, cause he's all about fortunes and uncertain outcomes init This is my fave composition right now, Tifa on point building ATB with ATB assist and back to back combos, with Aerith putting down wards for massive spell casts, and Cait Sith to say things like "i'll clobber you ye wee bawbag". He's my favorite character in the game, though in the meta I think Yuffie and Aerith are the strongest ones.

I'm booking Friday off next week for this, well not approved yet but lets see. After FFVII, playing at 4k high fps will be like a revelation 🐲 Even just messing around with the character creator I was like 'omg, the hair is so silky'. The faces look really cool. That's uh, my Dragon's Dogma II impressions so far

Enough people have been playing it by now, the dog battle theme from FFVII

Well I'm just shocked that you passed through that chapter 11 dungeon without a single sweary post Won all the Queen's Blood games, just have a few challenges in Gold Saucer left. The deck what won, minor sidequest spoilers I guess. Pumpkin and sandhog boi mvp

Final draft mode doesn't change much I think. I think the whole idea there is it's just a recursive story that they'd like you to play more than once. If the DLC is consequential then maybe I'll do that.

The only capcom game that was really fucked on release in recent years was Village, cause its DRM interacted weird with other DRM and there was memory leaks everywhere. The console version is running at an unlocked FPS targetting 30 some of the time, and has some really bad looking FSR even in youtube videos. fwiw I don't actually recommend playing DD1 at this point in time, unless DD2 shits the bed it should make DD1 redundant. This is more like when a new Street Fighter comes out, time to move onto the new one edit DF says it has DLSS so that should help with scalability on the GPU side at least

I have beaten every Queen's Blood player except the last one, who I'm pretty sure might as well be the Emerald Weapon of card players, you actually have to really go explore the world and do all those puzzles to theory craft an effective deck build against them, which I love. My Tonberry King suicide build isn't working out Even though the game's ending is a stinky pile of poo, everything else about the game is so moreish. Like good crack That said, I'm still not even clear what you actually get from Queen's blood. Don't tell me either, I'll let it be a surprise. Although it would stink if it doesn't integrate with other progression systems, the rest of the game is pretty cool about giving rewards useful for combat.

I hate watching footage of other people playing these games, omg do something else other than pressing square square square 💀 But maybe this game doesn't have much else going on, I dunno. Sort of looks like Metal Gear Rising

The cuts have been so severe in game dev that it makes sense there's been doom and gloom, and it's very difficult to make a game as feature complete as Rebirth in that kinda industry when these things cost so much to make. In fact was reading that apparently Rebirth is not selling very well in Japan, though part of that is due to PS5 also not selling well over there.