toblix

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by toblix


  1. Yeah, everything is moving in this game, and there are tons of great animation everywhere. Also:

     

    • THIS GAME IS HARD. You'll be saving a lot for some of the areas, which can be pretty full of traps and enemies. It's pretty unforgiving too, at least early on. There are thorns and bad guys everywhere, and you can only take only a couple of hits before you die. Luckily you pop back to the save point really quickly, so there's something almost Meatboyesque to a lot of the more trap-filled areas.

  2. This game is out, and it's been really great so far (2 hours). It's an exploration platformer (metroidvania, I guess?) from Moon Studios, the studio without a Wikipedia page. It's really beautiful, sounds great and controls really well. You run and jump around in this wonderful, mysterious forest, firing glowing bolts at spiders and spiky blobs, and there's wall climbing and you unlock powers as you go, and you collect various kinds of items that gives you more health or energy or lets you unlock new stuff in a little three-pronged tree, and you jump on plants and there are secrets if you look closely! I guess if you like games like that and you also appreciate them looking beautiful as fuck, you should get this. It's out for XBONE™ and WINDOWS™ (on STEAM™ and probably on MICROSOFT™'s own store; they have one, right?) and will be out for XBOX 360™ later, so anything non-Microsoft is probably not coming ever or anytime soon.

     

    edit: Oh, I just remember the reason I was looking to post about this game in the first place: The game has this weird and quirky retro game mechanic in that it does not auto-save, so:

     

    • REMEMBER TO SAVE REGULARLY.

  3. Not to be the guy who's always complaining about Microsoft, but when did Microsoft last introduce a new crazy technology in a way that wasn't awkward, clearly idiotic and ultimately a failure?

     

    And the rectangle thing, I'm assuming that's just a limitation of the prototype, that they haven't gotten as far as Oculus with the display, with regards to size and everything?


  4. Now, this is a story all about how my computer has been acting weird the last few months, and I think it's the graphics card so I've ordered a replacement. The first weird thing was that the driver would sometimes reset out of nowhere, with the screen going dark for a few seconds, then everything popping back up with the little Windows notification balloon telling me the driver had reset. The second weird thing was that videos would sometime exhibit tearing, just like non-vsynced video games, only in the other direction! That's right, tearing down the middle of the screen! Weird! But that's not all. When starting a Netflix video (and only Netflix, not any other video thing) everything would freeze, and for a brief, shining moment, everything would be covered in a quickly scrolling cloud of colorful patterns and colors! Then poof, things were back to normal, as if none of this was actually happening, and maybe I'm just seeing things! But there's more! Yesterday, black rectangles started appearing on my screen. Sometimes one would just pop up for half a second and vanish, other times a bunch of them would show up and jump and dance around, and colors would be inverted, and pieces of one window would show up in another!

     

    Today I decided my graphics card was dying, so I thought oh I'll just order one of those GTX 970s, and oh boy there's a thing with them and everyone's up in arms and getting refunds. JUST MY LUCK!


  5. The minutes I spent playing Elite: Dangerous with the DK2 were amazing. The feeling of presence was super-powerful, especially when undocking from a landing bay, looking up and seeing the huge interior of the space station above me. It's almost impossible to use hotkeys with the thing on (a problem AR would solve elegantly) and trying to read interface text is crazy. It is readable, but only if stare intently and move your eyes to let the text pass over the Rift's coarse pixel array. I've read 1440p for the CV1, which sounds a little low to me, based on the difference from DK1 (800p) to DK2 (1080p). I guess you'd want to do a lot of bespoke UI design anyway, so I guess enlarging some fonts is not the hardest thing in the world.


  6. One thing about damage from ESD is that it won't necessarily straight up fry anything; it could also damage something so that its lifespan is reduced, or even just make it prone to random errors like BSODs and memory errors, data corruption, etc. I do the thing where I just hook up the PSU and fondle the case, and I've had very few hardware problems, but I do wonder if the busted RAM stick I had that one time could've been my fault.


  7. Look what came in the mail the other day:

    CMxYnfD.jpg

     

    Cool! What is it?

    Thanks for asking! It's "Lucky Wander Boy", which apparently is a book that is good and about video games. I'll sneak it into the next slot on my list (tough luck Karl Ove).

     

    There's also a thermally insulating drink container sleeve with a picture of a bird on it. On the bird the letters K and U can be seen, an initialism representing the Kniversity of Uansas. In the letter, which can be seen behind the book, and to which I'll get back later, there is some text briefly describing the history and origin of the bird, which, as it turns out, is not a real bird, but a fictional figure, functioning, as far as I can tell, as some sort of talisman intended to bring luck to KU, and the various sports teams with which it is associated. The origin is an interesting one, related to a group of warriors combating slavery enthusiasts during the American Civil War. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_Jayhawks#Origins_of_.22Jayhawk.22. I can put a beer can in it.

     

    To the far left in the picture above you can see a glazed ceramic tile beautifully decorated with the image of a couple of enamored newly wed skeletons! It reminds one of such great video games as "Grim Fandango" and "The Curse of Monkey Island". There was also a letter.

     

    Thanks to Bjorn for these wonderful gifts! They brought me both joy, cheer and the motivation to up my game for the 2015 sequel to Idle Santa.