I also find it hard to do evil play throughs. I tried to do one on Baldur’s Gate 3, but I couldn’t bring myself to because of how it affects your companions. It doesn’t help that I had already seen most of them work through their trauma on a more good aligned play through
Yeah, that kind of mocking is a direct attack at me, and I honestly like it because I feel like my weird achievement hunting is definitely mockable (especially because I already know how ridiculous I am and thus will not change in this respect)
Definitely play it. Just remember that “You Died” doesn’t equal failure and dying a lot doesn’t mean you’re bad at the game. Dying lots is a core mechanic of the game.
I’m of the opinion that the difficulty level isn’t that bad, and I’m not saying this in a gatekeepy “git gud” kind of way. I enjoy these games because they feel fair, and whenever I have been struggling disproportionately, it’s either been because I was somewhere beyond my current level (especially in open world games like Elden Ring), or I was doing something “wrong” (like stubbornly using my preferred weapon even though I knew a quirk of the boss meant it was suboptimal)
If the game feels like it’s being unfair to you, take a step back and rethink your approach. Try a different weapon or strategy (this might mean having to go to an easier area to practice the new weapon). Look through your items to see if you have anything that might help (including potentially helpful lore in the item descriptions). If you’re not sure what a thing does, try using it and see — the game won’t explain things explicitly because it wants players to find out in play.
If you like the look of Bloodborne, 100% give it a go — even if I weren’t already a fan of Fromsoft’s games, I’d enjoy Bloodborne for the impeccable aesthetic.
Oh yeah, I really wish I had played on a higher difficulty for this reason. Especially because one of the most immersive and thematically cool parts of the game for me was the main story section near the end of act 1 where you have to make a blade oil to fight a >!werewolf!< . (Vague wording to minimise spoilers in my main comment.) I really liked this because it made me reflect on what it means to be a Witcher — how the knowledge might be more important than the mutations and the magic.
An additional point to the prepping is that being open-world means that you can potentially go to areas or take on challenges far beyond the “intended” level. On lower difficulties, I didn’t feel sufficiently punished for being audacious in that way, and I think the potential for punishment is part of the fun of the audacity. Especially when getting destroyed like this isn’t the game “fuck you for even trying”, but rather a “try exploring some more, find some new recipes and come back later (or just read the bestiary and find out that you already have the item you need)”
I don’t think I’ve personally played any games with that, but I think it can be a problem? I get the sense that it may vary game by game, but as I say, I have no direct experience or knowledge
I don’t know how gaming on Mac works, but since I switched my home rig to Linux a couple of years ago, I have not once had a problem with installing a new game that doesn’t have native Linux support^[1]. I wonder whether developers have learned that they can rely on Proton for their Linux support (for better or worse).
[1]: there was a point when Baldur’s Gate 3 stopped working after a big update, but I fixed it by switching to Proton-GE, a forked version of Proton. github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
Do you apply toppings right to the edge? I’ve never had this problem despite using an absurd amount of cheese, and I was puzzling to figure out why. I think it’s because the crust rises up to act like a boundary that encloses a big lake of cheese.
It’s not the most robust analogy, but I actually really like your comparison to painting restoration; to do it well, one must understand the techniques and materials used in the original (even stuff below the visible surface).
Not a lawyer, but I think the original work is still copyrighted, and that restoration wouldn’t (or certainly shouldn’t) constitute a new artwork. Though now I’m wondering about that terrible Jesus painting restoration from a few years back — it’s certainly different from the original, and whilst it might not seem reasonable to call it a new piece of “art”, it’s certainly inspired a great many people(to make memes)
I think many people who are responsible for pushing the campaign forward would agree it’s a much bigger issue. It’s just that the bigger issue is big enough that there are multiple fronts one could fight on, and this is a politically useful opportunity to push forward. A victory from this campaign will be unlikely to lead to the larger developments without more of a fight, because achieving the general rule will take a few instances of arguing the specific case.
For now, I’m excited to see where this leads, even if the answer might be “nowhere”
I really enjoyed the characters. When I think about Mass Effect 3, for example, I think of how I felt when making peace between the Quarians and the Geth, because of how I had gotten to know the characters of Tali and Legion. Or Wrex enthusiastically greeting Shepard as an old friend, something that’s only possible if you talk him down in the first game.
I was as disappointed as everyone else at the actual ending to Mass Effect 3, and I do think the plot goes a bit weird even before that (the ending boss fight of mass effect 2 is a bit weird, but again, I think more of the personal stakes that had been set up by good character writing (plus Jack Wall’s “Suicide Mission” makes what could’ve been overly cheesy instead feel grand and epic)), but I found the smaller, interpersonal stories that Mass Effect tells to be quite compelling.
I like that as a framing question, and it helps me to further understand why it is that scenes like the RE4 one feels so weird to me.
I think the thing that makes me uncomfortable in that scenario is the fact that Leon is the hero. I’m a woman who has loved gaming for basically my whole life, so I’m used to playing as someone who doesn’t look like me — there’s a certain amount of abstracting away of gender that’s necessary if I want to be able to participate in some heroic escapism. That’s why scenes like Leon being a creep are so jarring, because he’s the hero. The narrative of the game is endorsing this kind of behaviour because it’s being done by the hero.
Dead Rising is a somewhat more ambiguous example, but still weird overall. I don’t necessarily even mind that the photography intro quest highlights the fact you can take sexy(?) photos, because the NPC in that quest is written in a way where it’s like the game itself is saying “yeah, this guy is a weird creep”. Getting points for “erotic” photos is a bit weird though, because whilst you can choose to not take photos like that, it feels like the mechanics of the game are endorsing the creepy dude’s mentality overall.
Sometimes. The chess community is very weird in my experience. Like, anarchy chess is a thing and shitposting seems to have permeated chess culture. Case in point, the double bongcloud being played in tournament (1:32 length clip). (For context, the bongcloud opening is very bad, playing it is basically a self nerf. Because of the way that tournaments and points work, the end outcome of this game was basically a mutually agreed draw, but they did it in the most shitposting way possible.).
Personally, I think this is great, it’s made it harder for some people to be gatekeepy arseholes within the chess community. I am always slightly perplexed by the memes though - with absurd humour, it can be hard to tell whether I’m missing the joke, or whether the joke is that there is no joke.