Underneath my yellow skin

Gaming, layoffs, physical discs, and me (part four)

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I’m back to talk once again about Xbox and what the fuck is going on in the industry. Xbox has big main villain vibes, but it’s not just them. It’s not even mainly them. They are just the most obvious symptom of an evergreen disease–corporate greed. That’s the disease. It’s always the disease. It probably always will be. That’s part and parcel of America; it’s built into the fabric of American society. We just take for granted that we are at the whim of our corporate overlords, and there is nothing to be done about it. Oh, and here is the post from yesterday in which I talked about how deluded (and heartless) the C-suite at Microsoft is when talking about Xbox profits.

I read a work blog, and any time the conditions of the American workforce is brought up (especially the fact that our healthcare is tied into our employment), Europeans pour in to tell us how appalling it is and how they can’t believe it. I mean, true, but we don’t need to hear/read it every time. We know it’s gross and terrible, but it’s not as if we can just move countries on a whim. Or overhaul our entire employment system with a snap of the fingers.

Journalism is dying out in general. Gaming journalism, in particular, is on its way out, too. And life as a gaming dev is hard AF. I don’t see how in good conscious I could encourage anyone to go into the gaming industry today*. Then again, it’s not like there are a ton of industries I would encourage anyone to go into, anway. But, especially not anything entertainment and/or journalism related.

Things are dire in this realm. People in the industry are feeling pretty bleak. There are some saying that it’s going to get lower before it goes higher. Others are not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Every day, it’s just bad news after bad news.

Which, come to think of it, is much like the regular news as well. *Sigh*

One thing I will say is that the physical discs issue–by the way. They didn’t even tell their partners that they were doing that until they dropped the news to the public. And, yeah. That did not go over well. Sony really thought they were just going to drop that and let it wash away. (I use Sony and PlayStation pretty interchangeably in this post for complex reasons I don’t want to get into here.)

To be honest, so did I. I mean, what was there to do? PlayStation in the past pretty much just did whatever the fuck they wanted to do with little to no pushback. Given that Xbox has floundered for several years, essentially giving PlayStation free rein. I wrote free reign at first, which works, too (meaning that PlayStation is acting pretty much as a dictator). And, really. They slid it in while the Xbox turmoil was going on, so they probably thought they would be able to go unnoticed.

Well, joke’s on them. There was such an uproar about it; I was quite surprised. It was loud. It was angry. It was sustained. I thought it would wash away in a day or two, but no. People were furious about it, and, weirdly, it’s the one thing that actually bolstered me. The reaction, I mean. I had been so beaten down by the news (gaming and general), I was numb. Everything sucked. Nothing was going to get better. Why bother?


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Gaming, me, and all is bad; part three

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In the gaming industry, there is a saying I keep hearing. “Put out a bad game–get laid off. Put out a great game–get laid off. It doesn’t matter.” Sometimes, people will add, “Put out an OK game–get laid off.” The point is that no one is safe. It doesn’t matter how well your game does–you can be on the chopping block.

The biggest example of this is id Software–the developers of the DOOM and Quake games (both of which are considered the grandparent of the first-person shooter). They have been consistent with their games coming out and being warmly received. Their last DOOM game came out last year to much fanfare, and it had an update this year.

In Xbox’s current brutal ‘off with their heads’ rampage, they laid off 136 employees at id Software. The co-founder of id Software (who has long since left), John Carmack released a milquetoast statement that said nothing and included a tasteless and, quite frankly, cringeworthy remark. He would have been better off not saying anything at all, quite frankly. Greg Miller from Kinda Funny Games and Tamoor Hussain from Gamespot talked about it passionately on KFG, and I’ve included the clip below.

With Obsidian, they did not get laid off, but they got yanked off the Forsworn sequel they were working on and told they were doing the new Fallout. This is where mixed emotions come in. No one was asking for a new Forsworn (or rather, very few people), and everyone was clamoring for a new Fallout. The last game in the main series (Fallout 4) came out in 2015! No wonder people are hungering for more.

In addition, there is a Netflix Fallout series going on, and it would have been a perfect time to have a new Fallout game come out. This is Bethesda I’m talking about, by the way. They are the ones who own the Fallout name, but Obsidian made what is arguably the favorite in the series–Fallout New Vegas.

The CEO of Microsoft has said that since being hands off hasn’t worked, it’s now time to be hands on (I’m paraphrasing). I can’t say that I disagree with the premise. Bethesda has two IPs that are basically printing money, and they haven’t done anything major with either series in several years (and, no, Elder Scrolls, I’m not including the countless time Skyrim has been remastered, remade, repackaged, and put on different devices).

On the other hand, it feels really tyrannical to order a team to make a new game that is not the one they intended to make. Yes, even though they have made one before. They were in the middle of making a sequel to their latest game! To be ordeerd to stop that and do something completely different, well, that would not sit well with me.

Everyone is angry about it, and rightly so. It’s been a bloodbath, and the worst part is not knowing when or if it will stop. Also, are any of the upper C-suite taking paycuts? I think not. They can’t do without their third home in Martha’s Vineyard, now can they?


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The state of gaming and me, part two

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So, amid all the wild shenanigans that Xbox and PlayStation have been wading through creating, EA decided that they had been quiet for far too long. EA, once voted the worst company in America for two years running in the tens. Watching PS and Xbox get so much pub f or self-imploding must have really gotten on their nerves. “I got to get me some of that!”–some muckety-muck at EA, probably.

Why do I say that? Because they did something so bonehead and unfathomable (well, it’s fathomable when you remember that companies are souless entities who only care about making a profit and not at all about people or their customers), people are calling for a…boycott of sorts.

In a nutshell, they released their new college football game and took out the “easy mode”. I have included a video down below from SnowBike Mike who works at Kinda Funny Games in which he explains what the issue is. As I understand it, there was a slider that allowed you to adjust to how much experience points you earned in two of the offline modes. Andy Cortez read from an article written by Lewis Parker at Kotaku that outlines the problem. Spoiler–microtransactions. It’s microtransactions. Actual, there’s nothing micro about it. It’s just transactions, really.  There’s more to it, but basically, they’re saying you have to pay actual real life money to get the XP rather than use the slider–which no longer exists (at least the easier side of it).

Now, you gotta pay a hundo to get your coach leveled up properly. Someone calculated that you would have to win something like a hundred championships to do it ‘naturally’.

Well, well, well. Reading through the article, it seems that EA has backed down. I don’t know if it’s enough for the people who want to buy the game/bought the game, but at least understood that what they did was not cool. So very not cool.

Some content creators were really upset, too, because they promoted the game and played a demo of it that did not have microtransactions in it. In other words, EA knew what they were doing was shady, and they deliberately hid it forom the very people they were depending on to promote their game.

Which is astoundingly short-sighted. Content creators can generate so much good will for your game–or, by contrast, call for their followers to ‘play, not pay’–which one content creator did in response to the news of the microtransactions. Also, it wasn’t as if EA could have hidden it for very long–and, indeed, the outcry was swift and vicious. The reviews on Steam are mostly negative (we’ll see how that changes with the new news from EA), and all of them are clear about the fact that it’s because of the greed and not the gameplay. Most people think the actual gameplay is great.


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Indie games, physical discs, and why I should care (as a PC gamer)

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I have spontaneously added a new tag–gaming hell. That’s because gaming is hell right now. Not literally, of course, but metaphorically. Some of it is out of the control of anyone in the industry–such as AI driving up the prices of RAM (long story, don’t want to talk about it) so that new consolse/PCs are going to be absolutely ridiculous in prices. I was thinking of buying a new PC a year ago, but I decided to wait it out beacuse graphic cards were already outrageous (because of tariffs), and I was hoping things would calm down.

Oh wait. At the end of the last post, I was talking about a game that came out yesterday that I so wanted to like (after talking about it in a previous post). I don’t know why I’m being so coy about it. It’s Moonlight Peaks (Little Chicken Game Company). I had my eye on it from when I first heard of it–when was that? Was it the Wholesome Games Direct in February? Was there even one in February? Anyway, it was a vampire farming sim. Yeah, you heard that right. OK, it’s not exactly a farming sim, but there is farming in it. And romance. And other life sim stuff.

You will forgive me if I was reminded of another game that was similar to it. One that I played the shit out of, had a chibi-ish style to it, too (well, more cartoony than chibi, but reminiscent of), and was a farming sim. It’s called, Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock), and I enjoyed it so much, I platated it. Here is the post I wrote about it for my game of the year awards last year.

I played it for several dozes hours, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have written many posts about what I loved and didn’tt like about the game, so I won’t belabor the point. I will say that I really loved the heart of the game, the fact that it incorporated magic into it, and how much diversity was in it.

Quite frankly, I was looking for something to replicate that feeling. I like a good sim, but I’m quite picky about what works and doesn’t work for me. I was really hoping this game would scratch that itch because on paper, it should be right up my alley. You’re a vamp who runs away from home and into a community filled with discord and strife? And you have to find a way to make the warring factions make nice (I’m assuming). There are werewolves, vampires, and other manners of fae (I think), which is great for me. I love that shit.

What I’m trying to say is that there was everything that I liked in this game. A farming/life sim. Magic and fantastical creatures. Not the chibi look, but I can grit my teeth and deal with that. Benig a vamp! I love vampires. I should have been all over that. But I just wasn’t.


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Birdigo, indies, and when a game just misses, part four

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I have one last post in me for the 100%ing  of Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin), and then it’s time to move on. I’m so relieved that I got the plat so that I don’t have to play the game again. That is no diss against the game, but a diss against my obsessive nature.

Side note (yes, this soon into the post): In the Discord I’m in, there’s a joke that me and a woman who is very similar to me are the same person. She recently moved to Minnesota, too, so that makes it even funnier. Separately, there is another woman who I’ve become quite close to offline (meaning in DMs). We like to joke that we are the same person as well. Shes’ the one who alerted me to the fact that I might be neurospicy, and I’ll be forever grateful to her.

Today, in the Discord, they were cracking wise about being neurospicy (ADHD for one and ADHD/autistic for the other) and how they had to pay the neurospicy tax. One penalty was the result of getting interested in an activity, being passionate for about ten seconds, and then losing all desire in it. They both commented earsier than I did, so when I wake up, I get a bunch of fun posts to read and respond to.

The two I mentioned above were commiserating about all the things they had stored in their closets because of this neurodivergency trait. They joked that this is how it was for children, obviously, as they were adults and most definitely did not do that. I laughed in rueful recognition when I read their comments because I most definitely did not do that, either. I was a grown-ass adult who most definitely did not have closets filled with jigsaw puzzles I’d never even opened (which I posted).

Anyway, this is the reason why once I go past a certain point in an activity, I have to keep going until I do it. It didn’t matter if I was happy about it or enjoyed it; I just had to do it.

Let’s talk about that final achievement. It was winning one run for the last route (Short-Tailed Shearwater). This route had 22 stops with the last stop being 20,000 flaps (points). This is middling when it comes to number of stops and number of flaps. I don’t know why this was the last to unlock as it wasn’t special in any way. In fact, I think that’s part of the reason I struggled with it. It was just meh–and a grind. Oh, here’s my post from yesterday in which I talk about the second achievement and indie games in general.

It’s funny because in looking up the name of the last route, I ran across a guide as to how to win. The first tip was to stick to one strategy. I laughed ruefully because I learned that way too late. I would say this is probably the most important tip as it’s too easy to get swayed–especially for me and my neurodivergent brain. But it really benefits you to establish your strategy early and stick with it.

It also benefits you to try to find the synergies that will boost your strategy. Of course that’s where RNG plays a part in that you have to decide which strategy you want to use and stick with it. That means that you have to pass on oter legit strategies even if they show up later.


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Birdigo after 100%ing it, part three

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I have a bit more to say about Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin) and indie games in general. At the end of the last post (which you can read here), I mentioned that I was surprised when I got the ‘win each round with one word’ achievement. It was anticlimactic because I did not realize I had won it until after it was over. I had been going at it for so long, I didn’t know quite what I was supposed to do when I actually won or how I was supposed to feel.

It reminds me of when the boys fought

*SPOILER*

Malenia for three days in their Elden Ring (FromSoft) playthrough. And, yes, it’s amusing to me to spoiler tag a boss from another game in this post. Part of the series evolved into Rory soloing every boss as long as there were no NPC summons to summon (and even sometimes then). In Elden Ring, they decided through trial and error that he would not use the spirit ashes for bosses. Krupa said to Gav that he (Gav) would one day rue that decree, but to Rory’s credit, he adamantly refused to use the spirit ash during the Malenia fight.

They edited down the footage, obviously, but they revealed that it was fifteen hours in total over four days. They did not even show any of the footage for one of the days. I think? They split it into three episodes, and each was over two hours. The last was almost two-and-a-half hours. It was epic, and the struggle was so real. The reason I mention it is because when he fginally beat her, the celebration was muted. I mean, the initial celebration was pretty hyped, but it subsided quickly. It became much more an expression of relief than excitement. Rory said something about not knowing what to do because he should be running back to fight Malenia again (massive paraphrase). He died 265 times to her, and you could see it wearing on all three of them in the last episode.

Anyway, this is me whenever I go for a plat. I go blank on the inside and something deep inside of me almost gets angry. Like, “You’re not the boss of me, and I’m going to do this!” Who it’s saying it to, I have no idea. Also me, probably. This is why I don’t do competitive sports–I’m way too hard on myself when I do.

It’s funny. It’s not so much that I care about winning and losing–though I do to a certain extent. It’s just me feeling like I’m not doing enough. It’s all about me winning and losing against myself–not me winning and losing against anyone else.

I just now realized that Birdigo sounds like vertigo. D’oh! Huh. The video I’m including is an interview with the two devs. I didn’t realize that the game was a card game first (called AlphaBird). Huh. Made by the same two guys. Thats’ pretty cool!


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Birdigo–those last three achievements, part two

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I’m back to write more about Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin), 100%ing it, and my gripes with indie games in general. Before I get into it, here’s my post from yesterday. I started talking about the three achievements I needed to 100% this game, and then I justt migrated (heh) all over the place.

I am so bad when it comes to sticking to a subject because everything is connected in my brain. So, I may start out by mentioning that I 100%ed the game, and that makes me think about the game, of course. Then, I think about what I didn’t like about the game and/or what frustrated me. That got me to thinking about what I didn’t like about indie games in general, which then led to me broadening that out to games in general.

Then, I give in to my to rant about how much I hate certain things in tutorials–and then I forget what I wanted to talk about in the first place. Or I run out of time/desire/will to talk about it. This is how my brain works, much to my dismay.

Speaking of, I just tried the demo for a typing game that has absolutely no tutorial; it was frustrating as hell. Also, here is one of my pet peeves in games: limited inventory. In the demo I tried, it’s a farming/cooking sim with something like 10 slots of inventory. 10!!! It encourages you to go out and explore so you can pick up ingredients for your recipes. Except I can go about two steps and pick up ten things (I can pick up several of each item, but 10 different items total). I can barely go to the next area before I have to return to put tihngs in my box.

By the way, I had to find that on my own. They don’t tell you there’s a box. Also, I got into the restaurant biz because my grandfather died and deeded it to me (of course).

I don’t mind a nonsensical or unbelievable premise, but I do mind not being able to figure out what to do. I will give a shout-out that they allowed me to type in Dvorak without switching up the keyboard.

Anyway. Back to Birdigo.

I used the Lean Deck to tackle the win a route by using one word per round. I didn’t think I could do it with the Feral Deck because I did not have the confidence that I could consistently–wait. I think at some point I changed to the Feral Deck because I realized that if I could only use one word per round, then I might as well use this deck and have six wild cards.


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Birdigo after 100%ing it

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I have finally 100%ed Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin). Here was what I had to say in my A Quick Review about it. As usual, the one achievement I thought would be the hard one was the easiest (and the first of the three that I got). Let’s review. The three achievements I had left were–

Before I get into how I did each of the three achievements, I want to talk a bit about the different decks. The first is the classic deck. It’s the most well-rounded of the decks and it has no penalties. It has two or three of each consonant and four of each vowel. And one wildcard. It’s what I used for most of my gameplay until I realized the usefulness of using the more thinned out decks.

You have to unlock the other decks under certain cirumstances. Some of them are joke decks like the Pirate Deck, which you unlock by playing one word with 3 Rs in it (I had to look it up, obviously). There are three decks that I consider joke decks (Gadsby Deck, Pirate Deck, and Alphabet Deck. Well, the last one is not a joke, exactly, but it’s a deck that only has one of each letter. And you get one extra word at the start. You unlock it by playing each letter at least once in the same run.

The Pirate Deck has 9 Rs in it and one wildcard. The Gadsby Deck is unlocked by winning a run without using an E. The deck has no E, but you start with 10 seeds. (Seeds are used to buy feathers and songs, both of which will help with the run). And it has one wildcard. I have never won a run with any of these three decks because the wackiness of them did not appeal to me.

Oh! The two decks that I consider more serious. One is the Lean Deck. It has one of every consonant (well, two of a few like S and T) and three of every vowel (except U. Only one of that) And one wildcard. But you also get one less discard.

Finally, there’s the Feral Deck. This has the same letters as the Lean Deck, but it gives you six wildcards instead of just one. And you get one less word. Normally, you start with three words, which means you start with two (there are ways to add words). This is the deck that is often said to be the best overall–if you’re comfortable only making two wourds per round (for the first few rounds at least).  This is the deck that most people seem to recommend for–well, just about everything.

As a reminder, these were the three achievements I had left:

1. Win a run by passing each round using only one word.

2. Win seven daily migrations (daily run. I don’t know how they were seeded, but you had to finish them in the same day. Or rather, the same run. I’ll get more to that later).

3. Finish the final route (Short-tailed Shearwater). It’s not the longest or shortest of the routes, but–I’ll get to that in a minute, too.


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Not feeling it

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I was startled by some loud popping about ten minutes ago. Some VERY loud popping. I nearly jumped out of my skin, and for several seconds, I had no idea what the fuck was going on. Then, I remembered that it was the fourth of July tomorrow.

Sigh.

I can deal with fireworks on the actual day as long as it’s brief and at a decent time. It’s gone from fireworks on the day to fireworks the weekend of (or the few days surrounding the actual day) to more than a few days sometimes.

It’s so loud. SO loud. And sharp popping. I was not happy, and I know that poor animal friends will not be happy, either. Funnily enough, my scaredy cat, Shadow (who jumped at everything including his own, well, shadow) did not bat an eyelash when it came to fireworks or the vacuum–two things that most cats did not like. Raven, on the other hand, did not like either.

I’m in no mood to celebrate. I haven’t been for a long time, and–

Wait. I need to clarify something. I have never been a patriotic person. When I was a kid to when I was thirty, I was neutral to slightly negative as to how I felt about America. Then, when 9/11 happened, my opinion took a sharp nosedive. Not because of the event that happened, but because of what happened afterwards. Everyone put American flags outside their house, and so many people said if you didn’t, you were unpatriotic.

And the company line from the president and his acolytes didn’t inspire confidence in me, either. We all knew who was really in charge, and I knew he had a hunger for power–no matter what. it seems kind of quaint now, but also sad that I considered W and his VP to be the pinnacle of corruption and the worst thing to happen to the country.

I was so naive back then, thinking that was the worst it could get. Then again, how could I know how utterly batshitcrazy my country would get just because we had the temerity to elect a black man as the president. We are still paying for that in so many ways.

When I think of the trajectory of the country from 2016 until now, I just want to close my eyes and cry. That wouldn’t be wise or advised, but that’s how I feel. When I think about all the steps we could have taken to avoid this, and when I think of how many men weren’t willing to have a female president–let’s just say that I have very dark thoughts in my head.

I find myself saying often, “I did not come back from the  dead (twice!)”, and it’s really distressing. It’s not even the fact that this president is so mean and spiteful, and he (and his acolytes) are doing so many vicious and vindictive things.  I mean, that’s a large part of it, but it’s not the only thing that is bothering me these days.


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What matters to me in gaming (and what doesn’t), part two

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Let’s talk more about everything that is wrong with gaming. It’s been a shit week, and it just seems to be getting worse. Plus, the weather is so gross. It’s been in the eighties to ‘feels like’ in the hundreds–which suuuuuuucks. It’s definitely summer, which means sticky slimy. And insects coming out to play. Bah. Let me get back to winter, please. I’m doubly mad that we skipped spring because I hate summer so much.

My brother taught me a really cool trick to help with CPU. I usually have about fifty tabs open–up to a hundred or more. (He has over a hundred). You can group together tabs and then ‘shrink’ the group so all of the tabs are hidden. All you see are the the tab group names. It really celars up space, and then you can click on the group tag to let the tabs come out to play.

I was so excited when my brother taught me this, which made him laugh. It was the coolest thing, and it makes my life so much easier. It brought down my CPU usage by around 30%! I joked with my brother that I would be doing this for the  next following hour or two. Onrce you put a bunch of tabs in a group, you can name it and give it a color. It’s seriously the coolest thing I’ve learned in quite some time.

Back to games. We, the consumers, are part of the problem . We are not the cause of the problem, and there isn’t much we can do to stem the problem–but we are definitely part of the problem. Meaning, we’re going to buy the games no matter how expensive they get. There was talk about how expensive  Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games) would have to get before people wouldn’t buy it. $80 for the base game hasn’t stopped it from selling pre-orders like crazy. The fifth game sold roughly 230 million copies world wide. It came out in September of 2013, so that’s nearly 13 years ago.

This is mind-boggling, but, honestly, it’s not as many copies as I thought it would be. A content creator I watch sometimes said to guess how many copies the game had sold. I thought it would be over a billion, quite frankly. But a quarter-billion is still an astounding number.

I’m sure this game will match if not exceed the number. Or maybe do slightly less, but it’sll be around the same number. People are not NOT going to buy the game. I think the only glitch is that there is no physical copy being produced (which, just, sigh). I said in my post yesterday why I personally don’t care about physical copies, but I do think it’s a shame that there won’t be any. Why? Because a lot of people may not be able to afford the game at full price, and without any second-hand copies, they will have to do without.


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