Week End – Wall-to-Wall E3

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.

Fallen Earth wasn’t updated for a reason. Besides surely not making enough money to pay any programmers, the code is apparently a mess. That doesn’t surprise me because I remember Fallen Earth as a decent, but also very quirky game. As a developer myself, I’m very familiar with the problems they are now going through: Trying to figure out how to make a purchased code base even compile, let alone run. (Hey Orbit, I’m even available if you’ll let me work remotely. :)

Trion’s new Defiance 2050 launches July 10. But more importantly for my own planning purposes, a PC open beta will be from June 22-25. I always liked Defiance, though it’s a fairly shallow game. You run around, or ride around, and shoot stuff. Sometimes you shoot stuff with other people in a zone event. That’s about the extent of it. But it’s fun in small doses. (There may have been some kind of story too but it never stuck with me.) I don’t expect anything different from Defiance 2050, which is fine with me.

Of course E3 2018 was this past week, although I think most people only cared about the “showcases” which happened last weekend. I wrote two posts about it, and there are tons of other posts around the blogosphere, so many that I will inevitably forgot some links, but here are some, in the order they appeared in my RSS reader (not counting news sites, of course, which have been wall-to-wall E3 all week). Anthem, Fallout 76, and Cyberpunk 2077 seem to be the main interests of the RPG community.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention in my own E3 posts that I didn’t watch the PC Gaming Show. I started to, but it began very dull, and whatever the “best games” for the PC are going to be, given the cross-platform nature of gaming now, I figured they would have already been mentioned in the Microsoft and Sony presentations anyway, so I played Dark Souls instead. Also I was slightly put off when the emcee walked out on stage and immediately dissed the live audience by saying hello to the streaming viewers first. I’ve never done a single thing on stage and that just leaped out at me as a massive etiquette mistake.

My Week

My Dark Souls Remastered Nostalgia Tour began last Friday night, and once I start playing a Souls game, it’s kind of hard to stop. (Unless of course my SSD crashes and I have to abandon a Dark Souls 3 The Ringed City DLC blind playthrough right before the end.) You-yes you!-can watch the tour on my YouTube channel. You might even be the very first person on The Internet to do so!

Anor Londo, Dark Souls Remastered. This area looks fantastic in the Remastered edition.

In other minor news I bought a PS4 Pro this week. I ordered three $20 games online (Last of Us Remastered, BloodBorne, and Horizon Zero Dawn), all exclusive Sony titles. I will probably also get the complete Uncharted series eventually, as I’ve only ever played the first one. So far, the console has been sitting in the living room unconnected, waiting for me to figure out how I want to use it. (My living room is barely amenable to watching television, let alone gaming.)

Cataract update: This week has been particularly vexing, as I noticed that if I cover my left (good) eye, I cannot read a single thing on a computer screen. It’s just a wash of blurriness like a Guassian Blur filter set to maximum. Let’s just say it makes reading and writing quite a lot more challenging when you only have one good eye and it’s just a tiny bit depressing, considering it will likely be months yet before I’m able to get to surgery. On the plus side I’m getting a lot of great insight into just how terrible computer operating systems and many games are at supporting the visually impaired.

Bird update: The same flycatchers have built a brand new bird nest from scratch in the exact same spot right outside my back door, and there are already new eggs. (I removed the last nest, hoping it might gently encourage them to build elsewhere.) I still don’t know precisely what kind of birds they are, since I have yet to hear them sing anything but a plain old “peep.” Eastern Phoebe? Willow Flycatcher? Alder Flycatcher? Something else entirely? All I really know is that they are very adept at catching dragonflies. I’m working on more active and passive measures to protect them from my cat.

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