Stolen Valor

I’ve decided to take a brief break from playing Fantasy Life i to write about Fantasy Life i. I’ve just passed the 40 hour mark and I feel like I have some wisdom I can share with those of you just getting started in your Fantasy Life adventure. 

The weekend after the Google I/O presentation has been dizzying. Most of the time when they drop shit like this it's a bunch of tech demos - systems in search of a use case, let alone an end product. Naw. We're fucked. They have put a stick in their own spokes so many times on the way to this moment, and have now arrived at the point where they can just do a kickflip on the grave of the worker. I wonder if they just asked their Devil Engine, in the end. I suspect the version they have is perhaps less circumspect than the ones we are allowed to play with.

I might actually have to grab Fantasy Life i now - after launch, they've pretty significantly changed how multiplayer functions, which in this case means it now has some of the things we would consider "multiplayer functions." And only a couple days after launch! They just announced free DLC to celebrate, shit must be going well over there.

Level-5 is a legendary outfit that just drops bar after bar and has for a quarter century. My initial plan was to be, like, "Here are the games they have made which ended up being super meaningful to me," but when I looked at the list there were way too many - but Ni no Kuni and Professor Layton oughta be a decent start.

You can now kick it with Darth Vader in Fortnite, which filled the weekend with bizarre audiovisual snacks, but nothing like what we saw at the beginning; the creature has no doubt been lobotomized several times since then.

I think Doom: The Dark Ages is really, really good. I also think there's no reason to review it in the classic sense. This is not to denigrate it or to say that it possesses undetectable levels of virtue, so any attempt to access it isn't required. No! I say thee nay. It's like Kellog's trying to seek a Michelin star for a Pringle. It has plain, universal virtues that don't require any fine equipment to detect. We don't gotta plug anything in.

Whether something is a review or review bombing is purely rhetorical; the color of the dress is based on a bunch of stuff you believed before the thing in question ever happened. It's essentially a kind of intellectual pose, an inoculation against new information, the implementation of a kind of mental hygiene. At some level I think that dogmas exist to control the biological costs of cognition, but we don't have to trek all the way out there. It's not any more complex than this: people we don't like will sometimes be correct. Because we live in a world largely made of information now, we can curate ourselves utterly out of any functional mode of self-correction. It hasn't made us any smarter, and when we become aware of just how thoroughly we have invested ourselves in illusion it falls on you like a guillotine.

My mind can do a couple neat tricks; this site is a kind of display case for the one or two novel maneuvers I got up top. One thing it definitely cannot do is know whether I'm going to be hungry or not hungry for a specific food at a particular time in the future. I can turn a blank sheet of paper into a place you can journey to but if a feat of imagination involves theoretical fruit and cheese it's simply beyond my ability to calculate.

For those of you not in the know, a streamer named Dr. Lupo - we played Amogus with him for charity! - admitted to cheating in a chess tournament. I don't think I would enter a tournament for a game I didn't know how to play except as comic relief or something. I would gladly get dumpstered live, but then, my work mostly involves making jokes at my own expense.

I spent the last couple of days working on getting my sim racing rig set up again and I took this opportunity to attempt a new VR solution. I was curious if I could get my PSVR2 headset working with iRacing on my PC. The TLDR is yes it can be done and it looks great! 

I'm heading down to PAX East now, maybe you are too, but I know a lot of people who make games there and I gotta ask them how in the fuck they're doing what they did in that GTA VI trailer. I didn't understand how they did the first one, and I'm even less able to get this one dialed in.

I finally got to what Gabe has been dying to talk to me about in Clair Obscur, and now I know why he wanted to talk to me about it so bad. That it still has serious things to reveal coming up on fifty hours is cool, but the things it goes into are gobsmacking. No part of the gob has remained unsmacked - it's barely recognizable as a gob at all.

I did another batch of Marvel Snap cards and at the end of this week during PAX East they will arrive in the game! Since they have already been revealed I figured it was okay to share the original art. So here’s a look at my five new Snap Variants:

If they had dripped those first three episodes of Andor Season 2 out, the community would be in crisis. I understand what they were trying to do, because some aspects of it get unfolded in the second three episode arc - which is excellent and is exactly what I want. But those first three feel mostly like setup, sawdust in the flour, because that's sorta what it is.

All of these things more or less happened when we were playing Sunderfolk and the amount I can get away with as honorary Uncle is profound. Profound!

When Gabriel told me that he hadn't skipped a single cutscene in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I sat bolt upright. Well, I slouched less - let's say that. But when he told me he was walking around and initiating dialogue with random NPCs, just to stretch it out like so many Caramellos, that's when I did the thing I said I had done initially. This is how I came to be ensorcelled by some of the Frenchest horseshit I've ever been exposed to in my life.