Edge of Tomorrow. (that's fucked up because I wrote this blog before seeing that one of the hopefuls put up a blog homework post about movies... weird!!!)
I got bored as all hell at Ark because it had been crashing like crazy. Did some things and managed to get it to stop but that involved literally killing every other process even explorer.exe.. for some reason Microsoft still doesn't understand that no one needs a machine that eats 6 gigs of RAM while idle, and the game runs at 4.7+ gigs of RAM.. other processes eat up the remainder until Windows reports a low memory problem and the game crashes.
Up until this chronic low memory bullshit I was making some progress but didn't feel it. Beating my head against vanilla Scorched Earth was slowly driving me nuts because of all the little in game setbacks.. but the low memory thing was breaking the camelsaurus' back.
A couple of the crashes helped to pace out the issues and save a couple of dinos from death but it wasn't stopping me from getting bored. And I got so bored I tried to find a sheep in the desert.
Basically the DLC is geared towards playing with a tribe. Otherwise everything is ludicrously difficult to solo. Unfortunately for me I have insanely bad luck and an inability to waste time planning shit out because even if I do.. rock elementals end up screwing those plans up.
With no real way to kill them, and stopping to spot for them being one of those ludicrous things I couldn't be bothered to do.. progress was slow.
But yesterday I started to feel, two to three weeks into this shit, that that progress was aimless.
So I tried to find a sheep in the desert because outside of the bosses they are one of the only creatures from the DLC that I haven't seen yet. They just don't spawn.
The game's community powered wiki has a map that shows that they should be spawning on just about half of the map.
3 weeks and I haven't seen one. I have bad luck.. but 3 weeks?! Hell I've even gotten a Nanophoenix from the Destiny Wrath of the Machine Raid and that shit took 63 attempts on Heroic. I have yet to get one for PlayStation but with a drop rate under 2 percent.. well I'm playing Ark instead.
So bored though that finding that sheep.. maybe it would validate the experience.
In the last week I've been making progress learning all of the DLC's mechanics and re-learning the basics of survival. Mostly that the whole point of the DLC is to remind one that the game is designed to kill you. Just dealing with the weather, trying to work outdoors, will kill you. So no matter how tedious it is trying to prepare for each day and for any excursion beyond the base walls.. there's only so much you can prepare for.
While flying around.. no sign of a single Ovis.
I did however find a replacement Moschops which is great because they are also pretty rare. The day before yesterday I lost one because it wandered off and got its stupid self devoured by a raptor.
I have 2 because the damned things are designed to be very timid and sheep like. But they are pretty much mandatory to have because they can collect prime meat from certain corpses very efficiently.
But I'd gotten bored of using the Trump like Wall I'd set up to trap creatures that produce prime meat after taming a 3rd or 4th Rex. It felt pointless to keep taming them as they'd all be too low level for what I needed them for. I'd need several to kill a death worm, and perhaps dozens to be able to collect enough deathworm drops to tame a Mantis.
And then the main plan of collecting enough metal to make a cannon and a few cannon balls to kill those blasted Rock Elementals.
But like the missing sheep.. there also haven't been any alphas. I mentioned this because at first Alphas tended to be very common on the island and very deadly. The weaker ones were certain death at the beginning but turned out to be a massive boon as a source of prime meat.
Scorched Earth does away with them though, other than Alphas wyverns, which I've also ot seen in 3 weeks or so.. but furthermore as mentioned it spoils that prime meat harvest twice as fast.
So fast, even though it was plenty ludicrous before, that I couldn't kill a Paraceratherium, grab the prime meat off its corpse, and get back to base with that prime meat and cook it before it spoiled.
Thing is, just using it properly, which would involve dropping a wild Rex or Argentavis, then letting it starve a bit, then feeding it prime meat... the prime meat would spoil long before the taming would be complete. Even adding preserving salts doesn't do much because the preserving salts spoil too damned fast and don't do much to reduce the spoilage rate of anything.
The mechanics of the game are simply ludicrous.
Feels like not having extra alphas around is actually a good thing. Except the Rock elementals are just as one-shot deadly or worse.
So while flying around hunting those Ovis.. I got extremely bored. So bored I dropped into the World Scar after dropping off that new Moschops.
It wasn't so bad since there weren't any Wyverns visible. But it was stupid because, d'uh, there's always Wyverns around. And my Argy was slow.
It needs to have a movement speed of 185 to 200 or more. It only had 130. The Wyvern caught up without breaking a sweat and started spiting fire. The Argy got hit and started to burn.
Although I know it doesn't do anything I alt-f4'd out and just restarted the computer because there was already nothing else running.
I just don't understand why the game needs to be this ludicrous and tedious.
So while the machine was off.. I was supposed to take a nap.. I decided to check a couple of random harddrives I had sitting around.
For the most part I think Google's auto photo uploader was done with the drives I have plugged in. I checked a couple of files from the 2 other drives and noticed they hadn't been backed up.
And I found a bluray rip of Edge of Tomorrow.
For lack of anything better to do I started it up.
A couple of hours ago i was thinking isn't it 2017? Why don't we have curved laser projectors by now? Looking at the wall behind my 3x 24" screens in portrait, simulating an almost 4K setup.. I wondered how much longer it would be to have optical connections on a video card connected to a laser projector, point at a 4x8 foot curve silver or white painted screen made of Bristol board.
But meanwhile.. the movie still looks great. Sadly after dealing with Ark's constant oversaturated storms everything else looks washed out. No matter. The movie sucks you in.
I remember from the numerous articles and featurettes for the movie that they were very aware that both the movie and source material resemble a setting for a video game. Something like it would evoke the feeling in gamers that over time, of doing something dull, dumb, tedious, repetitious etc like video games you'd get dulled to the norms before serendipitously making progress. It's hard to guess how many loops Cage completed before he figured a way through an impossible task.
Seems like any video game. The current one for some people being Nioh. I watched a couple of Twitch streamers playing it and saw them getting stuck. missKyliee and Nerdy Netty. Actually I didn't even watch Netty play and only saw missKyliee get stuck on the one boss. Way back when playing Ninja Gaiden, I did enjoy how the game was difficult but you could get through it easily enough. It wasn't even that hard after you got the hang of it.
Nioh, being crafter by the same company that did Ninja Gaiden, Team Ninja, even what feels like a dozen years later, looks at a calendar.. ok 13 years later.. looks very similar to Ninja Gaiden.. but there's something different about it. It looks too much like Dark Souls. That being the case, I don't think I could every bother with it.
But then I look at Ark and think... there's something different about Ark. Although you can die, like Edge of Tomorrow, you do recall everything that happened. Things might not play out exactly the same way but at least you're that much better prepared.
But then also the world doesn't stop just because you died.
I think that would have been the 4th or 5th time I've watched that movie. I don't at all tend to watch movies more than just the once. And while I didn't get anything more out of it, it was still entertaining. Because it still makes me think.
Ark comes in more closely to the movies older, alternate title, as do most other video games with a death and revive function. Live. Die. Repeat.
Regarding Ark, there's very little else besides that procedure. Progress isn't lost, but items and such can be lost and have to be replaced.
I wonder how many free days Cage added to his life during those loops. Vrataski says something like she saw someone die 300 times. 300 deaths? Let's be serious, and I mean lets talk to anyone that plays video games where the mean lifespan of a character is seconds to minutes (like lets say in a raid). I know I made the same comparison in an old block but 300 isn't that many. over 3 years playing Destiny on two platforms.. I'm sure there have been tens of thousands of revives.
Given that Cage is pretty must trying to one-man a fight against an entire army, 300 revives seems too few.
So I was wondering.. when you're trying to tell a story where one of the main mechanics is a revive system, do you just deal with revives or write yourself into a problematic gray area of a time loop?
Tens of Thousands of revives adding days to the process of winning a war does seem highly daunting. But if you could learn what you needed to within a few dozen, like what it takes to learn and complete a raid in Destiny, even if that's a group effort, there were revives for that first worlds first.
When you have to look at it being done on Heroic, where there's only 1 class that can revive but everyone else dies and stays dead into the area is cleared.. then you start looking into how many revives that took.
I watched Lulu's team, 5th to finish the Heroic version of the raid, practice on Normal and it was really impressive to see the strategies that they came up with. Running the raid with her was fun, but often not so much fun at all because she didn't want to waste too much time when they had to reset.
Reminds me so much of Vrataski because she'd be quick with a wipe when she thought it was necessary.
When you know that you can revive or you have to wipe, it does change how you play.
It doesn't apply to Ark for me. I figure most players don't mind that they can die and revive in Ark without losing progress but it bothers me. There has to be a way to avoid that death at all costs. For the most part I do. After getting those basics, I don't die that often.
Looking at Destiny's raid though, since I still play it to get the Heroic ship for PlayStation.. so many people don't understand the basic concepts for staying alive or why it is absolutely imperative to put your life above all else. Outside of the Heroic raid you can die as much as you like because you can be revived. Even PvP allows you to revive so most people just run around balls out with a shotgun and who gives a fuck.. I'll be revived in a few seconds. You aren't learning anything. I mean that's why for the first couple of years on Destiny all I ever said to people within the first 10 minutes was "I don't play PvP". It's pointless.
These days people are playing the raid, claiming to have been playing for years and they'd say certain things like well.. if you don't understand the raid how are you even at the max light level for your character. Which is a twofold question, 1 way are you playing if you have the max light level, there's nothing more you can gain, 2 that they are idiots because the gave has several ways to get max light level.
Sure you can keep playing because you enjoy the game.. BUT that died somewhere along the way for most people when they realized Bungie doesn't give a fuck. At all. All they do is break the game, and render everything you earned obsolete so you keep having to re-earn highest level gear.
Those that played on understood that, yes, losing your max level stuff, especially things that took several hours or weeks to earn sucks, but it isn't like the new stuff, which you paid for when buying every new DLC, generally had now and interesting perks.
But some things are just a slap in the face from Bungie. Removing all but 1 primary with a burn? Each time a hard raid weapon was rendered obsolete. Designing a weapon that wasn't even specifically for the raid, the Touch of Malice, to have a ludicrous quest to obtain it, then having most teams require that you have it, but it had no practical use at all in PvE.. and of course making it obsolete again once Take King's DLC content's active lifespan ended.. Putting Gjallarhorn back after taking it out of the game. Bringing the Icebreaker back in.. but also giving that weapon a ridiculous quest. And now this last week's nerfing the Truth rocket launcher into the ground, AGAIN.. it's like Bungie. Stop. Please stop ruining the game.
At least the extremely ludicrous quest to get the Outbreak Prime gives you a weapon that is somewhat universally useful. And they have yet to nerf it. Probably because it wasn't even that useful to begin with. Else it would have been yet another in the line of mandatory weapons to run the Heroic version of the raid. But obtaining it requires running the raid. As much as it is design that leaves it up to the raid groups to decide to bring in an extra player that doesn't have the gun.. or excluding them, had the stupid thing been actually useful then having six of them would have made the raid easier and getting more fresh people through that first few runs wouldn't have been that bad without everyone having one.
Instead almost no one has one and almost no one will help other people to obtain it. Oh well. Good game Bungie.
I figure that's like when Cage and Vrataski realize that the visions were being fed to them in order to trap them. When you're fed potentially useful information only to realize that it's bullshit.
But that's what all video games are. Oddly because it is such a powerful thing it makes the movie even greater because they capture all aspects of it. You do get stronger over time because you can keep trying but you lose something along the way because of how much effort it takes.
As the movie closes it raises a question I don't think I thought of before.. or it just wasn't important. How do you approach someone you know everything about? If you were stuck in a time loop or if you just happen to know much more about a person than they might know about you?
During the film Rita does tell Bill that he must find her and learn how to fight.
But during the rest of the movie she only wants to focus on the fight.
Near the end she does say she wished they could have gotten to know each other.. but she knows that he knows her very well already.. but only as a war fighter.
It wasn't clear really that she'd want to get to know him outside of the context of the war.
But with the war ended.. they'd have all the time in the world. But she isn't the same person that made that wish. Does he have any right to just walk up to her and try to get to know her even if she would understand what happened to him and they'd be the only two people in the world to understand?
As a gamer I understand what that would be like all too well.. but still doesn't seem right that she doesn't have the advantage of having been in that same loop.