The Backwards Journey

By | October 23, 2018

Recently my friend Tim Jordan wrote on Facebook about his friend Joe. According to Tim, Joe was an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic, the type who ends up so deep within the thralls of their mental illness, they forego their medication, they believe everyone is out to get them – except for Tim in Joe’s case. The mini biography that Tim wrote about his friend Joe was both sad and touching, and I wanted to share it with anyone who may cross paths with this post.

Tim’s story goes as so:

Sometimes I would be driving past this one particular park with my friend Joe the Unmedicated Paranoid Schizophrenic and he’d be like, “Hey dude, do you want to go raise the devil?” and point down the road into the park because apparently it was the best spot in town to conjure up the Father of Lies and I would always say, “Nah, man. Let’s just focus on getting this weed and then go back home and smoke it up.”

Then he’d be all, “Okay that’s cool man. One day though, right?”

“Yeah dude. One day for sure, Joe.”

Another time I was with Joe in his apartment, and he was operating, at that time, under the particular delusion that he was a 2000 year old monk. We watched a lot of good Kung fu movies at that time, and he was gathering a lot of cheesy Kung fu magazines that we enjoyed looking through. Yes, magazines were still pretty relevant then. It was sometime in the early aughts, as the cool kids say.

So anyway he ordered this cheap Shaolin monk garb and it arrived while I was there. I watched him put it on with a great deal of excitement. Finally, after 2000 years he was getting back in the groove.

After getting everything on he immediately threw this high kick that was pretty impressive, but also unfortunately absolutely ripped the ass out of his monk pants.

It was hilarious, but I absolutely could not laugh because Joe could be volatile and I really wanted to stay on his good side. Which made it even more hilarious. I had to make an excuse to run over to my apartment real quick so I could laugh in peace.

But then, there was that other time that Joe casually mentioned he started to burn down his building, but only changed his mind when he worried that my apartment was too close, and might catch on fire too.

Then, there was a period of time where Joe was convinced that he could get his magic powers back, if he just straightened his spine; so he built this medieval torture device looking thing that he could hang from while wearing a helmet. Sometimes I would come over, and he’d just be swinging from that thing, and carry on a conversation like it was something everyone did.

Then, he became convinced that if he ate enough rice that it would fill up his esophagus, and straighten his spine. He already had a giant pot of rice made.

So I asked him, “Are you saying you’re going to eat all that rice to the point where your stomach fills up and it backs up into your throat? Like, I could look into your mouth and see the rice poking out back there?”

“Yep,” he said. “Want some?”

“No thanks, Joe”

I watched that pot of rice slowly turn to rot over the next few months. Just like everything else in his apartment.

Before Joe completely succumbed to his mental illness, he had what I thought was the greatest job ever. He was contracted by a third party to manage all the arcades at Carrowinds, our local amusement park.

He got paid all year round, even when the park was closed, but he had to work just about every day in the summer when it was open. He used to sneak me in the park sometimes when he was working.

He was great with kids. If he saw someone having a bad time he would give them free games and prizes. Like those remote control cars and boats are kind of tricky to learn. He’d teach the kids how to drive then better with a few free games.

He was the best.

Sometimes in the winter when the park was closed we’d drive over and into the park. We’d smoke a blunt in the car and he would drive all through the park on the walkways, etc. It was wild.

Then he’d open up some arcades and we’d smoke some more and play free games for hours.

Joe was the best.

Then there was the day Joe told me he had to smoke crack to make the voices in his head go away.

Over time we went through this backwards journey with technology. We started with a PlayStation 3. Then he sold it to his brother.

So then, for a while, we had a Super Nintendo. We played a lot of baseball. He didn’t have many games. I sucked at that baseball game. Then he sold it too.

Eventually we were sitting in his dark apartment because he had no power, playing this handheld baseball game straight out of the 1980s. I was better at that baseball game.

Sometimes Joe would be waiting for me, on the steps outside my door when I came home from work. I was not always happy to see him. By this time most of what he spoke was nonsense, and I had usually had a shitty day renting tuxedos and dealing with a terrible boss. Oddly enough he would act pretty normal around my wife Alice.

I tried to keep most of the crazy from her. Joe was getting thinner and we’d feed him. He didn’t trust food from anyone else anymore.

We fell into this pattern where I spent an hour or so with him, listening to him ramble on about conspiracies. One minute he would be Jesus, the next the devil.

Once he told me that he was trying to get political asylum from China. Turned out he was telling the truth there. He was emailing a lot of craziness to people.

After an hour or so of sitting in the dark in his filthy apartment I would go home, get high, and try to decompress.

My escape was Dark Age of Camelot. I role played in that game. I created my own little world there, and everything else just faded away for a while.

Joe was going to be evicted soon.

I had no idea what to do.

Listen, I’m no saint here.

Joe lived in the same apartment complex. He knew when I was home and I couldn’t avoid him if I wanted to. I didn’t want to make him mad, or think I had betrayed him some how.

He’d already attacked his dad with a crowbar.

All his family lived here too, but they abandoned him when he got sick. His mother used to call ME and I would beg her to go see him. I got mad at her once and told her she was just going to let him die, that this wasn’t going to end well.

I was as scared of him as much as I loved him. We had a spare bedroom and he knew this, but I also knew I couldn’t let him in.

I just couldn’t trust him. I couldn’t put Alice in danger, but I felt like I was failing him.

I think at times Joe was the loneliest man on the face of the Earth.

Then an old friend stepped in. He could take Joe but he lived in Virginia. I helped Joe pack, bought him a new tire for his junker car.

I also tried to warn the friend, but I knew he couldn’t quite grasp what Joe was going through.

Joe’s last night in Charlotte, he slept in our spare bedroom. I kept a bat by the bed and didn’t sleep. Joe was my best friend, but I couldn’t trust him not to snap and do something horrible.

I felt like I was betraying him.

Saying goodbye was horrible but also a huge relief. I felt guilty about that. Still do. If I could have done more for him I would.

But I wasn’t doing so well then either. Watching Joe change and disintegrate right before my eyes had taken a toll on me.

Joe stayed in Virginia for about a month. Things got far worse. One night I’m playing Dark Age Of Camelot and the friend calls. He says:

“Joe killed my cats. My neighbor saw him and called the cops and he’s on the run. The only place I think he would go is straight to you.

Oh, and on a side note, someone from the Secret Service came by and took all of our computers. Joe was writing threatening letters to the president.”

Alice and I stayed at her brother’s house that night. The next morning I have to go to work and before I even open the store I can hear our phone ringing.

It was Joe. He wanted to meet me on my lunch break. I worked in the mall and thought if there’s anywhere I can do this and probably not die it’s going to be here.

I told him of course I’d meet him. And I would buy him lunch.

He was so thin when I saw him but he ate the burger and fries I bought for him. He was twitchy and paranoid and probably on crack or something else.

This was my best friend. My last best friend and he was just a husk of the Joe I knew. He casually told me that he killed the cats because “they were talking” to him. I had to just eat my fries and nod. Thankfully he told me nothing more about it.

He told me that he was going to Charleston and work on a fishing boat. I wished him well, gave him the few dollars I had on me, and hugged him tight. He hugged back, and we just stood there in the food court, hugging each other for a long time.

That was the last time I ever saw Joe. I got a few updates over the next few weeks from my weed man. Joe had hooked up with some mutual friends down there.

Those updates were never good.

I used to dream about Joe a lot after he was gone and in these dreams he was right about all the delusions that he’d held.

He raged across the Earth like a demigod and he KNEW. He knew I had never believed him, that I was just humoring him and wishing that he’d be “normal” again. He was disappointed in me. Angry with me. I had nowhere to hide from him.

Then one night I had a dream where I came upon Joe sitting calmly in a tree. He thanked me for being his friend and disappeared.

I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed of him since. I don’t have any pictures of him. It gets harder and harder to recall his face.

His mother hired a private detective to find him after the messages from the weed guy stopped coming. The detective found a record of a speeding ticket in Charleston. Nothing else

I was at my wit’s end, Joe had vanished and I was desperate enough to go to a psychic who told me he was dead. She told me he was in the Pisgah National Forest.

He had talked about going there a lot. He wanted to live there. Then again he also said he had a mansion there with a gigantic Boulder of crack. Who knows.

I went on the Doe Project, a database for unidentified bodies, and found one in the Pisgah National Forest that did kinda match. I tried to contact his mom but years had passed at this point and I couldn’t find her number.

It’s probably not him but I try to be a realist about these things.

Joe is either in jail (he’s not though, I’ve checked), committed somewhere, or dead.

I mean, I’m pretty sure he’s dead.

I still have a cell phone with my same number from back then. If he’s alive he would have found me by now. Or I him.

Joe was the last. I can’t do that again. I have IRL (in real life) friends and they are fabulous but I can’t take any more in. That was enough for me.

Mostly I live on the internet anyway.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read this. I did not mean to do this tonight but it’s been a decade and I still mourn Joe.

I started mourning him before he even left. The Joe I knew died a long time ago.


Tim’s story put a lump in my throat, and accentuated the way his friend Joe affected his life with untreated mental illness, going from being relatively benign, to dominating the entirety of his personality and actions . I sincerely hope Tim gets closure on his friend one of these days.

In the near future I would love to write more of these stories, about people who have influenced peoples lives, both good and bad. Check back soon to see what I can come up with.

A tech review – Toshiba Satellite A300/0C3 (PSAGCA-0C301N)

By | February 1, 2018

Note: This is an old post from another blog I had at one time, that I found and copied this from. The laptop in the review is dated and useless but because this was a well received post at the time I’ve decided to repost it for posterity. First published on: Apr 24, 2009 @ 05:20

 

Being that this is usually a blog I post on a couple of times a year when something pisses me off enough to write on it, I don’t usually do things like a product review. But seeing as its 5am on a day I’m supposed to be up around this time on, I guess it can’t hurt to type for several hours about a product I’m not being paid to plug.

The laptop in question is the Toshiba Satellite A300/OC3, or according to all the fucking labels on it, the Toshiba Satellite A300 PSAGCA-OC301N which doesn’t seem to occur very frequently in google searches, making this laptop quite difficult (I use that word lightly) to find any non-commercial non-webstore sites containing any sort of technical information on. So here we go.

Off the shelf, this laptop comes with a 2ghz Intel Core 2 “Centrino” processor, with the model number T6400. It had 2ghz of RAM and a 320 5400RPM hard disk. The onboard videocard is an ATi Radeon HD 3470 with 256mb of onboard RAM. Straight out of the box, this laptop has the potential to replace an older Athlon X2, Pentium 4 or early model Core 2 Duo or Solo desktop computer, Bolstered with a larger hard disk, and some more RAM it can start to replace all but the medium-high to highest ended desktop computers. The machine comes pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit, but has the option to install Home Premium 64bit (Boot the machine while holding 0).

The wireless card in the machine is the Intel 5100, which works with Ubuntu linux straight out-of-the-box, and will even break a WEP connection using aircrack-ng (I broke my own home wireless as a test) without any need to change settings at all. Unfortunately it doesn’t like to work under OSX, however the onboard Realtek8168 LAN adapter appears to, although I haven’t really bothered. The range on the wireless card is pretty damned good too, I seem to be able to pick up my shitty netgear router from over 25 metres away, along with just about everyone in the houses adjacent’s wireless connections with pretty good signal. Unfortunately, the button that turns the wireless on and off is a switch, which sits on the very front of the machine. So if you’re a fat fuck, or lazy, and you have the laptop on your lap, resting against your gut, theres a good chance you’re going to accidently switch off the wireless, which is the most fucking irritating thing on the planet.

The laptop itself is very shiny and professional looking – until you start using it. The keyboard is black and shiny, the lid is shiny as as the mouse buttons and the finish on the wrist rests, and around the keyboard. This isn’t a problem when clean, but after use it all becomes very dirty very quickly. The finish smears very quickly with fingerprints, and the dried salt from sweat, making the machine feel unclean and look fucking gross.

The touchpad mouse on this model of laptop is highly accurate, with built-in scroll horizontal and vertical, at the right and bottom of the keypad. The scrolling takes getting used to, but it all ends up working seemlessly after a bit of practice. The touchpad is about the only thing that doesn’t seem to get dirty. One problem I have with the touchpad is the inability to change the side of the vertical scroll, as I use the touchpad with my left hand (but a mouse with my right). The big mouse buttons make a rather loud “click” which can be heard a room away if its quiet. This has annoyed me when someone else has been using the laptop and I can hear the click click click from the other room.

The keyboard on this model of laptop is glossy black, and so it smears with fingerprints very fast. It is also impossible to see in the dark, which is not a problem if you’re a touch typer so much, but to the person who requires the odd finger repositioning or to use a symbol button, it gets a little frustrating. there are 6 multimedia buttons which are LED lit, and part of the plastic, with a touch-sensitive pad that picks up your finger but not anything else apparently, which I’m not sure is annoying yet or not.

The speakers on the laptop are pretty decent quality Harman/Kardon (more like Karman/Hardon amirite?) that can be turned up quite far without distortion, and are capable of playing music at a reasonably quality.

Built into the laptop shell is a webcam and microphone, which comes with really annoying software, but has pretty decent resolution and the mic picks up voice loud and clear. Not sure if Ubuntu knows its there though (but if you’re using ubuntu you don’t have any friends to webcam with anyway AMIRITE?).

The laptop has 4 USB ports, one of which is also an eSATA port, a HDMI port which displays perfect HD, SVideo Out, speaker and microphone ports, and a card reader (SD, Sony Memory Stick/Duo, and Compact Flash), there is also an expansion port on the side (right where you can snap the end off anything hanging out, with an overzealous left hand). The laptop even brags the ability to charge your USB devices while turned off, as one of the USB ports has constant power. I assume it only works if the laptop is also plugged in, as I have not tested this “feature”. It also has a DVDRW. I wasn’t gonna mention that because I didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to wonder if it did or didn’t, but seeing as this is the internet, I assume there ARE people that stupid, and you MIGHT be one of them (hint: you probably are).

The battery appears to run for about 2 hours on “full power” mode under Windows Vista, and about an hour and 30 minutes on the default power setting under Ubuntu (which seems to like to run the fans pretty high the whole time). Powersaver Mode on Vista gets the machine to almost 3 hours, but don’t think about actually doing anything productive. The best thing you’ll get away with without frustration is reading Wikipedia or a similar mainly text site.

Seeing as this is not a gaming laptop, I’m not really inclined to talk about its gaming performance, but it runs Counter-Strike Source at about 100~ fps on medium-high graphics, Fallout 3 fares a little worse on medium graphics, and World of Warcraft is very much playable on medium-high.

To run this whole typed ‘review’ into the ground, and to sum it up, here’s the TL;DR version:

Toshiba Satellite A300/0C3 (PSAGCA-0C301N)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo (Centrino) @ 2GHZ (T6400) – 800mhz FSB
RAM: 2GB (Single stick with 2nd slot available, total capacity 8gb under 64bit OS)
HDD: 320gb 5400RPM hard disk
Display: 15.4inch widescreen, built in webcam (1.3mp) + microphone, 1280×800 max resolution.
Videocard: ATi (Mobility) Radeon 3470 with 256mb onboard RAM, HDMI/SVideo out
LAN: gigabit wired ethernet, Intel 5100 wireless b/g/n
Unimportant shit: 5-in-1 Card Reader, DVDRW “super multi” drive, 6 cell battery, headphone and mic jacks, harman/kardon speakers
Dimensions: 2.7kg, 36.2cm x 26.7cm x 3.8cm (WxLxH)

Pros:
Decent desktop replacement, powerful and attractive
Decent mobile gamer
Cheap considering (mine cost about $1300 AU and they’re cheaper now)
Shiny (oooh shiny)

Cons:
Gets dirty FAST
Black keyboard you can’t see in the dark
BADLY PLACED wireless switch
Preinstalled software is very business-user oriented, and thus I had alot of stuff to delete when I first fired up the machine.

And this concludes my first (possibly last) product review. Hopefully that was…useful….
Until next time.

Avoiding Village Roadshow Lawsuits – Australian Edition

By | August 28, 2017

Recently it has come to my attention that Village Roadshow is going to start issuing fines to people in Australia, caught downloading via torrent. I’m going to put a little guide together that tells you how to avoid being fined $200+. This is stuff you should have already done, but since I know a lot of people are ignorant of how torrenting actually works, this may shed some light. Furthermore, I’ll throw in some links about how to change your DNS (the thing that pulls up websites, to put it in very basic terms) in your router, though this isn’t entirely required, it is helpful (but can be difficult for people who aren’t entirely sure of what they’re doing).

First of all, if you’re running the latest version of µTorrent, get rid of it. Now. The latest version of µTorrent you want is version 2.2.1, and anything after this version is an ad-filled mess that reports data about your usage back to Bittorrent Inc’s servers. Not only that, but because of the risk of it being full of spyware, a lot of websites, trackers and even other clients ban µTorrent which means torrents with lots of seeds and leechers often won’t connect to most of them.  You can find 2.2.1 here at oldversion.com (for Windows only) but I would use some of the other alternatives, since that version is so old.

A better idea would be to switch torrent clients entirely. there are a number of well made, open source, comprehensive torrent clients available, such as qBittorrent (available for Windows and Mac) and Deluge (Available for Windows, Mac and Linux). I personally recommend qBittorrent.

Once you’ve installed a torrent client that doesn’t suck, you need to make sure you setup your upload speed and torrent encryption, because the default settings will strangle the shit out of your connection, and the lack of encryption means your ISP can see exactly what you’re downloading. Depending on what you use your internet for, your overall speed, and if you have any data caps, your upload limit should be 5-50% of your total upload. Here’s an example:

Approximate upload rates for torrents depending on your internet plan. Click to open

To set your upload rates and torrent encryption, first open your torrent client. I’ll also be For the examples here I’ll be using qBittorrent and (sigh) µTorrent.

qBittorrent

For qBittorrent press Alt+O or go to Tools -> options, then down to the “speed” button. Tick the box next to the first “upload” option, and then set your upload speed according to that chart.

If you have no idea what your upload speed is, just set it to about 15. You might get less priority when downloading torrents, but if you’re entirely uncertain as to your internet plan that’s about as safe as you can get. With qBittorrent you can also click on the upload and download notifications at the very bottom of the client, and set your upload (or download if you like) from there.

The green arrow shows the download speed limit, the red arrow shows the upload speed limit

Clicking the speed limit brings up this box

You can also set a scheduler so your torrents download overnight, but I’m not gonna go into that now.

Next you’ll need to enable torrent encryption. Torrent encryption makes sure your ISP cannot see what you’re downloading. This also makes it harder for other parties to see what you’re downloading (though no impossible, we’ll get to how to fix that later). In the options of qBittorrent, go down to the “BitTorrent” button, and force torrent encryption. It should already be enabled, but you want to make sure it’s always on.

Do NOT enable anonymous mode, or you’ll pretty much never be able to download anything ever again.

Note: These options should work on MacOS exactly the same

µTorrent

For µTorrent you’ll need to press Ctrl+P or go to Options -> Preferences. Click the “bandwidth” button on the side and then set your upload speed. Just like qBittorrent, you can also set your download and upload speeds from the main interface window exactly the same way you do with qBittorrent.

Green arrow down, red arrow up

Setting encryption is done pretty much the same way as qbt. Go to the “bandwidth” option on the sidebar and set torrent encryption to “forced”

And finally, µTorrent has a very annoying habit of trying to make you update it to the latest version constantly. You DO NOT want to update it. Absolutely DO NOT let it update. When you first run the program, it’ll probably pop up a box asking if you want to update it, make sure you uncheck the “check for updates” box and select no. Next go into the options under “general” and uncheck all the boxes under Privacy.

Fuck. Off. µTorrent.

I still very strongly recommend not using µTorrent. Please. Please use something else.

But torrent sites are still blocked?

Ah so they are. The best method to fix this is to set the DNS in your router to either Google DNS or Open DNS. I use one of each. Both of them are reliable and don’t block torrent sites. Both of those links contain information on changing your DNS so you will see blocked sites again. You may need to reboot your router and computer after changing them to see any effect. I recommend changing the DNS in the router, not in your operating system, but if it proves too challenging, you may be able to follow the next instruction:

Buy a VPN

This is probably the easiest way to get around torrent blocks and the threat of paying out the arse because you don’t think it’s worth paying $27 to see a fucking movie in the cinema. Or $35 to buy a fucking blu-ray. The best company I’ve found is Private Internet Access. They have an app for each operating system including Android and iOS, and their speeds are good enough that you can torrent at full 100/40 NBN speed through them without slowdown at all. You can even set your account up in your router so you’re permanently connected to your VPN. They also have servers in about 50 different countries. VPNs are also useful for buying games online cheaper than on Australian stores, or watching blocked content on YouTube. At around $55 AU a year it’s also reasonably cheap, and unlike free or extremely cheap VPNs, they don’t sell your data to 3rd parties, log your actions or get overloaded and slow right down. PIA also offer full encryption, so good luck to anyone trying to prove you downloaded Dunkirk when all the computers in the world wouldn’t be able to decrypt a man-in-the-middle attack.

P.S. This isn’t a paid for article, I genuinely think Private Internet Access is a great VPN company. They’re not the only great company, but they are decently priced for how comprehensive they are.

EOF

Agents of Mayhem – Everything I Dislike (and a few things I like)

By | August 18, 2017

Welcome to yet another one of my reviews where I list all the things I dislike about something, and a handful of things I like. Since I initially wrote this review on Steam, and eventually ran out of space, I will be keeping my review up to date here. While I am sort of enjoying playing this game, I cannot recommend it at its current price ($60US on the Australian Steam Store as of game release – 15/08/17). Here is a list, that I will update while I play the game, detailing things I’m not happy with, or problems with the game. Most of this is opinion and therefore is subjective, but as a big fan of the Saint’s Row series, and having bought this game due to the developer and their previous work, I am unfortunately mostly disappointed. This review is a work in progress, which means I’ll be changing it as I play the game, or the game gets updated. This article will contain some spoilers, but they are mostly minor.

This review covers release and the small patch a few days after and is up to date as of 22/08/17 additionally I have added a section where I will be moving certain “bugs” as they are fixed or patched.

Note: Most of the things listed in this review will be specific to the PC release only, despite the fact that I’ve tagged this article as both a PS4 and an XBOne article. Undoubtedly, a lot of the things I’ve listed will be platform agnostic, but there will definitely be some things that are isolated to PC only.

Things I Dislike:

  • The dialogue, the characters, everything is extremely poorly written. It’s extremely basic and generic. I doubt the same writers of Saint’s Row wrote this. Edit: Then again they might have. I think I have rose-coloured glasses on for Saint’s Row 3 and 4.
  • The humour misses the mark, hard.
  • I cannot tell who the hell the demographic of this game is, the characters swear, but the game is “safe”, in that a child could play it very easily without hassle, the game holds your hand a lot, the enemies are pretty simple, it is just not challenging, even if you crank up the difficulty. Edit: the enemy difficulty and density gets better as the game progresses…but…so do you. You gain levels, and health/shield which better protect you from the many more enemies thrown at you.
  • There is only one weapon, an alternative fire for that weapon, plus a “special” attack per character. Unlike the weapon wheel full of fun guns SR had, you have to choose a different character if you want different weapons.
  • Weapons auto-aim. You cannot turn this off. Since some people say you can, you can switch it to disabled, and your camera won’t follow your target around by itself, but certain weapons will still hit your target even if your aim is very off. Rama is the best example.
  • It feels like a single player third person Overwatch clone (by clone I mean it shares a hell of a lot of similarities with Overwatch, and feels like it was steered in that direction to appeal to a similar audience, it’s not literally a third person Overwatch) on the SR engine with its skill-set independent heroes you can change around between on the fly. I don’t dislike Overwatch, but I don’t particularly enjoy it either. This feels like I’m playing that without any humans to actually challenge me.
  • When in motion, either on foot or in a vehicle, the camera controls snap back to behind you constantly, even though I have a MOUSE to move my camera around with. This cannot be turned off.
  • The Mayhem ability. It’s your special ability and it’s supposed to be super powerful and ultra useful. It is not. It lasts about 3 seconds, which lets you kill about 3-4 enemies (if they’re spread out, which they usually are) and takes FOREVER* to charge. In a mission you get a chance to use it once or twice maybe. On the other hand the “alternative attack” charges in about 5-6 seconds and it usually much more useful (e.g. being able to launch a grenade that splash damages everyone around it if you’re playing Hollywood) Spending skill points increases Mayhem time and effectiveness, however you won’t end up having those upgraded for a long time yet. *Edit: If you have Hollywood in your team, and his group passive is upgraded, you get Mayhem abilities very often, and some characters are actually useful when their Mayhem goes off. Johnny Gat is the best example in my opinion. Edit #2: It is really dependant on who you’re using in your team as to how effective your mayhem attack is. Some characters just stun everyone around them which isn’t particularly useful compared to actually doing damage.
  • Not a big deal to me, but no cooperative play. You can select three heroes at a time, you would think the game would let you coop with 2 other people, but it doesn’t. I believe Saint’s Row 2, 3, 4 and Gat out of Hell are coop friendly, why this isn’t I have no idea. Edit: The game does have multiplayer, but it’s not story mode cooperative.
  • The character customisation just…blows. The upgrades don’t even seem particularly useful. Edit: most aren’t useful. They’re just alternative methods of play, sort of.
  • Hardtack is one of the characters you start with. His main weapon is a shotgun. A shotgun that does zero damage to anything about 3 metres (10~ feet) away. It just doesn’t connect with anything past that range. It’s the most useless shotgun in any game ever. You can get an upgrade that increases the distance the shotgun makes contact in….but it also decreases it’s damage. Absolutely pointless. Edit: Trying to level up Hardtack really sucks, because even with upgrades his shotgun isn’t anywhere near as powerful as Johnny Gat’s or Red Card’s
  • Hardtack’s triple-jump barely ever works. Edit: actually a handful of player characters triple-jumps seem to work with varying degrees of success.
  • On further observation, almost all weapons have very short range. Much, much shorter than you would expect. Of course, the enemies don’t suffer from this ailment at all.
  • Every single one of the civilian cars sucks. They’re all utterly useless. Edit: there’s also only about…20? different ones. They’re also all as slow as shit.
  • You can’t get into the LEGION military cars, even after the LEGION soldiers get out of them.
  • I don’t have any graphics issues because I updated my drivers. But occasionally a lot of things explode on the screen and my fps dips for about a half a second. Not really an issue.
  • I’m decently far into the game now (edit), and there aren’t any mini-games like Saint’s Row had. There are things scattered around the map that you can blow up, but they’re not really “mini-games”. The one where you put a shield around a person strapped to a bomb then detonate the bomb is kinda fun though, because the person with the shield ends up in a bubble that bounces around the place, and if your physics glitch out (which I believe is intended) they go flying.
  • There are some shitloads of physics glitches. Floating enemies, trucks loaded with cargo exploding once you’re in range enough for the physics engine to kick in, items bouncing around. Edit: The small patch fixed this a tiny bit, but it’s still a problem
  • Cannot fire from vehicles. Which is a step backwards from the Saint’s Row series.
  • For some reason on the “pause” menu, is an option to “Erase all save data”. This seems…well…bizarre, and increases your risk of accidentally clicking it and erasing all your data.
  • Johnny Gat in this game is only Gat in voice and model. He is not the Gat from Saint’s Row. I mean, for one he’s a cop. This is explained by the whole “alternate universe” thing, but still. He definitely has some of the best dialogue in the game though. If you don’t want to cringe much, make sure Gat is your main character. Avoid Braddock (even though her weapon is one of the better ones) because her voice sounds so fake and put-on that it gets old very quickly.
  • The radio is terrible. It’s just the same electronic background noise on every channel.
  • You can’t ride motorbikes, there are none in the game on the streets, and the parked ones are not able to be ridden.
  • There is no vehicle customisation other than 8 different skins per vehicle (10 vehicles total).
  • There is also no player customisation except for 6 or so skins for each character and then 6 or so skins per character’s weapon.
  • Warping. No one opens doors or anything, they just…warp around. Like straight through the car’s window into the drivers seat. Enemies also warp into the area instead of arriving in vehicles or helicopters. Edit: can be explained by the futuristic setting, but it’s still a bit of a cop-out
  • While driving, vehicles within your draw distance but far away disappear randomly. In fact the draw distance in general is sort of broken.
  • There’s a cooldown on melee attacks. The cooldown is about 3 to 4 seconds.
  • Cash is a bit useless. I never used any until I was level 8, and then I had so much left over after I had bought upgrades that it didn’t really matter. This isn’t really a negative, since cash ends up pretty much worthless in Saint’s Row after a while too, including it in the game just seems kinda pointless. There’s like 5 different typed of resources you need to be running around picking up constantly, which is ridiculous.
  • Apparently everyone in Korea speaks American English.
  • I only really just realised this, but the map is tiny. I’m not sure if I’m into the game far enough yet, or if any more maps unlock, but the map size is about half of Steelport (Saint’s Row 3 and 4) and about a quarter of Stilwater (Saint’s Row 2). Remember when Volition made Red Faction Guerilla and the map was gigantic (albeit empty). Everything to do in this is very close together.
  • Repetitive LEGION lair dialogue over the PA system gets annoying after you’ve heard the same line 5 times per lair, and I’ve done about 8 lairs so far and there are at least that many more to do. It’s funny the first time, but it gets old fast.
  • When you first load the game, or teleport back into the Ark, you are not given control over your character for a minimum of 3 seconds, and a maximum of about 15. Everything has loaded, you just can’t do anything until the game randomly lets you.
  • Friday has really shitty dialogue. It’s just extra shitty and I can’t stand it. She’s also a bit of a creeper.
  • Can’t change the contents of your squad unless you deploy
  • There are “Mayhem Knows” load-screens where some of the characters from the game show up and a soundbite plays detailing something “witty” (see: stupid) about them. This extends the load screen much longer than it needs to be.
  • You CANNOT run over enemies. They either dodge your vehicle, or even if you hit them dead on, they don’t take enough damage to die and bounce off your car. I have yet to kill anyone who wasn’t a civilian (who are easy to kill) with a vehicle yet.
  • There’s no way to upgrade melee strength, so the more you level up, the progressively more useless your melee attacks get.
  • Each time you return to the Ark, the game penalises you by uncapturing one of your outposts you’ve captured, giving it back to the enemy. THIS IS NOT A BUG IT’S A FEATURE AND IS FUCKING MORONIC. THIS IS IN BOLD BECAUSE OF HOW FUCKING ANGRY IT MADE ME.
  • Despite being able to apparently climb walls, most of the heroes suck at actually doing it.
  • While unlocking the vehicles is alright, each vehicle has an arbitrary amount of unlock blueprints needed. No two have the same number. Some cars have 1 blueprint needed, others 10.
  • Everything after this line added on 22/08/17
  • After antagonising LEGION enough to max out their response (like you max out the police in Saint’s Row or demons enforcers in Gat out of Hell, the game throws difficult super soldiers at you. But they are seemingly endless. They keep coming forever, and the only way I found I could get rid of them was by going back to the Ark.
  • Dead bodies jiggle around on the floor a lot, constantly causing me to think they’re still alive and shoot at them.
  • Johnny Gat’s shotgun occasionally does no damage to certain female-only enemies.
  • Some of the “side missions” (like the above-mentioned rescue-the-guy-stuck-to-a-bomb-by-putting-them-in-a-bubble mission) glitch through the floor, making them impossible to complete.
  • When driving, a lot of things are still indestructible, causing your car to dead-stop on things. Especially heinous when racing and the game forces you to take certain jumps that if you misjudge  slightly, make your vehicle stop.
  • Civilian vehicles plough over you without slowing down or stopping. The vehicle-driving AI is terrible, and doesn’t give a shit about you at all. It will absolutely run you down in the street.
  • Vehicle damage is not representative of the health shown on the car’s HP meter. Car looks totally fucked before it is anywhere near it.
  • The game tells you to repair your car and shows locations you can have it repaired…when you’ve got about 10% damage on the car. Even the weakest of the player cars takes a hell of a pounding before it blows up. The civilian vehicles on the other hand are weak and will blow up just by being shot at – but only if you’re driving them. They’re significantly harder to destroy if you’re just shooting at them yourself.
  • Slight Spoiler: A character mission for Kingpin has you driving vehicles to beat an “unknown racer” at certain circuits around the city. The time limits given are long enough that you could probably sprint them on foot if the game would let you, and you’d still make the times with plenty to spare.
  • Doomsday weapons all follow the exact same, boring formula every single time they show up. If they didn’t take pot-shots at you constantly, there would be absolutely no reason to destroy them at all. Unnecessary time wasting bullshit.
  • Your callable vehicles are equipped with an AI. The AI has no real purpose other than to say “witty” things. Instead it’s an annoying fucking pile of wank that says dumb, annoying shit.
  • Terrible FOV (field of view) and zoom. No option to change either.
  • Johnny Gat’s mayhem ability causes him to fire against walls and into the air sometimes as it’s not able to be redirected or aimed at all. It even does so when there are targets out in the open.
  • Joule’s melee often fails to connect.
  • Everything in the game telegraphs, making avoiding things without thinking simple.
  • While doing a lair invasion, the AI on the PA system continuously told the LEGION NPCs to “protect the captain”. It continued to do so even after I killed everyone in the base and reached the extraction point. So did I kill the captain or not?
  • Game occasionally draws objects on top of each other. Example: I was driving as fast as I possibly could, using the nitrous and then stopped dead, the game already had 3 cars parked on the side of the road, and then decided to draw 3 more on top of them, causing them to jump out of the parked cars and explode.
  • Daisy moves about the same speed as everyone else runs…when she has roller skates.
  • You need to rely on RNG (random number generation – where you hope the game “rolls the right numbers” and gives you proper items when you loot the crates strewn around the game) for character/weapon/vehicle skin and vehicle blueprint unlocks.
  • Red Card, a German (and a good guy), seems to ADVOCATE FOR FUCKING EUGENICS. WHO WROTE THIS SHIT?

Things I Liked:

  • Plays like a Saint’s Row game, which is why I bought it in the first place.
  • Driving is top notch, better than Saint’s Row 4 or Gat out of Hell.
  • Game is smooth as butter, seems pretty well optimised. This could be isolated to my machine, because a lot of people have told me that I’m wrong about this.
  • The world is pretty nicely crafted, if a little…boring? Seoul has no soul. But it looks shiny and futuristic.
  • You can still murder civilians. You can’t seem to kick them in the groin or throw them around, but you can shoot them to death
  • It appears that vehicles from Saint’s Row 3/4 are unlockable by finding “blueprints”
  • The unlocked cars from Saint’s Row have been given a very slight face lift
  • The one-use craftable items are actually useful
  • The upgrade cores actually make your characters a lot better. Except Hardtack.
  • The usual collectibles everybody loves that Volition is known for strewing across their games. (this is half sarcastic, but seriously, it wouldn’t be right if this game didn’t have 50 million collectible items)
  • There are robot cars, some drive ads around, some are utility vehicles. Also robots float around showing ads which is kinda cool
  • There are upgrades after a certain level which show collectibles on the map.
  • Pressing X and calling in your car is handy as fuck
  • The game does get better the more you play it, but doesn’t really reverse anything I’ve listed in the negative section unless otherwise specified
  • The game has NVidia Ansel, which is pretty awesome if you’re into taking super high resolution screenshots with an adjustable camera
  • A bunch of characters (not sure if all of them – Johnny Gat doesn’t seem to have one) have a skin reminiscent of Marvel superheroes (e.g. XMen, Iron Man,
  • Once you get your hero to level 10, it unlocks a secondary trait, so you can lose your weaker characters. e.g. Johnny Gat becomes armour piercing, so you can get rid of Fortune or Kingpin
  • Took me a while to realise that Kingpin is Pierce Washington’s alternate universe alter-ego.
  • Enemy speech has context depending on which hero you’re playing. For example, Braddock was a military commander who trained many of LEGION’s troops before they defected from her command and joined LEGION. They say snarky remarks about the training and joining LEGION out from under her.
  • The game has a very diverse cast of people, which, before someone calls me an SJW, so did Saint’s Row. Instead of having the usual muscular white dude/s it’s got someone from everywhere on the globe.
  • Everything after this line added on 22/08/17
  • Some of the explosive barrels kinda look like Daleks (Okay, not really a positive, but I found it amusing)
  • Slight Spoiler: The Johnny Gat mission with the robot police officers was actually pretty amusing, and enjoyable.
  • The game is actually VERY stable. I have not had a single crash yet in (as of writing this) 24 hours of playing. I have tabbed in and out constantly, and abused the game a little bit and it’s been fine.
  • Each character has unique dialogue recorded for it, for each time one of the mission givers talks to the group. Whoever is your currently selected character will do all of the talking. You can change it on the fly.

Fixed Issues:

  • Game resets itself to windowed each time I start it. I prefer it on Borderless or even Full Screen, but it insists on starting on Windowed.  This seems to have been fixed. EDIT: OR NOT. Sometimes it seems fixed, sometimes it fucks up again.

Even Yahtzee shits on this game.

The Gentle Giant

By | July 9, 2017

Perusing Facebook this morning, I came across a post by a friend, Tim Jordan, who wrote a story about his grandfather. The story was quite moving and I asked him if I could publish it here, of which he gave me permission. So for your consideration, here it is.

My grandfather was in WWI.

That’s a fact that still absolutely confounds me but my mom was the youngest of 7 children, the only girl, and there was a significant gap between her and her youngest brother. I remember a picture from the newspaper of him at the train station holding a sign that said GO TO HELL GERMANY and that also confused me as a child because my grandfather was the gentlest of men and I couldn’t even imagine him saying hell, which along with butt and guts I considered the worst of words at that age.

My grandparents lived in Olla, Louisiana, more accurately on the outskirts of Olla, in the middle of fucking nowhere; an ill kept state road farting away into nothingness just before making it to their home. A home my grandfather carved out of the landscape using stones and trees from the very land where the house stood. It was purely functional, a small 4 room shack with a porch and a cistern off to the side, long sealed away before I was born and the source of many warnings I ignored. How I never ended up as a literal Timmy in the well I’ll never know.

Over the last 20 years or so I became more and more interested in Grandpa John and in talking to my mother we both began to slowly realize a pattern of severe depression and possibly psychosis. He never held a job for long and spent lots of time at home rarely moving from his favorite chair except to hunt the occasional squirrel. There were lots of other signs too but I won’t go into them here because I really want to go back to WWI.

Grandpa wasn’t in France long, maybe about three weeks, before he was sent back home. He was uninjured physically but most definitely suffering from what we would now call PTSD. He was never quite the same, outwardly the gentle giant we all knew, but prone to bouts of psychosis where he didn’t know where he was, vomited profusely, cursed up a storm, railing against the horrors he saw in the war. I heard some of these stories as a child, listening in where I wasn’t supposed to, and I can remember climbing up in his lap as a child to comfort him even though I didn’t understand at all what was going on with him. I never saw him in any of those states though. He was always so kind and loving and willing to hold us kids for as long as he could, before we wiggled away to chase the cats in the yard or catch lizards that were cute until they bit you.

Grandpa eventually fell and broke his hip, spent a while in the hospital, then came home and required a hospital bed and after care. I can’t say what happened to his mind at that point, maybe it was dementia, which runs pretty rampantly on the other side of the family, but it wasn’t like dementia I’d ever seen before. He just seemed to give up and sadly languished there for a decade or more.

He was mostly silent but would occasionally shock everyone by talking and letting us all know how aware he was about what was going on around him. Maybe those were just random moments of lucidity. In the 80s, small town America, physical and mental rehab weren’t exactly the norm so nobody really knows what was going on with him. Occasionally my grandma would wake up in the middle of the night to find that he had climbed out of bed and was sitting in his favorite chair. These moments made me profoundly sad for him.

When he died, the first of my grandparents to pass away, I was glad that he was finally at peace but I felt like I hardly knew the man yet at the same time I felt like he was a kindred spirit. We don’t have much left of him anymore. We have some pictures and my mom has his favorite coffee cup, a little dainty piece of china decorated with pink flowers.

I can always remember the day he died because of what my grandmother said one time when were visiting his grave. “He died on the longest day of the year,” she said. “It was certainly the longest day for me.”

 

Mass Effect Andromeda – Everything I Dislike So Far (Part 3)

By | June 22, 2017

Another entry in my list of things I dislike about MEA. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m actually enjoying playing MEA a fair amount, but it’s still making me cringe quite often. Also since the last post it updated to 1.0.0.7 and then to 1.0.0.8, so this post will actually be two entries in one – the one I wrote for 0.7 and the one I wrote for 0.8. This post contains spoilers. Also videos for the first time.

Part 1   Part 2

Main Menu

  • Menu takes a long time to decide that a unit upgrade is available.
  • Mouse very, very rarely, ceases to work in menus at all. Game must be restarted

Dialogue

  • You meet new allies, the Angarans. Instead of telling you what they’ve been calling the Kett the whole time, they call them the Kett too. How about telling me what they’re really called?
  • “I need to change your entire planet’s climate so my people can live here, lol” ‘oh OK, but do this task first’
  • Jaal threatens to kill me in my sleep. Hilarious.
  • Sohkaa and Ryder treat each other like fucking idiots
  • “Are all humans so quick with words?” after I went afk and left the screen paused on dialogue for 5 minutes (not really a complaint, but still)
  • “They put every credit they made into my education” how very Americocentric of the writers to assume capitalism would be universal.
  • “niche” said like NITCH
  • “download some movies for me lol, I like bad movies, I’m literally a walking meme” – Liam
  • “just be yourself and the flirts will flow” holy fuck I just lost brain matter
  • “Damn politicians”
  • Using the question-mark option in some conversations throws out a total non-sequitur, making it sound awkward when you put the conversation back on track
  • “tell me more about fighting Kett” needs to be selected constantly, never greys out even when you’ve exhausted all options.
  • “Want us to get out and push?” ‘Veeeerrry funny Ryder’ No.
  • “by who?” “by whom.” fuck off SAM you cunt.
  • “you took out the kett crown jewel” seconds later “we want to hit the crown jewel of the kett” so did I take it out yet, or do I still need to take it out?
  • “what the actual hell” fuck off with your tumblr meme shit
  • What sort of rude fucking bastard ends a conversation with “I’m good for now”?
  • SAM SHUT THE FUCK UP I KNOW IT’S COLD

Game

  • Dumb fucking escort mission in the Angaran settlement when you first land (Hidden City)
  • The Angarans draw a bead on me the second I take out my scanner
  • What the fuck accent do these things have? Is it African, English, Australian? All three? Why do they have EARTH ACCENTS?
  • Ryder is told the Angaran people get kidnapped. Looks bored as fuck, like he’s about to fall asleep standing.
  • Avela seems excessively enamoured where 5 minutes earlier she didn’t give a single fuck
  • Background plants behind Avela shimmer terribly
  • These aliens I just met are WAY too trusting.
  • I don’t remember picking up a universal translator?
  • Peebee’s writer is a stupid fucking cunt. She is the most fucking irritating piece of shit in the game.
  • The entire crew is unmotivated to do the fucking jobs they’re supposed to be, instead opting to make dumb wisecracks and say other stupid shit.
  • Not even on my second planet and I have a full roster of crew. There are no more companions to collect.
  • Whoever wrote Suvi is a fuckwit. Her dialogue is pure shit.
  • Right-click doesn’t skip dialogue.
  • AWWW DRACK IS ACTUALLY A SOFTIE. Most boring fucking trope ever.
  • Being biotic is literally an oppressed state, like being Black or Asian
  • Talking to Cora again immediately after ending the automatic cutscene changes her mood, her stance, everything entirely.
  • You can call an Andromeda Galaxy alien a BIGOT for calling YOU an alien. IDPOL HAS GONE TOO FAR
  • Cutscenes starting with you standing 30cm behind your chat target like you wanna fuck them
  • Every time Peebee talks I want to shoot myself, or better, her in the fucking head.
  • And her flirting is just absolute fucking trash
  • Not only is she annoying, she’s a thief, a liar, and a menace and should be in a fucking jail cell.
  • SJWs literally wrote appropriation into the script
  • Suvi talks about the least interesting thing about her (not that there is much interesting about her) too much – her stupid fucking faith.
  • SHE BECAME RELIGIOUS IN HER TEENS. HER PARENTS AREN’T RELIGIOUS. SUVI IS DUMBER THAN SHIT.
  • Aliens have weirdly human personality traits.
  • A protester with red hair has hair that looks like it was put on over the top of another hairdo
  • The protesters are ridiculous as fuck.
  • Reporter quest ripped directly from Mass Effect 2/3
  • At least Addison looks less stupid as of 1.0.0.6
  • With the amount of load screens, this game would be irritating as fuck to play on a non-PC
  • Game continually sends me back to the Nexus. That’d be fine if it didn’t take 5 minutes of cutscenes each time.
  • WHY DON’T YOU JUST TAKE A FUCKING NAP MID SENTENCE RYDER, YOU SLEEPY LOOKING FUCKING CUNT
  • Ryder tells Spender he’s onto him well before he has any evidence or even reasonably doubt to be able to have him arrested, making sure Spender can clean up any mess he needs to or disappear.
  • You can leave Voeld in the middle of nowhere which causes a 2 minute fucking leave-the-planet cutscene.
  • After this line is from 1.0.0.8 
  • After rescuing Nillj, his companion speaks to you but is not in range at all, so only her subtitles show up but her audio isn’t heard. She doesn’t seem to come closer either.
  • If you don’t have a weapon drawn, you cannot use melee.
  • Using the remnant elevator causes the game to undraw the AI companions, and then redraw them again at the top.
  • The AI companions act like they contribute to kills during combat. Without mods, they do zero damage and are nothing more than a liability.
  • An item disappears and reappears when using the omintool. Item can be clipped through when omnitool not used. I made a video of it, here or embedded at the bottom of the post.
  • NPC walks around me several times, then walks off. Video of it Here or embedded at the bottom of the post.
  • Addison is probably the most inept, useless, and fucking stupid character in the entire game.
  • You can’t talk to NPCs without them facing you, which gets irritating.
  • Nostril holes look stupid as fuck
  • The whole “sibling in a coma for the entire duration of the game” is pretty fucking stupid
  • There are 5 videocom consoles and you can only use one of them. In about 30 hours of playing, I’ve only used them once, what’s the point?
  • SAM things it can boost the Angaran’s computer power despite not having actually interacted with an Angaran computer before, and not knowing how much processing power they do or do not possess.
  • A graphics glitch made it look like Ryder had a mouthful of metal, like Jaws in 007
  • Some quests marked as complete remain in the menu, and don’t elaborate what else needs to be done to ACTUALLY complete them.
  • Jaal’s clothes blow around like there’s wind when there isn’t
  • Ryder asks Jaal about biology. Jaal fobs him off completely leading me to believe that the writers never bothered actually fleshing out the Angara. Lazy as fuck.
  • WHY DOES A HOLOGRAM HAVE EYELASHES

No doubt there’ll be a part 4 soon, but I’ve already catalogued a lot of the shit that pisses me off, and I’m finding it harder to find new things that aren’t completely dialogue based. Also there are mods now, so I can remove a lot of annoying things. EOF

Mass Effect Andromeda – Everything I Dislike So Far (Part 2)

By | May 16, 2017

Since I wrote part 1, the game has updated once again to 1.0.0.6, and some of my critique is out of date, but most of it still applies. Here’s part two. Possible spoilers ahead.

Part 1

Main Menu

  • Still can’t use enter key to select anything from the game’s opening menu

Dialogue

  • “have a Dirty Squirrel” the bar has dumb as fuck names for drinks. Because they couldn’t possibly just use existing names.
  • “Fine, you can be a regular” said to Scott Ryder by the bartender.
  • “Be careful, the snark is strong with this one”
  • DUTCH HAS THE MOST WANKY SHIT DIALOGUE SO FAR.
  • “You can’t deploy and omelette without deploying eggs. And eggs won’t get you steak” WHO FUCKING WROTE THIS SHIT
  • “They’re scanning us!” ‘WELL SCAN THEM BACK’ genius dialogue. 10/10.
  • Ryder snorts in his dialogue, subtitle says he “exhales”

Game

  • NPC bumped through a crate, NPC was then difficult to interact/talk to. Once dialogue was initiated, NPC proceeded to walk BEHIND the player character.
  • NPC fucking asks me to talk to it a second time to start the quest it has.
  • Game breaks 4th wall. Example – an NPC has a quest icon above his head, instead of asking him how he’s going, and then him responding that he has some trouble and could you look into it, your dialogue starts immediately with “is something wrong?” despite no indication that anything is wrong in the first place.
  • Seems almost everyone who isn’t a random filler NPC has a dull, monotonous and very mundane quest for you to do.
  • Pathfinder gets paid for completing tasks.
  • Pathfinder also needs to pay for items and equipment, as if he’s not the most fucking important thing in the entire goddamn galaxy at that point.
  • A quest involves finding ingredients for “new cocktails”
  • Junk, filler quests everywhere. I cannot state this enough.
  • The Nilken Case. The options are black and white. You cannot choose for him to go into community service (although one of the options makes that happen anyway) or serve 3 months in a cell, you can only choose to release him or exile him.
  • Addison randomly talks to herself. Possibly the worst design choice ever, to include this fucking batshit insane character.
  • Brecka’s accent sounds fake as fuck
  • The drop pod/AVP is similar to the Inquisition Powers in DAI (this isn’t a complaint, just an observation)
  • Default load screen times are excessive.
  • Ryder’s face lags and changes in an instant.
  • Kett aliens seem to speak in alternating accents
  • Somehow the aliens damaged their ship without actually attacking it at all.
  • Ryder makes first contact with the Angara by being an arrogant fucking prick. Very American.
  • Aliens speak to each other in English, after starting dialogue in their own language.
  • “Hidden City” not actually hidden at all.

This concludes part 2, part 3 should arrive in the next couple of weeks, since there’s so goddamn much wrong with this title.

Mass Effect Andromeda – Everything I Dislike So Far (Part 1)

By | April 29, 2017

I bought Mass Effect Andromeda about 2 weeks after it first came out, and I’ve played through as much of the first planet as it would let me (which wasn’t all that much). As I’ve played the game, I’ve wrote down what has annoyed me. Here I will detail what has annoyed me about the game so far. POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD

Main Menu

  • mouse highlights wrong item on hover (fixed – sorta) after update 1.05
  • Game loads for a significant amount of time after exiting character creator back into the main menu

Dialogue

  • Almost all the dialogue listed here will be goofy. As a general rule, if the dialogue isn’t goofy, it’s flat fucking boring.
  • “I feel like a 600 year old popsicle” after coming out of stasis.
  • “since when do rocks float” ‘just go with it’ when flying above the first planet you come to, to complete the tutorial level, Liam and Ryder have this exchange.
  • “it’s like they didn’t finish building it” after it was stated that the Nexus wasn’t built.
  • “can you tell me where the welcome party is hiding” after boarding the Nexus and seeing no one around
  • “you’re a BRAVE PIONEER” don’t blow smoke up my arse, NPCs.
  • Liam continually mentions the Nexus is vacant
  • “Unknown Error” spoken like VI has never spoken either word before
  • MEMES LOL
  • “14 months and you start stooping to poetry”
  • “ugh goddamn poetry”
  • Tann’s voice actor seems to be playing a “character” and is doing it badly.
  • Scott uses “uh” to answer questions
  • Suvi sounds fucking stupid
  • LIAM SPEAKS IN MEMES
  • “oh you know things? good for you, I know things too” Wow, Peebee you sure showed them
  • “We nearly died!” “YEAH BUT IT WAS TOTALLY COOL” – definite seizure probability.

Game

  • textures shimmer
  • blank, non-moving faced weird fucking NPCs (noted as fixed with update 1.05, but not actually fixed)
  • Ryder’s hand passes through an item he is grabbing hold of in a cutscene
  • too easy to cut off dialogue/dialogue doesn’t complete often
  • clunky movement at times (but combat is very satisfying)
  • Rocks. Are. Floating.
  • animation of shooting at corpse doesn’t contact
  • dopey, clueless expressions POST 1.05 update
  • Scott Ryder seems overly happy immediately after his dad’s death
  • Foster Addison is excessively stupid. Holy fuck.
  • Female Krogan – goofiest fucking Krogan in the galaxy
  • Numpad keys are totally randomised
  • Not much difference between selection colours – already chosen dialogue very slightly different hue from unused dialogue. Gets really fucking confusing during times where you revisit a character.
  • Animations do not match voices
  • Textures popping in and out during interviews
  • Weird model tooth overlap
  • Vetra is an atypical turian
  • Two audio files from the same NPC can play simultaneously, creating some weird fucking shit
  • only 2 squadmates compared to 3 in Dragon Age Inquisition (minor annoyance)
  • 3 different NPCs talking over each other…
  • Peebee is an annoying fucking Mary Sue who speaks in Tumblr memes.
  • Pretty sure they won’t be calling it “3D printing” so far in the future
  • Quests with no clear objective
  • After selecting to land on a planet, the decision CANNOT be cancelled.
  • Weapons loadout cannot be changed at the ship without leaving the planet.
  • Pee(nis)b(reath)ee walks like she’s shat in her fucking pants
  • No choice of whether to recruit or abandon new team mates, they are automatically added.
  • Ore remains behind after being picked up, instead of disappearing.
  • Game flickers yellow in certain areas, due to the ingame filter having a certain boundry the camera crosses
  • Group dialogue reads/plays out like a fucking terrible sitcom, without a pathetic laugh track
  • Game arbitrarily forces you to leave Eos. No real reason at all, just so you don’t exhaust all the content on that planet straight up.
  • BORED ALREADY WITH NO DESIRE TO PLAY ANY FURTHER.

Hopefully I’ll end up playing more, so I can make a part 2, but until then, this is all. EOF

Remembrance Day

By | November 11, 2016

Today, the 11th of November is Remembrance Day. The day we remember our fallen soldiers who fought and died for our way of life. Soldiers who were drafted or volunteered, to make the planet a better place. To fight oppression, and for us to live free.

In the Great War, our planet’s first war where countries all over the globe participated, we fought against German Nationalism. Germany sought to absorb the countries around it, relentlessly bulldozing their way through Europe. Further south, the fascist Ottoman Empire was doing the same thing. Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, The United States, and several countries of Europe and the Middle East fought against these war machines, pushing them back. Forcing Germany to surrender, and leading to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. We fought against fascism and nationalism, and we were victorious.

After the First World War, Australia (and other nations) took in refugees fleeing from their countries. Their homes were destroyed, their families killed, their possessions forgotten. They came from Europe, they came from the Middle East. Many of them did not even know that English was a language and had never heard it spoken before. Yet they came. They integrated, and they made our countries better for it.

During the Second World War, Germany, this time a fascist nation, which grew from the seeds of discontent, again decided to usurp Europe for itself leaving nothing behind. It wanted Great Britain, Russia and even Africa to itself. Several countries – Italy, Hungary, Romania, etc – allied with Germany, out of fear, or because they thought there would be more to gain by allying with them. In the east the Japanese Imperial Army, another fascist, nationalist country, were attacking and absorbing territory from China, Korea, Indonesia, and the rest of South East Asia, attacking the United States in Hawaii, even coming as close as to bomb Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia. Their ambitions proved fruitless as again Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, The United States, Canada, and many other nations joined forces to push back the conquering aggressors and end the war. Once again, the victory went to the forces fighting for freedom, and against fascism.

Once again, refugees fled their former countries, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia. Australia accepted not only refugees but people who just wanted a better life than living in war-torn Europe. Even soldiers who fought for the Axis powers were allowed to immigrate to Australia, rebuilding their lives here. We welcomed them with open arms, they integrated with us within a generation and our culture learned and grew from their input.

The Korean war, and the Vietnam war were the next wars that these allied nations joined together for, fighting the aggressive expanding Communist Chinese in Korea, leading to the liberation of the southern part, which became the Republic of Korea. China supported the Vietnamese bid for independence from the French by providing arms and war equipment, as well as funds and soldiers. We fought this war to prevent the toxic nationalism of China from possibly spreading further through Asia and into the Pacific. Fears that communism and nationalistic policy would make its way throughout the world unless it was stopped fuelled the war that Australian, New Zealand, British and American soldiers (amongst others) died for. Communism and Nationalism was not compatible with our way of life, and we were not prepared to allow it to continue to flow out of China.

The Vietnam War created tens of thousands of refugees who fled in rickety boats from Vietnam. Many of their boats ended up in Australia, their occupants terrified and sick. We allowed them into our nation, we allowed them to integrate with our culture and become Australians. Our cultural backbone once again strengthened with their addition.

The Cold War lasted decades, from after the war until 1991. During this period there was only muted fighting. The Russians had supported the Chinese during the Korean and Vietnamese war. No actual fighting was done between the two great nations of the USA and Russia. However during this period, thousands upon thousands of people fled the Eastern Bloc into the west of Europe, over or under the Berlin Wall to West Germany. To the United States. To the UK, and to Australia. These people have also been important for our cultures.

Our allied powers once again fight against nationalism and fascism in the Middle East, against Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi, Assad and the Islamic State. We create refugees because we fight the terrifying ideals of their leaders. Their leaders who want to impose strict religious rule upon the rest of the world. To impose strict fascist laws upon every nation, and to control us with fear and threaten us with destruction. Their ideals that are not shared by a majority of their people, the people who flee towards freedom. The people who escape those countries in the most dangerous ways because it’s more safe to sit in the ocean on a boat barely holding together than stay under the rule of their oppressors for any longer.

We only strengthen our nation with the blood, sweat and tears of people who join our country to live free, who wish only to make their lives in a free country, to have their children in a free country, and for their children and their children’s children to grow up free.

Australia is a free country.

This is what our soldiers died for. Freedom. Against fascism, against nationalism, against war, and for the safety of the oppressed.

Lest We Forget.

Lest We Forget

Internet lies and how to fight them.

By | October 28, 2016

I’m not going to talk about Trump.

That’s not true. I’m going to talk about him. I’m going to talk about him a lot, I’m sure. But for my first post here, I’d like to focus on a more pervasive issue, one that I believe can be blamed for his rise, but which existed long before it, and will continue to be a problem after he is, god willing, gone. It causes far more problems than Trump supporting, including, but not limited to, vaccine denialism, climate change denialism, fear of genetically-modified food, and pretty much every conspiracy theory. That problem is the inability of the average person to critically evaluate sources and determine whether or not a website, meme, video, etc. contains accurate information.

I am now 26. When I was in school, we didn’t really cover this. We spent about an hour learning about what sources could and could not be cited for research papers. The class basically boiled down to “not Wikipedia.” No one taught us about hoaxes, or lies, or outdated information.

My upbringing taught me to mistrust sources, because my dad thought it was really funny to make things up and tell me about them as if they were true. So from an early age, I learned to double-check things – if Dad said something that sounded a little suspicious, I’d go ask Mom to confirm. But most people don’t have parents who lie to them for shits and giggles, I imagine, and so they miss out on what turned out to be one of the most important lessons I ever learned.

You can see this throughout the internet. People see a meme or link making an outrageous claim and they just share it, even become outraged over it, without checking the facts. Older people seem to be particularly susceptible, but young people are by no means immune. Many humorous examples can be found at http://literallyunbelievable.org/, which is dedicated solely to people who do not know that The Onion and ClickHole are satirical.

Let’s play a game. I’ll post a few images and you decide whether or not each one is trustworthy and accurate. These are images I have created. I have chosen apolitical subjects for these memes (at least, as of 10/27/2016 – I do not pretend to know whether these poor animals will someday become politicized through some strange turn of fate).

firegoosememe

This one can be discounted immediately. It is unbelievable and cites no sources. If you want to be particularly skeptical, you can look it up online anyway.

 

wolfpackmeme
This one is believable and cites credible sources. If you go to those citations, you will see that the information is backed up.

 

hummingbirdmeme

This one is a little surprising, but again, the citations back up the information.

This one seems kind of odd, right? Even if you study birds, you’ve probably never heard this. But wait — there are citations. But they are very small citations, and I didn’t do you the courtesy of putting them into TinyURL first this time. What happens if you type either of those URLs in (which no one will really bother to do)? SPOILER ALERT: the claim actually doesn’t appear anywhere in the cited work. I made it up, then linked to related pages on credible sites so that on the off-chance that someone DOES go to the links, but doesn’t read them, they’ll think I must be telling the truth.

A common method for disseminating incorrect information is to link to a source that agrees with the statement, but which is biased and/or a complete hoax. If you can’t find a certain claim from a real mainstream news site or a scientific journal, you can assume that it is not true. Of course, this is rather difficult to get people to believe now that we have certain candidates openly saying that “the media” (actually an incredibly vast group of people consisting of news networks, newspapers, radio stations, and websites) is always lying. That’s an issue I’ll address in another blog post, however.

How can we stop people from falling for hoaxes on the internet? Through education. Every single time you see someone fall for a hoax, point it out. This is easier said than done, especially if it’s a family member, but it’s very important. They may not like you for it. They may not even believe you. But you have a chance to convince not just them, but the people around them (including people silently watching an internet discussion), if you bring facts. Children in schools are now being taught how to tell a good source from a bad source — reach out to your local school district and ask if they teach this skill. They probably do. The people left behind are people in their mid-twenties and older, and they need to be called out when they perpetuate misinformation. We can change the culture of the internet if we stop letting these things stand unchallenged.