Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

So idk no one else watch all 5 yet.

They're neat, but they're not "black mirror"

The draw for black mirror is technological horror/nightmare and a couple are more friendly. None of these really fit the nightmare or really fit at all. They're more like twilight zones.


These would be good twilight zones, they're bad black mirrors. They should've been doing twitter, meta / vr sets, zombie apocalypse via smart phones, another political nightmare. There is a MYRIAD of blackmirror ***just happening right now that was ripe for the ripping. And they just completely missed it.

Random thought. When games have moral choices, I think it'd be more interesting if those choices were better ingrained in the game's mechanics. Keep the "good" choice morally fulfilling, but give the "mean" choice some sort of benefit.

The way most games seem to do it is just give different dialogue depending on the choice, and often filling up a "good guy" and "bad guy" bar to encourage you to select all of one choice for each playthrough. I'm not implying every game should have dozens of intricate, branching paths, because I understand how much extra work that would be.

In real life, being selfless is a lot more challenging than being selfish, but they both have their own rewards. If they give you more immediate gratification for choosing the selfish option in games, it would give more meaning to both. It might even make the "Renegade" playthrough the Easy Mode, and might force players to make really tough decisions if their "Paragon" playthrough is seeing them struggling for resources because they're being too charitable.

Maybe your first playthrough is so challenging that your success completely relies on making selfish choices. Then every subsequent playthrough, as you get better at conserving resources, you can make more and more altruistic choices. That's adding replay value, gameplay satisfaction, and mechanical challenge to the game, with minimal impact on design time.

Fable 2 did that, being good is harder than being evil in that game. I don't think the result was too good though....



Only Bioware RPG(KOTOR, Mass Effect etc) did that no? Many other rpg like Undertale, Fallout, Disco Elysium doesn't do that, instead the world will change based on player's actions.

Honestly I am never a fan of Bioware's system to begin with. It encourages player min max and discourage players role-play too much in my eyes.

Some non-Bioware games I've seen sort of do some of those things better. Of the Fallout games I've played, as well as the first BioShock, they give you different rewards depending on your choices, but not necessarily noticeably better for being selfish. Like, if you choose to Harvest the Little Sisters, they give you more ADAM up front, but you're given a wider variety of rewards only a little while later for Saving them instead.

What made me think of this in the first place was I was watching a stream of someone playing Red Dead Redemption 2. In the middle of a cutscene, the streamer was suddenly presented with the option to either help or abandon a particular NPC. Without skipping a beat, the streamer chose to help the NPC, saying their reason for doing so was because they were doing a "good" playthrough this time. It made me take a step back and think about how shallow those black-and-white morality systems really are.

100%. I've always liked Mass Effect, but its morality system is pretty garbage.

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While mixxer failed miserably, looks like kick bout to kick twitches *** right into bankruptcy (not amazon obviously)

With the upcoming RPG entry that is trying to regain some prevalence among the modern consumers, XVI, it seems like "fun"(in terms of having it while playing vs something you build up to along some laid-out track) is more a byproduct of video games than an actual design intent. Not to say this is some revelation, rather, this makes me wonder if others here would also be interested in something that tries to keeps you engaged while you are actually playing the dang'ol vidya game.

Feels like trying to make summary of the game in question here, beyond mentioning it has clear FF Tactics, Grandia and even Shadow Hearts influences, would be superfluous given how many of us can make our own impressions given the chance, so just gonna leave it in spoiler.

I've always been fond of the morality meter in the true Ogre Battle series.

They called it the Chaos Frame, and in some entries it is invisible to the player. It goes up or down depending on your dialogue choices, and your dialogue choices always impact the game directly, whether it be a simple choice of which route to take or ever so slightly different responses.

But it's also more greatly effected by whether or not you capture or liberate towns. To liberate a town, it has to be held by enemy forces(there is no liberating neutral towns), and the alignment of the unit you send to it has to match the town's morality. Whether than be good or bad, it's lawful or chaotic, though obviously these eventually trend towards good or evil for the most part.

To change the alignment of your units, depends on your actions in individual battles. If you are ruthless and always kill units to the last man, and over level your units compared to the enemy, you generally get alignment down, pushing them to be chaotic. If, however, you merely fight to push enemy units away and fight at even or lesser strength, you often get alignment up. This is a simplification as other things do effect it, but that's the gist.

In this manner, it is possible to have an entirely chatoically aligned army, but come out with a Lawful Chaos Frame by the end of the game, netting you the good ending.

Also rather than represent the Chaos Frame with two poles, it is merely a meter. If it's full, that's 100% Lawful. If it's empty that's 0% Lawful. The lower your score, the worse your ending/more evil stuff happens etc.

It's not perfect, but it's my favorite morality system in video games.

Welp, I wasn't expecting to pull off two 9-boss sorties in one night, but I'll take it.

This talk of Tactics Ogre makes me want to play FF Tactics again. I had a lot of fun with that game, but there are rumors of a remake so I may just hold off for now....

I still want to get into at least Dhartok kill.

Does the basement bosses have some sort of rage mechanism? Or maybe I can try dishing dmg to beat them?

I mean there is no secret in the traditional burst setups, only some gear requirement to hit those short times.

That and because multiboxing is what making me do stuffs lower.

If there is a DPS race in those fights, i kinda gonna need some improvement in my line up.

Anyone playing Diablo 4?
What are your thoughts on the grind; aspect and gear farming?
I think I'm more likely to get 10x perfectly augmented +2 JSE earrings for each of my FFXI jobs before I get a single relevant piece for my vorttex barb in Diablo 4.
Maybe I'm going about this wrong.

Also, I tried twice the botulus to get the metal, arsehole didnt give me the chest in neither...

I did WS in its back, all chars registered in hate but there must be missing something

You mean FFXVI, right?

That's a pretty apt description of how I feel about FF16

Glad to know ENB's game is coming along & is finally presentable! Been a while since I last checked on his streams.

Yes, all the basement bosses have a rage mechanic, effectively a dps check. After 3min they all start doing more annoying TP moves.

For Dhartok that's the poison clouds, Triboulex has a hard 3min timer after which he does a wipe move and so forth. Generally want to finish them in under 3min.

Botulus is a little *** and not everything is known about his chest. Generally "do most dmg from behind him" seems to be part of it. I have also randomly not got chest even after this.

UFOs real? aliens or some secret blackbox technology, or some ancient civilization that was dormant and now being caught as more and more communication technology becomes more and more available to everyone?

It doesn't do it often, but Final Fantasy Tactics offers a few neat moments of player choice. The noble choice is usually a lot harder, but the cowardly choice permanently lowers the Bravery of your units (y'know, until you permanently raise it back using Inspire).

For example, when you first run into Algus being attacked by thugs (which he likely provoked by flashing money at them and saying how much better he was than them, the pompous little ***) you're given the choice to make his life the priority or not. Either way, your objective is to defeat all of the enemies, but if you choose to make his life a priority and he's KOed, it's Game Over. If you choose otherwise, he can get KOed 100 times and it's OK, but you lose Bravery.

The current term is UAP (IIRC), unidentified aerial phenomena. (I am positive about the aerial phenomena part.)

Do these aerial phenomena include the classic UFOs with little green, or gray, men? We don't know. But they do include things we can explain as well as things we can't.

Some say there are UFOs in Ezekiel. "Wheels within wheels, way in the middle of the air." Check it out!

feed me some media to consume about this please.

My nut theory based on some of Joe Rogan's recent guests:

That recent news story about the 8ft tall aliens in vegas is so fake lol

Revelations 21:15 LITERALLY has the dimensions of something coming out of the sky.

*** linux. Decided to watch a dvd and it just did'nt work. I don't mind tech issues per se, but what gets me is that it used to work. Regression is infuriating to say the least. I have broken packages or something? I don't *** know. Sometimes you just can't figure this ***out.

The intelligence whistle blower 1 week before that wasnt fake. Would be interesting to see how often legitimate UFO related news is followed up by ridiculous false UFO news. Like drowning out the message with amplified noise to get everyone to dismiss it all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spaceships_of_Ezekiel

https://forward.com/culture/470977/the-secret-jewish-history-of-ufos-and-why-ezekiel-might-have-had-a-close/

https://www.thetorah.com/article/ufo-and-alien-encounters-in-the-bible-reconstructed-by-ai (amusing AI pics!)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3498620/ Movie that I had never heard of. Nor its actors either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GwZfhcv35M

Of all things to have a dyslexic slip on, but yeah thanks for the catch, it should be fixed.

Burn

Oh. this. Yes I've seen many talk about how the christian God was just an alien or time traveler.
I had some atheist friends in high school and we used to debate for hours after school on the existence of God.
After 3-4 years worth of debates the 2 of them cave and say "fine. we believe there is a supreme power out there. some super inteligence. but it isn't some man with a grey beard in the sky shooting thunderbolts of wrath - i.e western mind of"God"".

We believe that the supreme force, master intelligence, originator, and one above all, is "God". It's just that in most Western minds "God" triggers a visual image of a humanoid/man. That's not the same case in the middle east. When you say "God", it doesn't trigger an image of a human. most report it triggers an image of bright blinding light.

I hypothesize that while God was sending messengers to bring humans out of ignorance, the devil and his offspring of demons were busy pretending to be false Gods and deities. And that's what I believe some UFO's are; the Djinn.

Sorry, the Ezekiel / flying saucer thing is only tangentially about god due to the vehicle / saucer often being described as god's chariot.

The controversy is all about is this a flying saucer or a vision / hallucination.

Have you ever tried DMT?

That line always cracks me up


This was filmed by someone I know (the title says "UFO" in Arabic):


The guy is a polyglot & a polymath, with an IQ of over 190. Just pointing out that he's not some random dude chewing grass.