Hornet

Even the singleplayer experience benefits from the Lisa Simpson "Challenge you can do" effect tho w/r/t adapting controllers, accommodating colour blindness. Nah, you're right, games accommodating easy difficulty is good in some sense, but Winning feels best when it was Hard to get there. I say this as someone who is not good at videogames lmao Except sometimes. Idk. I think everyone deserves the "Omg I can't believe I actually managed to do that!" feelie.

@Lucy you bring up a valid point bringing up coordination difficulties and var. disabilities, conditions and impairments as reasons to make a game include an "Easy" mode... But I feel like "Easy mode" is a copout. Microsoft have made hella cool steps towards accessible controllers, a lot of games now have HUD and skin adaptations towards making games more accessible to the colorblind... Making the game softer rather than adapting the user experience in such a way that disabled people can smoke ablebodied players on their own merits is in some sense Cheap, y/k? I have some limited experience, though, of adaptations towards disabled use of a computer, being a) being dyspraxic enough that I can still type good, and b) once breaking a collarbone and learning to play CS against bots one handed, c) Spilling a glass of wine on a keyboard to the point that it constantly typed full stops and adapting to using microsoft On Screen Keyboard to the point i could type 70wpm d) playing videogames w/ disabled adults on the reg. e) having a wife that LOVES farcry but gets simulated motion sickness so bad she borks. "Hard" is definitely subjective though, at The Bad Place, there was a dude laughing at the idea that games around emotional intelligence should be a thing, and that games purely about twitch reflex is kind of underselling the medium... and I listed about twelve games that had an Emotional Intelligence route that was done very well... One in particular being LA Noire. (As someone with shit memory, LA Noire made me better at finding things btw... I search my house for dumbshit like my keys now in a systematic way that is like, walk in a repeating line search for the thing, looking at every point in the house once in a big ol sweep.)

Replay value, replayability probably has a lot to do with whether games ought have an easy mode. If ur game is enjoyable on a second playthrough, easy mode is probably a better idea, because you get to like... Get good at the game, and have fun playing it on a higher difficulty the second time through as a norm, and the third time through as HaRdCoRe idk, there's a line in the Simpsons that was Lisa responding to the teech saying; "I thought you said you wanted a challenge!" and she is like... "Yes but a challenge I can DooOoOooOo..." That.

Today I walked for nearly six continuous hours as the guy I look after went into various stores trying to make a 25 pence saving on a canned drink. He was convinced that 85 pence was too much to pay, and that he had seen it at a different store for 60. So we went to five. different. fucking. stores looking for dat elite 25 pence saving... Then I took him into one of the maker spaces in town and said "Look; if you go to one of THESE places you can learn a craft. They will let you play with tools and you can learn something." He said he would think about it, then we spent 3 more hours shuffling around for no reason. The whole time we discussed his repetoire of about five different topics of conversation. We walked past two museums, a library, and three galleries. I lost my vape pen in a field. Sat down for a moment and that shit rolled out of my pocket. He spent a lot of the day trying to think of an insulting nickname for me. One day I am going to twist his head off. After work I went to the pub and read 2 chapters of True Grit and had 2 beers. Yesterday my best friend since childhood told me he intended to poison a cat. He is planting lillies with intent. I told him to buy a super soaker, an ultrasonic scarer, one of those sculptures with marbles for eyes that scare cats away. That he could plant lavender. That he could push toothpicks into the earth so the ground is unpleasant to stand on He said no. He's planting lilies in the hope that the cat dies.

(BTW I switched from Normal to Easy on Bioshock Infinite to clear the final boss, fuck that boss... If you haven't focused on DPS the whole game and instead finesse, and the last part of the game is a TIMED boss with a shitload of health? You fucked up.) (haha "specced for DPS... how do you do fellow kids)

I'd say "let the user choose the experience they would prefer" is valid; but the challenge to that is "It's more important to preserve the artistic integrity of the game". Outside of gameplay difficulty, a game narrative I really respect is MGS2's. Kojima repeatedly messes with the player's expected, anticipated enjoyment in order to make some weird-ass postmodern statement. It's commendable that he chooses not to give the player what they think they want in favor of something arguably better. Games like Dark Souls, I figure, are intended to scare the shit out of you via a rollercoaster effect of heightening monster grossness = AAAAAA FUCK FUCK FUCK I gotta marshal myself to beat this guy otherwise I am going down hard. The problem with an easy mode in such games is like; what if playing on Easy becomes the norm and the effect is ruined? It's a little like putting "easy mode" into a rollercoaster where at the flick of a switch the drops are smaller or the ride is slower. That's not to say difficulty can't Ruin a game, Far Cry 5 introduced a superhard difficulty mode for New Game+ that, because they didn't bother to balance the scripted sections (Such as mandatory vehicle turret sections) didn't give the player challenge but basically made those sections into a savescumming craps game where you might die or else luck the hell out. I'm going to completely hedge and say "Some...times... an easy mode in a game is a good idea?"

I think dude realizes what you're saying, but he's arguing against having an easy option because it encourages people to ruin their own experience, rather than having the intended experience which included being like... Terrified of the models of the monsters because not only do they look scary, they are a threat to your progress through the game, & that Easy mode will just mean that people will be inclined to squash their own experiences, and the monsters will never represent threat. Makes sense to me, but I'd argue that the entry barrier to computer games... Like, if you don't know what certain colours of bars and numbers are typically symbolically coded to mean (Red bar is health, blue bar is shield, yellow means invincible, -0 means no damage,) from past experience you are absolutely Boned if you ever want to get into videogames. Having an easy mode in a computer game means that the bar to getting into videogames as a new player is lowered. And once you're familiar with typical mechanics of games and the tropes of a typical HUD you will probably become a "Normal" player.

Typically I've gone with companions or I've sat down and read, but there's one memorable night where me and some mates were sat off in a heavy metal pub; and oneeight had gotten out of work and bought a big rotisserie chicken, we caught her and waylaid her to the pub with is; and we just busted that chicken out and shared it with the rest of the pub. That was weird and cool.

Oneeight: "You were at Billy Ocean! He played Carfest" Me: "Oh, I don't remember" Oneeight: "That's because it was fucking boring."

Michael Jackson HIM Cradle of Filth Then w/ oneeight

Tried making this; eyeballed it wrong and while eating it knew it could be better, but it was still very very good! (Hey, it embedded, awesome!) What's the consensus on non-chicken eggs? For me; duck no, quail hell yes.

Some of the most savage parts of the Offit book, that he presents with some tact; - Jenny McCarthy tilts at various toxins alleged to be in vaccines with a face full of botulinum toxin (This was a masterclass in parliamentary language) - The anti-vaccine movement existed when vaccines were invented, in p.much the same form Just finished Grey Eminence by Huxley... Which is legit making me want to switch majors to PPE

I thought the treatment of the lore of the movie was done well... He managed to spin enough to leave you not frustrated and to spin a certain invisible grossness to the whole arrangement of your own imagining, while not explaining everything, which means that you leave the cinema speculating. The "line" is to sort of leave the audience with the sense of an internally consistent otherworld that you don't know the full truth of, and he managed that, and that's boss. It sticks with you.

Charp clocked Moby Dick recently and said the same thing about it being very in-depth down to the specific obscure maritime knots used on var. bits of rigging; and also lots of Very Gay cerumen-kneading. I really ought to sit down and read a Tome, but I tend to be limited to reading books the size of my pocket. (reading being smn I do on public transport and pubs and only very rarely in the house, which is where my PS4 and laptop live.) I shud probably dig my 2011 kindle fire out of the cobwebs it resides in and actually use the thing. For the 100% truth in physical books being tangible and pleasant and probably better for retention; an ebook enables you to discretely walk around with a thousand-pager without people going "Pff."

I was just leaning back on my not-mafia-playing ass going "heh... people gettin into Out Of Game beef over a game... ludicrous" Then I remembered the time I came very close to flipping off an escape room camera during a fucking team building exercise with a service user. Don't give me the solutions to puzzles I've already solved maze-bitch (He actually said even before I went in that people tend to get all het up at those things and will flip off or curse out the cameras/host and it's all fine and expected x) )

I enjoyed the last collection more; because it was a grab-bag or an anthology. I think that's a better way to read Junji Ito than to read a few hundred pages on the same concept (even tho he did vary the takes on it a lot.) The truly weird shit his brain conjures and the variety of it is way more engaging than pages of, oh she's pretty but now she has a bunch of weird heads. I think I'd have enjoyed the Tomie stories more if I'd read them sort of organically... Here and there between other Ito madness. The way I did it; (Read the entire manga in a day) felt repetitious. But as I say that's because I bought a trade. Stories themselves are fine.

Saw this at the cinema yesterday. I was expecting it to be in the vein of Get Out; horror via social commentary about race, and a slow creeping burn. There is social commentary abt class and standpoint, but it's primarily a balls-out horror film about doppelgangers who want to kill you. There is a message, but It is way fuckin louder and more forthrightly about entertainingly scaring you than the previous. It is very good & cinematic & really manages to disquiet, disturb, shock and surprise. "Get Out" is kind of like Silence of the Lambs; "Us" is more Carpenter or Romero. I fuckin loved it.

It's taken me a long time to come to this conclusion, and I came to it reluctantly. To me; Guillermo Del Toro is hit or miss. I fucking adore Pan's Labyrinth and the Shape of Water, like... I'm not just praising good kino there for the sake of looking patrician, I genuinely love those movies but so often he leaves me straight cold. Hellboy, for instance, did absolutely nothing for me. I didn't like it on any level. it was abject meh. Pacific Rim was a spectacular ok. So much, soooo much budget for a film I found basically fine. I go into a Del Toro picture *hoping* it's Pan's Labyrinth but always with the niggling doubt that it's just going to be base geekfeed. I want to be on board with del toro, but sometimes phhht. It's tough, bros.

(that was a "They Live" joke)

Happy Birthday bigman, 33 is a very aesthetic number

tbh I was joking x) I'm not a Who-guy except for 13, and not a show-tune guy except for Les Miz... But idk mayn maybe it could be a time. Fuck it. I'm game for anything.

I just put on these weird shades, and now it's there... wtf?

I bought a manga! For about the second time in ten years or so. An acquaintance persuaded me to buy the Junji Ito "Tomie" collection. I'd read the "Shiver" collection previously, recognizing the author/artist's name based on having read the Enigma of Arigama Fault when it was a meme. Going to try to have it read by Monday.

Adore They Live and The Thing. Those are my go-to "Cool Uncle" movies that I showed to my brothers growing up; and that I frequently throw on for older service users. I Didn't know Christine was him, though! One of the few movies based on Stephen King properties I've seen. I've read, incidentally, only 1 Stephen King story, and that was 1408, which I really liked. No idea why I haven't read more (any?) Stephen King and intend to rectify this. I remember watching Escape from New York as a kid and remember liking it a lot, but I feel like I'd appreciate it a lot more as an adult. Need to rewatch. (They Live weirdly absent from the poll, so I went with The Thing)