I enjoy the immersive sim subgenre of video games, focused on player agency and interlocking systems. I’m also a fan of the games of Arkane, who have made many of those over the years. While Dishonored and Prey rightfully get a lot of love, I haven’t checked out their earlier titles. I decided to give one of their early games, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic a shot. Is it actually interesting? Let’s find out!
Continue readingMedia
Very brief thoughts on Being There
America was in a bad way in the 1970’s, and political dramas from the time reflected the malaise. While Network gets a lot of attention (and rightfully so, as a great film) in the genre, an underappreciated classic from the same milieu is Hal Ashby’s 1979 film Being There. In contrast to Network, with its brash calls to action (“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”), Being There has a subtlety to its observations, and dare I say, might have aged better. I think we’re too fragmented as a society to all shout out from our windows in unison, after all. Spoilers below the fold!
Continue readingObservation on the real-time strategy genre
Quick post sharing a theory I have. The RTS genre’s heyday was in the 90s. What used to be a big category of games that sold really well is mostly a niche, catering to the hardcore – and those just tend to play established games such as Age of Empires 2 or StarCraft. But the interesting thing to me is why it no longer is the case.
Continue readingFixing Returnal hanging at a black screen
I’ve been enjoying Returnal recently, but I’ve had a ton of technical issues with it. Half the time when starting the game, or performing certain actions, it would just hang at a black screen. Sometimes, the game would be still running and updating the system resource monitoring, but be completely unresponsive.
Turns out if you’re running Windows 10 LTSC, you lack the VP9 codec, which the cutscenes are in. The black screen is because it can’t play the cutscene properly. (Any bits about DX11/DX12 seem to be red herrings.) The VP9 codec is on the Windows Store, but since you don’t have that in LTSC, you can install it via other means. For example, this dump in the Internet Archive contains the codecs you’re looking for; install them, and after a reboot, things should work again.
Dealing with the vending machine achievement in Control
I was trying to get the last achievement in Control; killing four of the possessed vending machines that drop loot. Unfortunately, it seems that if you die while one is active, they never seem to respawn again. Even worse, the only way to unbreak this is to use the mission select and take you back to the Endgame chapter, which is after you’ve completed the main campaign. Note that said chapter will have your last progress of the AWE DLC; if you’ve had the issue at Endgame, you’ll need to roll back to an even earlier chapter. For me, I had beat AWE at Endgame, but the vending machines were still untouched.
You’ll lose progress, so make a backup of your saves. I found them in this directory (Steam version, on Linux):
~/.local/share/Steam/userdata/<Steam User ID Here>/870780
After you do what you needed to do, you should be able to roll back to your original saved game and get your progress back. I was able to do this and now I’ve got 100% achievement progress with my original saved game.
Brief thoughts on Princess Mononoke
Princess Mononoke has been talked about a lot elsewhere – why wouldn’t it be? It’s a great movie that everyone should watch. What I want to talk about briefly is the motivation for characters, and how they put many “prestige TV” dramas to shame in terms of complexity. Spoilers below the fold!
Continue readingEconomics Has Become a Spiritual Thing: How David Byrne Predicted Open Source and Startups
Here’s a post off-the-cuff (and not what I usually write): True Stories is one of my favourite movies that never gets talked about. It’s got everything – Talking Heads songs done better than the album, observing the state of the American suburbs of the 1980’s, and bizarre monologues. What’s not to love?
The scene I want to talk about the most though, is the scene where Byrne has dinner with a local businessman (the kind revered for contributions to their local and small community) and his family. It’s one of the most amusing scenes, but also the most prophetic – particularly for people in the computer business.
Thoughts on The Man from Earth
I recently watched the much-lauded-on-the-Internet film The Man from Earth. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s about a Cro-Magnon man that’s immortal, has experienced history, and lives to tell about it to his unknowing friends. This movie gets praised a lot for its thought-provoking plot and effective use of its budget. While it gave me some ideas to meditate on, and I thought it was a great example of a “bottle episode”, I think it falls short in the claim of being one of the best intellectual movies. I wonder if a lot of its praise might have been due to coming at the right time at the right place. Spoilers (and unpolished opinions) below!