From the way you've described your mental health problems, I've had similar friends who have found stable, loving relationships. So there's hope, though I know that can be the most infuriating thing to hear.
A highly customizable table is the core of how you pilot your ship. It's an overview that gives you a list of everything you've set it up to show in space around you, as well as a bunch of columns with information on said objects. Some of it is obvious and straight forward, like distance, but goes down into the minutia like transversal velocity. You can set up a bunch of presets for checking on different things.
Logistics and economy are huge parts of the game that you could mostly ignore (though at some point you're going to open the market which is exactly as detailed and dorky as you imagine) which will prompt you to make your own actual spreadsheets at some point. Though funnily, in the 10ish years I played I never made a spreadsheet despite being notorious for doing it in other games.
There is just a ton of math and potentially useful data accessible to the player that you might want to use at some point.
My potentially hot take is the spreadsheet UI is the best, all MMOs should do it, and the worst parts of Eve's UI are the parts that aren't spreadsheets.
Weird how the times have changed with VOY. It was never hated, but I never saw love for it until long after new-Trek. The argument used to be whether VOY or ENT was the worst lol
SNW is worth trying. It's got a couple of really solid episodes and a few of the characters are great, I'm a particular fan of Mbenga. It still hasn't grown the beard in my opinion, but it's much better than PIC or STD and seems like it could grow one.
The best of new-Trek is actually Star Trek: Resurgence though. It’s a Telltale style game set in the TNG era and gets it. The first act is spot on quality Trek, and the rest is still decent multi-episode finale stuff.
ENT & VOY above TNG & DS9 would have been a wild top three before 2009. Weird hit of nostalgia thinking about how much of an argument that would have stirred lol
I really need to rewatch Enterprise at some point. I keep seeing people say the later stuff is good, but my recollection is it was annoying time travel stuff and actually worse than the earlier seasons. It's making me doubt myself, especially given how long ago it was.
You're kind of right. Discovery S1 was trying to be a dark, prestige drama. It felt a lot more like BSG than Trek. I haven't watched it since it premiered but I don't remember hating it, though I didn't love it either.
They fired their show runner pretty early, so there is another tone shift from S2 onward. The tone becomes a lot more like the new-Trek movies, and later much more like Strange New Worlds. Take a look at screenshots from Season 4 compared to Season 1 to see just how much it shifted stylistically.
The real issue isn't aesthetic or tonal, it's that the writing is excruciating.
Just a heads up if you do try it, I mean the original not Catalyst. The sequel constantly kills that flow state with all the annoying intrusions you'll see from other AAA open world games. It's not the worst game ever, I did finish it, but it was the last time I bought something on release.
The original is just a short collection of levels. It's extremely minimalist. The only diversions from the flow is a simple story linking them and a handful of hidden collectibles.
(which is a part of the modern era of games as far as I’m concerned)
Yeah I was ready to shake my fist at the the idea these were "old" games, but in fairness we're talking about 15 years ago. It's entirely possible the creator of the video wasn't even born yet when Oblivion was released. It's way longer than we used to give games before we considered them old, though I think that's a result of how rapid obvious progress was - which has slowed down drastically.
Him fawning over the Witcher 3 as an old game from another era cracked me up though.
It's easy to look back on JRPG classics today, but 95-05 was also the dark ages of localization. So many titles got mangled that the mainstream perception of JRPGs was very similar to bad cult movies, especially during the trend chasing rush after Final Fantasy VII's success.
Even those that avoided translation butchery were still highly divisive outside of it's niche fanbase. The "western" RPG and JRPG divide was largely defined by people arguing over them in the 00s after western RPGs made their shift towards being narrative focused. The primary need for distinction, for the "western" RPG set at least, was that JRPG writing was seen as pretty poor. Ironic given some of the absolute slop "western" RPGs had put out that was being conveniently ignored in this argument, but I digress.
But that aside, yeah my anecdote was made with western RPGs in mind. There was a heavy emphasis on dungeon crawling and questing as a barebones narrative excuse to adventure. Kill monsters, get treasure. It's very much like the history of D&D in that way (not by accident). It's not until the late 90s, with games like Fallout and Baldur's Gate, that a shift occurred.
Even then, that shift was hardly over night. What defined something as an RPG was a big debate among that crowd. The systems crowd argued it was the mechanical structures brought over from TTRPGs, while the new wave of fans argued it was the narrative elements that made it unique. This hit it's peak as the genre hybridized with 'action' games and started to shed many of the TTRPG structures.
But that's all kind of irrelevant history. The video, and my response, is talking about broad popular trends and conceptions at the time. There were always exceptions, but the era the video mostly fawns over still hadn't even settled the "can games be art?" debate. The medium was still seen as very low-brow as a whole.
Eh, yes and no. It might help illustrate the limitations of testing for some people, but it's not really telling us anything new about them. It is meant to cheaply provide an indication of how a student is fairing and has never been considered by anyone serious as some kind of comprehensive measure of intelligence. Their flaws have been known for a long time.
It was already a rough start but the claim that people didn't say things like "the graphics look incredible" was so ridiculous I had to pause it, especially while simultaneously showing clips from around the 7th gen. We absolutely praised games for their graphics back then (and much earlier), not just in terms of technological advancement over other titles but as things that were visually pleasing even outside of being a game. 7th Gen is actually notable for how aggressive the marketing around graphics became.
We did not, in fact, talk mostly about the stories of games. For a long time video game writing was widely considered unimportant. There were exceptions of course, though this thinking was so wide spread that I think younger gamers might be surprised to find that even RPG stories were often secondary - at best - to the game play for a long time. Story became a much larger feature once voice acting came to prominence in the mid-00s, but it would take awhile to catch on.
The author then states that Assassin's Creed 2 and Black Flag had memorable stories. What? I played both at the time, and had enjoyed both, but their stories were entirely forgettable. The writing of the series was even kind of a punch line at the time. You know the thing people really talked about with Assassin's Creed 2? How cool it was to parkour through such a beautiful recreation of renaissance Italy.
The stuff about how there were no microtransactions back then is nonsense as well. The period he keeps going back to for old games was the rise of this bullshit. Oblivion's horse armor was already years earlier.
The vibe of this video is just an awkward teenager lamenting he wasn't born in his imagined version of an earlier time.
The disappointing thing is, I do actually prefer older games. I think there is a wealth of interesting discussion about the things that were done differently. This video just isn't it.
soli @ solitaire @infosec.pub Posts 1Comments 244Joined 2 yr. ago
From the way you've described your mental health problems, I've had similar friends who have found stable, loving relationships. So there's hope, though I know that can be the most infuriating thing to hear.