Anyway,
Play
I can't remember playing much recently. I really need to crack on with Esoteric Ebb and Dispatch. I'm going into London next week for the Valorant Champions, which should be entertaining. Though we arranged everything, then realised we could've gone to multiple eSports events in Paris as they're moving the World Cup there. However, that is laced with dirty Saudi blood money, so maybe it's for the best.
Want
I have to say the new ROG Ally with the OLED screen is probably going to have to be bought. It's going to be bundled with the new XREAL glasses, so people think it'll be about 2k dollars. I can't even use the XREAL glasses as I don't wear contact lenses much any more…. I still feel a strong pull to get it….
Bin
We had three days of summer in Ireland, now the long range forecasts suggest 2 solid months of rain. I'm Welsh, so I do appreciate rain as a norm, but bloody hell the West coast of Ireland is depressing sometimes.
Massive 20 percent redundancies where my partner works (she missed this round of cuts, but there will be more). I can last a year or two more in the business I'm in, but holy fuck the jobs landscape looks bleak. AI-catastrofucking, tightening margins and a completely overblown world economy that has to be heading for a full on crash of epic proportions. And a world already a tinderbox driven by oligarchs and populist politicians. I know, by some metrics, everything is supposed to be getting better, but wouldn't it be nice to see that from time to time?
Bin
UK politics is a complete mess at the moment. Seriously starting to think we're going to have to go through a period of Nazis to get back to the good stuff again.
Yeah, as I said in the off Topic thread - I think I've reached this point now. The people going all in an Reform will be the most fucked by them. I'll do brilliantly out of it. At some point you have to shrug your shoulders, give people a dose of Orban, and then check back in ten years and see how they're getting on. For sure, as I've said many times it's a bit like the Sheriff of Nottingham in Shrek (some of you may die but it's a price I'm willing to pay) but fuck it. If I read one of these fuckers writing THE LEFT ARE THE REAL FASCISTS on a social media post again, I will literally scream.
Why is the new God of War generating any excitement at all - it looks near identical to the other two. With a gender swap. Narrow FOV, corridor levels, QTE heavy combat, looks very pretty. Utterly meh.
I think it's the principle of it - the entire database in the system I designed to try to cure cancer is 10Gb.
Is Forza 6 15x better than curing cancer? I don't think so.
Late Play - Ravenswatch.
This is a good looking Hades-esque roguelike/roguelite. One big plus is that it's multiplayer (which is fine for 2, but probably uplayable for 4). It also has some interesting character designs, which go a little further than the Gauntlet-style classes you still get in games like this. It looks great, has random map generation, plays well and probably should be fantastic - but it's also hard as nails. Every enemy is a bullet/damage sponge, and it's the sort of game where you have to learn intricate attack patterns. It's like the opposite to Diablo IV, which is superficially similar, but just has you wading through enemies with barely a thought (unless you're playing on the harder difficulties, but even then….). I don't know if I like it - I might try playing more of it coop and see if it's more palatable.
Want
A Switch 2, maybe. I really want to play Mario Kart, even though I know it's not great. Maybe I'll dive in at the next bundle.
Bin
My partner is looking to become tangled up in the latest set of big tech firms doing layoffs because of AI. It does feel like a proper snake eating its own tail system at the moment. If you AI everything, then who is left to be a good capitalist consumer of anything? I'm just hoping I can eke out 10 years of work until retirement, but I do wonder about what my kids are going to be doing for jobs.
I was in until I saw Forza 6 was 153Gb. Jesus wept.
cavalcade