Video Games

I'm at 3000ish hours, the most minute differences feel massive to me now. But, my conclusion after my experiments, which weren't that fancy, I just did a mix of free training and plat/diamond/champ challenges to see which car performed best and it was consistently dominus for me across the board, despite rarely playing it much of this year.

I think the octane dominance is likely a few reasons. One, it's the main car of the game and the one you're most likely to start out with, so you'll stick with it. Another reason, which I kinda disagree with, is that it has the tallest hitbox of any car (except I think Merc - but merc hitbox is its whole other story), which is supposed to make it better at challenging or something. I swear the way I challenge and go for double touches favors a car like dominus or plank. My argument is the HEIGHT of the car doesn't matter when almost every play in rocket league isn't on some perfect x/y/z axis, cars are twisting and turning constantly all over the place. In that case, a car with the largest *surface area* would probably be strongest, right? because I can maneuver my car in a way to maximize that surface area and become most likely to get the winning touch in a contest situation. I've only rarely heard pros mention this.

What can I say about this game really? It's star citizen. you probably heard of it, the 500+ million behemoth project that has been in an open alpha state for 9 years now. It has a devoted following of absolute fanatics that have pumped thousands of dollars into a game that doesn't even have a projected release date of 2027 that they will almost certainly not reach. More likely 2030 at earliest.

So why would you play such a game?? Scame?

No. I do not think so.

Star citizen is a game in which there is no real goal or point, it's a truly massive space hyper-realistic space exploration/flight sim that for some reason has an entire CoD-like FPS bolted on to it. You can smuggle, you can bounty hunt, you can be a cargo runner, you can be an errand boy, a doctor, sky's the limit really - I have yet to think of something I want to do that I couldn't make a modest "living" at in that game. I would say the game it most reminds me of right now is star wars galaxies, a ~2002 MMO based in the star wars universe that was basically aspiring to be exactly what this game is. It's an emphasis on player driven content, rather than scripted MMO's like WoW or FF online. E.g., "we create the playground, it's your job to play now." I like that design in a MMO and nothing since star wars galaxies has really captured that. Part of this will likely be driven by player-built real estate and housing, but I'll get back to that later, because it's super duper interesting.

And if you don't want to play the mmo?? that's fine. There's a single player mode coming (allegedly), but right now there's also a star fighter mode that's f2p pretty much, and a cod-like game as I mentioned before that is actually not half bad from what little I have played (I do not generally like war-sim kind of shooters but it was fine). But the MMO mode is the real star of the show here. My god, it is GORGEOUS. Like, in a "this may break your machine if all your drivers aren't up to date and you don't have an insane rig" kind of way. It crashed my PC 3 times for drawing too much power, something I didn't even know I could do. So, be aware right now, that's gonna be a limiting factor for a lot of people. I have a $1500 gaming rig, and all I can do is medium settings at 60+ FPS. It stresses processor, memory, GPU like a benchmark would. It uses EVERYTHING, but my god it's some of the best graphics I have ever seen hands down in my 30 years of gaming now. Unbelievably good.

The world/solar system. Oh my god it's scale is truly overwhelming. So, first off, this game is actually 1/6th scale of an actual solar system. Like I'm not joking. If you decided to drive without quantum drive across the solar system it'd take you a number of years maybe in the thousands. The planets are planet sized and you can land anywhere you want on them. There are hidden things everywhere - for instance, someone found a drug outpost several years ago, and players wage wars over it sometimes. Player driven content. It's the best kind of content you can experience in a MMO. Getting back to the player real estate, if they ever get that implemented, then this game's gonna become gangbusters fast, and I mean FAST. I've seen the creativity of players in games like this when real estate gets involved.

The game itself is fun. I've been doing a mix of smuggling and courier work. Flying is legit fun - it scratches my boat driving itch. Space flight simulator feels very boat-like but you just have a third axis, so I found it came pretty quickly to me, within ~1-2 hours I was taking off and landing without issues. However, I have seen people whining in chat that they cant do it after 12+ hours, so be wary of that, if you are interested.

My entry point was $40 pledge. I got a fully functional ship, enough credits to get some gear, and some starting gear/gun of my own. Cool. I started in the bounty hunter town and did some bounties and quickly learned I didn't know what I was doing. I'm better now - but I've turned to a life of crime after nearly ending up in prison over essentially a parking violation. This game's hilarious like that.

So, yea. In concept there's a LOT of game here for $40. You'll probably spend more - you can purchase ship upgrades, which you can refund at any time (called "smelting" I think) but once you buy a ship it's yours forever, apparently, even through server resets, of which they do time to time. In fact,, there's a major reset coming in the next few weeks (allegedly).

Speaking of which you may have noticed by now me saying "if" and "allegedly" and stuff like that. Well, there's a simple reason, and we're about to get to the cons here. The reason is they are adding entire game systems and expansions still while this game's in late alpha. It seems like a neverending project and if you invest in this game like you'll ever see its release I think you're doing it wrong. It's impossibly buggy and probably would be considered unplayable to the average retail geek, but since it's an alpha build, instability is to be expected. There is annoying stuff that can and will happen to you and it won't be your fault at all, but to be fair, the game is absolutely MASSIVE and I'm amazed as much works as it does.

So yea. Not a scame imo, if your goal is to have fun in a very very playable space simulator.

I wanted to play elden ring out of nowhere today too but didn't wanna use 100gb of disk space so decided not to.

I fired up MultiVersus, the Warner Bros smash bros look-alike that's actually nothing like smash bros except the basic premise.

They have a random mishmash of weird and fun characters. Rick and morty, the gremlins, lebron for some reason is a character. Not a huge cast and no one feels overly powerful except FUCK Arya stark. I'm a rick main and having a blast. It's considerably more complex than smash brothers. It's come a long way since the open pre-release that was in like, July I think? I played it for about 10 mins and said "cool" and then never played again til I saw it's now on its season 2.

I've played super smash brothers since I was ~9 years old. Whenever it first came out, I got it on the first day on N64. Everyone in elementary school was hyped on it. I never stopped playing and did some competitive stuff like 2 sequels ago. So, this was a little harder to dive into because the major difference between this and smash is you have no shield. Just a really shitty dodge that has a cooldown. so lots of times the best defense is an all out offensive combo fest, and it feels very fast and frantic compared to smash. I won like my first 8 games with rick and ended up against a top 30 player, so the ladder system works. ended up like solidly diamond-ish, no idea the ranks yet other than what it tells me on MMR for casual. I still have yet to unlock ranked despite playing at least 50 games today.

Rick is a hilarious character btw. His down attack summons a butt that farts and launches opponents upward and its one of his main kill abilities and never fails to make me giggle when it kills someone. He has all his funny quotes and even the butt shake animation for a taunt. He has made me laugh many times throughout a game by his voice quotes. "GOD DAMNIT!" when he dies. Or when it's sudden death he will act very arrogant like "oh noooooo not sudden death."  He plays as a "mage" which means he mostly zones you out with range attacks. you can set up whacky combos by clever usage of portals and meseeks summons.

One weird thing is they consider their 2v2 the main competitive mode. I find 1v1 far more technically challenging and the competitive gaming scene is going to prefer it for that reason. 2v2 is a big button mash fest. I do believe this will be a competitive game. It's far deeper than it appears and the skill ceiling is extremely high. Low skill floor + high skill ceiling usually makes for an amazing game. Look forward to seeing how it does.

Oh, about its monetization. It's f2p + you can buy stuff. Like, I bought rick for $10 because I didn't want to stream me failing on bugs bunny for 2 hours straight before I unlocked him. However you can unlock all the characters by simply grinding and it doesn't really take too too long. If you're dead set on a particular character you may have to spend money starting out but very likely unless you care about cosmetics this is a completely free game for you.