The Mind Of OverlordTomala

The first week of idiocracy

When I get home from work and read the political side of my RSS feed.

What a rollercoaster ride it’s been, downward… I’ve been wanting to post about these events but it’s just been too much to keep up on. Every time I read about something stupid the gelatinous orange shit stain that is President Fuckface Von Clownstick has done along with his cronies I feel exhausted just from reading it. There’s this combination of severe depression, dark humor, more depression, and then I get tired. I can assure you it isn’t from boredom. Something tells me I’ll be sleeping a lot more, and buying more popcorn while I can still afford it.

I don’t want to go into detail about it right now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much stupid take place within a single week. There’s so many things I could write about it and my head is spinning trying to process everything, reading multiple sites to confirm that this batshit craziness is real, I have no clue where to begin. If this goes on long enough I’d be okay with a nuke dropping on me, just as long as it’s while I’m sleeping.

Just when I thought I could take a break from Rapture.

Drill baby drill.

This series is drawing me in like Skyrim… I thought I could put Bioshock down I got drawn into Bioshock 2, not the remaster but the original. It runs better than the first Bioshock and I look forward to comparing it to the remaster when I finally get around to it. At a glance I can already tell one difference, the original has more achievements than the remaster. Not entirely sure why as of yet.

One of the things I had to do throughout my gameplay was remap the keys constantly. I’m not sure why they switched it up compared to the original Bioshock apart from assigning different buttons to new abilities, but to me it would make more sense to leave them on their original buttons. Like E to use or T to listen to recordings. I had to make multiple trips to the control settings, but it’s far better now than when I started. Also the mouse sensitivity was set at 0.4… DaFuq? Who was the genius that decided the 0.4 would be a good start? I mean I know you play as a Big Daddy, and Big Daddies tend to be slow as fuck unless they’re charging directly at you, but seriously…

Who’s yo daddy?

As I stated above you play as a Big Daddy, an early prototype called “Subject Delta”. For those unaware of the Bioshock lore a Big Daddy is a genetically enhanced human being who has had their skin and organs grafted with a deep diving suit, like an underwater cyborg tweaker protector of spliced drug addict children kind of thing. You, the protagonist are an early build of a Big Daddy, probably the most horrifying one to imagine too considering unlike regular Big Daddies you can use Plasmids to wreak all kinds of chaos, like shooting lightning from your hands, and bees apparently. O_o

Big Daddies have a bond with little sisters, which are little girls who were also genetically altered and mentally conditioned to get ADAM from dead corpses, a drug of sorts. In the Bioshock games you use ADAM to enhance yourself and EVE to use the powers given to you by the ADAM usually. This has left me wondering one thing, is there a powerup called STEVE?

But anyway… You’re a Big Daddy, and you have your own little sister. At least you do until the new leader of rapture forces you to pull your helmet off, killing yourself with a pistol she gives you. I’m guessing some kind of hypnosis? You’re revived what I’m guessing is years later in a vita chamber. I’ve made it into the 2nd level, chasing a big sister. Like a Big Daddy but much more ninja like…

Why couldn’t there be a game where you play as a big sister too? That could actually be kinda fun running around doing ninja stuff with guns and drills…

Hacking got an overhaul from the previous game. No more fucking pipe dream, instead you have to wait for the needle to get into a green or blue area to successfully hack into something. Landing on blue gives you an item bonus.

I’m only a little over an hour in, it takes some getting used to but I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been fun drilling and electrocuting my enemies, though you have to find fuel constantly to use your drill. Makes sense I guess, and it’s a mechanic I’m familiar with in other games. Fuel, Food, Electrolytes, Blood. It all balances out. Different games call for different ammo and sustenance.

Ok, enough Bioshock… I’ll do something else tomorrow. I promise! Kinda…

Obduction Stutter Showcase

It’s been about 5 months and Obduction still has a stuttering issue. I’ve finally sent in a dxdiag report to Cyan with a link to my YouTube video showcasing stutters and lag. I have it public for anyone else who would like to see it:

Considering you spend a good amount of time exploring, wandering back and forth, and observing the environment for clues and stuff this gets annoying on the eyes after awhile, I’d hate to imagine playing it in VR. For the quality no one should be stuttering or lagging like that, especially on cards like mine 4GB and up.

I’ll also note for the record that I’m not the only one who is annoyed by the stuttering, even YouTube caught onto it right after I uploaded the video:

As flustered as I have been for wanting to play the game without the eyesores that did make me smile a bit. It’s funny considering I’ve never had this request for gaming footage before. 😛

Resident Evil in my Killing Floor 2

Instead of playing more Bioshock I figured I’d pay a long overdue visit to Killing Floor 2, where I decided to play a custom map I got off the workshop forever ago. I didn’t even remember it until the map loaded. Needless to say I must have downloaded it while having Resident Evil on the brain.

The map uses models and textures from Resident Evil 4. Felt quite nice to frag some zeds (zombies) in a fitting atmosphere. My character is now a level 5 berzerker. My friends are light years ahead of me in leveling… It doesn’t really bother me, there’s too many games that require leveling. I’d rather let it happen and not worry about it.

Meanwhile… In Rapture

I’ve pressed onward through Bioshock Remastered, even made it to a point where the game became a horrid lagfest. Thankfully it was in just one area of the game and not the entire thing, though I would rather it didn’t.

If it’s anything I’ve learned about the Bioshock series it’s that 99% of the people you meet are crazy, wanting to kill you, or both.

This person is named Peach, and he ain’t no princess… He let me clobber him over and over again with my wrench. I don’t think he was supposed to do that, but considering how stupid the people in rapture are I’ll just say that he’s a fucking moron.

He sent me on a quest to find a camera and take pictures of splicers (basically the equivalent of meth addicts in this game) for scientific research, and in exchange he would let me into his little clubhouse. Then he made me put down all of my weapons minus the wrench and magical drug powers I’ve accumulated thus far. I murdered everyone and pressed forward, now I’m at a point where I can craft stuff. Now I’m understanding why so many Bioshock fans didn’t care for Infinite, they took out a few things from the first game (and I’m going to guess the second, haven’t played that one yet). Bioshock itself is fun, but I think I still like Infinite better. Though the story seems to follow a similar pattern.

The pro’s and con’s of Bioshock Remastered

I decided to check out the Bioshock Remaster, I’ve been putting it off long enough and figured a rainy day would be the right atmosphere to play a game about being entirely surrounded by drugged out residents in an underwater utopia gone to hell. I’m at the point where I have to kill the second Big Daddy, that’s about the point where my game started being a crashy mess in the original. So far I’ve compiled a list of what I like and dislike about the remaster:

Pro’s:

  • Manual Saving instead of just relying on vitachambers.
  • Better stability, no crashes thus far.
  • Achievements.
  • A museum was added to show off early concepts. (Originally only for people who purchased Bioshock Ultimate Rapture Edition for consoles).
  • Challenge Rooms (Originally an exclusive for the PS3 version of Bioshock Ultimate Rapture Edition, but was later released for the XBox 360)

Con’s:

  • Texturing seems too glossy in most areas, like it’s covered in vaseline. Only things the player notices sooner seem to have better texturing, like NPC clothing and consumables.
  • Less configuration options compared to the original, requires tweaking in the ini. Not an entirely big deal but if you’re making a remastered version of a game it would be nice to have better graphics options…
  • Still running on Unreal Engine 1.5… They couldn’t even bother to port it over to Unreal Engine 3 or 4.
  • No surround sound option (can be fixed in a roundabout way).
  • No mouse acceleration (tweakable in ini), mainly fixates on controller options and key binds.
  • Game keeps launching in windowed mode for some reason.
  • No borderless window option in 2016/2017.

I’m thankful I can actually play the game, however that isn’t going to stop me from pointing out how lazy the porting is. Usually when you do a remake on PC you add more features. Hell, Killing Floor runs on a modified version of Unreal Engine 1 and it has more features than this. While we’re at it I think Unreal Gold has more customization options than this remastered game. It’s like they took the special console edition, changed a few things, ported it over and called it good… Lazy as fuck.

Well, at least it was free. If they made me buy the remaster I probably would have waited for a big sale so I could get the challenge rooms. Other than that it seems pointless.

Thread to confirm that I didn’t die

I’ve been busy these last few days. Yesterday I came home from work and decided to do some dusting around the room. I dusted everything but the computer area, as that was cleaned off already. Eventually I’ll have to pull everything apart to do a deeper cleaning though like I did everything else. I enjoyed listening to some oldies while tidying up. I picked random shoutcast stations on my Roku and listened with my new wireless headphones that I purchased for the TV (to enjoy streaming music and quietly enjoy my programming while in bed). They’re a Sennheiser RS-120, basic but I like them.

It’s a good thing I decided to do some cleaning up too… I went out to lunch after work today to a new Japanese/Chinese/Korean restaurant, and my former work friend gave me some late birthday presents from last year. One was a miniature shopping cart, a jewelry box with a necklace inside, and a sign. Here are some pictures:

I decided to put the sign and the cart on the bookshelf. Fits most of my hot sauce collection quite nicely.

I decided to put the jewelry box next to my jewelry box because why not have some redundancy? I have a total of 4 jewelry boxes, and only one is full… Maybe on one of my days off I’ll sit down and sort out what should go between these two. See if I can properly fill it. 😛 Some might use this as an excuse to buy more jewelry, but I’m not so sure…

Spain is looking rather sepia this time of year.

After a couple days of dabbling with console emulators I’ve decided to return to a console port… I will say that I like Resident Evil 4, but the controls take some getting used to. Moving the mouse doesn’t turn your character in any particular direction, you have to use WASD at all times to move a certain way… It took a couple deaths for me to really get used to moving around like that, you definitely don’t want to stand in one spot while zombies try to tear you apart with explosions and pitchforks.

The game centers around Leon Kennedy, he’s like Dante from Devil May Cry minus the personality, demon/angel powers and sharp objects… Actually he’s not like Dante at all, he just looks like a less albino version of him.

That’s the RE6 version of him, but my point still stands. He’s fabulous.

Leon is a government agent tasked with rescuing the US president’s daughter, and the path left him to a part of Spain that suffers from a plague of depressing sepia.

I haven’t found her yet, but I’ve found plenty of other interesting things. In the RE games it’s important to observe your surroundings for clues, you don’t want to miss out on anything stating the obvious!

Of course you have Leon… You’ve passed it like 12 fucking times so far.
Someone needed to feed their pet maggots.
I would too, looking up and seeing Palpatine on the wall would make anyone stain their sheets.
Yes, I’ve decided that’s Palpatine.
I’ve yet to find the chicken laying these things.

I just made it passed the point where I met a mysterious fabulous Spanish dude named Luis Sera. He was bound in a closet, then we were bound together. The locals haven’t been friendly, but one thing is clear… They’re into bondage. We managed to escape a local that had an axe to grind with us. I’m now at the point where I met this charming fellow:

From what I can tell he’s the local drug dealer, but he’s out of the usual stuff and has weapons/weapon upgrades instead. Weird controls aside, I think I like this game. I’m glad I have this version and not the first release. I haven’t looked into it but have heard it was a terrible port, if it’s anything like the DMC3 port for PC I may have dodged a bullet.