The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Gaming / Rants

Unleashing my inner samurai

The Steam Winter Sale brought forth lots of fun investments and gifts, I decided to venture into one that was gifted to me recently called Samurai Warriors 4-II. It looks promising, the art style is really beautiful and the dialogue is in Japanese, so you’ll want to use subtitles unless you’ve mastered the language. The characters themselves look pretty awesome! You even have the option of making your own to play outside of story mode:

It was bound to happen.

The gameplay looked like a lot of fun from what I’ve seen in videos. That was until I had a look at the control scheme:

Bit of a problem here… The mouse is non-existent in this game, as in it doesn’t even exist as a cursor. Pretty shitty considering other hack n slashes give you a keyboard and mouse option. Seriously, who thought these controls were a good idea? For example if you want to rotate the camera around you have to press buttons… I tried plugging in a controller, not my Steam Controller but one of my Logitechs, since this game is a port from Playstation I figured I’d try something close to its native control, but even that felt awkward. And the camera wouldn’t move with the right analog stick, fucking really? When that didn’t work I looked into Steam Controller configs. Some of them came pretty close to working out ok, but I think I’ll have to make my own from scratch.

This is a Japanese game, but for the love of Bob look at some other Japanese ports to PC for inspiration. The Devil May Cry games (excluding 3 because that was a shitty port) and Metal Gear Rising did a good job porting the game to work with both a controller or a keyboard and mouse setup. There really is no excuse for this.

I’m hoping the Steam Controller can fix this game up good with a special config. I really want to like this game, it’s pleasing to all the other senses, but play-ability thwarts appearances. The game has such positive reviews, so I’m hoping there is some sort of workaround.

All in an Overlord's day

Reflecting back on 2016

Ordinarily I’d post about the game or games I finished in 2016, but I think I’ll take it in a different direction. Not because I didn’t finish any games, in fact I did finish one (Hard Reset Redux), but I’m playing it on a harder difficulty and making sure I collect some more info on it before I post a synopsis on it (and maybe play the original for a comparison). I think it would be more memorable to reflect on the total shitfest that was 2016.

How 2016 felt for many.

We watched celebrities and well known people meet their ends in one way or another. All tragic, though I think the most tragic of them all were Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. I know people my age may look upon this as a bunch of old people kicking the bucket, but the way they went seemed so surprising to me. I’m really at a loss, like anyone else I feel sorry for their families. We’re all human and I know what it’s like to lose someone you really care about.

Then we also had the election from hell, with two candidates that were pretty undesirable, even the primaries were rather pitiful. I definitely didn’t feel like I missed being a small (i) independent. Though after the election I’m finding it harder to remain that way, one party is a bunch of spineless cowards and the other won’t welcome you unless you’re a straight white male. On second thought walking my own path isn’t that bad. Nonetheless this doesn’t change any outcome. The electoral college and Russia spoke for most of the country. Idiocracy is in full motion, and having listened to these idiots at work bitch and complain about the Obama Administration not doing a single valuable thing I look forward to the looks on their faces when their state provided healthcare gets revoked, or when their young adult children get dropped from their insurance plans. Some might call it heartless, but I think it’s time to play this game at their level. Some of these changes are already going to have effects on my family, and they could care less with their IGMFY attitude.

Reading and dealing with peoples attitudes since the election ended has been about as painless as a root canal with no drugs, and I’m not the only one who seems to have noticed. I only follow a handful of blogs and websites as going to official news sites or watching it on TV only serves to make you less intelligent when you’re done watching. They either post false information, or they leave out important details. The conservative owned liberal biased press is a total clusterfuck and needs a full blown enema. I’m trying not to pay much attention as it doesn’t seem to be good for my health. I expect I’ll be ranting more on the blog about this kind of shit when I have the time and energy to, have to keep my blood pressure low somehow apart from the occasional FPS or Hack n Slash.

I should probably quit on this post while I’m ahead. It’s difficult to think of positive things right now, well… I’m alive. Though for some that’s going to be debatable. I’ll try again next year.

Gaming / Streams

Streaming and Recording woes.

I’ve spent most of the day playing Aragami and experimenting with OBS Studio trying to fix a problem I’ve been having for the last couple of GPU driver updates. For whatever reason I can’t stream and record locally at the same time. Well, I can… But both the stream and local recording lag the fuck out. I don’t get it either, before the ReLive update everything worked fine when I went to stream and record at the same time. But then even rolling back didn’t fix the problem, same with rolling back OBS Studio. This sucks because if I want to stream something I won’t have a local copy for potential highlights.

I did play a bit with AMD ReLive, sadly that doesn’t allow me to simultaneously stream and record. Recording is actually quite good, while streaming seems to suck no matter which setting. I also don’t care for the interface, why does everything have to be tiles and buttons? OBS Studio gives you all these sliders and options, and it looks more organized. Not filled with a bunch of friggin tiles. I hope AMD improves their GUI design, because if they want to incorporate game capture (which is a really good idea and does run well on the local recording side) they need a cleaner design.

Gaming

Aragami, the true Shadow Warrior

The Steam Winter Sale is in full swing, and I’ve already been playing one of the games I’ve purchased from it so far.

Aragami is a stealth indie game developed on the Unity Engine. You’re an Aragami, a being made of shadows. You have been summoned to save a girl named Yamiko. She is being held prisoner by the army of light or the “Kaiho”. She talks to you via projected hologram.

Yamiko guides you through the game and teaches you how to traverse the shadows, you can leap from shadow to shadow using Shadow Essence, as well as unlock other skills by finding and spending scrolls on them, which I haven’t done yet (but I have TWO SCROLLS). Light makes you weaker, the shadows keep you strong. Don’t go towards the light! Offhandedly, Yamiko tells you that when the sun rises it will kill you. Fortunately this game doesn’t have a day/night cycle. 😛

Aragami runs on Windows, Linux, PS4 and Mac. This is probably one of the more smooth Unity Engine games I’ve played, though the graphics are rather simple but work well with the art style. Reviews for the game on Steam are “Very Positive”, Metacritic gives it an overall average rating of 70/100 on PC, and 71/100 on PS4. I’ve only played an hour of it thus far, and so far it’s been really nice. 🙂 I might install this on my laptop and put together a Steam Controller config (unless someone else has already, which is highly possible).

Work

Happy Hollandaise

For Christmas I get the next couple of days off. I had to work today, but went in a couple hours early (huge freight load) which I was happy about, the last couple of weeks have been unbearable with last minute shoppers who get easily outraged that we’re out of something. There was even someone who was aggravated that we weren’t open on Christmas day, or open all of Christmas eve… God forbid allowing us one fucking day a year to be with our friends and family on a holiday. Meh, I’m sure one of these days it’ll be taken away from us too like the other holidays. Only a matter of time…

I have a nice collection of gifts I’ll be unwrapping gifts tomorrow, and I’ll be in good company. Plus steak and lobster will be made, one of the few Christmas traditions we have upheld is the annual steak and lobster. I don’t have a tree to put my presents under, but that’s ok because I have a bookcase made of wood… so I hope that counts.

Gaming / Streams

I did a thing

Did a public livestream to Twitch and YouTube via restream tonight. The game of choice was Hard Reset Redux on hard mode (finished the game recently, but wanted to play it on a harder difficulty). I’ll have to play with the bitrate some more because it seemed rather grainier than the last time I streamed a game. Looks like Twitch also supports 60 FPS now for everyone, instead of just sponsored users… Finally!

Sadly I don’t have any video to share from tonight; the quality was too suck for my liking and for some reason when I tried to do a local recording the framerate tanked, which didn’t happen last time. Great, more investigation…

All in an Overlord's day

Evening Open Thread

I’ve been experimenting with restream.io, a service that allows you to stream to multiple places if you so choose. I did a test earlier with Twitch and YouTube gaming. Other than YouTube hiccuping everything seemed to run ok. I felt inspired after finding out Twitch is now completely HTML5, meaning my friends who don’t use Flash can watch me stream there. But I want to stream to YouTube as well, so hopefully this will work for me. Already seems so, though a longer stress test may prove useful in the future.

I hope I can find some time to do some stuff, time has not been on my side lately. I’ve mostly been dealing with the holiday rush day after day after day after day… and it’s been old since before Halloween. I think I’m at a point in my life where I dread Christmas before it even starts, which seems to be August now. If they push back the holiday sales any further it will literally be Christmas in fucking July. I wonder how much longer it’ll take before we become a 24/7 Christmas preparation country.

Gaming

Revisiting Darksiders after the patch

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The other day I wrote about my experience with the Darksiders Remaster, and at the time I wasn’t impressed with the framerate and the audio latency. I’m proud to say that performance has increased substantially. I haven’t dipped under 100 once! Plus the cutscene audio syncing is fixed as well. The developers were quite speedy in addressing and fixing the issue. I wish more devs would do this with their games instead of going the ‘we’ll see’ route, or giving up entirely on one side, or in some cases both. With a bunch of disappointing releases from either indie to AAA title it’s been rather depressing. I really miss the days when games were GPU agnostic, as long as you had a proper GPU from any company you were fine.

There really isn’t much else to say about the game. I didn’t play much of the original, I just know from what little I’ve played of the first one and what I’ve played of the second one thus far, the graphics are a nice improvement. I do like the general feel of the gameplay, might have to install it on my laptop for lunch time. Perhaps do a lunch vlog of it at some point too. It could alleviate copious amounts of stress. 😛

Gaming / Rants

Better off slamming my head against a brick wall

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I’ve spent the about the last 4 or 5 hours trying to get Fallout 4 modded on my laptop with no progress whatsoever. I don’t get it. I’ve followed the instructions, edited the appropriate ini file as per Nexus’ instructions, downloaded and used the same mods from my desktop and even tried to copy them over directly to my laptop… Nothing. It just wants to ignore my mods even exist and continue in pure vanilla. I have no idea what is going on, and I’ll probably find out later on it was probably something stupid that I’m missing, but at this time it’s incredibly frustrating. I didn’t have this problem getting Skyrim up and running on my laptop, why does Fallout 4 have to be so god damn S.P.E.C.I.A.L?

I’m going to have to set some time aside, on a day off preferably so I can properly figure out WTF is going on when I decide to pick up on it again…

What a waste of time. I need to stop doing this shit on work nights.