The Mind Of OverlordTomala
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.

Gaming

Darksiders Remaster, another buggy release for 2016

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Yesterday I took the Warmastered Edition of Darksiders for a spin, it’s free to those who have the original game so if you haven’t checked your inventory recently you might want to give it a go. I will warn you though, it’s buggy and laggy.

Running the game in a Borderless Window seems pointless right now, as mousing over to my second monitor and clicking minimizes the game, the cutscenes have a serious latency issue, and overall performance has been sketchy. Once again mostly on AMD cards with some NVidia users here and there chiming in. On the brightside, the dev’s are actively looking into the problem and even have a beta out right now. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I heard there isn’t much of a performance difference. Nothing stellar anyway.

A shame really, the graphics look really nice. Guess I’ll put this in the same category as Obduction for “wait and see if it improves”, although with the amount of attention that is being paid towards these lag issues it stands a good chance of being taken care of. And I can’t complain too much as this was a freebie just like the bioshock and skyrim remasters.

Update

People are reporting good performance with the beta. Will have to give it a go at some point!

Gaming2

War, war never changes…

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The whole war turned my hair white, even before the war.

With the Steam sale I decided Fallout 4 was cheap enough with both the game and the season pass (although I purchased it through Bundle Stars instead with an additional Black Friday coupon), and so far it’s basically Skyrim with guns. I’ve really been enjoying it, even though I have some pet peeves about it compared to Skyrim.

In Skyrim you could press ESC to get out of any menu or map, but in this you have to use TAB instead unless you’re using workshop mode, then you have to press ESC. That has taken some getting used to. Then of course there is a framerate issue, being that NVidia and Bethesda have been bed buddies for over a decade I kinda expected it. But in most places the framerate stays at 60, in larger areas it dips down pretty low though. Probably doesn’t help that I’ve added a foliage mod to make the scenery more fabulous. There have been points where I’ve had to stop playing it to rest my eyes because of it, one of the same reasons why I can’t play much of Obduction between the low framerates and the stuttering. I think my new glasses somehow make it worse, this is going to be one of those games that I’ll progress through very slowly as a result.

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Fabulous hair is fabulous.

I mentioned that I added a foliage mod, I also added some character mods too since vanilla was so… vanilla. Made my character amazing. Then there is my husband…

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Error: Don’t know how to father.

Plus I’ve added some additional armors, suits and weapons that I’ll hopefully find in the future.

Work

Open Thread

Once again I wasn’t able to record any gameplay, mostly because I was stuck talking to an idiot during my lunch hour. I did manage to play still while he talked about himself for about 45 minutes. He did ask me my opinion on what I thought of the new Final Fantasy game though, I told him this video pretty much mirrored my opinion. Then he proceeded to talk about the other Final Fantasy games and what he thought about each and every one of them.

Work overall was pretty busy. I can’t wait for Christmas! Then it’ll all be over…