What grinds my gears

Farpoint is one of the first video games for the PSVR that's more than just a technology demo (not the very first one, but arguably among the first three or four at most). This paragraph in the IGN review of the game grabbed my attention: Like any good VR game, Farpoint makes concessions for the limitations of virtual reality. For example, in story missions enemies only ever come at you from the front, which lets you play the whole game without having to turn around much. By traditional shooter standards it’s boring design, but in Farpoint it helps stave off the motion sickness some people experience in VR and avoids issues with moving outside the bounds of where the PlayStation Camera can detect you or your controller. Yeah... concessions for the limitations of virtual reality. By traditional shooter standards it's boring design. You know, like any "good" VR game. Because that's considered good, apparently. I'm not saying it's a bad game (I...

The company CD Projekt RED, which is developing the upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077 , caused a bit of a mini-controversy when it was announced that they were seeking to trademark the word "cyberpunk". People freaked out, mostly because they don't understand how trademarks work. Sure, even within the context and scope of trademarks it would indeed be questionable to grant a trademark to that particular word because it could ostensibly lead to abuse, given that it's such a generic name of a science fiction genre that's popular in video games. However, that's not the reason why most people freaked out. Most people did so because they have the misconception that if somebody trademarks eg. a word, that means that nobody can use that word anywhere , in any context, without paying royalties. Essentially, the word becomes banned in all contexts. But that's not how trademarks work! Trademarks are always tied to a very specific context. It protects the...

One of the most controversial and infamous game releases in recent months has been Mass Effect Andromeda, the fourth part in the popular Mass Effect series. Much hype surrounded the game, yet the end result was incredibly horrendous, and very much unlike Bioware's previous games (both in the Mass Effect series as well as their other games, such as the Dragon Age series.) The game was plagued with completely horrendous body animations, and especially facial animations, that were completely uncharacteristic of Bioware's previous games, as well as games of this caliber in general (or even games made for much cheaper, for that matter.) In addition, facial animations also seldom matched the tone of the situation, or what was being said (such as the main protagonist sporting a permanent grin completely regardless of the situation, even in situations that would clearly have required a serious expression; but this was not the only such example.) Another prominent thing with the gam...

Especially now it's really easy to agree with the vast majority of things that American conservatives (ie. the "political right" in the American sense, not the European one) is saying. After all, they are (perhaps ironically) defending very liberal values in the current political climate, such as freedom of speech, as well as all other kinds of basic freedoms, basic human rights of the individual, democracy and the democratic process, constitutional rights, treating people equally, and so on. They are also highly critical of unrestricted immigration from cultures that are fundamentally incompatible with our western constitutional democratic system. And they are, of course, deeply against the current regressive leftist racist and sexist ideology. When you eg. watch videos from a conservative source, such as The Rebel Media (which is a Canadian conservative online political commentary organization), or Milo Yiannopoulos, it's very easy to agree with at least 95% of wh...

I wrote in a recent post how people keep telling me that VR is the future, and will revolutionize the gaming industry, even though sales figures and the VR triple-A game library don't back up that claim. Just as an example of that, I just had an online conversation with someone, about this exact subject. He mentioned exactly that, ie. that VR is the future, and blaa blaa. I presented my doubts, giving my counter-arguments, related to the sales figures (both PC VR headsets combined have sold in one year less than a popular game console typically sells in its first week, and only a small fraction of what it sells in a year), how the adoption rate is abysmal (less than 0.2% of Steam users have a VR headset), which makes creating triple-A games for it really unprofitable, and I made a comparison with the two other quintessential examples of recent commercial failures, ie. the PS Vita and the Kinect, and the reasons why they failed (eg. one factor for the latter is the almost compl...

If you were to poll people who grew up in the 80's (and perhaps even a bit later) which one of the Rocky movies is the best, at least 90% of them will say without hesitation the fourth one. In other words, the one with the big Russian bad guy named Ivan Drago. It is, however, completely mysterious to me why, given that Rocky IV is by far the worst movie in the entire series (including all current six movies). I'm being completely serious. Please hear me out. Movie "connoisseurs" will invariably choose the first Rocky movie as the best. In a sense, it arguably is. However, I would also argue that the first movie is of a different genre altogether. It's not really a boxing movie, nor a sports movie. It's a drama. The boxing is just incidental; a framework for the drama. It's about a poor Italian nobody living in an American ghetto who through determination and hard work raises to the top and get to challenge the world champion in a sport (boxing in th...