Rants / Reviews / Random thoughts

• the beginning was tiresome and boring, being stuck in the citadel for a while... for me the game start once you gain access to space
  
• the lore felt restricted, it is not as wild, diverse and fun as Star Control 2, it is well made but it is way too conventional; shallow, generic, obvious and boring, follow norms too much, too human-centric
  
• gameplay was tiresome and i felt some parts were made by sadists... such as the heavily repetitive planets gameplay with the mako, especially on worlds with huge hills... another tiresome gameplay thing was the melee rushing enemies or the rocket launcher abusive ones when the player doesn't even have the equivalent weapon to counteract; why ? also explosives everywhere (same in ME2)... perhaps the gameplay just didn't age well and they were still figuring stuff out at the time, anyway it is pretty mild for a FPS, i didn't like backtracking as well especially in ME3 (fast travel option in Citadel still require some amount of walking probably made to lengthen the game)
  
• i dislike the abuse of invisible walls everywhere to prevent the player from falling (same in ME2 and 3), this impact the gameplay in Mass Effect because the player path is often blocked for no reasons
  
• the copy pasted buildings / spaceships interior is mediocre, same as backtracking... i see all this as a cheap development / budget trick typical of these game studios doing business
• the cities are actually pretty limited size wise, you'd expect a huge area but no, many invisible walls etc. same in ME2, it does a great job at appearing as bigger though
  
• the UX was bad... especially the inventory or when skipping dialogs, the HUD UX was ok, this improved a lot in the sequels
  
• it was not as lively, one thing i enjoyed greatly in SC2 was the dynamic map with the enemies slowly progressing as you play and which can eventually wipe all the galaxy out, it is admittedly a pretty hardcore feature though and required me to do the game a second time because i wasn't aware of this at first :D, there is choices to make sometimes in ME (more in ME2) but it is focused on characters with bits of romance, choices are carried over to the sequels though which is a nice feature.
  

Visions of Mana

• game pace is much slower and perhaps slightly easier than before, there is much less bosses and they are paced differently perhaps to lengthen the game, bosses were attractive in the original Mana series as a way to rhythm the game and keeps the engagement going with much harder encounters placed at some key points of the adventure, the flow felt great
  
• story is weak, i didn't like the too easy "Soul guard" trope of the main character, the Mana tree pilgrimage is okay, the human sacrifices part is kinda strange in the way it unfold, characters are a bit familiar at least
  
• monsters are in some specific areas of the map, quite classical in this sort of game but... maps can be huge in this game and this spawn system doesn't work as well with big maps, understandable but a conservative choice
  
• UX / controls are a bit confusing sometimes but it is a minor annoyance
• no coop ? game does almost everything likes the first game but drop the innovative coop mode... while being tailored for it, guess it wasn't worth it from the developers standpoint
  

Din's Curse

Quick reviews log

• Deleted videos on YouTube showing up as deleted but without metadata anymore (title at least) is a damn plague, i had a way to dodge that by asking for my data from time to time but they don't even show the title anymore in the metadata... (i think they used to ? anyway that is how they treat your data...) fortunately there is tools... with a bit of JavaScript to put in devtools console to get all playlist IDs on the playlists page (once you fetch all of them due to infinite scroll) :
  var pls = document.getElementsByClassName("ytd-playlist-thumbnail")
var plsId = ''
for (const e of pls) {
  if (e.tagName === 'A') {
    plsId += "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=" + /(list=(.*)&+)+/.exec(e.href)[2] + '\n'
  }
}
console.log(plsId)
• YouTube playlist feature is quasi unusable with high amount of videos and the endless scrolling of doom unless you just change the URL... perhaps that is why they limit it to 5000 videos !
• Control freaks websites that detect ad blockers are ridiculous, kinda funny how much time they spend trying to lock content down with various complicated schemes and how users threatening the whole thing is, they also often make false promises (e.g. reducing intrusive ads), anyway they fortunately cannot do much more than spitting to an equally technical person.
  
• Formal verification of software programs are a very useful resource for maximum efficiency and reliability in defense programs (aerospace etc.), an interesting example of how a mix of seemingly innocent mathematics and software engineering can be reused for the gloomy stuff (but not only fortunately), seems the main source of funding for this in the US is (was ?) the DoD itself. Same for AI by the way. Not new at all but a good reminder from time to time.
  
• Etymology of "silicium" aka silicon is from Latin Silex or silicis for flint, it is fun to me that this metalloid (combining metals and nonmetals properties) chemical element which is the second most abundant element in the earth crust is so widely used in computing hardware (backbone of semiconductor technology) and relate to one of the first multi usage (almost fundamental) stone age tool around. The fun of this relation between ancient tool-making and modern technology was in part triggered by a Deleuze lesson in relation to a Rimbaud text. Although bullshit my mind later wandered with the musing / metaphor that the flint was somehow one of the Eden forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge which enabled refined goods (such as leather cloths) and more tools which enabled more awareness and further refinements (the fall and man "disobedience" against its previous nature) perhaps allowing him to "eat" from the tree of life which might become a form of carbon and silicon association. (AI ?) This was kinda fun as i see it as some sort of distilled science fiction story mixed with spiritual ideas, this was perhaps triggered by science fiction stories such as the one in Mass Effect video game since i can see similarities, some recent black metal lyrics also. Note that this align more to some kind of Gnostic interpretation but it can be adapted.... (of course.. !) that view is of universal salvation (eventually) from gathering fragments, it is more redeeming and transformative than "usual" and ignorance there is seen as the act of forbidding the access to the tree of knowledge, the "evilness" lie in preventing awareness which just lead to not knowing whether own action is evil or not (true evil is in the suppression of knowledge and awareness), the serpent is metaphorical and may be seen as anything adversely that trigger changes (usage of new tools !) to push forward and self-realize. Note that even if tools are important there, they may also suppress awareness... it is nuanced !
  
• Editing videos or audio is a tiresome soul crushing task ! Probably why i never made any sens of "studio" at all (and the associated hardware / software) even though i respect the minutiae of the peoples doing it, like the technical side of it and probably listen and watch to a lot of heavily edited stuff, things is i naively thought that most stuff was done live when younger and this magic was shattered a bit later when i *got* the editing aspect, the (probably) many hours passed in post production polishing the end result is somewhat of a nightmare to me... couldn't conform to that and that is why i nowadays fully go to one shot stuff (with the unpredictable / unexpected sometimes popping up !) although i get that editing is sometimes necessary as duct tape even for one shot stuff.