dragontology

Chili and corn bread. My chili uses beans, but I’m not from Texas, so it’s fine. I use two kinds of beans (pinto, and dark red kidney) and two kinds of meat (ground beef, and hot Italian sausage).

If I wanted to make Texas chili, I wouldn’t use ground meat, I’d use stew beef, and I’d have peppers (Bell and jalapeño) and I’d omit the masa. I could make decent Texas chili, but my regular chili is awesome if you don’t hate beans.

DX2 needed a remake or fix that removed the hard coded load times. The small areas would be forgivable on modern hardware with virtually no load times. The game itself was solid, the biggest criticism at the time being the universal ammo that Mass Effect and others used well. The loading screens being an issue came up later when we played it on newer systems.

Not buying it. I played way more Deus Ex than most people (though, maybe not as much as someone with a DX avatar?) and I played more Fallout 3 than most people, too. Other than the things that define an action RPG, like dialogue choices and skill points, I'm not seeing it.

Want more Deus Ex? Cyberpunk is the way to go, not Fallout. Want Deus Ex but with magic and space and sex with aliens? Mass Effect. Actually if you just want choices to matter, you've got Life is Strange on one end of the spectrum with adventure gaming and teenage drama, and then on the other you have Mass Effect where choices you made in the first one come back to haunt (or help) you in the second and third one. For example, the third one features a robot invasion of Earth. Robots the size of ships. (ICYMI, those "ships" attacking Earth in ME3 weren't ships, they were individual robots.) So your job is to go to all the aliens and beg for their help. They all want you to do things for them before they will help. The more you do, the more they help (and Earth just has unlimited time, there's no rush, you can even take a break for a few days in a cozy penthouse suite in the intergalactic space station). And you have this score you have to get over a certain amount to even have a chance. After that, the higher, the better. And there's this one race of aliens (insects, sort of) that are only available to help you if you made some specific dialogue choices in the first one. There are also two races at odds with one another, and in ME3 you have to choose between them. If you did a very specific sequence of choices throughout the series, you can get them to join forces. Doing that over one game would be a tall order, but doing it over three? (And now there's a fourth one, but none of the choices from the first three affect it. They basically decided to start over.)

Singing this in Rockband was fun as hell. Especially if you had the lyrics to Weird Al's version ("Pretty Fly for a Rabbi") handy and sang those lyrics instead.

One-Winged Angel. Just the intro, before the Latin. Specifically this version.

The best final boss music to a video game was 29 years ago and has not been topped since. Of course, with the rise of PlayStation and disc-based games (ironically, where Final Fantasy 7 was released and in which form), games became more about the journey than that final fight. There were still "last boss fights," but they became less the focus and more about the end of the journey. But after beating Sephiroth for the first time, and he sprouts a wing (just the one!) and this song kicks in, and the real fight begins... that's when you knew you were in some shit. Especially if you reached max level and Sephiroth took literally an hour to beat (I think this was an early anti-cheat thing).

Because they're not computers, they're media devices, like Xbox and iPod. They're not meant to be open.

Yeah, it's not so much gamerscore as it's gamer history. So if you look at my gamerscore, the actual number of points doesn't really matter, but you can see I've been gaming on Xbox for like 20 years, I've played so many games, you can judge me as a gamer based on what I've played and how far I got. It's not fair to mistreat a person based on gaming preferences, I'm just saying you get a clearer picture. So on mine you'd see a lot of RPGs, action/adventure games, point and click adventures (Dontnod/Telltale stuff), and Metroidvanias. You wouldn't see many sports games, racing games, or simulation games, and that would tell you things about me as a gamer.

Of course, I'd been playing video games for about 20-25 years before I ever heard the name "Xbox," but that's not tracked.

We could get into how achievements are just a stupid collectible for gamers, but are used by Microsoft to monetize anonymized gaming metrics to inform publishers how their games are played. Not all of them care, and this service is part of what Microsoft charges ~30% for, it's not an extra service. Some do, and most famously to my knowledge, it's why you didn't get an evil path in Fallout 4, because an overwhelming majority of Fallout 3 players went for the good karma achievements. Fallout 3 gave you achievements at levels 8, 16, 24, and 30 (the cap), but it also noted your karma level (good, neutral, or evil). And at each level it was like a stupidly overwhelming win for good, so they assumed most players didn't want the evil option. I mean, they did give you a couple evil factions to work with (the Institute if you were scientifically evil, and the Brotherhood of Steel if you were militarily evil), but ultimately your character is a good person.

PC has been coopted by Microsoft and gamers to mean an x86-64 box, and it kind of applied to Intel Macs since they could run Windows and could have graphics cards (specifically the Mac Pro which had PCI-E slots and was really just a traditional PC that happened to be macOS certified and shipped with that OS.

So yes, it's a specific kind of PC. It's like saying a truck is a car. Yes, technically, if you wanna split that hair, but it's not like people calling it a truck are wrong. And maybe they are proud of what they have, but they're also just trying to be accurate and not disingenuous.

By saying it's a Mac, I avoid people suggesting I run tools only available on Windows. However, I attract haters. I'd rather be concise and informative than well liked. I don't care that you or the next guy doesn't like Macs, but yes, I'm going to call it what it is, because while it's also a PC, it's different enough and I'd like to avoid the chain of conversation that comes with "just use X app" and then I have to say "it doesn't run on my platform" and then we're back to here with the haters. So I just cut out a step.

She doesn't have no gamerscore, she has like 1200 because her account was set up like a month ago and she has some token achievements she probably didn't earn.

It's not about the amount or how much. Phil Spencer had a lot because he was a gamer and an exec. He was one of us, more or less, he played games and he liked working in gaming. I don't agree with all of his gaming opinions (in fact, mine are fairly uncommon, so that just comes with the territory).

I have a pretty high amount just because I've been gaming since before most people here were born. So I've had an Xbox account for something like 20 years. I've only really gone after a few achievements. Mostly I just play. Over time, that builds up. I've worked longer hours than a lot of people, in jobs most people are too good to do. "Work hard, play hard" may be a cliche, but I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't do recreational drugs, and I don't engage in extramarital affairs. I'm not a woodworker or a gearhead — gaming is my hobby. It's what I do to relax at the end of the day, if I have time. If I don't have time for a more "serious" game on the Xbox, I fire up my Switch and dick around on my Animal Crossing island. I've already rolled the credits (several times, long story, AC fans get it) but it's somehow fun to just run around and talk to animals and catch bugs and shit. Either way, it's what I do and I've been doing it for a long time.

I just think someone who's been playing games for years would make a better executive of a company's gaming division than someone who's never picked up a controller. LOTS of people play games. If someone never games, that says to me they don't like gaming — and they possibly don't like gamers. It's not a good look. Especially juxtaposed with the rise in AI and Microsoft bringing an AI exec in to run Xbox. It's not a good look at all.

Meanwhile, their biggest competitor is either Linux or UNIX. That is, if you accept that macOS "is UNIX." It's been UNIX certified for a couple years now, but it's UNIX in name only. While Steve Jobs' NeXTStep was based on UNIX, NeXTStep was also vapourware. Still, it became OS X which became the macOS we know and love (or hate) today. But the truth is, it's UNIX 3 certified, which is a decades-old certification, and it only just barely makes that. So it's a thing Mac users brag about. "A UNIX system! I know this!" Jurassic Park meme. And then of course there's Linux. And of course Windows has the Linux subsystem. Still, non-*nix is going the way of the dodo, just like Win9x did when Microsoft realised WinNT was the future. First with the tranwreck that was WinME, but much more importantly with WinXP. And NT was good, but its time is up (or will be soon).

On my Mac, I just use whatever the default static wallpaper is. Or I pick one of theirs. I always have widgets covering my wallpaper and I don't know how to easily see what it is (short of  → Settings → Wallpaper), but I think it's like a forest/hills. On my MacBook it's a lake.

On my phone, I have a Star Trek theme. LCARS (the OS on Next Generation) lock screen, and one of the ships (I think it's Discovery, I never really look that closely at it) warping up toward the top with the trails down between the icons.

I mostly don't care what the wallpaper is because I never look at it, but I'm too proud to just have it black (nothing there). I know that's an option on Windows (no wallpaper, and there's a setting for the desktop colour), but I'm not sure about Mac or iOS.

I almost envy people who have "cool" wallpapers (my wife has a bunch) but I mostly can't be arsed. Like... I wouldn't mind having digital frames with rotating wallpapers or fan art or whatever. But my desktop? It's a workspace and I have work (or "work") covering it all the time.