haha, that’s why I’ve put almost 10 hours into it.

i suspect most mini games start to show their problems and biases when you spend 10 hours playing then lol. like, gwent was sick, but it really was just about stacking the most strong cards intoa single deck as you could.

caravan though… that was a great damn mini game. the interactive and believable element of needing to go around and collect old world playing cards to build out your deck did a lot to extend the game into the broader world. more than that though, it’s a genuinely playable and relatively balanced game. i happened to have a lot of incomplete card decks lying around when i grew up. eventually i repurposed those into one big deck that would get split in half to play with people irl and a randomized deck. only fantasy card game I’ve ever been able to recreate and play at home without buying anything. and it even played pretty well.

yeah, Rockstar excels at this. red dead 2 had the best crowds and random encounters. it’s got me excited for gta6

it’s definitely balanced towards giving you better hands.

I’ve pulled like 8 royal flushes out of it with less than 10 hours spent playing poker in there. I’ve never even seen a royal flush in other contexts.

because it feels off balance.

the level of the horizon is a key part of composition. it effects comfort, balance, and groundedness. when the horizon is not level it will feel disorienting, dizzy, or chaotic. yes, you can break compositional rules for artistic effect, but you need to learn the rules and why they matter before you can do so effectively. the example you posted below doesn’t really make your case. it’s not that great of a photo, rotated or not. to intentionally rotate the horizon to give it an uncomfortable or disorienting feeling is fine if that’s the goal hell, maybe it’s more to feel otherworldly or any other number of things you can derive from it. the point is that you need a reason and intent behind the unlevel horizon. what feeling were you trying to invoke by not having the ground beneath the feet of the viewer?

yeah, this is one of those games where there’s like 5 ways to do everything.

i got so frustrated watching a friend play and seeing him load all of his packages into the back of a truck by hand. he didn’t want to be told how to do things so i just left him to it after trying to tell him he can do it through the menu once. then he showed me that you can use the container repair spray on your own back without unloading the boxes first… i never realized…

you can use your binoculars or whatever they are to mark waypoints very precisely that will measure distance on the map. just stand at the zip line tower you’re building from and check with that first.

you need line of sight anyway so it usually works pretty well for me.

there’s a handful of general directions you could go with both camera and mic then.

you could get a mic that plugs directly into the camera, but then you’ll be tethered. to it. you can get a mic that plugs into a little recorder, but you’ll need to sync your audio. you can get a wireless mic with a receiver that plugs into the camera, but that starts to get expensive. or a number of different options that can run things however you want. the most affordable option to start and remain convenient in my mind is a mic and a cheap recorder.

something like a used one of these with a cheap lav mic could be a good option.

as for camera, there’s two main paths. you could go mirrorless and get something more like the canon you already had, or you could get an actual camcorder.

a mirrorless camera will give you the option of different lenses and will have a larger sensor. it will also allow you to shoot nice stills and give you room to grow. it will generally have a higher potential for better quality video in the long run, but will be harder to learn and use. I think you’d be well served by a micro 4/3rds camera. a used Panasonic gh4 can be had for around $300. that would be able to provide some fantastic quality for the price. it’ll also be able to use any m4/3 lenses out there. they have a standard mount used by all such cameras. Panasonic is generally the more video focused brand in the space. a larger sensor with give you shallower depth of field, but that’s not as necessary as many like to think you the kinds of content you’re looking to produce.

the camcorder will be a much more streamlined out of the box solution. if you want something that will just work and be versatile without needing to spend money on additional hardware and learn all the ins and outs this will be a better option. it will likely have a highly versatile zoom lens and should still shoot plenty high enough quality for some simple explainer videos. it’s the less popular option these days, but I will think it has its place. I’m less familiar with these but I’m sure you can find a reasonable one with a little shopping around.

what kind of budget are you thinking?

the lens is likely incompatible with newer hardware.

I would recommend looking used. you can get a few generations old micro 4/3rds camera for very cheap. let me look through options tonight when i get home and I’ll probably be able to find you something for under $200 that will shoot modern looking decent quality video.

a mic to go with it would be very important. there’s so many ways to go about that.

-you can get a cheap on cameras shotgun that will sound decent, but pick up a good amount of room noise. this will be the easiest to use option.

-you could get a lavaliere of some kind, but that takes a second to set up and will require additional tools unless you want to tether yourself to the actual camera. there’s also options that plug in to a phone, but that would require a phone with a headphone jack…

-you could get a usb stick mic to record voiceover after the fact. this would give the highest fidelity Audio bang for the buck, but is the most cumbersome to use.

additionally, a light will go very far for making things look nicer. most homes are not set to to have good video lighting at all. you can totally get away with a cheap lamp that you bounce off the wall or something. as long as you don’t have a lightbulb directly shining on you creating hard shadows.

isn’t really a Republic at that point is it.

i know the meme, but he did eventually transition fully over to a galactic empire.

lh i forgot hades 2 came out this year. none of the others appeal much to me. i just tend to like the genres that are hard to do on smaller budget. story driven rpgs and action adventure games that aren’t souls like. not platformers, not craft survival, not extraction shooters, not bullet hell. there’s plenty of indie games i can enjoy, but few that i love. and sometimes it’s annoying when indie game fans just assume it’s because I’m ignorant that i don’t live their favorite games.

i hadn’t heard of doronko wanko or another crabs treasure. i might check those out

i am however looking forward to many of the games announced at the game awards this year.

I always hear that, but then i struggle to find indie games that i like. the genres that i like are hard to do with a small budget.

such as?

“a fantastic year for new games”? i couldn’t disagree more. i had no interest in any games that came out this year. i got balatro, and it’s kind of fun, but in a mildly addictive mobile game kind of way. not a “this is a really well made game” kind of way.

to me this was a year of greedy disappointments and corporate bullshit in gaming. this article mentions score inflation being a thing they’re weary of, then unironically puts the latest destiny dlc above 90%. pcgamer is absolutely part of the corporate megastructure that is bad for games and for for profits.

i mean, maybe if you’re a persona fan, but i just can’t get in to those games, i tried 3 of them.

it’s a lot more than puddles looking fancy. it’s the entire lightning engine. like how real light will come in the window hit the wall, the floor, the grass outside, and you, bouncing off of all of that to difuse those colors and tones throughout the room and change as you move. that’s what raytracing does. without it they just have to create different color lights sources in the room to approximate that, or just create a single color light source. raytracing is infinitely less work for the devs and is infinitely better as a light engine.

the problem is the whole industry glommed onto it before hardware could handle it.

i mean, this is also a handled. if we look at the way they name their handhelds then switch 2 may not be it, but switch extra or switch (new feature here) would be very in line with their names. Nintendo ds, ds lite, 3ds, others? Gameboy, Gameboy color, Gameboy advance, Gameboy advance sp - particularly egregious.

sure, but that’s not his fault.

there’s also the fact that dji released its first large form factor commercial lifting drones just a couple of years back. those things are big and bright and fast and typically used in areas where you wouldn’t expect to see drones otherwise. they’ve quickly been getting more and more popular for so many uses. from painting roofs and tall buildings to clearing snow from power lines. they’re starting to show up everywhere.

i bet these alien conspiracy theorists would shit themselves if they saw one of those hauling a crate in the distance. or God forbid, spraying “mysterious” chemicals on our food supply (fertilizer).

hmm, more like jumping into a new series in a franchise that rebooted a decade later. like saying you can’t possibly like the dark knight because the 90s Batman movies were bad. they’re completely different.

the Witcher franchise is based on books. the games happen chronologically after the books. the first two games don’t really follow the book story. the third one decided to pick up the book story again and can be approached on its own. the first game was the first thing they ever made as a tiny Indy studio. the writing was bad and the gameplay was completely different. it’s so old that it’s from before 3d movement was standardized in games. they learned a lot over time.

you’re not being fair by judging the later games off of the first.

oh man, to judge the entire Witcher series on the first one is intense. they’re all very very different games. you should try the third one on its own.

it’s like saying you don’t like mmos because you didn’t like classic RuneScape in the 90s. or like saying you don’t like rpgs because text based adventures weren’t your thing. not exactly representative.

IDK, honestly. one of my biggest takeaways from cp2077 is it felt like they wanted to do a more guided story in an open world and struggled with the custom character aspect. like how the origins were all basically meaningless after the first 10 minutes.

the frustrating part of cyberpunk was feeling railroaded into a specific character with specific attitudes and ideas. really, they were just doing what they know and what they’re good at creating a character driven narrative based on existing characters. I’m happy to see them go back to that because i think they’re just better at it.