im 60 hrs deep into nier automata and still not done route b… its just too fun to slow down with the sidequests! i luv the hacking and seeing a new outlook on things but i miss combining weapons and finding joy thru expression that way. hard mode is wayyy more enjoyable btw. just save some g for a bazillion cheap heals early on until you get the chips to allow for health recovery, of which there are several. deadly heal and offensive heal are such a blast!! they encourage risks to win back hp. in fact, i might remove auto heal cos its pretty op after a couple fusions.
i also played shadowrun hong kong for several hours. i meant to only test it briefly but wow is it ever absorbing.
i wish my phone werent in such a sorry state, i miss dq v!!! :’(
I don’t know why but I notice un-filtered environment textures in modern games every once in a while. In engines I’ve worked in it’s just a flag on that material but I don’t know if it’s a mistake or a decision to preserve contrast in noisy surfaces like concrete (trying to achieve an effect similar to the old Unreal engine detail textures, or the high-frequency specular layer we often get but which may be inappropriate for a low-reflective material like concrete).
I can’t quite get my head around the ways that Japan was a land of IP knockoffs like Hong Kong/mainland China just a few decades ago, and that it seems to have lived alongside world-class movie and game production for decades.
I wonder if that’s a good case study in the actual effects of IP protections on the entertainment industry. Like, we know that fashion benefits from only having trademark protection, what if Disney’s just plain wrong about the ills of Mickey Mouse in the public domain?
(I mean, it is my belief that they are, but Japan as a land of marginal unlicensed entertainment products could be factual fodder for it.)
I believe Japan has brought its IP laws and enforcement much closer to Western standards (please correct me if I’m wrong). It’d be very hard to separate the effects of an economy entering post-industrialization prosperity from IP laws in developing a native entertainment industry; I can’t imagine the IP laws being more than a quarter of the effect next to the underlying economic situation.
Canada being close enough to the world’s biggest cultural exporter probably has strong enough effects to depress unique cultural formation in high-capital industries, though in other ways it punches above its weight by offering incentives to lure businesses away from the states, like the Vancouver location shoots or the Montreal game development scene.
Maybe a small rich nation can be an entertainment producer as long as it is producing CONTENT to be primarily consumed by a larger market.