did anyone ever find out if the bending palm tree hologram in Cyberpunk 2077 was a glitch or intentional?
It was patched out, so regretfully it was a glitch.
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Foliage shaders do that pretty often in development
Basically theyāre meant to bend due to [wind, physical impact], not with physics but by manipulating the geometry. So every input has to be specially converted into the āreasonable valueā space it expects. More data transformations = wild ground for bugs. If the input is slightly off (wrong scale, a scalar got added in a way it shouldnāt) you get fantasy plants.
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I got a white phone case & wanted to post, it feels like having the blue ring in Zelda every time I look at my phone, seeing a sudden unexpected white thing.
Then I learned that links outfit is supposed to be light blue. I guess the video output on the 1993 NES really does suck
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bored so Iām writing a Select Button style Action Button review of Dillons Dead Heat Breakers. Giving it 4 stars. If you disagree, Iām going to frog splash you from the top rope
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DILLONS DEAD HEAT BREAKERS
FOUND FAMILY THE VIDEO GAME
The Bottom Line
Dillons Dead Heat Breakers is the only game that understands what itās like to work for a living.
Itās hard to distill Dillons Dead Heat Breakers into succinct paragraphs. There is no elevator pitch for Dillons Dead Heat Breakers. There is no āDeckbuilding Rougelike with wholesome elementsā tagline for steam users to grok onto. There isnāt a 3 tier skill tree. There are no ābuildsā. Nintendo will tell you itās a Tower Defense game. It plays like a brawler and a racing combat game. You also run a shop, play pachinko, and do races for extra scratch in between gigs.
When the game starts your protagonist, your Mii associated with your 3DS device, is transforemed into a furry and then your character pantomimes witnessing an unspeakable disaster, before the rest of the scene fades in with you driving a huge truck and about to be obliterated by alien rock monsters. Then the titular hero of the game, Dillon, a mute cowboy armadillo who rescues your ass. Youāre introduced by Dillonās loyal assistant, a talking squirrel on a pedal powered helicopter. The new trio drives to The City, the last save place in the wasteland, where you take up residence in the hotel. To save the town you just fled from, you have to build a doomsday weapon, and in order to do that, you need parts, and you need money. Thereās only one business in the wasteland that pays, and thatās protection. So the trio forms a freelance protection and defense force, hiring out contractors to fill the towers and helm the guns in each mission. In between missions you work odd jobs to finance and hire more contractors to take on bigger jobs, and also finance building the doomsday weapon.
The main game missions are tower defense in a very loose sense, you take the NPCs you hired and place them in towers. Then you, as Dillon, roll around the map and attack waves of walking rock enemies. It requires some strategy to navigate the map in a fast and effective manner, and you have to prioritize targets based on moment to moment positional information. You also have to keep towers charged with electricity by rolling over a little generator. Itās a lot to keep track of, and very stressful, which makes the breaks afforded by doing side business mini games on your off days much more ārelaxingā.
The NPCs you hire as guns are actually other Mii you pick up in streetpass, remember street pass? They are reoccurring characters in this grind for survival, and if they perish in a mission they are āabductedā by the rock aliens and you canāt hire them again. When you end a mission with fewer people than you started, you feel like a real piece of shit.
Before each mission thereās a small vingette between your hired guns, dillon, and the inhabitants of the small town youāre supposed to protect. One guy is the replacement mayor and wasnāt even supposed to be here today. Another town is inhabited 100% with beefcake bull men. The dialog is funny without being cloying, and has just enough weight so that there feels like thereās stakes, but never tries to going to the āGames R SRS BSNSā contemporary game writing that tries to ape an HBO miniseries.
Dillons Dead Heat Breakers is so committed to the world that the Hotel you live in has a bar, which is where you hire the NPCs for the next battle. This bar also has a bartender, who will provide a shot that gives a temporary and maybe unnoticeable stat boost. Thereās the gruff mole shopkeeper, who seems to know everything about the world and nothing about the world. If you find a bit of lego in one of the game maps and bring it back to him, he explains they were used by ninjas and scattered around to hurt anyone pursuing them, this works in a āstepping on legos is painfulā joke in with the radical disconnect between the old world and the now. But lets say you fucked up a race, or didnāt make enough at the shop, then youāre behind and canāt hire enough NPCs. Well you can borrow money from Stranger, a pigeon dressed in all black, who is more than happy to loan you the money for a job. Dillon sleeps on the couch in your hotel room, because thereās 2 beds, one for you, and one for the Squirrel guy, and this says more about the character Dillon than 3 remakes of The Last Of Us ever could about Joel.
Animal Crossing lets you hang out in the game world and build relationships with itās deizens, but Dillons Dead Heat Breakers understands the real world, where thereās bills to pay, mouths to feed, and shots to drink. Instead of everything in Animal Crossing existing for the player, the player has to survive in Dillons Dead Heat Breakers. The jobs in between missions range from working at a recycling center, to doing very well designed race sequences as Dillon, to running an entire store.
The store running mini game could be a game in and of itself. Anyone who has worked in a dingy store all by themselves will find nearly every element of that experience has been lovingly crafted. You arrange merchandise on shelves, you choose what to stock. You ring up customers, manually, using the 3DSās touchscreen. If youāre fast enough, you get a bonus. You get a lunch break, which you can choose to work through or eat something. At the end of the shift, you see how much profit the store made, alongside your pay, hammering home the rigged game that is wage work. AAA games donāt have the balls to make a shop running mini game this well done. A director would scoff at how boring it would be, having himself never worked a cash register, cutting it immediately for 30 or 40 new gruesome execution animations, before buying 10 more funko pops.
In most post apocalyptic settings, the game designer is trying to impress upon you their worldview onto you and that humanity is not to be trusted, that āweā are the āreal monstersā and once shit hits the fan the first thing you will lose will be your humanity, and youāll be knifing people from behind as they play on their PS Vita. Dillons Dead Heat Breakers, by contrast, understands that even after the apocalypse youāll still need to eat, still need to kick back with some gambling, and people still need to work together to survive. In this way, this is a more realistic portrayal than most other post apocalyptic media.
Thereās more interesting ideas in Dillons Dead Heat Breakers than in most AAA games. Maybe they donāt all work right, maybe the economy is a little broken, maybe you play missions over and over to get money. So what. And itās on a dead system, as an e-shop only title in the US, and soon to be disappeared as Nintendo shutters any legitimate way to play the game. This is a lost classic, having benefited from the mechanical refinements of 2 previous titles, a well realized world, and more charm than it needed. Four Stars.
- hellojed
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often lately i find myself thinking about how every Sea Power song that was used in Disco Elysium is the most moving melancholy piece of music in the world and every one that isnāt is that one indie song that your local youth station wouldnāt stop playing in 2006
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this is like perfect psychic damage because Iām almost sure this is a joke Iāve heard before thatās just slipped beyond the horizon of my memory to place it
ESKA
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thereās āindie game publisher fundingā discourse on twitter now and it makes me glad I never tried with them, seems like such a scam.
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I need Annapurna to help me license nyancat for my wholesome boutique poptart bakery wage theft simulator
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This is a perfect encapsulation of how I feel about Sea Power. Outside of DEās immaculate soundtrack, I donāt care for their music at all, itās just tedious indie rock
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them changing their name still makes me laugh so much. profoundly fucking stupid. im amazed they ended up on something as sharp as disco elysium.
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GOD yeah like, British Sea Power was such a wonderfully bathetic name, especially since their first album was called The Decline ofā¦
i get they didnāt wanna sound nationalist butā¦ did they
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That reminds me of how I was blown away by Electric Light Orchestraās Twilight hearing it for the first time as the soundtrack to Daicon IV, and then I tried listening to a whole album and it was just the forgettable 70s rock most people seem to agree ELO is.
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I think ELO is the most perfect ā7/10 video gameā band equivalent, and I do love me a good 7/10
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British Sea Power reminds me of the band formerly known as āNatalie Portmanās shaved headā
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That reminds me of when I saw that one maison ikkoku OP with the Gilbert OāSullivan song, it left me awestruck even though there are a million better anglophone songs/artists I could think of to actually use in an anime OP. Itās the serendipity of it
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Out of the Blue is one of the greatest albums of all time no cap, put respect on their name
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and there will be no point in time again where you can get that naive 1980ies vibe and energy of
Centre di Pompidou āIāve been there!ā flexxing, absolute naturalistic depiction of satellite telephony (including digitizing your head and sending it to the ether, as we all do regularly) and the barely suppressed inability of your keyboarder to not start laughing during his bluescreen debut (or so he makes us believe! Farming sympathy from unsuspecting know-it-alls like moi, thatās how professional the 1980ies showbiz was 
)
in short, thatās the spirit that only ELO can give you.
best time then for shamelessly confessing that young moi was totally blown away by
as a child (and LoLāing re: mv, which Iāve seen for the first time), as it was one of the first music cassettes my older brother recorded for me (because he had the Best Of ELO CD, for godās sake! that left such an Impression that i finally caved in and bought it in 2015 donāt @ me) and I believe this music wired some neurons in my brain that made me who I am.
And you donāt wanna see/hear what else programmed my young and easy-to-impress blank slate brainā¦ it is a cabinet of 1980ies horror-kitsch 
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I non ironically love Calling America, and Iāve been listening to it a lot this week for some reason
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