Castle Magus

Dont ever migrate your mojang account to microsoft. i am now in a nightmare situation where jack can’t play minecraft using our copy and it won’t let me buy one for his new computer.

— fredrin (@fredrin) December 27, 2021

Well, I haven't touched Minecraft since long before Mojank was bought by Micro$hit, and this obviously doesn't make me feel an urge to do so anytime soon, either.

Even ignoring the fact that FFXIV is a MMO, meaning that I already had zero interest in it to begin with, any game that requires you to wait in a fucking line for an hour or more before you can actually play it is a game that I will never be buying, let alone playing, I don't give a fuck how ostensibly good said game may be, especially if they are literally saying that, no, you physically cannot buy the game right now even if you wanted to, because they apparently have too many players already. Also, unlike these guys, I don't see it as a sign that the game is wildly successful, I see it instead as a sign that the devs/pubs royally fucked up and didn't properly plan to have enough capacity to let the people who wanted to play the game, you know, play the fucking game. If they can fuck up something that important, who's to say they won't fuck up other shit in the future.

"What are the *worst* arcade ports to appear on 8- and 16-bit consoles?"

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As much as I played the hell out of the NES port of the TMNT arcade game as a kid, yeah... no, it does not in any way, shape, or form hold up at all to the actual arcade game.

Aside from Mortal Kombat (which did indeed suck on SNES), I haven't really played a lot of the other ports they talk about (or the original games either, in some cases). I vaguely remember the arcade Ikari Warriors being cool, but the only experience I have of the NES version is the AVGN video about it.

Huh, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is coming to Steam in March 2022, well I guess that's coo-

...what? It has Denuvo? Oh... well... never mind then, I guess. Just forget I said anything. *shrug + weary sigh*

I'm being a bit facetious there, to be honest, because checking to see if it was contaminated with that malware was the very first thing I did. I wasn't surprised at all, since Persona 4 itself is still infected with that dogshit, too. Disappointed, maybe, but not surprised at all.

I will, at the absolute very least, give them some minuscule credit for admitting that it will have Denuvo now, three months prior to release, rather than being even more scuzzy and not revealing it until the day of release (or at all, as with DA:I).

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of that badware and because I don't feel like it warrants a separate post, here is another game that initially looked interesting, for about five seconds, but in which I lost all interest once I saw that it was infested with that shit. This one is published by Square Enix, naturally.

"John Oliver explores the lost world of snack-sponsored video games, and pitches some ideas to today’s snack brands."

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This video exists, but doesn't once mention either Sneak King or I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin' Good Dating Simulator. Fail. (To be fair, technically, neither of those are "snacks," nor were they made in "the 1990s," but still, I'm a little bit disappointed.)

Also, I learned today that KFC is apparently making a video game console (complete with "a proprietary 'Chicken Chamber' that can store and warm chicken"). WTAF. o_O

Oh well, I guess they're saving those for the now required, inevitable "Fast Food Video Games" follow-up video.

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This was a pretty interesting clip from their podcast (outside of maybe the middle third or so, when they started talking for a bit explicitly about Arcane [about which I have roughly zero interest, mainly because I have less than zero interest in its source material, League of Legends] and how good it supposedly is or whatever).

That said, I've talked about this topic at length in the past, and as such, I don't really have much new to say here, other than that I am still highly ambivalent in my stance on it.

Also, Pat at 34:31: "Should all of the studios that EA bought suffer because EA owns them now?"

Well, I mean, the studios that EA bought are already suffering (or else already long-since have been put out of their misery, like an old, sick dog dragged behind the woodshed), and this is intrinsically a direct result of the fact that they are owned by EA now, due to EA's explicit, highly visible, well known, and terrible business practices. This is completely irrespective of any other tangentially related evil, disgusting shit that EA may or may not potentially be doing behind the scenes that the general public hasn't heard about yet.

Huh? Axiom Verge 2 is out already? Wow, I didn't know that. Well, let me check it out, because I'd be interesting in buyi-

...what? It's exclusive to Epic Games Store on PC? Oh... well... never mind then, I guess. Just forget I said anything. *shrug + weary sigh*

It finally happened. I finally, without realizing it until now, have installed and have been playing a game that has Denuvo in it.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole. I'd played through this game in the past, a few years ago, and was completely unaware it contained Denuvo, as this was back before I really started paying attention to this shit.

The other day, I finished a second playthrough of South Park: The Stick of Truth (which does not have that shitware in it, by the way [or if it does, it's another of the cases where Steam and/or the publisher, Ubisoft in this case, are being less than forthcoming]), so I was like, hey, I'll play the sequel again, too, why not.

Well, as I've been playing it, I've been noticing random instances where the controls will just horribly lag, as in like, I'll be playing normally, without a problem, but then my character will just stop responding to inputs for like a second or two. I.e. if I wasn't moving, I wouldn't start moving until a second or two after I pressed the movement buttons. Or if I was already moving, and I released the button, my character would continue to move for a second or two before stopping. Nothing completely game-breaking (yet), as it only happens occasionally, but it's incredibly annoying when it does happen.

I was looking online for potential fixes for this, and I saw people mentioning "the DRM" as the likely culprit behind this. And I was like, oh no.... oh no. I went to the Steam store page and, sure the fuck enough, it is infected with the malware.

So, yeah, again, god the fuck damn it.

Oh, and on top of all that, this is also a game that requires Uplay (or "Ubisoft Connection" or whatever the fuck they call it now) in addition to being infested with the Denuvo dumbfuckery, so that's doubly loathsome. Everything about all of this fucking sucks because the game is otherwise pretty good. (Stick of Truth does not require this asshattery, mind you.)

All that said, I'm not going to stop playing it now, unless this lag issue becomes more troublesome than it already is, but I'm still extremely pissed off about this. This obviously doesn't mean that I'm suddenly feeling all hunky-dory about Denuvo, or that I'm going to start buying Denuvo-contaminated games willy-nilly or whatever, because fuck that shit all the way to hell and back and then to hell again, where it came from in the first place.

The only potential silver lining is that the next South Park game will apparently be created without the Ubisoft middleman this time, so maybe, just maybe, it actually won't be polluted with the shitstain on the underwear of the video game industry that is Denuvo. We'll see, I guess. If it is, though, I most assuredly won't be buying it. And, well, if it's not an open-world RPG like the previous two games were (regardless of whether it continues the same story from the previous two games or not), that will also dampen my interest in it, but that's neither here nor there. Also not sure why they're apparently going 3D with it, because I liked the 2D graphics just fine, especially since it's similar to (what little I've seen of) the show.

(To go off on a tangent, is it weird that I've played and [otherwise] enjoyed these South Park games even though I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of full episodes I've seen of the South Park TV show? I have to admit, to end on a semi-positive note, that it kind of makes me want to watch the show at some point.)

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Simple Rating (Kanzuki Karin's theme) from Street Fighter Alpha 3 is probably my favorite track from that game, and this remix... god damn...

I might just start doing this more often, i.e. posting random music Youtube things like this. I mean, I'm already doing it on Twitter every once in a while, but this is the first so far that felt like it deserved a post here, too.