Uranhjort

Oh hey it’s that time again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhZF66C1Dc

A man in his position has people for that sort of dirty work. Mind you that sick, broken troglodyte might have done it just for kicks.

This turned into a long un. Short version: These are both fair points, but ones you would expect a game heralded as the best of all time to do better.

Long version: That’s a fair question, to me there’s very few good examples and so many bad ones, which is why I largely avoid games described as such. For an open world setting to draw me in it must employ the aspect of exploration to reward the player with more than just gameplay resources - worldbuilding lore, storytelling or knowledge that impacts the main story.

The better parts of Fallout 4 did it well I thought, while trekking towards your destination you could come across an interesting looking building which can be explored to learn why it’s full of super-irradiated ghouls or an extremely predatory deathclaw. The world is also dotted with little nuggets of environmental storytelling that have no bearing on anything but serves to add texture and context to the world, to make it seem as though it’s somewhere people live - or at least lived.

I found nothing of the sort in Breath of the Wild. If you followed the most direct path to the giant glowing pillars the game invited you to use for navigating you may come across another goblin camp or fairy hiding under a rock, none of which compels you to keep exploring further save for the fact that you need a steady supply of weapons to replace the papier-mâché ones that are apparently in vogue. Other than the towers, the identical dungeon entrances and the occasional settlement the terrain is virtually featureless.

To your second point, it’s absolutely true that no game can force you to care about the motivations of the protagonist, but most of them at least try. Link wakes up to a voice in his head, grabs a tablet and off he goes saving the princess. Why does any of this matter to him?

With the context of growing up playing The Legend of Zelda, you already know this - bees sting, birds fly and Link rescues Zelda. For someone new to the franchise it just seems gratuitous, and it’s never expanded upon either. Link is as blank a slate at the conclusion of the story as when he woke, ready, presumably, to be put on ice till the next time Zelda needs rescuing.

Both of these criticisms can be applied fairly to any game, it’s true. But Breath of the Wild and it’s sequel are constantly highlighted as exemplars not just of the genre, but of the whole medium. It’s fair then to expect something that’s excellent in every aspect, which is absolutely not what I’ve found through many attempts to play them.

How unlike are they though? I haven’t played any of the other games, but from what I’ve seen the chief difference is the open world setting, the gameplay loop is mostly the same.

It didn’t seem like a particularly well executed open world to me, either - while it did give the option to stray from the most direct route to the next dungeon, what you found if you did was mostly emptiness. It even had you climb honest to god Ubisoft towers to uncover the map.

Regardless, I felt like I was missing a frame of reference from the very start. It’s just as well there was no sense of urgency to the central conflict, because I was given no reason to care about the stoic mute elf child or his damsel in the castle.

Having tried and failed to get into it some 8 or 9 times, I have to agree. Maybe it’s different if you grew up playing The Legend of Zelda, but I just found the visuals drab, the combat overly simple and yet slow, and above all like it was trying to be deliberately aggravating to play.

Not at all what one expects from one of the most acclaimed video games of all time, I do wonder how it would have performed had an unknown studio released it as their first game.

The multinational corporations I’ve worked with in Copenhagen were English language, from the executive suite to the mail room.

And while it’s true you’ll need to offer a skill that’s in demand, the list currently includes hairdresser, baker and landscape gardener among others, not to mention pretty much all the trades, and none of them requires a diploma.

Once you master all the business with half twenties it’s just a matter of memorising which article randomly goes with every noun, knowing you’ll sound crazy if you get it wrong.

Easy peasy, or as they say here, “kamelåså”!

You will be absolutely fine speaking only English to start with in the nordics as well, especially if you can land a position in one of the capitals. You will be required to (and absolutely should!) learn the national language if you mean to fully migrate and become a citizen, but I’ve known people who’ve lived and worked here for decades who still only have a tenous grasp on Danish.

Leave it to natalists to make extinction seem the better option.

Or install Decky and its plugin Unifydeck to have your Epic and GOG libraries appear seamlessly in your Steam library.

Huh, with the sheer volume of Aussie bartenders and waiters I’ve met here in Copenhagen I assumed there was already an open border agreement in place.

Happy to hear they’ll be free to bring more great banter from down under.

It’s ReCaptcha owned by Google, if you’re using a non-Chrome browser or an ad blocker it punishes you with tedium. Probably illegal to sabotage your competition but when did that ever stop them.

I’m not explaining away anything, nor denying that dangerously violent or even psychotic children exist. I was specifically railing against the idea of condemning a real, life human child because you have decided that they were “born bad”, in face of the plentiful evidence that they were raised in a violent environment.

For what it’s worth I’m sorry you had to go through that, but you’re not the only one who grew up with someone unstable and violent. I would not presume to speak to your experience, but in my case I was all too privy to the neglect and abuse they were put through and it’s left me convinced that barring any actual inborn neurological damage the only way a child turns violent is if something is pushing them to act that way.

Approx. 20.000 juveniles were arrested for murder or attempted murder in 2020 (per the US Dept of Justice) Shall we put them all down, as you say? Just to be safe?

Calling your position utilitarianism is interesting, in what way is really, actually murdering a child (never mind the massive amount of legal, ethical and emotional complications that entail) to prevent a hypothetical future murder maximizing utility for anyone?

Hmmm, yes, let us murder this child before he has a chance to murder us. This is what a society does.

Because the world is so much easier to comprehend when you convince yourself some people are just naturally bad and thus undeserving of compassion. To some this is preferable to thinking that an impressionable child may be pushed to violence by their environment.

Never mind that the child was likely mimicking his father (who had attempted to murder his mother on several occasions) and was raised in the kind of environment where a loaded weapon was just left around for him to grab.

Finally picked up The Gunslinger by Stephen King after wanting to get into the series for a while. It’s engrossing (and more brutal than I expected) so far, can’t wait to find out what all the hubbub is about the ending.

Enjoying the hell out of Beat Saber after sleeping on it for way too long. It almost feels like self-improvement as well, the higher difficulties are a workout and a half and with the massive amounts of custom songs available it’s not likely to get boring anytime soon.

I do wish it wasn’t mandatory to speed up the songs to get on the leaderboards, none of these tracks are improved by being played at whatever multiplier they use.