MaartenVC

Since the PS5 is launching soon (November 12th) I made a list of PS5 launch-titles. Console-Exclusive Playstation 5 (PS5) Games at Launch: Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales Demon's Souls (PS5 Version) Sackboy: A Big Adventure Destruction Allstars Astro's Playroom Releasing next year or later: Horizon: Forbidden West God of War: Ragnarok Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart Gran Turismo 7 Returnal Timed-Exclusive Playstation 5 (PS5) Games at Launch: (will be released on PC / other consoles +-1 year later) Godfall Releasing next year or later: Final Fantasy XVI Oddworld: Soulstorm Deathloop Ghostwire: Tokyo Bugsnax Stray Project Athia Solar Ash Kena: Bridge of the Spirits Non-Exclusive Playstation 5 (PS5) Games at Launch: (are released at the same time on PC / other consoles) Cyberpunk 2077 Assassin's Creed Valhalla Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War The Pathless Watch Dogs Legion Dirt 5 Releasing next year or later: all the other games: Outriders, Hogwarts Legacy, Atomic Heart, Dragon Age 4, Elder Scrolls 6, Starfield, Chivalry 2, Resident Evil: Village, Hitman 3, Balan Wonderworld, WRC 9, Pragmata, Battlefield 6, Immortals Fenyx Rising, Far Cry 6,...

Max Payne 1 and 2 are really good. I fully recommend playing them.

Saw First Reformed (2017) also recently. I kind of agree with you. Thought it was okay. It has some interesting ideas about faith and environmentalism. I like the feelings of melancholy / feelings of helplessness in the movie very much. Also the character arc. However, I think that the later part of the movie doesn't do the premise and concept too much justice. It derails at a place where it shouldn't. Maybe the metaphor becomes too real? I dunno. On the other hand, I keep thinking about the movie. Maybe I like it more than I'd like to admit.

A very good article. A must-read imo. Important quotes from the article: / TLDR: "The now-famed R0 is an average measure of a pathogen’s contagiousness, or the mean number of susceptible people expected to become infected after being exposed to a person with the disease."..."Unfortunately, averages aren’t always useful for understanding the distribution of a phenomenon, especially if it has widely varying behavior."..."There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious."..."Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it."..."This highly skewed, imbalanced distribution means that an early run of bad luck with a few super-spreading events, or clusters, can produce dramatically different outcomes even for otherwise similar countries. "..."in Daegu, South Korea, just one woman, dubbed Patient 31, generated more than 5,000 known cases in a megachurch cluster."..."In study after study, we see that super-spreading clusters of COVID-19 almost overwhelmingly occur in poorly ventilated, indoor environments where many people congregate over time—weddings, churches, choirs, gyms, funerals, restaurants, and such—especially when there is loud talking or singing without masks. For super-spreading events to occur, multiple things have to be happening at the same time, and the risk is not equal in every setting and activity"..."Cevik identifies prolonged contact, poor ventilation, a highly infectious person, and crowding as the key elements for a super-spreader event. Super-spreading can also occur indoors beyond the six-feet guideline, because SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, can travel through the air and accumulate, especially if ventilation is poor."..."given the huge numbers associated with these clusters, targeting them would be very effective in getting our transmission numbers down."..."In an overdispersed regime, identifying transmission events (someone infected someone else) is more important than identifying infected individuals."..."a relatively quiet period can hide how quickly things can tip over into large outbreaks and how a few chained amplification events can rapidly turn a seemingly under-control situation into a disaster."..."it’s misleading to take too much comfort from a low Rt when just a few events can reignite massive numbers."..." in Japan, they had noticed the overdispersion characteristics of COVID-19 as early as February, and thus created a strategy focusing mostly on cluster-busting, which tries to prevent one cluster from igniting another."..."a cluster-busting approach, including undertaking aggressive backward tracing to uncover clusters."..."also focused on ventilation, counseling its population to avoid places where the three C’s come together—crowds in closed spaces in close contact, especially if there’s talking or singing"..."stadiums are open—but without chanting"..."It’s not always the restrictiveness of the rules, but whether they target the right dangers."..."Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both world:s burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation."

Instructions on setting up RPSC3 & Demon's Souls: https://www.reddit.com/r/demonssouls/comments/8ejkbx/guide_for_setting_up_demon_souls_on_a_ps3_emulator/ Original post on how to get 60fps in Demon's Souls: https://rpcs3.net/blog/2019/08/12/new-demons-souls-60fps-patch/ Here are some extra mods you might want to consider: https://www.nexusmods.com/demonssouls?tab=popular+(all+time) I recommend "Lens Flare Fix for RPCS3 and Depth of Field disabled", "High Resolution Font" & "Gray outline removal"

I ran it from a laptop. Specs: Intel Core i7-7700HQ 2,8Ghz x4, Nvidea Geforce GTX 1060 Max-Q, 16GB RAM Framerate was locked at 30. Little to no drops. I read somewhere there is a way to get 60 fps. Only the environmental sound did some weird things from time to time.

Played and finished Demon's Souls (2009) I was actually waiting for the Remake to come to PC, but since it won't I decided to use the RPCS3 PlayStation 3 Emulator to play it on PC. (in 1440p) The game still looks very good for its age. Also good atmosphere. Gameplay is okay; You can really see the potential. It's a good game overall, but in my opinion the first Dark Souls really improved quite a lot over its predecessor. I hope the remake for the PS5 uses some of the newer gameplay-mechanics and improves some of the weaker boss-fights. Personally, if I had to rank the Souls-games: Dark Souls 3 > Dark Souls 1 > Dark Souls 2 & Demon's Souls I haven't played Bloodborne or Sekiro yet, so I can't compare.

Second Wave in Europe ?

It's interesting how that movie becomes more and more relevant and depressingly funny with the years. Who could've ever thought that "Idiocracy (2006) is like a fine wine, tasting more refined as it ages." That's both ? and ? This picture sums up my feelings about this nicely:

Whutnow? From the article; The list of studios Microsoft would acquire with this deal: Alpha Dog Games (mobile games) Arkane Studios (Dishonored) Arkane Studios Austin Bethesda Game Studios (Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4) Bethesda Game Studios Austin (Fallout 76) Bethesda Game Studios Dallas Bethesda Game Studios Montreal Bethesda Softworks id Software (Doom, Doom Eternal) MachineGames (modern Wolfenstein series) Roundhouse Studios (Rune 2) Tango Gameworks (The Evil Within, Ghostwire: Tokyo) ZeniMax Online Studios (The Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76) $7.5 billion dollarinos! That's absolutely crazy. Is this for real? That's actually big news. That might mean that future games within Dishonoured, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, and The Evil Within franchises could become release exclusively to Xbox and Windows PC. However my guess is that they'll eventually release their games about 1 year later on PlayStation and Nintendo Consoles. So timed-exclusives, like Epic does. They might also include more of these games in the Xbox Game Pass, enticing more people to subscribe.

Oh nooo. The curse of 2020 strikes again. The Dark Crystal was such a weirdly unique and imaginative show. Maybe Netflix cancelled it cause they think it didn't attract enough new subscribers? Maybe they want to produce more cheaper reality-TV shows. I dunno.

I read on the net: Starting September 23, 2020, Rocket League will no longer be available on Steam, but current owners, who bought it on Steam previously, can still keep playing the game, but only if they link their Rocket-league-account with an Epic-account. Starting September 23, 2020, Rocket League will only be available on PC on the Epic Game Store, and will be free-to-play (with cosmetic microtransactions). My thoughts: Seems like Epic Games is moving all of their games and the games of the Game Studios they acquired over the years from other competing Stores and Platforms to their Epic Games Store. (also look at the recent Epic vs Apple lawsuit) Reasoning: By no longer having to hand over the 30% cut on sales on other Stores and Platforms the Epic Games company gains more market-share and can make more mad $$$. This is probably the intention of both Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Epic Games and the creator of the Unreal Engine, (he owns >50% of the shares of the company) and Tencent, the Chinese multinational technology conglomerate holding company (they own 40% of the shares of the company). It's kinda weird that when the Epic Games Store was first launched and introduced to PC gamers their motto was to bring more competition to the PC store front, but it seems it's more about bypassing revenue-cuts, exclusivity-deals and market-share. However, they do hugely financial support a lot of indie game developers, apparently only in return for 1-year-timed exclusivity and a 12% revenue-cut. Also, I'm rather happy with all the free games you can freely collect from their store each week. This way I've collect about 140 PC games from their store so far. (I haven't bought a single game on the platform though, lol)

Instead of colonizing Mars or the Moon, we can pretend like we're actually already living there. ? "Honey, I'm going out for a (space-)walk. Did you iron my (space-)suit? Where in Earth's name did you put it? I can't go out there without it. The air would literally kill me."

Seems like Covid-19 is spreading once again more rapidly in some parts of Europe. :( Possible causes that I can think of: • People coming back from their summer-vacation-trips. • The re-opening of schools. • Relaxation of preventive measures. • Disregard of remaining preventive measures; with some people probably: • ... being fed up with the remaining preventive measures. • ... thinking the pandemic didn't seem all that bad after all. • ... reading and believing contradictive news-stories on questionable social media / news-outlets. • ... being selfish. • ... don't giving a shit. We're not yet at the number of new infections of the first wave, but this is not really a good sign. I hope our politicians are not too afraid of the public and of the economic downturn to implement some preventive measures once again. But I actually fear they might be. (It think they might wait longer, sacrificing lives in return unfortunately.) Maybe the believe is that most people who were vulnerable to covid-19 already passed away or have built up some form of immunity. We'll see how this evolves. Here are the most recent maps of new infections: (I wouldn't really rely on the world-map: some governments might publish lower numbers than there actually are, but no way to confirm, yet)

Ooooh nice. That sounds really good. Great music. I'm reading in the wiki that, just like the movie, the game too flopped. But the music is very impressive. Might be one of the better soundtracks on the SNES. Before I pressed the play-button I was actually expecting old-school / 8-bit / tracker / chiptune / demoscene music, but it seems the SNES was already capable of way more than that: full samples and advanced synths. I didn't know there was that much difference. Interesting.

Re-watched Waterworld (1995) First act of the movie is good imo. Then it looses direction unfortunately. It also has some questionable editing. Another writer may have been able to make a better script / story. Movie is a bit of guilty pleasure of mine. It must have been quite something to design and physically make all the props and sets in the movie. The character / personality of the Mariner (Kevin Costner) is rather interesting. Not a hero-stereotype. A survivor, loner, pariah. The interactions with the other people he meets are different than most other action-adventure movies. I like the concept of the story-world. It would work great in an Open-World Role-Playing Game or an Open-World Crafting-Survival Game. Games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002), Subnautica (2014), and Raft (2018) are bit like that. Other than that it fails. I like to fantasize in my head that it was better. lol. Anyway, here's a picture:

Covid-19 = Freedom Dust ? Maybe they should take of all of their clothes, run around naked in the store. Now that's what I call true freedom. lol. ^______^ But now, more seriously: How hard is it to wear a facemask, wash your hands and keep a small distance from each-other for a couple of months? Is that really too much to ask to some people? Yeah obviously, I guess it is, to some. Really, it's not that hard. Just put it on. Just do it. Do it for your country. Do it for your fellow citizens. Do it for the people you love. It's a matter of public health. It shouldn't have anything to do with politics or believes. It doesn't impede human rights. It doesn't impede your freedom, nor your freedom of speech. In my opinion, saying that wearing a mask is anti-freedom, is in all honestly a shameful insult to all those people in the world who actually do have to live oppressed and abused. This behaviour of some people. It's sad, disappointing, and infuriating. Don't they realize they're actively endangering the health and livelihood of other fellow citizens? Acting in this irresponsible way seems actually almost opposite to patriotism. In some weird way it's an ungrounded form of surface-level anarchism. I question: What drives some people to think and/or act this way? 1. Are some just misinformed, fed on wrongful data? Delusional, being unknowingly Actual victims of deceptive articles on social media and whatnot, highly-probable purposely-placed by more-malicious-meaning entities. 2. Or do some want to be a bit sinful? To be amoral, unethical, apathetic, arrogant, greedy, wrathful, envious, adulterous, gluttonous, and lazy. It satisfies the self really easily, uncaring for the consequential harm to others. 3. Or do some blindly carry out the orders of someone higher up in the group to which they belong? A sense of belonging with a we versus them mentality. A leader whispering the right primal words in their ears they secretly covet, sensing now an opportunity to act. 4. Or are some knowingly hateful towards others who think or are differently? Justifying it by believing they are mistreated or unheard. 5. Or are some willingly malevolent? Evil incarnate or psychopathic. Some people want to see the world with everything and everyone on it burn and die. It's probably a mix of all of the above, and I want to believe: with each listed explanation in diminishing quantity. Just my thoughts... I don't know. A complex world demands complex answers. Shoving and clumping people together in monolithic boxes brings division. I often find myself doing this myself, yes even now whilst writing this. The brain works in mysterious ways. (Can't help that mine might or might not be a bit OCD or whatever, lol.)

Saw The Invisible Man (2020) ✪✪☆ Not bad. The end is a bit shaky, but the start and mid sections actually have a good slow tense atmosphere imo. Written user reviews on imdb rate it very very low however. So, I dunno... Try it if you like your scary movies to be a bit slower and grimmer. Better than Hollow Man (2000). Haven't seen The Invisible Man (1933) so I can't compare.

How Kodak detected the events of atomic bomb tests in their medical X-Ray films because of fallout. (rain and/wind carrying radioactive particles falling down on the ground) The photographic companies and the US government made a deal that they would not to tell the public/populace/world/Soviet-Union (aka: cover up possible exposure) of these atomic bomb tests, and in return the US government would provide them maps and warnings so they could react in time to protect their vulnerable films/products from exposure to radioactive particles. The argument for why they didn't provide maps or warnings to farmers, other companies or vulnerable citizens in the possible fallout areas is that the US government and the scientists didn't fully know or understand the harmful effects on health, or so they say. To keep the existence of atomic bombs secret. Or one might also say differently that military defence / homeland security and financial gain is more important to the government (and the involved companies) than the health of citizens.

The last game I bought on disc was Diablo III in 2012. I remember the day I bought it: The game released on a particular warm day here in normally grey and temperate-cold Belgium. I had to go from store to store as most of them had sold out. I was so happy when I finally found a copy. In the end, the game itself was a bit disappointing. Well, it was ok, but I had expected more from it. I see that game / time-period as the start of the stagnation and decline of Blizzard. I truly loved their previous games: Diablo II, Warcraft III, StarCraft II,... And I thought at the time they were one of the greatest game-developers of all time. Oh, how times have changed. Now they mostly seem to make okay-ish money-grabbing multiplayer games. Not my cup of tea at all. Anyway, I sold Diablo III a year later. Over the years I sold most of my physical game-collection. Now, the only physical games left in my collection are: Starcraft II (2010), Mass Effect (2007/2008), and Age of Empires II (1999). With Starcraft II and Mass Effect as being games I really liked. And with Age of Empires II as being the first computer game I ever bought with my own pocket-money. The Euro-currency wasn't even in circulation back then. I paid 2000 Belgian Francs for it. The game came in a big box, and included was a hefty full-colour manual. I kinda regret selling Black & White 2 (2005), as to this day that game can't be bought digitally online. I read somewhere this is because of some idiotic copyright reasons, and the original dev doesn't care I guess. I also kinda regret selling Neverwinter Nights (2002), as it's one of my all-time favourite games. Although I now actually have 3 digital copies of that game in my digital collection. I buy all my games digital now. I even re-bought the ones I bought as a physical disc back in the day. I use GOG Galaxy 2 as my collection hub for computer-games. It combines all digital stores / game-clients together in 1. (Steam, GOG, Epic, Ubisoft Uplay, EA Origin, Blizzard Battle.net,...) I sometimes think about restarting a physical collection, but that would just be a heck of a job. It would just be something one can only look at from afar. It would have no actual function. I don't have any disc-drives anywhere any more. Maybe I can buy a bunch of empty dvd-cases and print out the covers of my favourite games. Displaying them for shits and giggles...

The Social Dilemma (2020) Explores the impact of social media on human psyche and human society, with tech experts from silicon valley raising great concerns over their own creations. Great and very relevant documentary. A must-see in my opinion.

I tried beating the first one, but I only ever got as far as Area 3: The Ice Caves. After trying several other rogue-lites I concluded that I plainly just terribly suck at them. ?

Played and completed: Dust: An Elysian Tail (2012) ✪✪☆ Good Game Hack-and-Slash Platformer Game. + Fun Button-Mashing Combat + Some good Exploration / Metroidvania Elements ± Rather Easy ± Ok Emotional Story / Characters ± Ok Anthropomorphic / Furry Art-Style

I just saw the full 2 hours and 14 minutes of I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020). My opinion: Whu...? (do yourself a favour and don't watch this movie)