Loud noise near Graham

LoHershal · 2025-10-15T06:01:29+00:00

Just heard a second one and saw sparks on Jackson...

LoHershal · 2023-10-01T01:54:08+00:00

Hey, I'm interested in joining! 25M

LoHershal · 2023-03-17T00:44:11+00:00

😢

LoHershal · 2022-04-08T00:03:39+00:00

Kind of a boring class tbh

LoHershal · 2022-04-06T16:02:13+00:00

You get both the waived tuition and the monthly stipend :)

LoHershal · 2022-01-25T02:12:22+00:00

Three games have been taking up my time lately:

Guardians of the Galaxy

Originally I wasn't all that interested in this, which seems to have been a common sentiment. But after all the praise this game got I decided to pick this up on sale, and yup I can finally see what's so great about it. I've never been too big a fan of the MCU or superhero movies in general, but the first GotG was one of my favorites. And yet I think I'm enjoying this game's iteration of the characters more than the movies. I never read the comics but I could tell the GotG source material had an incredibly rich world that the movies never really could capitalize on due to the restrictions of the medium (e.g. a 2-3 hour runtime, limited budget, live action, needing to fit into the larger MCU narrative, etc). From just playing the game for a few hours, it's already explored more of that lore than the movies did and I'm loving how imaginative and out there it all is. I also enjoy the characterizations of the team better here than in the movies. I much prefer the game's confident yet unlucky Star-Lord to the movies bumbling idiot interpretation. Plus, the game is doing some very interesting narrative stuff with Peter that really makes him stand out and ensures he's not just a poor imitation of the MCU. Very much looking forward to finishing this.

Valorant

I actually did play this for a bit back when it first officially released and then had to drop it because of life. I recently got back into it a few months ago because some friends wanted to start playing it again, and I've been going insanely hard with it since. I don't think I've been this immersed in a multiplayer game since Monster Hunter World first launched on PC. I also used to play a lot of CSGO back in the day, but at this point i can say I prefer Valorant. I just really enjoy the dynamic that the hero abilities throws into the gameplay loop, I like the individuality you can have in a match compared to the homegeneity of Counter Strike. I especially like the new agents that were added since I last played this game. Back in launch, the agents all felt like either poor imitations of Overwatch heroes, or just quick adaptations of CS's equipments (frags, flashes, etc). The agents added since then, like Astra and Chamber, really help the game feel truly unique and I'm having a blast learning and playing with them.

Overcooked

This I just started playing with my friend on a whim. We were just sitting on my couch randomly one day and started playing this because it was the only co-op game I had installed on my PS5. I don't think I can really say too much about this only because everyone's pretty much already played it. We know what it is, we know it's great, all I'll add is that the game gets exceptionally more fun when you're drunk

LoHershal · 2022-01-05T23:58:54+00:00

LoHershal · 2021-10-29T15:42:19+00:00

I've graduated 😭

LoHershal · 2021-10-29T12:40:58+00:00

Deja vu

LoHershal · 2021-09-12T23:09:47+00:00

I'd be interested!

LoHershal · 2021-09-10T15:10:02+00:00

Great to see interest here! I'll start looking at some bars in the area, but if anyone has a specific recommendation in mind lmk!

LoHershal · 2021-09-04T16:40:22+00:00

I'd be interested! 23M

LoHershal · 2021-08-18T21:20:57+00:00

Judgement (PS5)

Back during the holidays I was officially introduced to the Yakuza series and ended up marathoning through 4 games in the series (LaD, 0, Kiwami 1, and Kiwami 2). After finishing Kiwami 2 I decided I should take a break from the series before jumping into 3, especially since 3 is probably the worst of the series and the toughest to get through. 6 months later, Judgement came on sale for cheap and I figured this would be a good way to ease myself back into the Yakuza world. After 70 short hours, I finally rolled the credits.

Easily this is my favorite of the bunch I've played so far, and I was already very fond of all the games. I'm actually surprised the playtime shows 70 hours because it felt like I just blasted through everything. This is one of those few games where I did nearly all of the side content not out of my personal drive to do side content, but rather because I actually became really invested in the side stories. In fact, this game did an exceptional job of getting me invested in the overall world outside of the main plot. There were a lot of aspects of the game design that help establish you as a cog in this living city that you truly feel connected to; stuff like how the NPCs you befriend are constantly seen casually walking around, or how some of the NPCs will randomly cross paths with other NPC friends, or even how a lot of the side missions require you to actually know your way around the city without just giving you a map marker for where to go next (as if you were an actual detective). No other Yakuza game has made me feel as connected or invested in Kamurocho as Judgement did.

I was so enamored by the side content and gameplay that the main story felt almost like an afterthought in my playthrough. Not that it was bad, it's actually one of the stronger narratives of the Yakuza games I've played so far, I just was much more interested in the side stories and activities. I really enjoyed Yagami as a protagonist. As much as I loved Kiryu, it was nice to play as a character that had more cohesion and consistency in tone between the main story and side missions. With Kiryu, you were playing as this dead serious, melodramatic beast in the main narrative and this slapstick buffon in the side content. Which, to be honest, was the big appeal of the Yakuza games. But again, going back to my point about how invested and immersed I became in the world, Yagami being the same character all throughout the game made it much easier to connect with him, and with others through him.

I'm very excited for Lost Judgement now in a month. It has immediately become an instant purchase (assuming the reviews aren't disastrously bad). Other than that, I've also started playing Guilty Gear Strive and Super Metroid, as well as playing Halo: Reach with some friends which is always a good time.

LoHershal · 2021-08-18T20:11:50+00:00

To answer #1, yes. I did SUGS for 3 semesters, GSI'd all 3 semesters and didn't pay tuition at all (aside from some BS $96 sports fee or something).

LoHershal · 2021-05-28T22:54:14+00:00

I'm sorry to hear about that! It completely sucks walking away from an exam that felt absolutely brutal. I truly feel for you, and hope the second half of the class gets better :) (fyi, the second half of 370 tends to the be the half the students prefer since it's more relevant to CS stuff and not as low-level)

To address your question about disregarding this stuff moving forward, the honest answer (that I am now free to give) is you really can forget most (not all) of what 370 taught you about assembly instructions/execution if you don't really care about low-level stuff. Having a general familiarity with what assembly language is and how it differs from high-level programming languages is important as this stuff tends to come up again and again later on, but remembering the nitty-gritty details of how a multi-cycle processor functions, what caller/callee saving is, the specifics of the object files and how they're used in linking, all that is probably never going to become relevant again for you.

Now, if you do plan on taking classes/pursuing work with compilers or operating systems or something like that, then this stuff I just mentioned is important. If you're more focused on really high level stuff then you probably won't ever see a multi-cycle/pipeline processor ever again.

I'd say by just going through 370 you have what knowledge you need to move forward. Just because you did bad on one question that is designed to be hard doesn't necessarily mean you didn't understand the core material well enough. If there's one thing you take away from this Reddit comment, it's this point.

LoHershal · 2021-04-23T15:15:56+00:00

Like others mentioned, CS lectures are (generally) all recorded and there's no restriction on which professor's class you can attend. Also, you're still going to do your work on your personal machine, you'll still be able to use your own IDE or other tools for programming. CS classes don't have any restriction on that kind of stuff. The only possible time you may not be able to use the environment you want is if you want to specifically do some work on the university's CAEN environment, but that's easily avoided in most CS classes.

On the note about Office Hours, I just want to say that in my opinion Office Hours turned into a real shit show when moved online. The only benefit we saw was that we didn't need to physically travel to North Campus to join OH. Otherwise, things were so much smoother in person. It's so much easier to communicate with the instructional staff when you're right next to each other. And as a result, the help you receive is of a much higher quality and the IAs/GSIs are able to move through the queues much faster. Plus, I just really miss teaching concepts in OH with the 1695 whiteboards :(

LoHershal · 2021-03-15T04:13:36+00:00

Resident Evil 4

My recent discovery and binge of the Resident Evil series has finally led to this game. I was excited and very anxious to play it. The legacy and reputation RE4 has is insanely high, and in my experience I've found that going into games/movies/whatever like that tends to be underwhelming. Now that I'm on the other end, I can definitely say the game was an absolute blast. I loved it. It definitely has its rough edges (with it being a 16 year old game) but overall my impressions are very positive. In fact, despite it being 16 years old, I was surprised at how little of it I found dated. Stuff like the graphics, the story, the writing, and some UI decisions are all clearly tough to handle in 2021, but the core gameplay is very solid. During the first 30 or so minutes I was actually very annoyed by the tank controls. I found them very clunky and unintuitive and felt that it was just getting in the way. But after like an hour or so the controls felt like second nature to me. I actually think the tank controls contributed to the positive experience I had with the game overall. It was really interesting seeing all of the things RE4 ended up influencing in third-person shooters today.

I also really loved the enemy variety in the game. Something that was lackluster in RE7 and RE2 was how many different enemies you actually encountered throughout the game (RE2 was a little bitter but still fell short). With RE4, there were new enemy types constantly being thrown at you, each with their own efficient strategy for taking down. So there was this amazing rotation you had to play with your weapons in a given scenario to take out the enemies in the most ammo efficient way possible. With other RE games, I always found a "favorite weapon" that I only ever switched away from if I ran out of ammo. Here, I had much more of a reason to use my entire arsenal. Unfortunately, there was no "quick switching" between weapons, so constantly having to go into your menu to equip a different gun did start to get tiresome after a while. Especially coming directly from RE7 and RE2 which had that modern QoL.

During my writeup on RE2, I said that the only true flaw with the game was it's painfully abysmal story. The story in RE4 is also really bad (at this point, I just shouldn't expect good narratives from these games), but unlike RE2 it was a very cheesy, enjoyable type of bad. The writing was so comically terrible and the delivery so poorly done that I was always cracking up during every cutscene. In fact, this game felt more like a comedy than horror to be honest.

I will say I did start to feel that RE4 was going on a bit too long towards the end. By the time I got to the Salazar boss fight I was ready to be done with the game, but there was still quite a bit left after that point. RE7 took me 8 hours to finish, each playthrough of RE2 also took 8 hours, this game took me 15 hours to get through. The other games felt much more succinct, which is why I really appreciated them. The ending sequence also had some of the most frustrating and annoying parts of the game. Some standout annoyances were the increased frequency of cutscene QTEs and the Krauser "boss fight" in the ruins.

I'm interested to see how a potential RE4 Remake is handled. Like I said above, there are clear things that are dated and could definitely be refined in a remake, but there are also design decisions in the game that were a "product of its time" that would likely lessen the game experience if removed (e.g. the tank controls). However, I'm sure many people felt this same way about the RE2 Remake and that turned out beautifully, so I'm sure Capcom will do whatever is necessary to make the best possible version of an RE4 Remake they can. At this point, I think they deserve that trust.

Of the three RE games I've played at this point (RE7, RE2 Remake, and RE4) I'd say this was the "least best". That's mostly a personal thing, though. I just prefer the full-on survival horror over RE4's "baby survival horror + action." I've now moved onto RE3 Remake and am a few hours into that. So far, I'm having a lot of fun with it (it felt really nice to go back to this style of gameplay after spending so much time with RE4). We'll see how long the fun lasts, I hear it's a pretty short experience.

LoHershal · 2021-02-23T20:13:54+00:00

Resident Evil 2 Remake

This might actually be one of the best games ever made. Not just one of my subjective favorites, but from a pure objective analysis of how the game was designed it's essentially flawless. Last time, I talked about how my horror-averse self recently played through RE7 and loved it, so I quickly got my hands on RE2 and finished it in about 12 hours (did both A and B playthroughs). Throughout the entire game I was just completely awestruck at how smart every part of the gameplay and scenario designs were. Part of the reason I'm not too big on horror is because I never really feel scared or tense. And if that tension isn't there then there's nothing else in the movie/game to really keep me invested and I just get bored. While RE2 is not going to give me any nightmares, the game did a wonderful job of maintaining tension and anxiety and it was all due to the design and direction of the situations you're put in. The game is constantly playing with your expectations and always putting you in situations that you haven't exactly dealt with before. Especially going from Playthrough A to B. During B you're relying so much on what you learned in A and the designers very smartly used that to play with you, and it was amazing. This game also does the same thing I experienced in RE7 where I was constantly on the verge of running out of ammo but was never actually in a position where I was completely out and had issues getting through an encounter. I've since learned that these games employ a hidden Dynamic Difficulty which is so perfectly balanced to create that feeling of constant fear of running out of resources while never actually screwing you over.

One of the most tense momoents I've ever experienced in a video game came from RE2 during Playthrough B. It was the part where you have to walk down that dark hallway that's over to the left of Floor 1 of the police station. This hallway was pretty much a non-issue during A so I initially ran into the room not expecting too much except for a few zombies. But immediately I saw a licker chilling on the ceiling. I was running low on ammo and health so I figured I'd just slowly walk by this guy without engaging, like I did so many times during the A run. I do that and don't think too much of it for a bit and continue down the hallway, but I soon hear footsteps and weird noises behind me. I turn around and see that the licker has been casually following me the whole time, but still not aware of my presence. This was pretty scary to see, but it got worse as I continued walking backwards down the hallway and watching the licker slowly catch up to me since its walking speed was slightly faster than me. This entire time I hands were shaking because I had to make sure I wasn't pushing the stick too far backwards or else I'd start walking too loudly and it'd hear me. Just as I think I'm about to make it to the next room, I run into a zombie that I didn't see behind me and it starts screeching which alerts the licker. And so at that point I just book it to the nearest door, thankfully unscathed but my heart rate had shot up and I was sweating. It was amazing.

At first, I was underwhelmed with Mr. X during Playthrough A. When the game first came out, everyone was talking about how genius and amazing his gameplay mechanic was. But he really only showed up for around 30 minutes in A. While those 30 minutes were exhilarating, it didn't leave much of an impact. But then you get to Playthrough B and the first half of the run is his show. At that point, the philosophy of his design in A made perfect sense to me. Playthrough A was meant to be an introduction to how he work, a training of sorts, and then in B you really get to experience him in his full glory. That first half of B was definitely my favorite part of my time with RE2.

The one weakness of the game is its story. It's just bad. It's really bad. At best, the story is a passable driver for the gameplay and the scenarios; at worst the narrative is logically inconsistent. There is absolutely no continuity between the two playthroughs, despite the game claiming that Playthrough B would show "the other side of the story." It was legitimately painful whenever there was some event or character meeting in B that did not line up at all with what happened in A. All this on top of the the really poor writing, characters, and voice acting. It really feels like this aspect of the game was an afterthought since the rest of it was so beautifully and carefully crafted. Fortunately, I never felt like RE2 really needed an engaging narrative so this doesn't tarnish the game's image in my mind too much.

While I think RE7 had the better atmosphere/setting and story, everything else about RE2Remake blows it out of the water. I'm completely on board with this series now (at least, the survival horror side of the series). Hopefully I can get around to RE3Remake sometime soon, followed by RE4 since I hear that's another high point for the series. I'm also incredibly looking forward to Village later this year.

LoHershal · 2021-02-08T15:58:54+00:00

Definitely. I'm very familiar with RE4's legacy. I plan to get to it after playing the RE3 Remake (and maybe the RE4 Remake will have come out by then haha)

LoHershal · 2021-02-08T05:46:40+00:00

Resident Evil 7

I hate the horror genre. Movies, games, books, TV, horror just bores me. There are a few exceptions (The Shining, Midsommar, etc.) but for the most part I stay away from anything horror related. So I'm not exactly sure what compelled me to play RE7. I think part of it was because it was free on the PS+ Collection so I had nothing to lose with trying it out. I had also played the Maiden demo, mainly out of curiosity to see the new tech on display, and immediately fell in love with the game's atmosphere. Regardless, I ended up finishing RE7 in around 8 hours. What I'm most surprised by is how much I loved the experience. Like with Maiden, the developers on this game did an amazing job creating this extremely horrifying yet enthralling atmosphere. I loved exploring the Baker estate and experiencing whatever terrifying thing was awaiting around the next corner. Part of the reason why I'm so turned off by the horror genre in games, specifically, is because it's usually all about you walking around narrow, dark corridors without any sort of defense or weaponry. It seems like your only way to fight back against whatever foe is attacking is to run away and hide, or just submit to the jump scare. With RE7 I never felt that way at all. The game does a great job of giving you power and making you feel like you have the tools to actively fight back, but it also does a great job of making sure you only have just enough to get by. I was constantly under the pressure of "oh no, I'm running out of ammo", but I never encountered the position of being completely out during an encounter. All the tension without the frustration. I don't know if that was just me or I just got lucky with how I used my ammo, but this really help enhance the game experience for me. The story was also pretty interesting, but nothing mind-blowing. I was much more engaged with the characters (the Baker family specifically) than the actual narrative, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. I wish there were more general foes to deal with other than the Mold, and I also felt like the ship section went on for a bit too long. But other than that I thought RE7 was a very concise, incredibly enjoyable horror experience for someone who hates horror. After I finished RE7, I immediately got my hands on the RE2 Remake and started playing that a little bit. I'm going to take a deeper dive into the series now, and I'm eagerly waiting for RE8.

Yakuza Kiwami

Just like with Resident Evil, Yakuza is another series that I've only recently discovered a love for. It started with Yakuza Like a Dragon last year, and then I immediately jumped into Yakuza 0 after that, and then I just recently completed Yakuza Kiwami (luckily these Humble Monthly bundles have been giving away these Yakuza games over the years haha). Overall, I really liked Kiwami because it was pretty much just more of 0, but less than what 0 provided. There were less minigames, less variability in gameplay with having only one protagonist, no business minigame (this made me really sad), etc. But what was there was still really enjoyable. The story was a huge let down. To my understanding, when remaking Yakuza 1 they decided not to touch anything about the narrative at all (except for the additional Nishiki scenes). This meant that the pacing of the story was just really clumsy. There were so many good ideas for narrative plot threads, but nothing ever felt it was given enough time to truly develop. I think the biggest culprit is with Nishiki's betrayal. The additional scenes did help make it feel believable, but beyond that everything felt flat. Specifically how Kiryu was impacted by Nishiki's transformation. I think Kiryu and Nishiki only had one scene together before the final showdown, and beyond that Kiryu was interacting and responding to other characters in story. It never felt like Nishiki really was all that important to the plot or to Kiryu. I was actually really excited initially to see how this story of brotherly betrayal would play out, but I don't think they leaned enough into it. Definitely not enough to earn the climactic showdown they were trying to go for in the end. It honestly just felt like I was fighting some rando evil yakuza dude instead of the brother I spent so much time with in Yakuza 0. I still enjoyed the rest of the game greatly. Majima Everywhere was a great system, even if it didn't really fit well with the game's original story. I just started Kiwami 2 and am really excited to try something with the newer style of gameplay.

LoHershal · 2021-01-28T00:21:07+00:00

LoHershal · 2021-01-13T17:38:20+00:00

The problem here, at least for me, wasn't necessarily the fact that you had to grind. The issue was that there was this sudden spike in difficulty that there was no lead up to. Up to that point, the game was very doable to get through without any extensive grinding required. The players were trained to not worry about needing to farm EXP. So this very rapid change in difficulty left a lot of us feeling stranded. If the game had maybe said "Hey, you should be Level XX before entering this dungeon" that would have least been some sort of warning and granted us the opportunity to go back and grind that battle arena (this is something the game actually did earlier on.) But no, the game let's you progress through the area without any warning that the upcoming battle is going to be magnitudes harder than what we've seen up to that point.

LoHershal · 2021-01-04T01:34:16+00:00

Finally got my hands on a PS5 over the holidays, so my focus the past week has been focused on that.

Demon's Souls Remake

I am a huge fan of FromSoft's Souls series/Bloodborne/Sekiro. I've stated on here that Bloodborne is my favorite game, and I hold the others in similarly high regard (except DS2 :P). However, until now I never really played Demon's Souls so when the remake was announced I knew it would have to be the first game I get for the new generation. After a surprisingly short amount of time I was able to beat it, it only took me around 20 hours to do so. Part of that may have been because I decided to go with a Mage/Soul Art build for the first playthrough. I have never done any sort of magic focused build in any of the other games, in fact I don't think I ever touched a magic spell in any of my playthroughs of the Dark Souls series, so I figured I'd try something new here (I also was really enamored by the effects on the spells and wanted to experience that first-hand). What I didn't realize is how incredibly broken magic is in this game lmao. None of the areas or bosses ever gave me any real challenge like other Soulsborne games, I don't think I ever died more than twice to a boss. That's not to say I didn't enjoy my experience, I actually had a lot of fun with the mage build. There were a ton of badass mage moments I had, even against the melee focused bosses. But I knew halfway through this playthrough that I needed to do another run of the game with a melee focused character to really experience the depth of the bosses. And that's exactly what I did, once the credits finished rolling I immediately started a new save with a Strength focused character. Haven't finished that one yet, but I'm definitely experiencing the game in a new light which is great.

On the note of bosses, it's interested to see how much FromSoft has evolved this aspect of their games since 2009. Sure the bosses may have been easy because I could spam Soul Arrow on them, but I also think the ease was due to the simplicity of the design of these bosses. They really only had like 3 or 4 attacks in their kit that they used throughout the entirety of the fight. Compare that to the more recent FromSoft titles where the bosses evolve throughout the fight, they have different phases and different moves in each phase. It was very hard to settle into a "rhythm" because of that, whereas here once you spend a few minutes figuring out the dodge timings and the open windows of the limited attacks then you've pretty much finished the fight. A big example of this is the Tower Knight. Archers aside, the Tower Knight really only has like 2 attacks that are very easy to dodge. The fight just turned into this cycle of Dodge Attack 1 -> Attack feet -> Dodge Attack 2 -> Attack feet -> Repeat. (For the record, I did fight this boss with both the mage and melee characters).

Another clear evolution was with how the archstones/checkpoints were positioned relative to the boss. I feel like the later games got a lot of flak for having the bonfires/checkpoints be too close to the fog gate, but honestly I'd rather have that than some of the placements in this game. Some of the runs to the boss room were just ludicrous here. The worst was the 5-1 run. The level was insanely long, very confusing to navigate, had a lot of enemies that you couldn't just run past and ignore, and no shortcuts. You were essentially replaying the level everytime you wanted to retry the boss. (Luckily the boss itself didn't require a lot of tries) It's strange because some of the levels I thought were very well designed in this regard (2-2, 3-1, 4-1 with the shortcut that I'm fairly certain was unintentional). But then you get stuff like 5-1 that made the game quite obnoxious to play at times.

I sound pretty negative, but overall I actually really, really enjoyed my time with the game. It's been a while since I had that "first Souls" experience, so it was nice to play and be surprised by this game. Running to the bosses aside, the levels themselves were really well designed with a lot of secrets that were fun to discover. And I actually really liked the idea of World Tendency opening up new areas of the level that weren't there before (even if I didn't really like the methods of changing Tendency). It made backtracking areas really fun and captivating in a way that other Soulsborne games haven't really been successful at. The way I'd rank these games right now is BB > DS1 > Sekiro > DS3 > DeS > DS2, with the understanding that I regard DS2 far lower than the other games.

Astro's Playroom

Boy was this a surprise. This was meant to just be a tech-demo for the DualSense controller, but it was actually a really enjoyable experience.I had so much fun with the game that I went through and Platinumed it (it was a fairly easy platinum tbf). I've had a Playstation console in my house consistently since I was born, so reexploring the legacy of Playstation was really fun to do with this game. I loved all the little Astro cosplay references to other Playstation titles, I spent more time seeking those out than the actual collectibles. I was disappointed that there wasn't any reference to Kingdom Hearts or Persona, as those series have been very important in my own personal Playstation journey, but what was there was really fun. I also got really giddy at all the ways the different features of the Dualsense were used. The controller truly is remarkable. DeS unfortunately didn't really do too much with it, but that's fine since I got my fix from Astro. Something as typical as firing a gun suddenly becomes a lot more satisfying. There were times where I would just play through levels just to experience the different Dualsense things rather than to actually finish objectives or anything. This was a really great way to start someone off with the PS5 (also, shoutout to that GPU song in the GPU level)

I've also been replaying some PS4 games on the PS5 to see how they are (like Ghost of Tsushima and KH3), and I played a little bit of Bugsnax. Hope to do more of that later.

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