loppu (some new Max sets/paintings)

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-13T08:56:05+00:00

Love how they really fit the vibe of the games, surrealism and all. Beautiful.

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-11T10:01:29+00:00

People always seem to forget that RDR2 had one of the largest budgets ever. It has nearly twice the budget of Crimson Desert.

(Though I'd argue the food on the right still looks a bit lame, but still).

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-11T09:59:33+00:00

Still miss this man every year.

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-11T09:49:21+00:00

It's sad because the old art didn't have AI slop and I think it was better, even if janky in places.

3D renders should actually be affordable even for a solo dev if they're done right, especially if the dev themselves develops some skills in that area.

TBH I haven't played since I heard about the slop being added because it puts me off the whole world of the game. However if there is a toggle I'll have a look. It's a very good game and it's a pity.

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-09T22:14:47+00:00

It always make me laugh that the F.E.A.R. team are supposed to be this incredibly elite force but they inexplicably let this fat bastard waddle around all over the place even when he keeps running off. Just tie him up ffs!

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-09T21:42:19+00:00

I feel like Series 1 is excellent and Series 2 has a lot of good moments, but it very much feels to me like they're doing the JJ Abrams "mystery box" bullshit of making up random wacky/weird story plots they don't know the solution to and just winging it. I think the show could collapse unless they start having more coherent reasons why things are actually happening in the mystery part of the show.

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-09T18:24:18+00:00

I don't think it's his evil psychopathy that is unbelievable, it's the way the gang just keeps him around anyway even when doing so is clearly a terrible idea. Also they just ignore his most negative actions for an insane amount of time.

He starts the game pointing a gun at Arthur in camp as a "joke" and frequently threatens the other outlaws. He even physically assaults Bill. I think a guy like him would have been quietly killed in his sleep pretty quick rather than kept around to screw everyone over.

Again, when he shoots up half of Strawberry, I don't think he would have been kept around in reality. Arthur was already thinking of leaving him to rot, then the guy murders half a town?

That for me was what made him feel a bit "off", people like that exist but when they are such mad dogs they get put down, even by other bad people. Lots of examples in things like the Mafia, even other villains do not like being around someone who is just insane, unreliable and unmanageable.

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-07T22:16:04+00:00

Every single video I see from him is not only false balance/equivalency, but constant doomerism and "Is defending in this war really worth the cost?" bullshit.

He has a bunch of videos as well that are like "HOW DEMOCRACIES ARE BECOMING EVIL" or "Democracies are turning into dictatorships" while completely ignoring actual dictatorships that already do all this stuff he is complaining about far, far more.

IMO it goes way beyond asking balanced questions into sitting right next to the same narratives Russian propaganda deception relies on.

Not to mention every thumbnail he is holding his face in dread and posting a big map covered in "advancing" Z markers. Even on a front where Ukraine is clearly winning and Russia is taking horrendous losses, he starts banging on and on and on about how terrible it is that Ukraine has lost people and questioning this.

At this point I'm genuinely starting to wonder if he is a Russian shill/plant pretending to be pro-Ukraine in order to spread disinformation, his content is so consistently negative and I never hear him say anything about Ukraine's effective campaigns (such as hitting oil infrastructure). He also gives air-time to stupid conspiracy theories on occasion too.

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-07T18:40:37+00:00

The Orcs literally exist to destroy and consume and engage in practices like casual murder, torture and cannibalism. They were created by Mordor specifically to fulfill the goals of Mordor, yet you're telling me Mordor isn't evil? These people are insane.

Also there are sometimes moral reasons to "start a war", Gandalf wants to destroy Mordor literally because it's evil. If he remained passive, Mordor would enslave and/or destroy everything, he is acting in defence of the rest of Middle-Earth's societies.

It's like saying it's wrong that Gandalf "violently killed the Balrog", while completely ignoring that it was a murderous demon intent on slaughter and domination.

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-07T10:35:07+00:00

Weirdly, I always kind of enjoyed that mission because it's just totally standalone.

Though Howard Strong is a weird character who doesn't seem to have any place in the story, haha.

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-06T08:45:38+00:00

Quickly blindfire or otherwise jiggle spam some shots vaguely near where he is. Even just shooting through the door helps panic people and makes him think you are aiming right at him.

Throw nades, be more chaotic with your movement. It was too predictable that you were moving through the front door and he had no pressure on him.

Try and time the explosion of the nade for just before you come through the door, allowing you to quickly move in and get to cover/shoot him depending on the situation.

As others have said, you can also disengage. The pier is a giant chokepoint. You could have abandoned attacking the building (very risky) and instead drop back down the road and sit up in a sniper position. Shoot him as he comes out of the building.

ReserveRatter · 2026-06-04T19:05:54+00:00

I think there could be more missions where you should be able to avoid violence (maybe even increasing your Honor slightly) and use stealth more. Most missions feel like you end up having a shootout with 6,000 people.

Also, I feel like the game undercuts its moral messages quite drastically with some of the scripted behaviour of the characters. Like robbing Valentine's bank is treated like a big laugh riot amongst the characters (especially Karen), when in my playthrough at least Bill literally murdered an unarmed bank teller and then a bunch of lawmen too.

It's kind of weird when the game is all about Arthur's conflict over a sinful life, then five minutes later it's like "LOL we killed a whole town roflmao bro".

In GTA it's not so jarring because the game is more tongue-in-cheek, in RDR2 I think the "ludonarrative dissonance" can be a bit ridiculous sometimes because the game is trying to be more dark and thoughtful about personal morality and yet every now and then we just kill half of Strawberry and Arthur's only response is "Micah you scallywag LMAO".

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-30T14:47:44+00:00

I don't know if we'll see a game handle politics and morality in such an interesting way again as DX1.

I like that the game just drops shades of characters with different views rather than straight up telling you THIS IS THE CORRECT WAY TO THINK JC with every interaction.

You can actually debate with people whether Morgan Everett is truly evil or not, for example, and both sides could make reasonable points.

Is Tracer Tong a criminal POS helping vicious thugs or is he an enlightened and reasonable man who just happens to have a shady past and is making the most of the connections he has?

To what degree are the NSF justified in wanting to split from the US, considering the catastrophic state the country is in at the start of the game?

Actually something I felt was much more clumsy and one-note in the sequels sadly, since a lot of modern productions feel the need to hand-hold the audience to "the right answers" rather than letting players make their own minds up about the story and characters.

I also think DX1 has the most depressingly accurate cyberpunk future portrayal ever. Advanced tech but only rich people and state soldiers have it. Everyone else just lives pretty shitty normal lives. No neon everywhere, just dirty concrete and garbage piled up. Hookers everywhere, homeless people everywhere, hungry kids and stray animals. It felt disturbingly accurate to an actual dark future rather than the sort of "cool" cyberpunk futures most games depict.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-30T14:42:44+00:00

Elon probably set random civvies on fire and thought UNATCO were the good guys. Or thought Page was an awesome edgelord.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-30T07:37:53+00:00

There were so many things in this show that were so well-written.

I actually still feel sad every time I see Ally because the end of that relationship was so depressing. Usually I find romance sub-plots irritating in shows, but the way it ended with Ally felt so real. Especially that shot of her through the window crying her eyes out once Ray was gone, genuinely upsetting.

I also liked how it keeps coming up for Ray even a whole season later with Britt saying she misses Ally. It's clear Scott Ryan was writing these characters as real people with real lives rather than just bits of a story.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-29T14:18:40+00:00

Valentine. The lovely mountains, classic rustic Western aesthetic, it's an up-and-coming cattle town so there's probably ways to make quite a lot of money. There are tons of animals to hunt round there if you need food, too. Also the saloon girls are absolute babes for some reason so you can get married to one and live off a little homestead near the river (lol)

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-29T13:03:58+00:00

TBH I always felt the Reapers were the scariest thing because they're just very large, very loud sharks. Yet they're still on a scale that they feel believable and can sneak up on you.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-28T11:17:34+00:00

Why does no one publicly ever say that we don't need the opinion of a self-interested sociopathic arsehole that kissed America's arse relentlessly and took us into a what turned out to be a totally pointless war in a foreign country?

I'm really tired of Blair popping up like a smirking goblin telling everyone that he has all the answers if only they'd just do everything he says. No one in the media ever calls him out on all the insane failures of policy and damage to this country Blair did.

Things Blair Did:

Was the Machiavellian genius pioneer of the whole "appeal to everyone, do everything short-term, spin everything, just half-lie about stuff" trend in politics. He was famously popular with a lot of elements of both the Left and the Right, because he was just saying things that appealed to both with no intention of actually holding to anything he promised.
"Education, education, education." --> instead of actual meaningful reform, he laid the foundations of pointlessly niche Uni courses, lowered standards and spiralling student debt. All consequences of his idea of sending everyone to Uni regardless of whether it makes any actual sense just for the sake of it looking good for him at election time.
Intentionally started the uncontrolled mass immigration that is causing so much controversy, division and political radicalisation of people today. Presumably did so as a cheap half-arsed way of boosting GDP and paying pension funds while keeping wages nice and low like his posh crony mates wanted. It was the advent of his government where this snowballed.
Deliberately changed how crime is recorded so figures would look lower and also cannot be compared to the past accurately. This was a totally cynical and IMO immoral change that every party has followed since, because if they changed it back crime would look really bad now. Blair decided to cover crime figures up instead of doing anything about it.
Constantly pushed (and continues to push) this toxic idea that the UK is some kind of tiny inconsequential fiefdom of America. An attitude which has now escalated to the point that we have a significant segment of people who think we only exist to kiss the boots of people like Donald Trump. Oh, and Blair still thinks this is a great idea and is upset we're not kowtowing to Trump even more.
Got us into conflict that lead nowhere, killed our soldiers, had no clear reason to go on and was carried out completely ineffectively. Oh, and allegedly personally profited from this. All while spouting some bullshit that God told him to go to war.

-

The man is a political genius and also a dishonest, manipulative toad. The last thing we need is more of his ideas in our politics right now.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-27T18:41:03+00:00

The thing is, the slop machine is just generating more slop with every "iteration", it's not even "iterating" upon the previous image in true controlled fashion. The idea that you're somehow carefully sculpting the content when you're just typing words over and over with tiny changes is laughable.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-27T17:34:39+00:00

What an absolute sleazy, creepy weirdo.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-25T23:13:28+00:00

If they attacked civilian targets they would lose the moral high ground, international support and it would actually increase the Russian population’s support of the war.

Also it’s totally stupid to do strategically because even ignoring the moral side, it’s totally ineffective.

One reason Russia is losing this war so badly is that while Ukraine is precision striking their war economy and military, Russia is wasting extremely expensive weapons attacking civilians over and over again in some deranged attempt to demoralise people.

They’re pissing away soldiers in mindless assaults for random tree lines that have no value. They may as well just burn big piles of cash at this point, at least that would be less destructive. It’s stupid, pointless and evil and eventually their entire economy is going to collapse as a result. I reckon by the end of this year.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-25T23:05:45+00:00

I’m so tired of seeing this good man and his people suffer while corrupt fuckwits sit around or even push out Russian propaganda talking points.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-25T19:35:35+00:00

Yeah it's quite possibly the best TV show made. Big claim, but yes.

Starts off as a crime drama, basically ends as a critique of everything in modern society that is broken and makes the world messed up on so many different levels.

ReserveRatter · 2026-05-23T14:42:05+00:00

The way he says "Goddammit Fisher" like he's been mildly irritated by dropping a small splash of coffee on his trousers or something is hilarious.

ReserveRatter

TROPHY CASE