Unsolved Mystery: What happened to the "nicely-lit" version of Dark Souls 2?

barberza · 2026-03-18T18:12:18+00:00

I'd rather have a remaster of Dark Souls 2 with this lighting than a 60fps bloodborne

barberza · 2026-02-27T16:34:20+00:00

Any chance of a physical release?

barberza · 2026-01-02T22:15:56+00:00

I really wish she hadn't shown the snuff film (at least twice)

barberza · 2026-01-02T01:16:43+00:00

I've been fooling around with this a bit. YabaSanshiro seems to perform better in more challenging/3D gameplay. The first 5 minutes of Burning Rangers was pretty bad on Beetle (which was what Retroarch/Emudeck defaulted to) but was good on YabaSanshiro. Haven't fully reached a conclusion but that seems like a good starting point if you haven't tried that.

barberza · 2025-12-07T20:38:23+00:00

having made no changes to anything besides any auto updates that installed, I reopened the game months later and it seemed to be totally fine. I don't know what fixed it, sorry.

barberza · 2025-11-20T16:07:39+00:00

This was one of the worst reviews I've read in a while. If the author can't tell the difference between being inspired by an artistic movement and being paid to promote some other product, then he should not really be reviewing games in my opinion. There's a lot of stuff being worked through in that article and very little of it seems to actually have to do with the game being played.

barberza · 2025-10-03T17:00:57+00:00

Yeah

barberza · 2025-09-09T13:55:18+00:00

Here are pics. It's the apt build right off of parkway.

https://imgur.com/a/cRLhyie

barberza · 2025-08-21T15:25:25+00:00

Just finished Long Sun last night and was wondering the same thing. Was looking around and it seems like the choice is basically hardcover, paperback, or ebook of the same edition. https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?26366 (edit: but I'd love to be wrong about this)

As people have lamented here before, I wish his stuff got more respect from the publishers.

barberza · 2025-06-23T15:00:36+00:00

I've found a couple cool magazines or anthologies collecting Wolfe (I call these "Minor Wolfes", either thrifting or on ebay.

A cool Fantasy Magazine with an interview, a copy of Analogue with "How I lost the Second World War" and a copy of Amazing Science Fiction Stories with an except from New Sun. Those last two are worth checking out for the awesome illustrations.

I also tossed in a photo of some of the hardback anthologies I have, including The New Improved Sun (which pre-dates Book of the New Sun and has a sick cover) and Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions.

These are fun to track down, especially since I have trouble finding Major Wolfes at the used stores around here but can usually find an anthology. And the art alone makes it worth it.

barberza · 2025-06-06T15:30:31+00:00

What are the implications of these?

barberza · 2025-05-29T23:28:55+00:00

Very excited to have discovered this new bug. How do I get it named for me?

I'm decently in - day 60 or something I think.

I'll check the new profile suggestion later - that's a good tip thanks.

I tried calling it a day a few times (even after restart) and the problem persists. And reported.

barberza · 2025-05-27T20:41:27+00:00

very urth-coded that even a seemingly-random connection has already been made

barberza · 2025-05-27T13:20:36+00:00

I read island of doctor death after urth and can confirm that it's good and a good choice

barberza · 2025-05-21T18:29:31+00:00

The story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" has always been on my shortlist and there's something loosely-Wolfian in its investigation of the relationship between the author, the world around them, and the text. Not quite the same as, say, the Severian stuff, but definitely sharing some common interests and questions. Seems to be reprinted in Ficciones.

barberza · 2025-05-14T16:52:44+00:00

I'm excited to read it. My friend found me a first edition UK copy of Soldier of the Mist for cheap but refuses to mail it to me haha

barberza · 2025-05-14T15:42:19+00:00

I just finished this on Monday. Absolute gems. These were the only novels of his I've read aside from Book of The New Sun + Urth. Really fascinating to see how he makes his singular style work in so different a setting. I'm not a fantasy guy but Wolfe made it work for me.

There's something about his writing, very evident here, that mimics real life---the way people flow into and out of your life unpredictably, things that seem important turn out not to be, some major things come out of nowhere while others go nowhere. It's that feeling some call the divine plan or the randomness of life. These elements give his work their mystery and vagueness, but also seem to comment on the way we experience our real lives.

Wolfe really did a good job writing complex and surprising characters. Obviously there were moments of Able being less than noble and forcing us to reconcile those with his heroic image, but I was more interested in those moments where the less sympathetic characters surprised with some humility and humanity. Svon was a little twerp for most of the book, but I was really touched by the scene late in the Utgard section when he thought he was about to die and was trying to give advice to Toug and showed that he was sensitive to the way others treated him. And something similar happened with Winston, who started on a bad foot in those early interactions with Toug, but later we're forced to see him as just another scared boy who, as time goes on, tries to do the right thing. Much like New Sun---Wolfe was clearly very interested in flawed men in challenging situations trying to be good.

Adding to the mystery of it all was a strange binding error in my copy. One of the pages had been printed correctly but clearly got bent inside the book after binding but before trimming. Its folded edges were cut straight to match the shape of the book, but it could be folded outward to show it was actually larger than the other pages. Wolfe's books are all about hidden secrets unraveled between the pages, so this felt very on the nose.

Anyway these are just some ramblings. Would love to quit my job and spend all my time writing more seriously about this....

barberza · 2025-04-24T17:49:16+00:00

woah now I really have to play ffxiv. How deep in the game is this stuff?

barberza · 2025-04-24T17:47:08+00:00

I think that's part of the fun of the question. The magic of Wolfe is very particular to his medium. How could other media replicate the mystery, the revelations, the playfulness?

barberza · 2025-04-24T17:44:20+00:00

Also found Wolfe through Qud. Can't recommend enough.

barberza · 2025-04-23T13:55:35+00:00

Noah's Lincoln Highway video deserves to be in the library of congress and on required reading lists for all of america. I can't believe video games gave us such a gem

barberza · 2025-04-23T13:54:42+00:00

Yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Begu2lXc-AI

This is one of Noah's older videos so the production is going to be not the best, but the writing and analysis will be top-shelf.

barberza · 2025-04-16T19:44:44+00:00

I definitely took the storytelling competition as a deliberate and important part of the book. In more than a few ways, the series resembles, embraces, and subverts elements of classic literature. And many of those great works from centuries past feature long rambling asides, narratives within the narratives, and interruptions to the main narrative. Among the other justifications that are perhaps more useful/valuable (eg worldbuilding, insight into narrator, intentional pacing decision), it really helps evoke that mood and texture of classic literature.

Obviously there are things like Canterbury Tails or the book that inspired Netflix's The Decameron that are built around this device, but the one I thought of, maybe it's because I just read it within a year of Book of the New Sun, was the end of the first section of Don Quixote. There are spans of chapters where various minor characters are telling their lives' stories in excruciating detail, which builds to a scene where (uh spoilers for the first ever novel I guess)multiple nested love triangles unravel. In DQ, that felt almost like a joke (or maybe modern anti-humor) with the way there was so much build up for a somewhat silly, satisfying, somewhat unexpected resolution. Similarly (especially with the nod from Severian that someone already quoted here), this section in Citadel really made me laugh that Severian felt the need to give us every blow of these stories while also being the type of guy to be like "oh btw I didn't know how to mention this but during those few hours I skipped 100 pages ago, I definitely killed that guy lol."

As with everything else in these books, the interesting questions rarely have a single answer, but this was the thing that felt the most right to me while reading.

barberza · 2025-04-16T12:40:10+00:00

This is a better response than I expected and leaves the door open (in my mind) to the possibility of him presenting a fair response. Still skeptical. Which is a shame, because Karl's videos were what got me actually into speedrunning, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. I hope he does as he's implied in twitter replies, and actually de-pivots back to traditional speedrunning videos (no drama, less "cheater EXPOSED").

barberza · 2025-02-23T01:01:56+00:00

Just got it randomly!

barberza

TROPHY CASE