#Video Game Science

[hyruviandoctor]

New video is live now!

This is a series I've been wanting to start for a while now, and I finally got the guts to put it out there! If you like video games and are curious about the space science in them, please check it out and subscribe to keep up with the series! If you have

[throwsahammer]

One time, I decided to conduct an extremely scientific study of which Pokémon was the dumbest, as measured by how long they would stick around and let me keep throwing rocks at them in the safari zone. I would wander around and exclusively throw rocks at every wild Pokémon that appeared until they left, and then tally up my findings. I would use the dumbest representative for each Pokémon that I encountered, as I didn't really have a good way of gathering a good sample size for the rarer ones. While Slowpoke secured an early lead (9 rocks), I eventually found a really dumb Psyduck (11 rocks) that was the reigning champion for most of the experiment. Pretty much everyone was leaving after two or three good hits, so I was pleasantly surprised to crack double-digits with a particularly stubborn Exeggcute. My surprise soon turned into stupefied disbelief as the little clutch of eggs proceeded to take rock after rock unflinchingly to the face. After 12 throws I began to fear that I would kill the test subject before it fled. Finally, after 15 rocks, the world's dumbest Exeggcute realized it could end this nightmare and left me, troubled and sore-armed, to contemplate my life choices.

I thought that would be the end of it, but then I remembered that I hadn't yet used a fishing rod and proceeded to hook a Magikarp. Reader, words cannot describe the horror and elation I experienced as I proceeded to throw 23 rocks directly into that poor bastard's stupid face. At around the 20 rock mark I became extremely worried that Magikarp couldn't physically escape, and that the two of us would be stuck there forever. After that final excruciating ordeal I called off the experiment on ethical grounds and declared Magikarp the dumbest Pokémon.

[prokopetz]

Wrong: Ada Lovelace invented computer science and immediately tried to use it to cheat at gambling because she was Lord Byron's daughter.

Right: Ada Lovelace invented computer science and immediately tried to use it to cheat at gambling because that was the closest you could get in 1850 to being a Super Mario 64 speedrunner.

[diane-nguyen-watches-cartoons]

[koyoriin]

"for all of my life, a stranger i remain"

https://twitter.com/koyoriin https://patreon.com/koyorin https://instagram.com/koyori_n https://bsky.app/profile/koyorin.bsky.social

[retrogamingblog2]

[evelyn701]

games about a lesbian relationship between a former-human-woman-turned-evil-superstructure and a prisoner with incomplete memories trapped in a scientific research facility

[bikiniarmorbattledamage]

This is truly stiff competition for the worst case of willful false equivalence we've ever seen.

So, for those not aware: Ongoing embarrassment to gamers and the gaming industry, Mark Kern (former lead on FireFall), has been desperately trying to get Gamergate 2 going on X/Twitter... well after others have given up. If you need to get caught up on Mark, I recommend this video by documentary maker and experienced game developer, Dead Domain:

One of the latest fiascos in this mix has been the comparison of responses to character designs from Hades 2 (Aphrodite, left) and Stellar Blade (protagonist Eve, right). The post isn't by Mark, but is part of the general harassment campaign he's trying to lead.

If you're somehow not familiar with Aphrodite, she's the Ancient Greek goddess of love, lust and hot girl shit. It is absolutely perfect characterization for her to show up to a battle (or anything else) nude but for her hair teasingly covering the intimate parts of her body. But the buried lede here is, you don't fight her in Hades and nothing about Hades 2 indicates she'll fight there either, she just likes the aesthetic and has no reason not to indulge.

Stellar Blade will release on 26 April 2024, so we can't really give an informed discussion of her character. But what we do know is the studio head is the illustrator from Blade & Soul, Eve is described as being a member of "the 7th Airborne Squad" engaged in an "operation to reclaim the planet from the Naytiba", and the promotion material promises "an enthralling narrative filled with mature themes, mystery and revelation. Embrace the relentless pace, with no time to pause between moments where critical, story-changing decisions are made."

It's to be compared to games like Nier: Automata, Devil May Cry 5, Jedi: Fallen Order and Sekiro. And the screenshots look like this:

And yeah, unlike Bayonetta she's not supposed to be an unstoppable force of nature (and fashion) who is immune to self-doubt, she's supposed to be the scrappy underdog last survivor of her team.

Weird they gave her a costume that conveys... the opposite of literally everything they're supposed to be trying to tell you about her.

-wincenworks

[vgadvisor]

[milkywayes]

The reality was as cold and disillusioning as the rain.

a big thank you to @that-wildwolf for commissioning me to capture this emotional scene from Edge of Yesterday!

[undertalethingems]

Unexpected Guests Chapter 10, Act Two: Page 6

First / Previous / Next

Out of sight doesn't mean out of mind.... Gaster won't let anything interfere with his goal.

Look for the next update on Nov. 16th!

[ilikedetectives]

[throwsahammer]

Back when I worked the night shift in-office, the lads and I would constantly be on the lookout for internet content to keep ourselves entertained. This culminated in my buddy and I playing Oregon Trail Deluxe via the Internet Archive and getting into increasingly bizarre competitions. We initially started out with a simple race to the finish, but after a while, we were regularly trying to see who could have everyone in their wagon die of the same illness or seeing who could complete a run with the least amount of starting equipment. We'd see who could survive the longest off of a single bullet with no trading, or who could ford the most rivers with at least one survivor.

With all that in mind, it may come as a shock to you that by far, the wackiest competitions were the ones where we were trying to go for high scores. For those unfamiliar, the Deluxe edition of Oregon Trail would award you points at the end of a successful run for everything you had on you, including surviving party members, oxen, sets of extra clothing, leftover supplies, and cash. If you played the game as intended, you would typically have to make strategic decisions about whether to spend your meager starting funds on essentials or on score-enhancing items.

We were most definitely not playing the game as intended, and by that, I mean we were abusing the absolute shit out of the game's broken trading mechanic. See, instead of engaging with the game's actual economy, you could simply keep inputting a desired item and pressing a button until someone offered you a favorable trade. If you knew what you were doing, you could stretch your starting funds to a ridiculous degree, or even (slowly) generate infinite wealth. The game had hard limits on how many of a specific item you could actually have at a time, so usually, these runs would consist of trading in Independence until you had a full team of oxen and enough supplies to make the trek a cakewalk, traveling to just outside of the Willamette Valley, and then trading until you got tired and decided to just end it, which made Oregon Trail Deluxe high score competitions into tests of physical endurance.

I learned a lot about the game's underlying systems during this time and realized that I needed to test its limits via the ultimate test: could I have an entire wagon die of old age before ever even leaving Independence?

I quickly set to work, repeatedly swindling the locals out of the same ox and set of clothes in order to make enough money to buy food. Due to the fact that we weren't moving at all, I was able to set rations to bare bones, as the health penalty from starvation was almost entirely offset by the bonus from resting. I settled in for the long haul, resting for 9-day chunks of time (the most days it will allow you to rest in one go) and only interrupting the hibernation to trade whenever food stocks got low. Every few months, I would set rations to full for a few days to replenish everyone's health to the maximum before returning to the usual routine of slowly starving to death in a wagon on the outskirts of the city.

I kept this up for an ungodly amount of time. Years passed. I eventually did some googling and made the horrible discovery that there is no such thing as death by old age in Oregon Trail Deluxe, but by then, the challenge had already transcended its original concept entirely. I no longer wished death upon my little party of immoral wagon-dwelling scam artists, and instead decided to just see how long I could keep their little routine going. I set a soft goal of making it to 1948, a full century after the initial expedition's "departure". Alas, it was not meant to be. I only made it to the 1880s when a companywide hardware update erased all of my stagnant progress. I told myself that I would resume the experiment at some point, but I never did.

[prokopetz]

Conspicuous phenotypic similarities among characters like Astarion (Baldur's Gate 3, 2023) and Preminger (Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper, 2004) have been noted in the past; however, establishment of a definitive taxonomy has thus far been hindered by the fact that both are clearly juveniles of their species. Now, however, a mature specimen is believed to have been located:

[doomedyuri]

CROW in DESTINY 2: SEASON OF THE WISH.

[koyoriin]

NACHTREIHER // ARMORED CORE VI

https://twitter.com/koyoriin https://patreon.com/koyorin https://instagram.com/koyori_n https://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id