#this game is frustrating me with the lagging and bad rendering but it seems so fun and i wanna play it anyways qq

[tieflingbi]

i made a new character in bg3 because as much as i love cleric in regular dnd i'm not vibing with it in this game BUT the new child is a draconic sorcerer and our computer is fighting for its life rendering this game and it's like. not doing that with the face scales at all so she permanently looks like someone dipped her face into flour i can't live like this 😭😭😭

[jjkpls]

Mean Yoongi 3 (m)

> genre : smut, fluff

> pairing : min yoongi x reader (f)

> words : 5.2k

> warnings : strong language, oral (f receiving), fingering, masturbation (m), cum play , yoongoes is being a soft meany again

> “Are you here to distract me again?”

“Min Yoongi, you’re the one who called me.”

He just stares as he does, vaguely puzzled. However in the dim light, only illuminated by his computer screen, I decipher a tiny curve to his lips. Something subtle and sneaky that I keep seeing on his blank face lately. He squints his eyes my way, for the longest time, then tilts his head to the side, the way he does when he doesn’t agree or doesn’t understand, and turns around, humming to himself something I don’t catch. What a clown. 

> previous

< next

“Yeah sure, you can tell me about your day. You already do it all the fucking time.” He’s mumbling like a grumpy old man and instead of making me crack up the way it usually does, it annoys me to no end. He’s mean to be saying that. He’s not wrong per se but still. When he hears me scoff indignantly, he looks up from his laptop, he raises his lazy eyes at my face and I imagine it looks pretty pitiful because he’s rolling them in annoyance, one hand reaching for the back of my thigh squeezing kindly. “I’m just saying. You don’t need my permission.” I don't pull away for it feels too nice but it doesn't smother my pettiness.

“Cause I’m going to do it anyway?” I ask through a pout, shifting lightly on my feet. Yoongi smiles or more like grins. My heart squeezes at the sight. 

It’s so lovely. One of those rare ones. The ones that make him look like a turtle. A cute happy turtle with the most adorable gums. The thing is that I'm stupid and forget who I'm facing and dare wear my adoration on my face. As soon as he notices, his happy face falls in a scowl, ducking his head, he pretends to dive all of his much-needed attention in his computer – he just closes the software he was working on. “You should be sweeter with me, Suga.” 

I never call him that. Never, ever. And it shows. I see him visibly lag, tense a little as he bites the underside of his bottom lip, pondering over my words. 

His hands busy themselves with gathering the mess that is the top of his desk. He arranges in a neat pile papers and notebooks, puts away the pencils and empty coffee cups, slips his laptops and other useless devices in the drawer. 

“I’m not sweet?” He asks, eyebrows high. That is so him. He sounds genuine in his disagreement when we both know he’s not. Lately, I've been observing him more than usual, simply because I've been over the dorm and their studio more often. And something did not miss my vigilance. He’s sugary-sweet, honey-dripping-gentle with some of his bandmates -Jungkook and Hoseok, to name the main concurrents. It’s not surprising, I know him to be loving and caring inside. Before, he used to completely suck at expressing it and was an asshole to everyone. But he’s softened down with the years and some benefits this new lovely version of him. Jungkook and Hoseok do anyway. But not me. He’s not the worst, he’s just Min Yoongi. But I don’t understand why he never tries and hold my hand -like he does his younger brothers'-, make up private jokes and nicknames for the both of us -like he does with the maknae-, smile lovingly at me while beaming my way -for a hot second I almost thought I'd have to fight Hoseok for this man because the affectionate eyes he is granted with all the time were poking viciously my greedy heart. He does fuck -I'd like to say 'make love' but I'm not sure, and it makes me cringe and flush to think about it that way- me nice and he kisses me infinitely softly when he does but it doesn’t bleed outside of the confine, intimate space we meet in. So much so, Taehyung still thinks I'm bothering his hyung too much and low-key called me a 'stalker' earlier, when I walked straight past him, saying I was not here to see him but Yoongi. When he’s the one who called me!

That’s something I should clear out sometime. What am I to him? Because he sure didn’t clear this out with his friends. He didn’t hint at anything with me. Are we dating? Or just, friends messing around? I'm pretty sure that’s not his kind. Yoongi looks cool and laid back for the most part, seemingly detached. In reality, I know he doesn’t get close to people easily, it being emotionally or physically. It takes him time. He doesn’t complain ever about loneliness and that’s not because he’s never alone. I know him -and this mostly from his music since he never really talks about himself even though sometimes quiet words he utters here and there in interviews or during some of his late-night live streams give me hints- to be a sensitive being, passionate and invested when he does allow himself to love and care about someone. He wouldn’t let anyone in just to have light-hearted, unapologetic, aimless relationships with them. Even though he doesn’t show it too much, I know he’s soft and fragile. Precious.

Therefore, what does it mean when he doesn’t block my number anymore when I send him too many memes, doesn’t send someone else to tell me to stop messaging him or spamming him request to play some mobile games he doesn’t have time to waste on; when he initiates on his own initiative conversations to threaten me into eating and taking care of myself properly -which should annoy me because he assumes based on nothing that I'm an irresponsible slob but really, it makes me so giddy and tingly in the chest, I don’t mind it. And when he calls, like he did today, demanding me to come over 'just because'. Just because he wants to see me, if I were to let myself complete the missing words. Still, he doesn’t say so and I still don’t know if we are dating or not. 

I'm an idiot. 

Pretending that the thought just occurred to me when really, it’s almost all I've been thinking about lately. 

It's not the only thing, I owe to be honest. The other thing I've been thinking about is his body. More specifically his cock and his hands. They leave me restless and on edge constantly, it's become hard to live with it. Especially at work when I get bored or frustrated and my mind seems to think it’s funny to drown me in tantalizing thoughts with very strong implications that I can’t in any way indulge in. The fact that I'm too terrified to text him to let him know when I'd like to have him doesn’t help. I just let him do it. Staring down at my phone for hours, trying to make Yoongi manifest in it accompanied by a seductive proposition. Flooding his phone with amazing raccoon gifs that I know he doesn’t even appreciate the way he should, hoping that he’ll send something along the lines of 'if I let you suck me off will you stop harassing me?'. It never occurs. Since the first time we slept together, he’s called me over four times and I slept with him six -twice I was supposed to hang out with Taehyung but shit happens when Yoongi is eye-fucking me from across the room, not a care in the world for me nor our friend.

In other words, it’s hard 'dating' Min Yoongi and this precisely because he is not sweet enough. “Why are you wearing those fucking shoes?” He sounds so annoyed, glaring at my Converse like he means to set them on fire. I frown, twisting my ankle a bit, looking at them intensely. I love those shoes.

“What’s wrong with them? You wear Converse all the time.” He glares darker, this time directly at my face. My words have offended him even more than the shoes had, and I can almost hear him damn me to Hell in his head. When his hands grab my hips to lead me to his desk, pressing my ass against the edge where he’s cleaned up space, I squeal in surprise. Both from not expecting the gesture and from the ever gentleness of it, contrasting so drastically with his expression. 

“You don’t see me wear them when I’m going to get fucked by my boyfriend now, do you?” The magic word strikes me, stopping my heart completely for a second too long, it hurts when suddenly it starts beating again to a frenetic rhythm. “They’re a fucking pain.” He grumbles. His fingers are reaching down, aiming for the shoelaces he hardly fiddles with for a second before giving up, sighing loudly as he straightens back up on his chair, looking at me like I just kicked him in the dick. “What?” He asks after a while of me just standing there, shook and unresponsive. I see the blush on his pearl-white cheeks. It’s subtle, doesn’t match the severity of his features but it’s there.

“You said ‘boyfriend’.” And maybe it is time for me to go through my whole Mean Yoongi 101 textbook again because I keep missing the tips and tricks to hold some kind of power with the guy. Lesson 1: do not show any signs of distress, embarrassment, expectation, hope. It will feed his ego and his newfound confidence will enjoy thoroughly torturing you.

I sound tiny. Eager and desperate and so, so timid, so enchanted as I am to have heard the word. It’s all he needs to clear the pink off of his face and starts smirking like an asshole. 

“Oh yeah, my bad. Sorry. We’re not dating, right?” The question thrown out into space lingers, rendering me confused and speechless. 

“We’re not?” I ask and so pathetically so. I can feel my eyes wide, begging. I must look like a sad puppy, yearning for love and appreciation. 

“You didn’t ask me to be your boyfriend, did you?” He says it as if he wonders out loud, as if he’s skimming over his memory to retreat a recollection we both already know not to be there.

“No, but-“

“Then I guess we’re not,” Yoongi concludes, smacking his tongue on the ceiling of his mouth. He’s holding himself from sniggering out loud, it’s obvious. 

“I guess not,” I admit quietly. He’s lavishing in my distress, I can tell. Laidback as he is, arms sprayed along the armrest, the tip of his fingers drumming teasingly on the leather, he’s having a blast. What a dick. What a fucking dick. I'm not going to ask. I'm not that lame. It’s ridiculous anyway. If it were anyone else I wouldn’t feel so confident about it, I'd probably consider it to be a sneaky loop one could use to be like 'Well I asked you if you wanted to be in a relationship you didn’t say anything so I don’t owe you anything', but it's Yoongi and I know where his heart is at. There’s no doubt in my mind. Still, I hate the idea that he’s going to use it against me. The ambiguity, the doubt that is not really there, he’ll have fun torturing me with it. I just know it. There’s no fucking way I'm turning weak enough to ask for the stupid label. He’d love this too much. 

“Sit.” He commands and like a perfectly-obedient puppy, I take the seat he’s made for me on the desk. It’s weird. To be sitting like that, in front of him, higher yet vulnerable in a way. I don’t feel empowered. I feel minuscule and exposed, like a prey in front of its predator, useless and powerless, at its mercy, knowing it’ll get swallowed down in a second. “So, friend (I hate him, I hate him! He makes it sound so spiteful, giving me sort of a taste of how nice and brilliant it would feel to have him say the magic word. If he were to call himself my 'boyfriend', I would lose my fucking mind.), what is it you wanted to talk about? Something happened at work?” He slides closer on his desk chair, ending up all close and personal, with his hands encasing me, front arms laid along my thighs. His fingers, smooth as silk and precise, play with my skirt, swiftly bundling it up as high as possible.

“What are you doing?” I squeak out, pressing my thighs together in a protective reflex. As if. As if it's something that I've meant. As if I'm not craving for his touch every single second of every fucking day. I always want him. But it's hard. He's cool, so charismatic, beautiful and he makes me feel some type of way recently, as if my heart is not mine anymore but his. I don't remember willingly having given it to him but I don't mind it so much. Except when he's troubling me so much so, killing me with his teasing, it feels like he knows, without me telling him, that he owns it.

“Going to eat you out.” He sounds almost bored when he looks up at me, heavy eyes and lips pursuing forward. But a subtle glowering glint betrays him, I would have missed it if I've had overlooked. He wants it. I'm not sure if it's for my enjoyment or his. He always makes it feel like that. Like it's just about him. He demands and takes. His fingers are always ravaging my cunt, his mouth loving my skin, nibbling and sucking, but the back of his free hand swatting my wandering touch to prevent me from giving him pleasure too, not letting me try much on him. I wonder if it makes him a pleaser, one of those lovers who find the most of their pleasure in giving rather than receiving. How ironic would it be? Then again, we've never really taken the time to, well, take the time. It's always a bit rushed. Either by our schedules; or by invasive third parties -Taehyung- who doesn't get why so much of my time is spent on his hyung rather than them and where I've run off too when I was supposed to just be off for a quick bathroom break; or simply by fatigue, because not only is it hard for Yoongi to have some free time when he does, he's often worn out and not up for a sex marathon of any kind. Maybe he'd like to have me touch him more. Maybe it's something he's not used to and would require a bit of warming up to but still desires. I know the effect that compliments have on him. He despises them -while probably holding them dear to his heart when no one is here to witness. It makes me feel so sad. Probably too sad. He would hate it if I were to express it to him. I know he wants Love. I know he deserves it and maybe, doesn't get as much as he should simply because, the unfamiliarity, the bashfulness, render him a bit repulse to them. I just want to give him so much love. All the love that I own, all there is available in the world. I want him to bathe in it and never, ever have that dubious frown as a response to heartfelt praise. I want to give it to him. Starting now. And that's why I'm not having it, peering his way like I'm determined not to listen for once -well I don't really listen to him in general, but usually, I'm not facing him full-on, he'd be at the other end of the world or would at least have his back turned to me when doing so because he's still Min Yoongi, and he's scary.

“I said you can tell me all about your exciting life but I’m eating you out while you do.” So my life and its tales are boring, I get that. And a way for him to cope with boredom would be to give me head. Interesting. Sort of. 

I've never received a successful cunnilingus before. It would always last a couple of minutes at most, being shortened by my own initiative because I could tell it wouldn't take me anywhere. The pleasure was simply non-existent. Just awkward, unsincere effort put into tiny kitten licks placed right where I didn't need them. The main reason, I gathered from matching the impression these boys gave me to the testimonies I've found online, was that they didn't want to do it. They treated my crotch like some sort of gross time bomb they had to deactivate. They didn't like doing it and it showed. 

But here Min Yoongi is acting like he likes doing it as a fucking hobby. I'm not so surprised. He's never done it before but the soaked fingers he would stick, as if on instinct, in his mouth almost each time he's done fingering me and a few lewd confessions he's made in the crook of my neck in the heat of the moment hinted that perhaps, he's thought about it and meant to do it with me at some point, possibly, sooner than later. But again, time and circumstances and the universe did not want it to happen until now apparently. 

Today though, we have time. It's 9 pm, the whole dorm is empty except for the two of us, and it's not supposed to be crowded with overgrown invasive babies until at least midnight. So there's time. Min Yoongi likes eating pussies. He wants to do it to me now. There's still a little reluctance remaining in my attitude though. And of course, there would be. I feel like if I give in now, he's going to take the lead like he always does and I won't, even after he's done with me, have the occasion to treat him with all my love and spoil him until his porcelain cheeks turn into a flaming red. “Stop whining and lift your butt for a sec.” His hands are patting my thighs encouragingly but I don't. I frown and I scowl. So hard I might get a permanent crease rooted between my eyebrows but fuck him. Fuck him because I can already feel my determination waver, and I know it's going to end the way it always does: his way. He doesn't understand why I'm being so reluctant, persuaded I'm just playing hard to get as payback for earlier, he smugly claims, “Everyone wants to test my tongue technology.” I roll my eyes at that. Feels like too much Kim Seokjin has rubbed on him.

“You say it as if you're not the one who came up with it in the first place.” 

It makes him laugh and that's the moment he wins. With his stupid turtle smile, and the quiet breathy chuckle, what am I supposed to do? “Lift up.” I do it with a sulking painted all over my face. Along with my skirt, he brings entirely out of the way in a bundle behind me, he drags my panties down my legs, a tiny twitch of a smile at the corner of his lips dawning from my embarrassment. “Have you been eaten out before?” The tips of his fingers gently tap the side of my thighs. He's not pressing yet. Just smothering my nerves, making it a little easier to breathe and a little simpler to relax at each completed circle of his thumb.

“Just once or twice,” I whisper, flushing a little.

Matching my tone, he responds as quietly, the words hardly loud enough under the purrs encasing them. He makes me shudder. “Was it good?” I shrug dismissively. I don't want to get into it and it is of so little importance right now.

It takes me a moment to ease into him, no matter how bad I want him to start to please me, to discover if he's as good as he pretends, as skilled as I want to imagine him to be. “Open up.��� I decide I'm not going to care. He looks eager to start. His wide and cold hands, warming up at the contact of my thighs, caress patiently. He bends, kisses the side of my knee so softly -it still amazes me, how gentle he can be, he's really the softest under the thick first layer- I give in.

His thumbs attach to my lips, spreading them open to expose my clit. His breath hits it, he watches so intently and I wonder what he sees. I've never watched myself, never particularly curious about what I look like down there, from up close. Right now, I wish I did. That's a thing. I saw it on TV once: women that go to a club -they pay for it, which is so weird- to sit on the floor in a room, and individually check their pussies out in a pocket mirror. So fucking weird, I remember thinking. But I should have -maybe without the whole paying for a club and be around other people while doing so but at home, at least once, to know. Because I have no idea what I look like and I'm feeling suddenly self-conscious. Do I look any... yummy? Pink and wet and endearing? “When are you gonna start?” It makes me frown in confusion. Isn't he supposed to be the one starting something? “Telling about your day.” I groan petulantly.

“Yoongi, shut up!” It's outrageous that he puts me in this situation, legs open and crotch glistening with want, aroused, yet angry because he can't help but act like a dickhead. And as always, he won't pay for that. Not answering me, simply smiling to himself, he sets his wet mouth to my mound, sucking my breath away. It's not like it's for me. It's for him. The way he hums, his eyelids fluttering shut, he's enjoying it too much, savouring with utter pleasure my taste.

And of course, he's good at it. Not that I would point it out to him, purely from bitterness, if he were to be bad. His tongue laps along my whole crotch, the tip of his tongue dipping briefly in my hole on its way. I bite hard on my lip, sucking it in to hold any sound I could let out that he would, most certainly, relish in. Once he's spread my wetness everywhere with his tongue, he backs away for a second, staring again while he collects my arousal from his lips, savouring the taste. Yoongi sucks on my labia, taking each lip in individually, suckling like he's making out with my cunt. It's loud and messy, reaches my ears and burns my body with shame, making me sweat in my clothes. It's so hot. He's just so good. Delving his tongue inside, playing with my nub, flicking it left and right, up and down, lapping grossly. 

“Hold your legs.” He demands, guiding them himself to my chest and maintining them until I wrap my hands around my thighs and quietly keep the position. “Wider.” He intimates me, eyes glued to my centre, a thunder-like growling of delight coming straight from his throat. It's incredibly arousing. I'd be embarrassed, ashamed to go along and expose myself so indecently but when he's looking at me like that -like he wants me like he's never wanted anyone before, like I'm the most desirable woman he's ever seen- it's pretty easy to glaze over the feeling. I can feel myself dripping, the light grazing of air a temporary stimulation. I'm not sure how real it is, if it's my imagination playing with me, but I could swear I heard him utter a quiet 'good girl' as he hummed in appreciation for my perfect obedience. 

I can't help it -when it feels so good, it obliterates my mind and renders me stupid, only thinking about, only driven by the promised release- I have to grind on his face. He welcomes the motion so enthusiastically, sticking his tongue out for a while to let me ride it the way I need. I'm squealing. Literally. Tiny, high little whimpers I can't control. It's the frustration. I feel how huge it's growing. I'm so ready to have it snap and free me. But it doesn't. It's too much yet not enough and I'm whining in dissatisfaction. I'm so, so close. It just wouldn't burst. The hypersensibility, the overstimulation hurt. I'm in pain, unable to handle it all. My legs shaking in my hands. My eyes spilling tiny tears at the corners. However, Yoongi is here to save me. The same way he proved me multiple times before, he knows what to do. He takes a second to take a much-needed breath, mindlessly sucking on his lips. It's dizzying. His pretty hand, the one that's been sitting on the back of my thigh, slides down, two of his glorious fingers tease at my hole, a jolt of pleasure shoots me and he doesn't give it time to fade before he's slipping them in, effectively stretching me out -enough to feel the delicious burn but not too much that it hurts. They curl as soon as they're nicely snug in, the tips hitting right on my sensitive spot. I hiss aloud, he sniggers in my folds as he smacks his mouth back against my lips. His tongue flicks my bud a few times before he wraps his lips around it, the fingers abusing ruthlessly from inside the other end. It's too much, makes me cry out, hump the air. He hums and purrs and groans against me as his head follows, not allowing his mouth to part away and it's the vibrations along with the high double stimulation that take me there. My whimpers quicken, growing louder as his lovely mouth rides the orgasm with me. It's exquisite. Even more so as he keeps moaning against me, seeming more and more excited the louder I get. It feels like it takes forever for the spasming to stop, the high to weaken. I'm left spent, speechless, wincing because just breathing strikes the sensitivity. My eyes flutter open on him, standing up between my legs. He's watching me carefully, his feline gaze dark, as he wipes his chin dry with the length of his thumb.

“Okay?” He inquires tenderly. I nod and he leans in to place a tender kiss on my mouth. His tongue slides along my lip, leaving a wet path tasting like my own juice and then he stops teasing to focus on his belt which he starts unfastening. I'm left to watch him do it. He's so hot. Everything he is, everything he makes me feel, everything he does is so incredibly hot.

Yoongi doesn't bother taking his pants off, or even sliding them down, simply pulling his cock out. The pretty thing brings more heat to my cheeks. I've missed it. The straightness, the hardness, the whiteness with the charming flush head, the veins complimenting the ones on his hand. And he's leaking. A lot. I can see it from up there, glowering conspicuously in the dim light. His left-hand gets a hold of his member, wrapping around the base, squeezing firmly while his right one reaches forward, the back of his pointer grazes my crotch, dipping in the wetness. I flinch visibly, one of my legs jerks and that makes him chuckle again. He withdraws from my warmth, deeming it better to let me rest for now and instead diverts his attention to the tabletop, between my legs. My breath hitches in my throat when I notice the mess I didn't even realize I've made. 

There's so much. I've never really paid attention, therefore, I can't tell if it's more than usual; if, perhaps, I even squirted. Either way, Yoongi lives for it. He dips his fingers in the puddle, smiling to himself so obnoxiously, it makes me want to punch him in the rib. He plays for a bit with it, toying with the movement of the liquid, enjoying how much there is before he rubs all that he's gathered between his fingers on his cock. Looking me straight in the eyes, appearing as sinful as ever, he proceeds on treating his begging tip. He doesn't even bother taking care of the length or his balls, greedy as he is to come already, stroking the engorged tip, frotting his palm on it, twisting his hand around. It's so wet. I can hear the slick sounds his quick stroking makes from the mixture of our essences. There's the panting too. Erratic, coloured with lovely groans that make my cunt clench around nothing. That's apparently all I need to wake my arousal, to make me forget all about the uncomfortable stinging of oversensitivity: Min Yoongi, handsome as ever, with his lips red and swollen from eating me out, his cheeks rosy from excitation, lazy eyes begging me to watch him, abusing his cock with desperate frenzy. Observing him, not wanting to miss a beat of it, I move the dark hair sticking to his forehead with my fingers, to then let them rest on his plump cheek, so soft and burning under my tips. Yoongi leans in, eyelids slowly fall close, he purrs like the kitty he is and my heart hurts. Soon enough he's groaning again, loud and deep, and he's anything but adorable. “I'm gonna come.” He hisses, his jaw tight, hand pumping erratically. “Kiss me.” 

It's against the plump of my mouth, biting on my bottom lip that he finally comes, moaning a helpless call of my name that sends a shiver down my spine, turning every drop of the blood in my veins into an electric filled fluid. There's some of his cum leaning on the skin just before my crotch. It feels like pure torture, as it slowly glides down my thigh. I watch it, mesmerized, ignoring the amused eyes set on me. “If you wanted me to cum on you, you should have said so.” He taunts, biting on his lip as he smirks.

“Why do orgasms make you even more insufferable?” That's funny because he decides to shrug, giving a little side tilt of his head as if he admits it instead of arguing or come back with a snarky comment.

“Are you going to ask me to be your boyfriend?”

“You're a dick.” Yoongi raises his eyebrows high, pinching his lips together in mock bewilderment.

“You flirt weird.”

Giving up on trying to be snarky and sassy and smart, I simply repeat on my way out, “You're a dick, Yoongi.” I've reached the door already when his hands seize my waist, effectively stopping me on my track. I let him do it because I'm too merciful and too hopeful that he may have something sweet to say. He turns me around, holds my face in his palms, they're burning, and I feel myself melting in them. Softly, his lips meet mines. Not for long. But it's so tender and gentle, it suffices to take my breath away.

“I'm seriously not going to call you my girlfriend until you ask me out properly.” I fight my way out of his grasp, fleeing for his studio door under the loud background music made of his stupid breathy laughter. 

Today, he's too much of a dick, I'll just have to spoil him with my love another day.

A/N : So this happened. I don’t know about this, I’m stuck in a writing funk these past weeks or so... I feel like it’s all stiff and doesn’t flow well idfk. Don’t hesitate to let me know how you feel about this attempted soft filth. kisses & purple hearts to you !

[defectivenancydrew]

MID Review (finally)

Now that I’ve had a while to reflect on MID, I feel like I can give an honest, spoiler-free review. This turned out to be a much more in-depth review than I had planned on doing, but you can just read the italics at the end of each section if you just want the gist.

Controls: Okay, so for like the first fifteen minutes (or however long it takes you to adjust), the controls are frustrating. Once you get used to how to move (and it is still point-and-click), you’ll be fine. The only thing that I still didn’t have a solid grasp of by the end of the game was moving Nancy’s head around with the right mouse button--it might have helped to slow the mouse down for this function. That being said, the controls offer a lot to the game. The environments and navigation feel more realistic, and instead of jumping from scene to scene, Nancy slides through the space. It’s weird at first, but it’s ultimately superior. (Just for kicks, I went back and played a bit of LIE as a comparison, and the jumpy movement felt so weird after the smoothness of MID). Controls get a 8/10 for the steep learning curve and the more realistic movement.

Graphics: They’re not that bad, okay? On high render, the environments actually look really good and the characters are decent (low render is an understandably different story). Given the technical reasons behind the graphics looking as the do (full 3D render here versus painstakingly painted video files before), I don’t think that they’re really that bad. Puzzle renders and zoomed-in items/POIs really shine, appearing arguably better than previous games. It’s also important to consider what SCK/STFD look like compared to SEA--MID obviously looks better than SCK/STFD, but it has room for improvement. Just like the development team refined the graphics on their proprietary engine, they will refine the graphics on Unity over time. Again, looking back to the first three games, there is a huge jump in graphics quality between each game, indicating their ability to improve quickly. I’m willing to best that the next game (yes, I believe there will be a ‘next game’) will look much better than MID, and so on from there. Character renders are not as great, but this, too, is likely to improve and is probably also due to the fact that it’s 3D and not a painted video file. Their movements may be awkward, but the fact that they are mo-cap means that they may improve in future games. The only real gripe I have about the characters is the lack of facial expressions. Graphics get a 7/10 for up-close realism and room for improvement.

Performance: If you have a gaming PC or a relatively new device, you should be golden. The game runs smoothly at high render on my 2018/i7/SSD PC, but has some lagging issues at high render on my 2014/i5/HDD PC (issues that all but disappear by adjusting to low render). For those with older PCs or PCs with less processing-power, you may have to deal with way-off lip-syncs and choppy cut scenes if you also want to see the best possible graphics. The game only crashed once on my older PC (and it was more likely due to unrelated background processes I was running), but the autosave feature prevents crashes from being anything more than a brief annoyance. Performance gets a 6/10 for high requirements and the Sophie’s Choice of graphics or speed.

UI: I love the sleek, full-screen appearance and minimalist inventory/phone bar. If I had to ask for any improvements here, I might suggest that the inventory collapse into a bag icon when it’s not in use. UI gets 10/10 for maximizing space and minimizing distractions.

Environment (independent of graphics): HeR definitely stepped up their game (heh) on this front. While there are arguably no more locations to explore than in SEA, the environment is far more expansive and cohesive. You feel like you are in a small town (Salem), and you have the freedom to explore all the relevant places without jumping around or magically transporting. There’s only one location that is distant from the town center, and Nancy travels via car to get back and forth, which adds a dose of realism. We have our usual forest navigation (though it is mercifully straight-forward, unlike DOG or CAP), with the added bonus of looking around and using it to get from one place to another. The game makes good use of each space, though it’d be nice if there was more to do in certain lesser-used locations. Some of the locations really only seemed to be present to flesh out the whole environment--which is fine--but it’d be nice to utilize those locations a bit more. And when graphics are set high, the environments are quite stunning. The lighting and weather also do a good job of reinforcing the current atmosphere in-game. Environment gets a 9/10 for cohesion and light usage.

Characters (independent of graphics, story): This is probably one of the spots where MID won me over. Not only do we have eleven (11!) official characters, we have background characters that make the setting real! I didn’t count, but there were probably 10+ background characters that were present for minor commentary and realistic liveliness. For the first time in a Nancy Drew game, I wasn’t questioning where the rest of the world was. Yes, their movements were awkward and if your computer couldn’t handle the graphics, then their lips were flapping in mysterious ways, but they moved around and interacted with each other in semi-human ways. It is absolutely baffling to me that there are people who think there were too many characters. For one thing, we as fans asked HeR for more characters and that’s what they gave us. For another, the game never felt crowded. There were seven characters that were considered “main” that you interacted with often, three side characters that you interacted with occasionally, and one character that you only interacted with once. If they hadn’t been fully-formed characters with solid backstories, I might be persuaded that the number was an issue, but almost all of the characters were fully- or mostly-developed. Characters gets a 10/10 for quantity and quality.

Puzzles: This is probably the one facet of the game where it is most clear that HeR listened to fans’ requests. We asked for more realistic puzzles that were integrated into the game play and not totally irrelevant. That’s what we got. For some people, I think this made it seem like there were fewer puzzles, but I think there were just as many as before, it just wasn’t always super obvious that you were solving a puzzle (and they all but eliminated chore-type puzzles). The cooking mini game and serving mini game were both fun, nostalgic time-wasters in the best of ways. Another nice thing about the puzzles was that they weren’t super difficult as long as you were paying attention, so there wasn’t any need to google solutions or get frustrated. Puzzles get a 9/10 for fan service and perception (after all, perception is reality).

Story: MID really shines when it comes to the story line. The game delves into the full history of Salem, rightfully choosing to discuss topics that were always skirted in earlier games (prejudice, discrimination, slavery, torture, etc.). My only issue regarding the presentation of history is that a lot of the learning is optional, and can be easily ignored or missed. The actual story line of the game is well-established and doesn’t have any gaping plot holes (at least that I noticed on my first play through). There are multiple crimes to solve, multiple items to recover, and thus multiple endings/outcomes to achieve. I can’t go into too much more detail without spoiling parts of the game, but suffice it to say that the story has depth and gravity that might even place it ahead of previous games. Story gets a 10/10 for more mature themes and multiple, successfully interweaving story lines.

Dialogue: While the content of the dialogue is great and forms the foundation for much of the story, it loses me in presentation. First, the line-by-line captioning system is awkward at best, and a monologue behind at worst. I see no reason not to present the player with sentences or paragraphs at a time as before. Second, dialogue options are not so much options as dialogue tasks. You have questions you can ask, but there is no choice of how to ask them or how to respond to an answer. For the most part, you are just choosing the order in which to ask things. This, in my opinion, is a step backward from the previous games, where Nancy could be optimistic, pessimistic, direct, or passive-aggressive. Lastly, there is a strange lack of subject in Nancy’s sentence structure at times. She says “should do xyz” instead of “I should do xyz,” or “wanted to ask about abc” instead of “I wanted to ask you about abc.” While this isn’t really too weird in the context of modern speech patterns, it is still a little awkward. There are examples of this in previous games when Nancy speaks to herself, but never in dialogue with other characters. Again, this isn’t a big deal, but it crops up enough to make it noticeably strange. Dialogue gets a 6/10 for solid content and poor presentation.

Music: At first, the music seems to be nothing special; the main theme is quiet, unassuming, and a bit repetitive at times. But much like the rest of the game, it gets better as you progress. The music in Luminous Infusions and at the end of the game really stick out as great pieces, although the rest of the tracks are also very well-composed. There is thematic continuity between tracks and the tracks also reflect the game’s current atmosphere well. The music, while from a new composer, is still reminiscent of the old games, particularly the mystical tracks in CUR. I’m hoping HeR releases a soundtrack for MID in the future, but I do know there are no current plans for an official soundtrack (though you can find unofficial ones on YouTube pretty easily). Music gets a 10/10 for quality and cohesion.

Nancy: Nancy finally sounds like the late teen that she is meant to be! Nancy is witty and assertive, no longer speaking with the voice of a thirty-year-old and expressing the thoughts of a thirteen-year-old. The new voice actress is just what Nancy’s voice needed, in my opinion, though I have admittedly been a supporter of replacing Lani since about DED/GTH (don’t get me wrong, I love Lani and she will always be the classic voice of Nancy in my head, but I could also admit that her voice was losing its spark and pep). It takes a little while to get used to the new voice, but once it stops sounding different, it’s easy to fall in love with. Another great aspect of Nancy 2.0 is that she’s willing to get into it with other characters, even if they are in a position of authority. Nancy has always been an assertive character who stands up for what is right, even if it’s not easy to do. We see the return of this kind of Nancy in MID, and I hope we don’t lose her in future games. The only thing that I found a tad bit odd was how sugar-sweet Nancy was toward Deirdre. I like how their relationship was updated in order to model more appropriate/healthy female friendships, but it is a little weird considering the canon interaction model set forth by ASH and DED. Nancy’s other relationships have also matured and improved. Nancy gets a 10/10 for assertiveness and expressiveness.

Physical Copy: Well, almost two weeks after the release date, I finally got my physical copy of MID. This is unprecedented, as I always received physical pre-orders the day of or even the day before release. The long wait drove me to buy the digital download, which I didn’t mind doing, but this could be very frustrating for those not willing to pay for the game twice. I was disappointed to find that the disc art is just a copy of the cover art (which is minimalist at best), and not a characteristic color like the other games. The box art seems like it was put together at the last minute, not unlike the cover art. If it weren’t for my compulsive need to own all of the physical copies, I probably would have skipped it. Physical copy gets a 1/10 for slow delivery and lackluster appearance.

Weird Things to Complain About: Yes, there is one background character whose voice sounds like it was recorded on a Motorola Razr, but she says one sentence that you don’t even have to listen to. Yes, some of the background characters are overt clones, but we’ve never even had background characters to complain about before. Should there have been more to do in the Hathorne House or other one-off locations? Yeah, probably, but we were given a ton of locales to visit. The characters were always bobbing around and breathing, but--surprise!--this is something that real humans do. Did their feet/hands occasionally meld with other objects or the environment? Sure, but why were you looking at their feet during a conversation? Admittedly, Teegan sometimes looked like she was trying to scare off a bear or prepare for flight, even I can’t argue that that wasn’t odd. But for the most part, these are minor, petty issues. There weren’t gaping plot holes, there was actually a mystery to solve (looking at you, MED), and we got a lot of the things that we asked for over the years. There is always room for improvement, and this game is certainly no exception. I expect that the next game will make refinements based on our feedback and be even better. HeR completely changed the Nancy Drew game formula, but they used our input as a guide. They’ll take what we say about MID into consideration with the next game, and hopefully over time we will see the same level of improvement we saw from SCK to SEA. They started from scratch, and even though they had five years to work on it, the first time you try something new is almost always the worst. I don’t condone the way they treated us over the hiatus or how they treated their own staff, but I don’t think it’s time to abandon ship yet. If you play this game with nostalgia goggles on and a closed mind, you’re going to hate it, you’re going to ask for a refund. If you go into it with an open mind and excitement for something new, you might just find that you like MID more than you’d care to admit. Weird things to complain about gets an 8/10 for minor oddities that should be expected in a pilot endeavor.

Conclusion: Change is inevitable. If you were around when TMB came out, you might remember the absolute uproar that came with the UI change. People threatened to walk away from the series because of the new menu screen and bulkier interface. If you’ve played the original SCK and STFD, then you know how drastically the games improved over the span of a single year. And compare those games to SEA and it’s clear that the games are always improving. But you have to start (or in this case, restart) somewhere, and MID is our new starting point. The games will get better, and we’ll still find things to complain about (like we always do), because there is always room for improvement. There’s no point in lamenting about how good the game would have looked on the old engine, because that misses the point. The old engine could not deliver what we as fans desired. It could not handle more than six characters or more than eight hours (this is being generous) of game play. It couldn’t give us more expansive environments or smoother navigation. The new engine gave us all of these things, but sacrificed a bit of graphics. Big whoop. I’m willing to bet that none of us got into the games for their graphics, especially those of use who became fans early on in the games’ history. Bottom line? HeR gave us a good game. Not their best game, maybe not even one of their better games, but it’s certainly better than MED or SCKR. And hey, at least we finally got the game. Midnight in Salem gets an 80%, an admirable B-, because the effort and progress is there, but there are definitely things that they could have done better.

[commhunter736]

True Crime Pc Game Download

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True Crime New York City Pc Game Download

Luxoflux invites grown-up players back for another game of 'good cop (or) bad cop' in this follow-up to 2003's L.A.-based action-adventure. As in the original True Crime, players take the role of an unorthodox law enforcement officer, and by their actions and in-game choices, determine the character's morality as they play through the story. In True Crime: New York City, the hero is a former gang member named Marcus Reed, who uses his hard-knocks schooling to powerful effect in the gritty underworld of the Big Apple. As in Streets of L.A., New York City missions play out in freely-roamed, GTA3-style environments, stocked with plenty to see and do even when Marcus isn't working towards a specific mission goal. Key characters are voiced by accomplished screen actors, including Christopher Walken, Laurence Fishburne, and Mickey Rourke, with Marcus Reed portrayed by Avery Waddell.

Click the 'Install Game' button to initiate the file download and get compact download launcher. Locate the executable file in your local folder and begin the launcher to install your desired game. View all 52 True Crime Streets of L.A.

True Crime NYC is the sequel to True Crime: Streets of LA. It's also attempting a huge bite out of Grand Theft Auto's target audience. It's gritty, realistic (sort of), and meant to bring you right into the seedy underbelly of a New York crime drama. Does it do all this?

Nope, no, nada, sorry, but I digress. The rendering of New York City is incredible. A lot of detail and painstaking care went into making every street and alley look authentic. From Times Square to the depths of Harlem, everything is VERY close to reality. As a tour program this game excels, but I'm betting you're hoping for a lot more than a tour.

Before I get to what's wrong with this game, let me focus on what's right. It's a much shorter list. The graphics are quality, with features drawing from the latest in pixel shading, high polygon count character models and impressive motion capture, topped off with a gorgeous depiction of the big city that leaves a good taste in your mouth. You can spend a fair amount of time enjoying the scenery and getting lost in the mix. Another point for True Crime: the voice acting. They have spared no expense to obtain talent, Laurence Fishburne, Christopher Walken and many others top the list of grade-A voice acting for this game's gritty plot. When I first heard the voice of a mysterious officer bark out orders and explain my next mission in Christopher Walken's creepy cadence, I was very much caught in the moment. On a further note, the audio in this game is not lacking. Sound effects are crisp and believable for the most part, the soundtrack is as varied as you could ever hope for. Bouncing from White Zombie to De La Soul to The Ramones had me guessing that they wanted to avoid the rap-only crowd, though there is a large share of that too.

The plot, in case you're wondering, is you taking the role of Marcus Reed, a down and dirty gangster thug who has embraced the straight and narrow and become a police officer. Although he can still fight and play dirty, he's out to solve a few mysteries and clean up the town. This is mostly achieved by driving around (or by subway, or walking, but, unlike the real NYC, driving is preferable) and catching calls on the radio for random crimes. There is an interesting amount of variety in the crimes, but you soon reach the end of the cycle and bust your 34th counterfeit syndicate and your 23rd serial rapist and the regular missions soon get old. There is a larger plot to follow, however, and it is slightly more interesting. You follow a series of clues and leads to interrogate increasingly more important thugs. The interrogation mini-game is a fun little past-time to beat, or reason, information out of people. You're soon turned onto a mission that involves a mole from inside the precinct.

Ultimately, this plot has been done to death so many times on so many cop dramas that it's difficult to get engaged. This is just the beginning of where the game goes downhill. Obviously, high production values went into this game, but as is so often the case lately, they missed the mark in some very key areas. The controls for one. Amd display driver whql 8.10. I have rarely seen a more convoluted control system for PC.

I'll be the first to admit that this was originally for console, but it seems that barely a token effort was made to translate the commands to a keyboard layout. My fingers got a workout hopping all over the keyboard for the numerous and poorly constructed commands. If you're thinking that a gamepad might fix all this, nix that idea too. My Logitech PS2 Styled PC gamepad looked like a perfect match for this game, alas it was barely configurable and did not coordinate to the multiple styles of game play, you could set it up for driving, but not running, or vice versa, but its limitations soon had me back on the keyboard.

After I had adapted to the controls somewhat, the physics had me somewhat at a loss. Keeping in mind that this is not a driving simulation, at its core, I don't expect much more than doughy arcade style driving. Labtec speakers drivers download. But nothing handled as I expected, the cars were sloppy, sometimes you lightly skidded off the front end of a fire truck, other times being brushed by a motorcycle had you recoiling and turning 360's while your perpetrator was getting further and further away. The fighting system was convoluted as well, with a light attack, a heavy attack, a grab attack that was also the way to frisk people, which is also the button to arrest people, plus the buttons to put away your gun, pull it back out, fire a warning shot, flash your badge, tackle someone, all while trying to keep the squirrelly camera centered behind you (which it rarely does well).

In the graphics department there were glitches, clipping into walls, as well as criminals falling through solid concrete and waiting in the ether for you to attempt, in vain, to arrest them. At one point I was forced to kill a non-lethal perp by shooting him in the foot, just to end the mission. Top this off with some frame lag and a whack targeting system, and you can sense my mounting frustration. You'll often find yourself tackling air, punching civilians and firing point blank at walls. There were also numerous points where the textures for multiple guns seems to be missing, and your Uzi,s or pistol would appear as a white textureless shape.

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In a GTA-styled attempt to test the limits of my virtual city, I shot an arsonist, grabbed his flamethrower and took out 30 people before highjacking a public bus and driving over half the residents of the Lower East Side. I finished up with some cop killing. reckless driving and traffic accidents. I was being hunted by every cop in the city and identified as a rogue cop who was 'mentally unstable,' according to the radio. Assured of my own impending death, I ran to and fro waiting for the inevitable. Which never came. I made a break through the park and dived into the bay and swam around for 2-3 minutes. Upon returning to shore my 'criminal' rating had gone back down and I was back to being boy hero. Realism indeed. In another game glitch, I began a mission to follow a motorcycle courier on a bike of my own for an exciting chase, but after trying 20 times to follow him, he wrecked within two blocks almost every time. Finally I just tracked him down on foot after he fell and interrogated him, wondering why I even got on the motorcycle. It's this kind of unfinished and unpolished gameplay that brings this gaming experience to its knees. I couldn't bring myself to care about the characters, the city, the law; nothing in this game draws you in efficiently enough to make you want to finish it.

The controls need work, the engine needs work, the collision detection needs work, the AI needs serious work, all in all I wouldn't be surprised if you told me this was a beta. A brief look at the customer support page for Activision also shows that numerous glitches and problems were had by users of all consoles. Overall, a well-presented, high-budget flop. Advanced systemcare ultimate 7 crack. The world doesn't ever need another World War 2 game but developers keep making them, which I guess is the same reason they keep trying to capitalize on the awesome profits of Grand Theft Auto. But a bigger budget does not make a better game.

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[goldenpepper-fr]

Thundercrack Carnivale Skin Reviews

This is my first time looking at all skin and accent submissions in the 2019 Thundercrack Carnivale contest, and while it was very time consuming, I loved to look at the behind-the-scenes of all of them! Some of my favorites were accepted, but some were rejected. I’ll go through the ones who were accepted and I also approve of, then the honorable mentions, and then the ones that got rejected but I feel quite differently.

1. What’s Up Danger

I really love this one’s special effects that make it look very dynamic! My Lightning representative is also a female fae, so I’m definitely getting this one for her. In addition, the Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse reference was also very awesome!

2. Security First

DocMulligan, the designer, originally made 2 versions of this, the yellow variant and the blue variant. The blue variant was chosen, but as a personal preference, I like the yellow one better. It seems to blend in more with the black and yellow caution tape, and overall has a more aesthetically pleasing look.

3. Rendering

The idea of software and 3D modeling is a very unique one for the Thundercrack Carnivale! I really hoped this one would be picked, and the feeling of relief to see this skin make the cut was unexplainable. XD Unfortunately, I currently don’t have any dragons that can fit it.

4. All Systems Go

Snapper battleships??? Yes! This one was designed very well, and the shiny metal texture used for it is just amazing. I’m such a big sci-fi fan! I need to get a Snapper to fit this one.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

5. Expanse Enhanced 

The level of detail in this one is nice! Cyborg tundras need to be a thing! It also has a little bit of an unsettling look on it, with the metal skull and electric blue flames.

6. Blueprinted

The design of rough drafts is cool, and this one especially is created quite well! The gradient of purple and blue, and the little labels on the wings add a great effect!

7. Cyber Support

The color scheme is defintely cyberpunk! The batteries and pipes of glowing electricity look incredible! Gaolers with this tech are on the cutting edge of futuristic life at its finest!

8. S.S. Stormchaser

No contest, this is the most detailed entry of all. Look at the doors, the cannons, the electric spires, the flags flying in the wind...!!! There’s so much to observe in this skin, and I think it was quite popular with the other players too! A bit of a disappointment it didn’t get in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

9. Gaolitronic

This gives me big animatronic vibes! I really love how it has all these hints on the dragon that this is not what you think it is. The wear and tear of the wings and rust on the horns are also a great addition!

10. Mainframe

I know it’s a bit simple, but I like it! The lines are very clean, and it’s got a minimalistic look that I really dig. But is it just me, or does this one remind me of Ikea’s floor map???

11. Automaton

The way violentabyss draws wires is just??? So good??? Underneath the glass belly of the Pearlcatcher is a bundle of delicate cables and sensitive wires connected to an electric core.

12. Precious Metals

All I can say is... sparkly... the copper glitter effect is too good to resist... There’s even small sparkles on the wings too! A subtle accent, but great to boost the looks.

13. The Gods are Made

This one is absolutely phenomenal. How does one create that hologram look??? The fuzzy glowing edges and the lines that rise from the background light were done so beautifully! Turn any Skydancer into an instant vaporwave aesthetic!

14. Enlightened

Ridgeback lightbulb spines are an immediate yes from me. They’re just a fantastic idea!

15. Loading...

Ugh.. the lag... I find it hilarious to poke fun at slow loading screens and how only half of the picture is visible. The frustration! I would definitely buy this one if I could.

16. Circuit Charge

Like Mainframe, this one is simple, but the straight lines and perfect circles are very alluring. Black backgrounds and blue glowing lines are one of my favorite aesthetics.

17. Atomic Breath

Godzilla??? This one is epic! I like the spines and the ultimate energy this radiates from the core!

18. Stormy Wild West

Steampunk! Heck yeah! Yeehaw culture meets modern technology to create a fantastic skin! Guardians sporting this outfit definitely have the fastest hand in the west!

19. Nuclear Core

If I had a Guardian breeding pair, they would wear the Atomic Breath skin and the Nuclear Core skin. I can’t get enough of these types! I also love how AMPkid showcases that it works well on both light and dark color schemes! It also makes me want to get a Giraffe/Hex dragon.

20. Sign Off

Bad T.V. signal is a wondrous idea! The little glitch effect between the colors is also really cool! Applause to dadminkestler for the bold idea!

21. Iron Maiden

Similar to Automaton, this one shows the inside mechanical workings of a female Pearlcatcher. The details are also very nice to look at, and the broken pieces and torn wings are fantastic!

22. Color Bleed

This one is very similar to Sign Off, but for a Snapper! It’s a bit creepy to look at the eyes, but the chills are what I’m all about! I enjoy how the trickling colors fall.

23. Neon Desert

This is just so adorable to look at! The glowing cacti, fuchsia clouds, and tiny glowing stars make it feel cute and cozy. Seeing this accent makes me smile. :)

24. Zap! Pow!

Wow! Comic effects are so dynamic! This illustration is very unique and I like it a lot! Pretty sure I’ll be looking for any prints of these!

25. Digital Blackout

2 words: I. NEED. The circuits, the glitch effects, the binary code, and especially the low battery sign on the tail! Not only that, but the lighting of reds and blues is very visually pleasing!

26. Prickly Pear Princess

I understand that it’s part of the Thundercrack Carnivale theme because the Lightning territory is in the desert. This skin is very bold to be based entirely off of a plant and not copy everyone else with technology and electricity, and I applaud Lusterwing for that! This is thinking out of the box! Plus, the cacti look very well drawn!

27. Death’s Head

This one has big terminator vibes with the visble teeth/jaw look and the unsettling robotic eyes. It’s a terrific combination of skeletons and android parts! Also the glowing red parts remind me of Genji???

28. Pesky Pop-ups

This one made me laugh. Web-surfer problems now make their way onto the Flight Rising dragons themselves!

29. DinoRun

Ah... memories of playing this game when the internet’s down. This one’s a bit of a bonus one, because while I wouldn’t be interested in getting a print of it if it was available, it’s cute and funny.

[carnelianwings]

Tales of Berseria Blogging, Part 12 of Many

Right, so last we left off, I found my archnemesis (and early game bane of my existence) from Tales of Zestiria: The Evil Plantasm.  Did I beat it?  Of course I did.  Video and more under the cut.

Sorry for the graphical lag in a few places, my laptop really didn’t like recording and rendering Laphicet’s grabby hands of doom arte while I twirled Eleanor’s spear in its face.  Also, take that Plantasm.  The fact that Heartbreaker Shot is a Break Soul here actually made the fight a little bit easier than it was in Zestiria - Break Souls are really well telegraphed, and once I knew which move it was (I’d assumed it’d either be the Twirl Of Doom or the Mega Zoom Punch Of Doom - aka Heartbreaker Shot) making sure I avoided it became a lot easier.  Still spent quite a few tries getting this with No Deaths, but at least the AI was actually better at evading attacks than Zestiria’s (and me even lol) so that made the fight go a lot smoother and less frustrating than it was in Zestiria.  I still haven’t forgotten the number of runs that ended in failure when I did that fight on my NG+ Chaos run because Mikleo or Alisha would get smacked and then die, lol.

With that killed, time to move on to looking for the saleh’tomah flowers for the Van Eltia crew.  Malak Laphicet continues to make me think he’s actually the most powerful of them all with all the stuff he’s doing that Eizen can’t; the only reason he hasn’t like, done everything is that he, like Mikleo in Zestiria, is still very much an infant by Malak terms and hasn’t tapped into his full power yet.

Time to go on an expedition to a new area, Barbatos Island!  I knew this would be a Destiny 2 themed area, and the treasure you get for it did not disappoint me:

This is, of course, Judas’s mask from Tales of Destiny 2.  Judas also happens to be a reincarnated Leon Magnus, a talented teenage swordsman . . . who also happens to be the party traitor in Destiny 1.  (There was a reason for it.  He also gets Redemption Means Death applied to him in Destiny 1.)

Great, giant flying beetle thing.  The most annoying thing was when it would cast Flood Wall, mostly because I’m playing on Intense and Malak Arte casting times get reduced for the enemies the higher the difficulty you play on.  Spinning Needle (the Break Soul) wasn’t too bad as long as you watched for the graphical/sound effect that it was going to do it and moved to the side/behind it.

Okay, this is simultaneously really sweet and a little sad (in the feelsy sense).  It’s clear Velvet wants to indulge Malak Laphicet - she still sees him as a Replacement Goldfish for Human Laphicet - and so she’s clearly torn between killing the beetle and indulging him in his desire to have a pet.

I found this rather interesting given a friend and I have been discussing the possibility of Velvet actually becoming Lailah:

Especially since flames of purification essentially removes malevolence from the victim, and Velvet seems to be capable of doing the same with her arm.  Plus, Velvet’s also associated with fire so . . .

. . . god damn it Zaveid.  Also, good to know that Siegfried is an artifact weapon that belonged to Aifread . . . which I guess makes Zaveid still having it in Zestiria rather heartbreaking given what happened to Eizen.  Did he keep it because it was a memento of their Vitriolic Best Buds friendship?  Or did he keep it because somewhere along the way Eizen tells him to keep it because he knew he was going to turn into a dragon because of his curse eventually and he wanted to make sure someone who’d care would be the one to land the killing blow?  Either, way, I’m torn between exasperation (because Eizen just ran off again) and feels (because, I’m remembering Zaveid showing up at Rayfalke that first time and killing a hellion with Siegfried).

Also, Zaveid, you have these things called a gun holster strapped to your leg.  One on each leg even.  Do you really have to tuck Siegfried into the back of your pants?

And it’s pretty obvious the Abbey wants ot get their hands on Zaveid - I wonder if it’s because he’s a strong Malak and they want to enslave him or if there’s some other reason?

Hmmmm, Lothringen, Lohgrin . . . I wonder if those are one and the same.  Lothringen is a tower, you say?  And if I recall correctly, the subtitle for Lohgren in Zestiria is “The Tower’s Remains” . . . we’re going to blow up the tower, aren’t we?  *sigh*  It . . . it would definitely be very Velvet if we did.

LOL Eleanor:

Yes, Eleanor, you’re probably the only non-Chaotic aligned person/Malak here.  Except maybe Laphicet.

Oh hello, Burnack Plateau.  You look an awful lot like a Zaphgott Moor that got more rain.

Oh hey, Breed Wolf.  Nice to see your fight is just as annoying now as it was/is/will be in Zestiria.  For those of you who’ve forgotten, this would be the boss fight for getting Syndra to become Lastonbell’s Lord of the Land with Margaret and her dog turning into a hellion because the townspeople didn’t believe her when she said there was no guardian Seraph.

I think I’m starting to get Zaveid and why he clashed with Sorey right at the start of Zestiria.  Because young-Zaveid is reminding me of Sorey - never killing his opponent, trying to save someone (I presume).  Obviously something changed along the way, because he promises Eizen he’d kill him if he ever turned into a dragon.

Oh wow.  I’m inside Lohgrin as it was before it turned into a town of tents.  It’s . . . not quite what I was expecting.  Or perhaps, the better answer is, I wasn’t expecting it to be so empty - I go to Lohgrin all the time in Zestiria since the inn there has a +75% to gald earned for max damage above 10,000 (and that’s something I can do consistently so it’s totally worth it) and I was expecting it to at least have people there.  Instead I’m being treated to this eerie theme and the place being completely empty with these channels in the floor.  I’m guessing they were either destroyed or paved over with time.  And how fitting, that the event star is at the same place as the room with the monument where Mayvin will show Sorey and Mikleo the past at Camlann.

You know, Eizen talking about Aifread disappearing a year ago and Melchior being the one involved makes me think we’re about to get a major plot reveal here in Lohgrin-That-Was.  It would be rather . . . appropriate given the location.  Also, I wonder if the battle with the major casualties happened at Glaivend Basin?  The optional dungeon is called Ruins of Melchior after all . . .

You know, I think those treasure chests are even in the same places, except for the one on top of the staircase since it was, y’know, crumbled and ruined by the time we get there in Zestiria.

Okay, so not exactly a plot reveal, but stuff does happen.  To the tune of us finally meeting Melchior, and wow, he’s not much of an upstanding citizen is he?  A Malak enslaved to him gets her free will back, so he just corrupts her into a daemon?  I think that just earned him a spot next to Teresa.  Also, I might have freaked out a little when illusionary-Edna got shot.  Anyway, the boss fight:

I have to wonder if the Legendary Wyvern you fight in Zestiria to get Zaveid’s second mystic is the same one, although I’m more surprised that Zaveid agreed to become a Sub Lord after having been forced to become a slave to the Abbey in the past.  That said, young(er) Zaveid and his whole no killing creed reminds me a lot of Sorey and how he refused to kill (until there was no other alternative) and so perhaps that’s why Zaveid not only agreed, but insisted on going.

I also think Melchior and his illusions are what Symonne should have been.  But then I also like the idea that she never got to that level because she was a void - in the sense that nobody ever showed her affection (or hadn’t been shown it) for so long that she forgot what that was like and so couldn’t manipulate her illusions to resonate with her target’s emotions.

You know, that skit where they’re discussing “the girl with the umbrella”?  I’m just imagining Edna’s reaction to them talking about her if she were there.  Probably a round of umbrella whacks and pokes and prods to go around is my guess.

Videl and Laphicet getting all excited over that book made me smile - and it totally made me think of Sorey and Mikleo.

And now that I’m back in Reneed, time to call it a night.

[zdbztumble]

Now that I’m over the halfway point, thought it might be fun to rank all the Pokefilms I’ve seen to date. So, here we go!

1. Revelation Lugia: So far, there hasn’t been any competition for the top slot. Crisp art direction, an appropriately epic scale to the design and the staging of action, a gorgeous musical score (the dub surpassed the original on this point IMO), the best editing and pacing out of any of these movies, and a well-constructed plot that’s simple without being simplistic all speak well for it. But the real selling point for this film is the character work. The CotDs are engaging and play a vital role in the plot without overtaking it. This is the TRio’s finest hour to date IMO. And the main cast has never been better used in a pokefilm. Tracey may be along for the ride (as he often was in the show), but Misty enjoys the best role a travelling companion has got yet, and Ash is saddled with his greatest challenge ever (to my knowledge, anyway; I’ve got a hell of a lot of episodes to go in catching up on the series, but it’s hard to top “save the world by yourself because Prophecy.”) And this and the next entry on this list are the only two films where I felt that Ash (and Misty, in this case), more than just experiencing another adventure, actually grew as a character. Not that Johto or the later series built on that growth, but in this show, I’ll take what I can get.

...And, yeah, the pokeshipping doesn’t hurt its rating either.

2. Lucario and the Mystery of Mew: Again, it’s all about the character work here. This is the only other time that Ash seemed to grow as a character, through his relationship with Lucario and his discovery of his Aura (and, in a way, it’s more of a shame that the show never built on this than it is that they never built on Ash and Misty’s growth after Lugia, when you consider that the staff wrote themselves a golden opportunity to do so in DP!) His “this time, it’s personal” goal of saving Pikachu and the parallels between himself and Sir Aaron also serve to enrich his role in a way most of the other pokefilms don’t even attempt. Lucario is the most compelling and dimensional of the movie-featured Pokemon since Mewtwo. Mew is absolutely adorable. The art direction is beautiful (the color work, especially; everything is so bright and clean), and it’s the last of these films to feel truly cinematic in scope and ambition. It loses points for some awkward pacing in the front half (the dance is so slow!) and a ridiculous lack of pathos shown when the whole human cast (temporarily) dies, but it makes up a lot of those points with its gutsy ending. No contrived out for the heroic sacrifice this time!

3. Pokemon 4Ever: Possibly the most impressive art direction out of any of the movies; the forest feels huge, and old, and real, just in one look. The Miyazaki-esque look is appropriate for the “destruction of nature” plot, the consequences of which are plainly felt. The time travel aspect is intriguing and not confusing, and Sam is the real hero of the human cast. It’s the only film outside of Lugia to try giving the TRio a real reason to be in the movie, though it’s less successful. Drawbacks include a lag in the pace toward the middle, a contrived resurrection, a waste of the travelling companions even by pokefilm standards, and the sidelining of Ash himself.

4. Rise of Darkrai: Here’s where the list gets funky, because I would rather re-watch the two films below the Number 4 slot than I would Darkrai. But on a technical level, Darkrai has a more even script and a more consistently solid execution of that script IMO. It’s the best of the Sinnoh trilogy by a wide margin. The CotDs (well, Alberto at least) are fun and Darkrai is an effective featured Pokemon. But the problems of the Sinnoh trilogy, while not as pronounced here, are still at hand: a light tone that leaves the Legendaries feeling less impressive than their predecessors, a rather episodic layout to the plot that kills a sense of scale, sluggish pacing and a sense of padding, no real role for the travelling companions, and Ash being a glorified deus ex machina.

5. Spell of the Unown: Again, the film below this one is one I’d rather re-watch, though this is the one I most feel I should re-watch, as I think I missed a lot the first time ‘round. I recall feeling that, if other pokefilms could drag, Unown almost felt rushed, with no chance to catch my breath or get my bearings concerning the plot. The fact that Delia was clearly never in any danger from Molly hurts the stakes a bit too. But I give this film a lot of credit for having an innocent and traumatized little girl, or her feelings of loss and loneliness to be more specific, be the antagonist, and the threat that those feelings pose to Ash and friends when given immense power is very tangible. Giving Ash a personal stake in the adventure is very welcome, both travelling companions get decent roles, Charizard’s return is spectacular, and there is some delightfully off-beat and experimental work done in the production design. It’s an uneven movie, but one with a lot of ambition and daring, more than most on this list, and it deserves kudos for trying new things even if it doesn’t always succeed at them.

6. Mewtwo Strikes Back: Compared to my childhood memories of it, this is a very uneven film. The travelling companions have nothing to do, the CotDs are forgettable, the TRio set the “why are we even here” trend up early, the film loses a lot of juice once the battle of clones vs. originals starts (mostly due to sluggish pacing on the fight), and the means of Ash’s revival is infuriatingly dumb. But for the first (and, as far as they knew at the time, only) film of a kids’ cartoon meant to sell video games, it’s shocking to me how dark they went with this film. Mewtwo is a wonderfully grey character, and his origins and struggles render the first half of the film one of the best sequences in the whole franchise. The idea of prejudice and fighting for superiority as a basis for the conflict is solid in theory if a bit heavy-handed in execution. If Ash and friends (mostly friends) don’t get a lot to do once they reach the island, their journey to it is a fun adventure. And there’s a delightfully twisted horror film look to the production design. For a first outing, this was a very daring and risky film, and even if doesn’t fully work, I think it’s a more impressive effort than most of the pokefilms because of that.

7. Arceus and the Jewel of Life: Out of all the Sinnoh trilogy, this one felt the least padded, and helped clear up some of the murky plot mess of the earlier entries. The CotDs are serviceable if a little on the dull side. And this final chapter of the trilogy does aim the highest in its scope and scale, even if it doesn’t reach its goals. But Arceus’s terrible voice in the dub, and his rush to apocalyptic judgement, really hurt the character. And the main cast is worse off here than in the other entries, as Dawn ends up as sidelined as Brock in the finale.

8. Giratina and the Sky Warrior: You can give the film this - Shaymin is a well-developed character. She’s a little shit, but she’s a fleshed-out little shit. And Giratina was the most impressively presented of the Sinnoh Legendaries. But the human villain here is very dull, and Shaymin’s obnoxiousness makes it damn near impossible to get invested in her conflict. On the plus side, wonderful art direction and animation.

9. Pokemon Heroes: Possibly the most frustrating of these movies to date for me, because there were a lot of elements - the setting, the mythological background, the Dragon-types - that I really liked. It’s easily one of the most beautiful of the movies, and there was a lot of potential in the plot. But most of that potential was untapped, the elements never gelled, and I was often bored watching it. When I wasn’t bored, I was frustrated and questioning - see my “review” for the whole list. And this may be the worst film on the matter of sidelining the travelling companions.

10. Genesect and the Legend Awakened: The one film on this list I wouldn’t hesitate to say was bad. A fundamental weakness in the plot caused by making the titular Pokemon so unsympathetic, the poor handling of Mewtwo’s return, an unremarkable set of roles for the main cast, uneven animation, and a general feeling of laziness all conspire against a decent premise.

...And there you have it. Will update when I finish off the films, or at least get as far as I can down the list.

[pauldeckerus]

Lightroom Sucks: An Open Letter to Adobe

“Panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham, I wonder to myself, could life ever be sane again?” You’d be forgiven for thinking The Smiths were singing about wedding photographers mid-summer running around the streets in a naked hysteria after they’ve just installed the latest Lightroom update.

Adobe, I hope you read this because it seems like for too long now you’ve ignored the issues and released update after update that actually made things worse, NOT better!

This open letter is not a plea for you to up your game — it’s a demand. You owe it to all the subscribers that have shown great loyalty to you for such a long time.

“Ooh look I have 6 weddings in the queue, I’m a little stressed and wedding season is taking its toll, but it’s OK as I have three days solid booked out to make a dent in things. Ok, I’ll just load up Lightroom…” And this is where a whole world of frustration, irritation and wanting to walk into traffic begins. For while we may have time finally to catch up on some editing, Lightroom generally decides to throw a spanner or ten in the works!

Now I want to get one thing very straight here, Lightroom is a wonderful piece of software… when it works properly. It’s revolutionized the way wedding photographers process work, making it easier and more convenient.

Why oh why then does Adobe continue to release updates that seem to make it almost unusable at times? At best these days my experience of using it is sub-par, a whole catalog of issues are present at all times, and of course, I’m not the only one who has this experience. So Adobe for the love of God will you PLEASE sort it out!

I hear time and time again from people involved in their beta testing that Lightroom needs to be rebuilt rather than updated and that Adobe is aware of ‘bugs’ and trying to resolve them. Well, quite frankly, that isn’t good enough! How many hundreds of thousands of wedding photographers use Lightroom and pay their subscription to CC? It’s impossible to know, but MORE than enough to warrant Adobe giving us more back — a hell of a lot more.

There’s also a stark warning here for Adobe: you rest on your laurels and eventually someone else will release something and everyone will jump ship. You only have to see how many people have switched to Sony from Canon or Nikon to understand that brand loyalty doesn’t mean anything if something shinier, better, and more appealing comes along. It will happen one day to you too, Adobe, if you continue to be so complacent and not give us the software we want and deserve.

Minimum System Requirements

I’m going to list some of the issues I face using Adobe Lightroom in a moment and then a load that other photographers have also shared with me. Firstly though I want to examine what the recommended system specifications by Adobe are because it makes for surprising reading!

Source: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/system-requirements.html

So a minimum 4GB RAM and 12GB recommended. Yes, that’s right: a MINIMUM of 4GB RAM. So what Adobe is saying is that you CAN run Lightroom on a machine with as little as 4GB of RAM, really?

12GB is the recommended… how old are these specs? I think that’s one of the things that irks me about Adobe’s approach to their software packages. If they said ‘hey it’s a minimum of 16GB RAM but we’d recommend 32GB’ it would help us make informed decisions when spending $2,500 on our editing machines.

If you use Lightroom as your main memory-intensive application then you could easily be lulled into thinking that a cheaper spec machine with less RAM is fine, when it really wouldn’t be. Adobe do you really think Lightroom CC can run fine on a machine with 4GB of RAM? Erm, no!

I Have Issues

I tried to write down all the issues I face using Lightroom, some will no doubt have slipped my mind, but I think the list in itself is pretty comprehensive and includes the following:

– Flicking between images even with Smart Previews enabled takes too long, there’s a pause while it renders. Ok, this is one everyone pretty much has, but it seems to be getting worse!

– Preset not showing as being applied until I make a change. It just shows the straight-out-of-camera version until I change the exposure or crop/rotate and then BINGO, there’s the preset. This is an intermittent issue, sometimes it’s there, sometimes not… however, when it’s there it affects several hundred photos at a time. It’s a confusing and irritating problem. It seems to occur if I edit for a few hours, like Lightroom is tired and can’t be arsed anymore, keen to get home for its dinner and watch The Walking Dead.

– Trying to crop or rotate anything involves a lag similar to my 3-year-old when I ask him to do pretty much anything. This is a new issue (in LR, not with my 3-year-old — that’s always been there with him), and it’s very annoying, Adobe!

– In full-screen mode the left menu panel used to pop out when you hovered over it, it no longer does this, except last Tuesday when it DID, only to revert back to not doing so by Wednesday morning. Apart from that delightful Tuesday, I have to click to open it and click to close it again.

– Then there’s the curious issue for whenever a new update is available, my current version either suddenly runs super sloooooow or stops working altogether, forcing me to update to the latest one. Now I’m not suggesting Adobe is somehow sending a sneaky patch to break my existing version so I HAVE to update, but if they are it’s REALLY annoying and happens so often it’s hard to not feel a little suspicious about.

– Let’s not forget the issue where you are using a catalog and wish to open a different one, which results in the first catalog successfully closing, but Lightroom just sitting there and not responding until you either force quit (or sometimes actually have to switch off the machine as it won’t force quit), or after several minutes it finally decides to respond again and open the new catalogue.

– Photoshop opens weird about 75% of the time. So if you’re like me and like to add an extra bit of sharpening to portraits or clone out bird poop from the fence where the couple is standing etc, you’ll Command E to open Photoshop. It’s great you can open PS from LR, edit, save and it appears back in LR as a .tiff. Bravo Adobe, that is one nifty function! Except when it opens like this three-quarters of the time.

Apologies for the portrait, clearly not keeping it real at this point of the wedding – this was just the only time I remembered to screen shot the issue

I haven’t cropped anything from the PS window here, that’s how it opens most of the time. To make it usable I have had to click ‘view’ and then ‘full screen with menu bar’ so many times recently that I’m starting to get RSI (and RAGE) from it.

Incidentally, if anyone else is suffering the same issue, I found a quick way to make it display correctly. I stumbled upon by pure accident as I tried to ALT+TAB back to Lightroom. My RSI finger completely unaware of what it should be doing pressed the desk instead of the ALT key by mistake, thus showing me that pressing TAB alone changes the view mode and makes it normal again… hallelujah!

There are other issues too. It’s slow. It lags a lot. If you import images to a new catalog you have to close LR after it’s imported them and reopen again or it runs slower than me in a school sports day father’s 100-meter race. Oh, and don’t forget to close the histogram as having a tiny graph at the top of your screen makes LR wheeze with pain at the pure exertion of displaying it.

While all these things might not seem much, they impact my day to day work, it’s an inconvenience I could do without, and as I’m paying regularly for the use of this software I’d damn well like it to work properly! It costs me time and frustrates the living daylights out of me.

System of a Down(beat Photographer)

I appreciate I don’t have a monster of a machine, but it is actually a higher spec than Adobe recommends. So going on their information, supplied in order for us to make informed purchases, I shouldn’t be having any issues, certainly not from a machine performance point-of-view anyway.

Problems in the Community

I asked the Facebook community that I run (please join us on there if you aren’t already a member) what issues people were facing and what spec machines they were using because as with most things in life, you worry that it’s maybe just you. It turns out I’m not alone!

Rob Georgeson [Intel Core i5 / 16GB RAM / 1GB NVIDIA Graphics Card / 120GB SSD HD]: “My pc definitely seems to be working harder just to do basic editing. It used to be a breeze but now I can hear the fans running at full speed trying to get my computer to chill the f**k out”.

Andrew Bowness & Esther Wild [Windows 10 / Intel i7-6700 @ 3.4ghz / 16GB RAM / SSD / 6GB Nvidia Graphics Card, Mac OS High Sierra (10.13.6) / Intel Core i5 / 8GB RAM / Radeon Pro 2048 Graphics Card] also are having the same issue, Andrew’s being so bad ‘I put music on to drown it out.’ Esther also has issues with it hanging and getting the spinning wheel of doom.

Michael Newington Gray & Paul Marbrook [Mac OS High Sierra / Intel Core i7 / 16GB RAM / AMD Radeon R9 Graphics Card, MAC OS High Sierra / Intel Core i5 / 24GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GT Graphics Card]: When flicking between images in Develop module the images aren’t loading / going sharp until I zoom in and out.

Oli Kelly [Windows 10 / Intel Core i5 / 8GB RAM / GeForce GTX 1050 Graphics Card]: When I’m doing brush work it can lag out so badly and make the mouse skip over the image like it’s buffering. When flicking through images it can pixelate the original raw for sometimes 10 seconds until it remembers what I have done to the image and then shows my edit.

Denver Aubrey [Mac OS High Sierra / Intel Core i5 / 24GB RAM / AMD Radeon R9 Graphics Card]: Everything seems to lag despite massive amounts of ram and a decent spec iMac. Drag a slider, let go, wait for half a second or a whole second and then see the effect. Maybe. Just updated LR CC classic today to the latest version. Now LR opens for about 2 mins and then unexpectedly quits.

Ally Hedayati [Mac OS High Sierra / Intel Core i7 / 20GB RAM / AMD Radeon HD 1024MB Graphics Card]: When I want to do some external editing in PS from LR, PS revets it to SRGB – making a black and white image colour for instance. Even though I have “turn to SRGB” unticked.

Jade Eleanor Evans [Mac OS High Sierra / Macbook Pro 15″ 2017 / Intel Core i7 / 16GB RAM / Radeon Pro 560 4GB Graphics Card]: Too slow, not sure what on earth it’s doing but I have one of the new macs (2017) and it gets so hot it actually leaves red marks on my legs when I have it on my lap. Even when its used on a desk it still gets hot and the fans sound louder than my hair dryer! Also for some unknown reason when I export and choose ‘resize to fit, longe edge’ I type in whatever for the long edge and that ends up being the shorter edge… No-one has any idea why it does this! So if I type in 2048 for the long edge (I mostly shoot landscape), they export at 3072 x 2048 making the shorter edge 2048 (yes I am definitely clicking ‘long edge’ not ‘shorter edge),

Jamie Ousby [Mac OS Sierra / Intel Core i7 / 16GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GT Graphics Card]: Lightroom doesn’t export some exposure changes for around 10 x images when exporting a wedding of 800+ images. Go to the image in question and adjust the exposure slider up and it accepts it. Switch to full screen to take a look and it shows the correct exposure for a split second and then flashes back to the “as shot” exposure. No matter what I do when exporting this image it will not accept the exposure setting.

A bride on her wedding day still traumatised after installing a new Lightroom update the day before. Image by Andrew Billington

What is your current relationship with Lightroom?

The Other Side of the Coin

Not everyone we spoke to experienced issues with Lightroom. In fact, some found it to work perfectly. Their specs were similar to those above with one large exception – their memory ranged between 32GB and 64GB RAM. So is this the solution?

Adobe, we’d love for you to clarify just what is going on here. Is it just you’ve told us incorrect information when stating the software should run perfectly on 12GB RAM (hell, it should still run ok on 4GB according to your minimum specifications)? Or, as I’ve been told many times by your beta testers, is the software inherently broken and does it need rebuilding from the ground up? If that’s the case, is this going to happen, and if so when?

Yours Sincerely

I did consider signing off this open letter with ‘yours faithfully’, but to be completely honest I’m only faithful to you because there aren’t any serious alternatives on the market at the moment. Yes, Capture One can do a similar job, but from what I’ve heard it’s not quite enough to make the leap over.

So I’ll stick with you until something better comes along… or you buck up your ideas enough to actually make this more than a marriage of necessity. Over to you, Adobe!

About the author: Andy Hudson is the co-founder of Photographers Keeping it Real, a website, award, and podcast for documentary wedding photographers. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors. You can find more content by Hudson and connect with him on his website and Facebook group. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Header illustration based on photo by Mwangi Gatheca

from Photography News http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PetaPixel/~3/2CnQC6wObGA/

[minhthangcoi9993-blog]

Review Game Detroit: Become Human

It’s a testament to the breadth of Quantic Dream’s branching storylines that I felt terribly guilty as the credits rolled after my second playthrough of Detroit: Become Human, as I’d played against my personal moral compass to test how far I could push the story’s exploration of the morality of artificial intelligence. This was very much the opposite of my mostly peaceful first run, and Detroit obliged my wickedness to a surprising degree, leaving a trail of bodies of those who had previously survived in my wake. And while it never seems to know when enough heavy-handed expositional dialogue is enough, Detroit: Become Human manages to be a frequently moving melodrama that bends to your choices with meaningful results.

Each of those playthroughs took around 10 hours to complete, and during that time Detroit’s pace rarely lags thanks to the deft juggling act it performs, alternating between three android characters across multiple chapters: Kara, a housekeeper who must care for a little girl named Alice, Connor; a prototype police model whose assignment is to round up ‘deviant’ androids, and Markus; a carer model who believes androids should share equal rights with humans.

The trio of performances is excellent. Bryan Dechart is delightful as Connor thanks to his deadpan innocence, which makes for a great foil against the whirling dervish of his cynical partner, Clancy Brown’s Lieutenant Hank Anderson. Valorie Curry brings quiet strength to Kara, and excels at selling her love for her ward, Alice, who is quite possibly the least charismatic video game child to have ever existed. Jesse Williams employs all of his dreamy Grey’s Anatomy warmth as Markus and is never unlikeable, no matter how you choose to play him.

Based on your choices, you can change their personalities and the tone of their individual stories. In my first playthrough, for example, the relationship between a humble Connor and the android-hating Anderson played out like a knockabout buddy comedy. In my second, I let Connor’s ambitions take over, and his story was of a different genre.

Though Markus appears to fundamentally remain endearing no matter what you do (unlike Connor, who really can be played as a hero or villain), there’s a tug-of-war going on within him that throws up some of Detroit's most interesting moral quandaries. Kara’s story seems less tonally flexible but is the quietest and most intimate, which provides a welcome contrast to all the running and explosions you can opt into in the other two stories.

Play more Jelly Doods

Hot new 60 Second Burger Run

For the most part, supporting characters adapt to the way you choose to play, but there are occasional misfires. When I played as ‘nice’ Connor, for example, Anderson was far too aggressive toward him to be believable. When I played as ‘mean,’ or even ‘indifferent’ Connor, his fury made a lot more sense. At one point, Markus gained a lover very abruptly, and I felt I’d missed a slow burn somewhere. It’s noticeable when your choices feel they’re going against the grain of a more robust story.

I found all three of Detroit’s central characters to be dramatically interesting, which meant putting them in compromising situations – or worse, killing them – was a real fear throughout. It’s testament to the writing and performances that I found making decisions “just to see what would happen” teeth-clenchingly hard.

I'm a Real Boy

The backbone of Detroit’s story – meaning the one that’s relatively fixed in place despite the choices you make around it – is big, ambitious fun that takes Phillip K. Dick's question of whether androids dream of electric sheep to the nth degree. In doing so, however, it does suffer from a multitude of plot holes. Marcus appears to gain magical android powers when it suits him; Hank is impressed when Connor solves the most basic of mysteries; and one twist makes absolutely no sense if you look back on that particular storyline after having finished.

These were noticeable (and often pretty funny), but they weren’t deal-breakers for me. Detroit is audacious and silly as hell, but it’s got real heart to it. There were enough moments of quiet tenderness to keep me emotionally invested, and the stakes were suitably high - particularly in its final act - to keep me thrilled.

With this in mind, there is a lot of clumsy exposition and dialogue I was willing to forgive, as one would while watching a fun B-movie. But occasionally, Detroit ignores the standard writing rule of “show, don’t tell” to such an extent I was yanked out of the story. Bad guys spout monologues that spell out Detroit’s themes in capital letters. (There’s a compartment for androids on public transport, in case you didn’t get what Detroit was going for here.) Select side characters, like Hank’s harrowed police chief and the inexplicably wise and mystical Lucy - are loudly cliched, so we understand what their roles are without any real character development.

With the remarkable performance-capture technology – and performances – Quantic Dream has at its disposal, there’s no real reason for such heavy-handedness. Nor do I think Detroit is incapable of subtlety; some of the scenarios here are unusual and profound. But I wish its ideas had more room to breathe before being trampled by someone spelling out the meaning for us.

Characters are certainly capable of non-verbal expressiveness. The level of detail you can see in their faces is astounding; facial hair, blemishes, freckles, and moles are rendered in stunning detail, particularly in checkerboard 4K on the PS4 Pro. The animation is just as good; as Kara and Alice hurry through the rain on a freezing night, hunched over and miserable, I could have been watching two humans from the side-streets.

The world here feels very real, too, built with a sense of history. This is a miserable, dark version of a future Detroit where androids are so omnipresent that they’re old news, sold in chain stores for the price of a discount mobile phone. Little details from the sidelines tell the story of a burst tech bubble, like basements filled to the brim with discarded models or a street performer advertising the fact he is playing “human music.”

Though the path you are guided through in Detroit’s world is as linear as previous Quantic games, I felt like there was more time to enjoy these beautifully detailed environments. One of my favourite sequences involved chasing graffiti tags to find a particular location, which ended up being an eerie, silent excursion in a forgotten corner of the city. There’s also a marvelous scene in an abandoned amusement park which still creaked with enough life that I got a sense of what it might have been, once upon a time.

The way you interact with Detroit’s environments hasn’t evolved much from Quantic Dream’s usual formula, which is unobtrusive and mostly works. Action sequences are generally executed using timed button presses, swoops of the thumbstick, and occasional motion control, which evoke the action you are performing on a case-by-case basis. An android detective mode allows you to scan your environment to reconstruct crime scenes, and fast-forwarding and rewinding through these is a lot of fun, as is a new ability to ‘pre-construct’ scenarios before you execute them. I would have liked the opportunity to play around with the latter ability more than I was allowed to, in fact.

Like Beyond: Two Souls before it, though, Detroit: Become Human struggles to justify its multiple fight scenes with meaningful interactivity. Clicking on buttons at just the right time while struggling with an angry android encourages a welcome sense of participation in the fight, but you have to screw it up disastrously to fail. I understand that making combat a proper challenge runs the risk of introducing an immersion-breaking sense of trial and error, but I was left wishing the stakes were just a little higher after I ‘won’ each fight without really trying. Why make them interactive at all if the input feels so meaningless?

Of course, the way you play Detroit is primarily through the choices you make within it. While there’s that backbone of a story that can’t be shattered, which can occasionally result in frustration when it makes a decision for you to keep you from straying too far off the beaten path, I found its branching paths to be multiple and deep. Quantic Dream has been smart in making this multitude of paths transparent through flowcharts introduced at the end of each chapter, showing you just how differently it could have played out if you’d made another choice, enticing you to play through again.

Not every alternate choice leads to a drastically different story, but some will. Sometimes it might lead to the same result, but by a surprising new means. Sometimes it might change your relationship with another character and unlock a path that wasn’t there before. Sometimes it might result in death, whether that be of a supporting character or one of the central trio (they can all die at points throughout Detroit), or a dramatic action sequence with unexpected consequences. Comparing endings, not only between my first and second playthroughs but with other players, was astounding, particularly when I assumed everybody’s story had wrapped the same way as mine and found that nobody’s had.

For me, this is the biggest draw of Detroit. One playthrough really isn’t enough to see what it has to offer, and characters and world-building are interesting enough that it was a pleasure to go back to see what I’d missed in scenarios that are deceptively complex.

The Verdict

Detroit: Become Human is a poignantly pulpy interactive sci-fi drama where your choices can impact events to a greater and more satisfying degree than in most games of this type. Though I wish its story had been handled with a softer touch, especially considering the subtlety that can be conveyed through its tech and performances, its well-written and acted central trio were vital enough to me that I found myself feeling genuine distress when they were in danger and a sense of victory when they triumphed. Most importantly, Detroit offers a multitude of transparent branching paths that entice further playthroughs, and choices have a permanence that raise the stakes throughout.

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As someone who primarily games on PC, my advice to anyone who’s looking to get into PC gaming is usually going to be to build their own. Up until recently, I would have written that my advice would be to always go the custom build route, but thanks to that thorn in the side of the gaming enthusiast known as cryptocurrency mining, that may not be entirely realistic for a while. In turn, this makes buying pre-built PCs a better proposition than it usually is, and there are plenty of manufacturers ready and waiting to fill the gaps. Lenovo is once such manufacturer, with its Y720 offering solid mid-to-high-range hardware in a mobile package.

Design

The Y720 looks much like the array of gaming-centric PCs from Lenovo, sporting a black color scheme accented by red. If you’ve seen a Legion-branded machine before, you know what to expect: something a little more subtle than your average gaming notebook, but still decidedly a laptop made for gamers.

There isn’t much in the way of external lighting on the Legion Y720. The Legion logo on the reverse side of the display lights up, but other than that, you’re left with an all black machine (save for another patch of red on the underside of the device that no one is ever going to see). I like the look of it overall, but one thing that’s become an annoyance for me is that the smooth and glossy finish on the outside of the laptop seems to be particularly good at attracting fingerprints and oils from your skin.

Obviously, even though this is an endlessly frustrating thing for me, it’s not a deal breaker. If I judged a laptop’s value by such a small annoyance, no machine would ever get a passing grade. Still, this might be something worth keeping in mind if you share this particular irrationality with me.

In the end, the Legion Y720 has a fairly unremarkable design, but that’s honestly the way I prefer it. If I’m going to carry a gaming laptop with me, I don’t need it to act as some kind of shining beacon that lets everyone know I’m using the computer. The black and red color scheme looks nice, and the limited external lights give this laptop a fairly mainstream look that doesn’t overdo it. If I had my way, more gaming laptops would practice subtlety in the way Lenovo has here.

Like every other gaming notebook out there, the Legion Y720 weighs a fair bit more than your standard notebook. There’s good reason for this, of course, as it’s packing more serious hardware than your standard notebook as well. With a weight that starts as 7.05 pounds (and goes up depending on your configuration), this isn’t exactly a light machine. Nor is it small – its 15.6 inch display and full-sized keyboard see to that. You’ll need to make extra consideration for space if you’re going to lug the Y720 around with you, but such is the life of a PC gamer with a preference for laptops.

Performance

Obviously, if you’re buying the Legion Y720 for anything, it’s not for looks, but to play games (or do other graphics-intensive projects like 3D rendering). For this, hardware obviously counts more than anything, and a gaming notebook that is lacking in suitable hardware will quickly be left behind and forgotten as manufacturers move to cram their machines with better and better parts.

In terms of power, the Legion Y720 is no slouch. The model I was sent for review is Lenovo’s top-of-the-line Y720, with a Core i7 7700HQ CPU clocked at 2.80GHz and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. This model also boasts 16GB of RAM, a 1TB 5400RPM Hard Drive, and a 512GB SSD.

The result of all of this hardware is a speedy little machine that’s fast to boot up and manages to avoid lag when doing most tasks. While the GTX 1060 isn’t NVIDIA’s best 10-series card (far from it, in fact), it’s more than likely going to be capable enough for whatever modern games you want to play on a laptop.

Does this mean that you’ll be able to max out graphics settings in each and every game for years to come? No, but for now, the GTX 1060 is a solid card that should allow for some very pretty games. For instance, the GTX 1060 is enough to meet the recommended requirements for the upcoming Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, and I imagine that’ll be the case for a lot of graphics-intensive PC games for another year or two. In short: While the GTX 1060 may not offer as much power as its big brothers within the 10-series, it’s probably going to be a while before you begin to feel that rift in capability.

Indeed, for the time being, the GTX 1060 is a solid graphics card. In Divinity: Original Sin 2 – a game with no lack of impressive (and intensive) graphics – I found that cranking everything up to Ultra settings gave me a framerate that topped out around 100 in indoor environments without much on screen and bottoming out in the mid 70s during times when the PC had to render a bunch of objects and characters or when Original Sin 2’s wonderful particle effects filled the screen. The Ultra profile in D:OS 2 includes the highest settings for textures, lighting, and shadow quality; settings like ambient occlusion, god rays, and bloom turned on; and finally, 16x anisotropic texture filtering and SMAA.

So, the GTX 1060 certainly isn’t a slouch, though it won’t melt your face to the degree that the GTX 1080 can. Obviously, you’re going to want to keep the Y720 plugged into a power source as you’re playing, as trying to run a game while the laptop is running on battery will cause a significant drop in frame rate.

You can, of course, drop your graphics settings to compensate for this, but even then it still isn’t the most efficient way to play games on the Y720, as I only made it about an hour and 40 minutes from a full charge to the point where I was getting 10% battery life warnings while playing They Are Billions. Don’t let that give you anxiety about a potentially short battery life, as I got about 4 hours of life on a full charge when I was streaming video with the display at half brightness.

As an aside, it’s a bit confusing that Lenovo chose not to offer a Legion Y720 variant with a GTX 1070, even just for those who don’t mind paying extra as a means of future-proofing their notebook a little more. Regardless of which configuration you go with, you only ever have the option of a GTX 1060 with this notebook.

The review unit’s Intel Core i7-7700HQ and 16GB of RAM both help keep things going smoothly. With a Core i7, you’re not really going to have to worry about your CPU acting a bottleneck to gaming performance at any point in the near future, and unless you’re going to be doing things like video processing on this laptop in addition to gaming, you can honestly go for the base model, which ships with a Core i5-7300HQ.

While the base model only comes with 8GB of RAM, the good news there is that it’s also customizable, meaning that you can upgrade to 16GB for $100 more. This, I think, is worth the extra money – there was a point not too long ago where 8GB of RAM was suitable for a gaming rig, but we’re quickly approaching the point where 16GB will be considered standard. With many new and upcoming games suggesting 16GB in their recommended specifications, it’ll be much easier to pay a little extra than it will be to deal with the frustrations of hitting that ceiling later on.

The 15.6-inch IPS display Lenovo has outfitted the Y720 with is fairly solid as well. Though it isn’t matte like I would prefer with a gaming laptop, glare is not nearly the problem it is with other glossy finishes. Lenovo has treated the display with an anti-glare coating, and while it doesn’t stop glare from being an issue entirely, it does still cut down on it significantly. If I can’t have a matte display (which I understand doesn’t look all that great on a gaming laptop that is otherwise supposed to look sleek), I’ll definitely take something like this instead.

The 1080p LED display probably won’t blow your mind like a 4K desktop monitor will, but it’s perfectly suitable for this machine. Colors look rich and visuals are sharp, which is all you can really ask for at the end of the day, isn’t it? Anything else is just icing on the cake and borders on unnecessary when we also have to make concessions for battery life.

The trackpad and the keyboard are similarly “good enough.” Lenovo managed to resist going all-in on the RGB craze, and while the chiclet-style keyboard does have RGB backlighting, it’s zoned so you can’t make each individual key a different color or set up these crazy lighting patterns. You backlight is managed through Lenovo Sense, and even though the keyboard is zoned you still have plenty of options when it comes to customization, so I honestly can’t really say I miss having a backlight for each individual key.

The two-button trackpad does fine when it comes to browsing, but if you’re using this laptop for gaming (as is its stated purpose), you’re almost never going to use it. Get yourself a decent Bluetooth mouse and use that instead, because trying to play games with a trackpad – especially ones that require quick reactions – is really just inviting frustration.

Finally, we come to the Y720’s JBL speakers. These are something of an anomaly within the word of laptops, gaming or otherwise. The speakers seem to provide somewhat fuller sound than most laptops can (though bass is still lacking, unsurprisingly), but one interesting thing to note is that these bad boys can get loud. I think you should still get a nice pair of headphones or a headset to use while you’re playing games, but if that’s not an option after dropping the cash required for the Y720, the included speakers at least do a serviceable job.

Wrap-Up

In the end, the Lenovo Legion Y720 is a fine laptop, though it doesn’t really have much that makes it stand out from the crowd. As I said earlier, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because hardware – not software or design – is most important when it comes to gaming, and the stuff that’s packed inside this laptop is enough to ensure most games run well.

So, while I’m not about to sing the Y720’s praises from the mountaintop, I don’t have a problem suggesting that you at least consider the Y720 if you’re looking for a gaming notebook. This, of course, would normally be the time where I recommend that you build your own gaming PC instead of buying a pre-built, but there are two problems with that.

This first is obvious in that if you’re specifically looking to buy a gaming laptop for the portability factor, suggesting that you build a desktop instead is silly. Even if I could convince you to build a desktop instead, though, the second problem is that PC hardware is ridiculously overpriced at the moment. This means that pre-builts have a rare moment in the spotlight among enthusiast PC gamers, and the Y720 benefits from that.

Even though laptops aren’t my preferred form factor when we’re talking about PC gaming, those seeking one out should consider the Y720. Assuming you start with Lenovo’s base model – which is currently $1099 on Lenovo’s store – and make some tweaks from there, you should walk away with a solid gaming machine without ever having given the absurd prices of PC parts a second thought. Personally, I think that’s worth a lot at the moment.

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Nine Days With an Absurd $nine,000 Gaming Laptop

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Nine Days With an Absurd $nine,000 Gaming Laptop

There may also exist inside of you a preference that burns white warm for the Acer Predator 21 X, but you may by no means buy this PC. It is not for you, because in case you need this PC, you possibly can’t have enough money it, and if you may have enough money it, you’re probably antique enough to not want to spend $nine,000 on a PC that weighs as a great deal as a small toddler, and might even pick out up after itself.

But if you’re reading Gizmodo you’re nevertheless enough of a gadget fan to want to at the least recognize the $nine,000 PC. To that cease, I spent 9 days operating nearly completely with Acer’s ode to excess.

Here is its tale.

Day 1: The arrival This is certainly one of 300. “Why is there a dragon on it,” a person asks. “Why shouldn’t there be a dragon?” Our workplace supervisor seemed suspiciously from me to the box, which is the dimensions of 3 ten-12 months-olds squeezed collectively. “It’s a PC,” I defined.

While the workplace manager was incredulous, others were extremely joyful. “I need to sit within the container,” a colleague shouted even as snapping pictures.

Following the covered instructions, I managed to open the large cardboard box—as well as the almost indestructible Pelican case contained within. Desiring not anything more than to sport, I plopped the Predator 21 X on my knees as I would a MacBook. Fortunately, I used to bicycle plenty, so I’ve got sturdy thighs that don’t weep underneath the load of 19 kilos of pc—easily 4 instances the common weight of a PC.

When I informed inquisitive on-lookers the fee, they looked at me aghast. Why does a $9,000 device exist? I didn’t have a great solution.

So I pulled the trackpad out of its slot and showed human beings that it could be flipped over and used as more than a few bad. Everyone agreed that changed into very neat.

The trick earned the laptop its first “wow” unrelated to length or price.

After an hour and ten minutes of use, the computer died. It turned into after 5 pm, and I did now not want to locate outlets for the pics (two!) necessary strength components, so I left it on a coworker’s desk and went home.

Day 2: Set up Tobii eye trackers are usually chunky, but on a laptop this huge it disappears into the hinge. When I was given to the office, I sooner or later discovered shops for the 21 X’s two 330 watt strength resources and began to apply the computer in earnest. It comes with Tobii Eyetracking, however, it didn’t look like operating. The Nvidia six drivers were out of date too.

Nvidia GeForce unhelpfully uninstalled its drivers, and the PC broke for twenty minutes. I uninstalled the whole lot with the Nvidia name. Reinstalled. Inexplicably, the attention monitoring began running on the third restart.

After three hours of futzing with drivers and settings, I got Rise of the Tomb Raider strolling. My coworkers crowded across the laptop shouting their recommendation on how to walk in a direct line. Take a second, remember when there has been handiest one controller for the SNES at a shut eye party. This moment became like that, but burlier.

Yet there was precisely one coworker who did not care. She was the only who informed me to mute the computer earlier while she’d had sufficient of Windows notifications exploding from the computer’s four speakers and two subwoofers.

In case you didn’t think there was a subwoofer or. Now she turned into indignant because the paintings day turned into over and those had been peering at a PC. “Let’s move get beer” she bellowed.

The horde agreed. I saved my game and closed the PC. The battery turned into still not fully charged.

Day three: Making my way downtown, component 1 The wearing case. “You are taking this at the educate.” It turned into no longer a proposal. My boss and I agreed which you couldn’t evaluate a PC without checking out its mobility—how easy it changed into to p.C. Up and move around.

In the case of the Acer 21 X, it is a chore. Thanks to the mild curve of the show, the lid does now not sit flush, so the 19-pound computer can’t simply be shoved in a bag. The 21-inch show might crack. So I packed it again up into the Pelican case and headed home an hour and a half early.

No one questioned this.

A female supplied to help me deliver it down the second flight of stairs to the train, but I declined. “I want to try this for myself,” I said. With a MacBook Air, for contrast. On the educate, every person eyed me like you constantly eye the asshole with big baggage on a rush hour teach. It changed into most effective four:45 pm on a Thursday, but the teach crammed up to the closer to Brooklyn we got. When I arrived at my stop, I had to muscle my manner to the door and pray the wheels at the case didn’t roll over a foot. I am too delicate to be shouted at by cranky commuters.

Off the educate, I made it up one flight of stairs, a line of annoyed passengers forming at the back of me. A guy wordlessly held out a hand and helped me up the second one flight of stairs.

New York is nicer than you’d count on it to be. The MacBook Air looks as if a toy perched on a pinnacle of the 21 X. It is.Four miles from the train station to my domestic. The sidewalks aren’t the easy and smooth ones of the Flatiron District. They’re damaged with concrete jutting up out of the floor. On the day I delivered the Predator home, it had just rained, and at the same time as the streets had been dry, puddles of brown, stagnant lousy lay in a pedestrian’s direction at each intersection. I lifted and dodged and moved quickly domestic. The transport weight of the field is 70 kilos, and among the Pelican case, electricity supplies, and a 19-pound computer I turned into positive I turned into dragging all 70 kilos behind me.

The dog and cat were both alarmed by the monstrosity that took up house in our living room. That night my roommate arrived home. She noticed the laptop on my lap and couldn’t take her eyes off of it. “Is it like…For army?” she asked. Her voice changed into a whisper, barely heard over the hum of the device.

No. It changed into now, not for a navy.

Day four: I can not sense my feet

Powering on. The journey domestic had really affected me. Like the quality friend in a 19th-century novel, I became plagued by a cough and a sniffle and a weakness of indeterminate origin.

My only salve changed into the PC. I determined an area for its two plugs, settled it on my lap, and downloaded Mass Effect: Andromeda. The gadget did no longer just like the internet in my home and it took an hour, three tries to repair the internet, and one restart to download the game. $nine,000 buys a whole lot of PC, but it couldn’t solve fundamental issues of laptops plagued by means of weird net and old drivers.

The laptop rested on my thighs and destroyed all sensation underneath my knees.

“I cannot experience my feet,” I texted a friend at three:30 pm. Playing the game at the 21 X’s keyboard and the usage of its trackpad became a examine in painful frustration. I couldn’t get comfy. The Cherry Brown mechanical key switches had been great, and the trackpad gave me 0 problems, but the spacing among the keyboard and trackpad felt all incorrect, especially whilst the PC became sitting in my lap.

I, in the end, gave up and determined my Xbox One controller.

Gaming became immediately greater pleasant.

Day five: Never thoughts, everything hurts I played Mass Effect for longer than I must admit in a polite organization, and no less than the gaming overall performance is superb. The twin Nvidia GTX 1080 video cards and the dual 512GB SSDs in a speedy RAID 0 configuration, plus the 64GB of RAM and the Kaby Lake i7 processor method that is handily the quickest PC on the planet—with the aid of specs on my own. It had 0 troubles giving me a hundred and twenty frames according to 2d at the 2560 x 1080 21-inch show. And with two Nvidia GTX 1080 playing cards, it would be genuinely not possible for recreation play to lag

As lengthy as the laptop was plugged in. After a totally uncommon lavatory break, I sat go into reverse, balanced the computer across my lap and become startled to look the game had slowed to a move slowly. I end. Restarted. Played again. It was nonetheless slow. Then I found out the plugs had disconnected, and I changed into strolling on battery strength. I plugged lower back in and balance turned into restored The energy elements. You may want to swing them over ahead with the aid of their cords and likely kill a person. Until my controller commenced to randomly disconnect every short time. As if the PC knew I’d been gambling Mass Effect for 12 hours and needed a wreck. I got aggravated and powered off for the night.

Day 6: It’s hot in here The emblem lights up whilst the computer is on. Neat. It becomes over eighty degrees outside. The warmth didn’t trouble me, till I balanced the PC on my knee. Then I was reminded of summers in Texas, my god daughter sitting in my lap, all sharp bones and sweat and a furnace that could rival anything burns on your basement.

The laptop is like a toddler I can put in a container on the give up of the day.

The discomfort grew too bothersome for me to disregard. I attempted putting it on my secretary desk, however, it became too big—too heavy—to be supported. That gap. I ultimately gave up and went and performed Mass Effect on my ordinary PC. I straight away missed the expanded subject of imaginative and prescient the 21 X afforded me. The 21:9 ratio is actually awesome for gameplay—even on a smaller 21: at nine display like that of the 21 X. Moving to my 50-inch 4K TV ought to have meant the whole lot would feel bigger, however even as the belongings rendered by using the game had been large, the sixteen:9 ratio felt definitely claustrophobic.

Yet I persevered to play, due to the fact I did now not miss the heat, or the disconnects, or the crushing weight of capitalism on my thighs.

Day 7: A day of rest I stone couch, and labored hard at my task, and I used the 21 X as a stand to keep my telephone.

It was better this way.

Day eight: Making my manner downtown, part 2 My dog has a fear of packed bags. I am continually aware of it, distracting him with treats whenever I must % a bag for a ride. As I dismantled the X-21’s energy supply and carefully packed it back into the case, I seemed up.

The canine notion I changed into going for properly.

But I became now not. Instead, I took a Lyft to the workplace and an elevator up the stairs. “Is that a computer?” a co-employee laughed.

“Yes,” I stated.

Day 9: Goodbye old buddy I shot photographs in the afternoon. The pc felt heavier than standard, its fans and lovely little beeps have been a cacophony overwhelming the quiet hum of the newsroom.

The 21 X isn’t always a device intended for silence. It isn’t a system meant to be overlooked. It catches eyes, and earns feedback, and traces my arms when I want to transport it.

When I left that night time, leaving behind it, I felt no regret. It had reaped the reward it become constructed to earn. I had written approximately this $9,000 laptop, experienced it, so you—and your credit card—do not should.

Even now, long after it’s been put away, I nonetheless struggle to apprehend who it’s far for. It might be for those who spend $a hundred,000 on a car or a $5,000 on a cellphone. Yet, this is luxurious completed inside the plastic of peons. It’s a weird creature that cannot aesthetically attraction to the only-percent, even though they’re the simplest ones who should afford it.

So perhaps it is for the game enthusiasts. The obsessive individuals of the PC gaming community who fear over benchmarks and specifications like maximum of us worry over pricetags. Its sheer strength and the glowing lighting fixtures could be appealing to a gamer. But it can’t be upgraded. In 4 years, it’s going to, absolute confidence, be obsolete, its energy a rival only to smartphones or destiny all-in-one VR headsets. And for this reason, this will be a horrific buy for a gamer.

I think it’s miles best for you. The individual who read this assessment and continues to be reaching for their pockets, keen to have a $9,000 communique piece taking on all the area on their table. God rattling is it something to speak about.