Yuuki Bakuhatsu Bang Bravern Review

Overall Rating 4.5 out of 10 - Too much yaoi innuendo to be enjoyable

I dropped after episode 5 and do not recommend watching.

This is very uneven show. At certain moments it feels like well-made military themed story that can even beat Aldnoah.Zero at other times it just falls into its innuendo routine and make me want to quit.

After episode 1 I thought it would be solid 7.5. I wanted to drop and give it 3 after episode 2, but decided to stay around until they develop Lulu somewhat. Episodes 3 and 4 made it around 6 something. Finally, episode 5 was the final nail in the coffin, a box match as a "form of communication" between two guys is too absurd. Also, by episode 5 Lulu failed at being a cute girl, though these "ga wa pi" was funny.

This show can do a proper job sometimes. It has good art. These tropical areas in Hawaii, yachts and fancy furniture are so well made, it makes you want to live in there. Robots and other military equipment are well done as well. 

On the other hand, excess of shirtless dudes, fraternity jocks pseudo masculinity and the whole toughness routine is just awful. The show is a reverse CGDCT (cute girls doing cute things): pseudo manly dudes, doing pseudo manly things. As such it is of no value for anyone, other than fujoshi who get off yaoi and such. 

It's a shame, if not for the PMDDPMT, it could have become an awesome show.

Need For Speed Underground

 

Yet another game from the early 2000s that have beaten again. Back in when it was released, I played it once, I liked it, but have not returned to it. It was made by EA and they are frequent with sequels: next year there was a sequel, then NFS Most Wanted then NFS Carbon. 

The sequels however never quite lived to the high mark of the original NFSU. They were slow and too cluttered with unnecessary details and micromanagement. In a game about racing there were just too many slow drives the town to the next location, like GTA but without any shooting, pedestrians or even any other cars, without things that made GTA fun in the first place.

 In contrast simple original had just the adrenaline drive of never-ending racing. Cars had just enough upgrades to either make a visual impact or enhance speed instead. Starting from basic small everyday sedans, you can find on many roads, you would gradually progress to a budget sportscars like Acura RSX, culminating into Nissan Skyline GTR, that this game made iconic. Then you further enhance them with engine, transmission, NOS and other upgrades until they race like a Ferrari. Simple yet compelling formula that keeps you playing.

Then you can also color it and put vinyls with a pattern of your liking. Vinyl selection could be improved, but I found one that became iconic to me personally. As for body parts there were often enough choice to find something to my liking.

It's a casual game when it comes to racing: crashes do not destroy your car and so on. Races are fun, you race through variety of creatively decorated urban settings, occasionally smashing road signs and cones that say road is closed. They cannot stop you as you safely jump over the unfinished bridge to continue the race.

Overall, it's a fun experience from the happy 2000s era, before financial crisis, feminism, neo-Christianity and boomers made life miserable. I can recommend this game.

End of Desktop

 

I personally was for a very long-time a supporter of desktops. Even when majority of casual users long switched to laptops or even smartphones I still clang to a desktop. 

There were 3 reasons for that: videogames, modability and price.

Videogames is the simplest of these. simply put it modern graphics require a lot of computation power to run. If you are not happy with cubist primitivism of Minecraft and wanted a photorealistic look of Witcher III, then you needed a discrete graphic card.

There were early gaming laptops back in 2000s, but they were bulky, heavy, expensive and not that powerful. At that time, they were more of a aspiration to make gaming more portable than a real solution that could actually play newest games.

Finally, the often-overlooked advantage of desktops is modability and resulting price reduction. A gaming desktop used to cost less than a gaming laptop. However, it is only if you build your own gaming rig, that you can get a decent gaming performance for less than $1000. Compare that to $2500 something for pre-build gaming desktop than would be somewhat faster and around $5000 for gaming laptop that would lose to your sub $1000 in performance. 

There were a handful of strategies in selecting parts that would let you achieve such outcomes. Such as mid-range graphic card for example. A couple of cards often numbered something like xx60 or xx50 in nVidia nomenclature would perform well enough to run all the games but will not break the budget. Go below that towards xx30 or xx10 and they will not run games. In contrast xx70 and above cost astronomically and also require expensive power supply to run.

There was more. For example, AMD uses the same socket for several years straight. That way when you build new rig, you can buy motherboard with newest socket. Then in several years only need to swap a processor and graphic card and add some RAM to get a boost in performance, comparable to buying a new PC. Such a solution would save you a further money.

All of these considerations kept me on desktop for a long time.

However recently things started to change.

Gaming laptops became increasingly fasters, but also smaller and cheaper. By early 2020s progress in gaming laptop development finally started to threaten the gaming desktop market.

However, the biggest nail in the coffin came from a different direction. It begun when AMD finally released their Ryzen processors. They were slow to make it into laptop market but now you can find enough cheap laptops with Ryzen in them. 

Ryzen has reasonably good graphic core that can actually run modern games. Its release made Intel up its game and dramatically increase number of shading units in their processors starting from 2020s. 

Before that Intel processors could only run older games made before 2010 something. Intel even made an agreement with nVidia that likely included the clause about keeping shading unit count low in order to not destroy nVidia's discrete graphic card business.

From my personal experience Witcher III refused to run on my GeForce 250 GTS with 128 shader units. However, it run rather well on Ryzen 3 2200G with 512 shader units.

Now both Intel and AMD offer laptops that can actually play modern games with caveats.

The future looks even better. Competition between Intel and AMD will likely make each side to continue increasing shader unit count in their processors. Eventually the shader count will get so high, it would make discrete graphic cards completely obsolete. A 2000+ shader count would satisfy even the most.

On a separate note, we finally see SSD catching up to Hard Drives in their total capacity. Soon another legacy tech will become obsolete.

I wonder if we will see modular laptop design or may be even something more revolutionary.

Why Diablo II Classes is What Makes it Unbeatable by Others

Original characters are just that good to main, so people want them again and again. They just fit likable stereotypes, so people instantly like them.

Amazon is sporty fit girl who hits gym. Xena Warrior Princess for you to main.

Sorceress is nerdy frail moe girl. Anime goes Brr. She is cute, men love girls like her. She is favorite player's class for reason.

Barbarian is big and strong tough guy, they even made a game specifically about him, called God of War. Girls love him. He has felt of power about him.

Necromancer has dark powers over death itself together with sophistication and class. Nietzsche's Will to Power, as well as Goth and Emo feel. Choice of people who want to have power over others and an army of minions.

Paladin is moral holy warrior. Choice of all these moralistic people who believe in God and fighting evil.

Druid is hippy who loves pets. All dog owners, nature lovers and ecology activists will be happy.

Assassin is dark and mysterious women who fights with cool (if impractical) wrist blades.

These just appeal to stereotypes people like.

No other game managed to get classes this right, including D3. For example, WitchDoc is Necro without class and eerie dark powers, so no one wants to main him. Sorc is not as nerdy as in D2. Assassin has neither Xena Warrior Princess fell, nor much of the original's exposed hips. Not to mention whole sexualization was toned down.

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

 

Recently I came back to this rather interesting game. I played Diablo ever since my teens. My early builds were not that good, but I could still finish the game on normal with Barb, Amazon and Assassin. Later I learned to play better.

Recently however I wanted to finally finish the game on all three difficulty levels and finally see the fancy end-game gear and so on. So, I dusted out my old saves and begun playing again. There were fewer characters that I remember. My second barb from 2018 was absent but my first one from 20 years ago is still here, so were my chars from 2022 but that is more explainable. 

However, my Necromancer with completed Act I on NM was among them. 

I decided to go into summonmancer build early and for the most part it was success. There were few challenges however, rune drop was low and most runes I got were low level. Even when I got runes, I often missed bases to build needed runewords. I got Lore rather fast and later even White. White is not useful for summonmancer build, but I used it as secondary back up weapon and it helped me against Hell Mef. I also got Splendor in a Shrunken Head that I also used as secondary because I needed Shield with resistances. 

I wanted to wear basic RW Smoke all NM and later Hell but could not get it. Later in late Act V on Hell I got if for Merc as I myself got Trans-Oul Scales from Contess run after I cleared Mef on Hell. Highest rune I could get was Pul on random drop in Spider Forest in all places. I only had a ready supply of runes Hel and lower even though on Hell there should have been more higher runes.

As for game then both Act II and Act III had mixed feelings for me. I like Act II design, but summonmancer build works poorly there. Especially in maggot lair and arcane sanctuary. My skeletal army and merc just stuck in every place possible. The very same AI that controls my enemies however is much better at finding their way towards my char. 

On NM I often used curse Attract to make monsters kill each other, but on Hell they are just too beefy for that to work. On Hell even palace was a challenge as there are too many shooters that hide in cages where they shoot with impunity as my melee skelles cannot get to them.

In contrast fetid jungle of Act III that does not appeal to my aesthetics, was a constant boon of good loot and rune galore. Fetishes and even Stygian Dolls, who are bane of Sorc existence, are hardly a challenge for summonmancer.

It only gets bad on Travincal where ledges and Hierophants who cast Blizzard and keep Zealots alive with healing can really be problem. Named consul members are also a problem.

However, that only applies to open areas, as caves can be challenging.

Summonmancer is a very unconventional build in practice. You can easily kill Duriel that intimidates most other builds, but at the same time the Summoner would be near impassible obstacle as skelles and merc just could not get to him through all these stairs and ledges. I almost considered doing Duriel runs for farming stuff, but some monsters in the desert around tombs could be rather challenging for summonmancer. There are too many uniques with hard properties.

In the end I got level 84 while fighting Baal. Killing him was mostly a battle of endurance as my Merc with just Demon Arch for a weapon (no Crushing Blow or Open Wounds) and 6 of the remaining melee skelles took a lot of time to kill him. Baal killed all but one ice skellemage but could not kill merc or melee skelles. I kept Baal in constant Decrepify.

16bit Sensation: Another Layer Review

Overall Rating 6.7 out of 10 - Surprisingly interesting story, somewhat meh characters.

I recommend watching.

It's been a while since I reviewed anything as I was playing Diablo and NFSU recently. However, there is this show. 

A first I thought it would be just a one-off time skip but instead there were several and they have a story revolving around them, like Steins;Gate. They do not have as cohesive of a story as Steins;Gate but what they have is enough to keep me entertained. I will not reveal any more details to not spoil it as plot is the biggest asset this show has.

First half of the show was rather unlikable, I even thought of dropping it. However, they picked pace in the second half. They like to talk how main heroine enjoys the company of these guys, but they are nothing special just like she is. For a show about bishoujo games (sexy girl games) female cast surprisingly unsexy and un-moe.

In the second part the plot finally picks up. Things started to unfold, and you just keep watching because you want to know how they will wrap it up and what will happen in between. It gets from curious twists to wild and surreal rather fast. Suddenly you see main heroine in Tron like suit in the middle of conspiracy.

In the end they could not wrap this wild plot in any cohesive way. Deus ex interference saved them all. However it was nice rive overall, so I can recommend it. There are better shows out there, but there are many worse.