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An Ode to the Save Point

Saving our progress is as primordial as actually playing our games, because some games are too sprawling to actually be finished in a single session. In the arcade era, games were compact experiences that either repeated over short loops of content, making you aim for a high score, or had a limited amount of stages, in such a manner that you could clear them in an hour or two.

With the advent of Personal Computers and Consoles, things had to change because the gaming experience was coming to the comfort of your home. Content was getting easier and cheaper to produce as well, which meant more hours of richer, better content for lower prices: win-win-win. But if a game is supposed to be 20 hours now instead of 2, what happens when people need to go to bed or to work? And effectively, back then, some people would... just leave their consoles on overnight, and pray that no power outage or no naughty sibling was to come along and turn off or reset your game.

Back then, storage was incredibly expensive, so clever ways had to be used to allow for some semblance of saving. Passwords, of course, were the most common manner: the game generates a complicated series of inputs, encoding information, which you can reenter at the start of every session to pick up where you left off. Useful, and some password systems are really clever or funny, such as the Megaman passwords or how Metroid has Justin Bailey. There's a massive charm to retro game passwords.

But we still wanted more sophistication and eventually save systems came around. Powered by a clock battery that keeps the data alive and ticking in your cartridge, games with save memory usually let you save your game through an in-game mechanic. In The Legend of Zelda, one of the earliest and most popular games with memory, one can save every time they get a Game Over, or by inputting a secret combination on the second controller.

Then, games started getting clever with saving, realizing that saving could be an interesting game mechanic if well implemented. Some games allow you to save at any moment through a pause menu, like most Zelda titles. Games such as RPGs have save points, places that you must find and visit in the game world to be allowed to save. Earthbound uses phones as save points. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest usually have shiny places or orbs of sorts clearly marking where you can save in the game world. Resident Evil uses typewriters, which you can only use a limited amount of times and consume ink ribbons in the early titles. Games like Lisa: The Painful destroy its save points forever, crows perched on a branch, after usage. Games like the early Mario series usually prompt you to save upon goal completion, such as clearing a section of the game world or defeating a boss.

Some games allow you to save at any time, not just in the pause menu, an action which is known colloquially as "quicksaving". PC games, such as early corridor shooters, tend to have quicksave features more frequently than console games. Some people may consider them a bit cheap, though, since quicksaves effectively cancel any risk/reward balance the game may have. Others don't mind them at all and believe them to greatly enrich the gaming experience.

Once emulation came around, things started getting even more interesting by extending the quicksave idea to pretty much any game with the concept of save states. Savestates make a complete copy of the game's RAM at any point and saves it to disk, and upon reloading that copy they effectively work like a time machine to that point in time. Again, some people consider them cheating: as in, retro games, which tend to be very hard because that's how they had to be designed back then to be worth anything, can be completely cheesed by (ab)using save states, and some people do as a way to "get their revenge" on old games which they never beat back in the day when they were children, so in this way, they're a blessing; yet, if you did this... did you really beat the game? Makes one ponder.

Games like Undertale even turn the whole idea of Saving on its head, making it part of the plot itself, by making the protagonist able to save miraculously during the final fight, which turns into Saving their Friends, and making the antagonist able to quicksave and quickload through the power of Determination. This ability to save is what led Asriel, the antagonist, to become who he is at the end of the game. Actually, games like Braid, Undertale and Super Meat Boy reek of "zoomer-who-grew-up-playing-emulators-with-savestates-and-reloading-every-three-steps-to-never-lose-lives", with their blocky visuals and their metanarrative tones, when you think about it.

Once storage got incredibly cheap and present in every console, clunky, stupid memory cards be damned, some games eventually started to do without the whole idea of saving by introducing auto-saving... "Do not power off the console when this symbol appears", have you read anything like that before? Sure you have, given how the vast majority of games use this feature since the Seventh Console Generation. The idea is to make gaming more accessible and easier for everyone, since most people who may neglect saving manually by any reason may find themselves losing progress in their games unexplainably at some points. Also, some people may get turned off from playing a game if they lost vast amounts of progress by Game Over, so auto-saves are the developers attempting to correct this and make it easier on the player overall.

Auto-saves are usually fine, but I find that a little bit of the whimsy and happiness of saving has been forever lost to time. Running low on HP and miraculously finding a save point or finally putting that boss down and joyously getting to save or write down a password were small joys that most people nowadays will never experience in the name of accessibility because there's a tiny percentage of cases where this will lead to lost progress, either by battery failure, or by negligence, incorrectly writing down a password or by any other randomness.

Games like Dark Souls, creatively, turn the idea of auto-saving on its head by making it your enemy. Dark Souls saves your game when you visit a Bonfire, die, or quit the game. Every decision is final and has consequences, and cannot be reversed except by re-rolling another character from the very start of the game.

Sadly, though, nowadays, between auto-saving and restore features... game saves have mostly become extinct. Consoles like the PS4 and the Switch have normalized restore features, similar to PC sleep features, meaning that at any moment you can put your console into hibernation state without having to close the game, and pick it back any time you turn it on again.

Again, even though all of this is handy and I wouldn't have it any other way, I hope that people stop and reflect for a few minutes on the allure of saving in video games. I hope this has made you reflect on it too.

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PS1 Cracktros

So, imagine that you're just some random kid playing Playstation 1 games.

It's the weekend, and you got a burned copy of Crash Bash (since that was literally the sole way to procure games without breaking the bank back then), and since you're a fan of Crash you're ecstatic to play. You go home, pop the modded psone open, put in the disc, watch the PS1 boot screen, and then you immediately see this:

Welcome to the World of PS1 cracktros.

Perhaps unknown to some of our USA friends who didn't play modded copies back then, pirated games are released by underground circles called the "warez" (rhymes with Juarez) scene. Woops! Turns out, your Crash Bash is a STATiC group warez release, and the utility you see allows you to play Crash Bash either in NTSC or PAL video standards by the push of a button.

Warez people who work on circumventing security measures, such as antipiracy, video mode patches or cheats for games, aka trainers, call themselves "crackers". There's many cracker circles active even to this day, and they revel in their excellence, speed and dedication at cracking games, usually releasing them before the street date.

Something catches my attention: scenesters' obsession for technology and their endless ambition to produce very interesting tech and visuals with almost no budget. A complete flex of their brainpower and artistic prowess, running circles through around video game companies such as Sony's ultracomplex walled gardens, they build software for computers that they're not supposed to be building for, completely unsanctioned, with no tools or information except for homebrew software... And they're doing it all just to show they can. They also, quite literally, fight turf wars against other groups, which they may greet or trash talk in their cracktros.

I've always been mesmerized by cracktros and the warez scene completely, given how underground, seedy and edgy it seems. Crackers place cracktros before their releases as a mark of pride, as a sort of "Digital Grafitti". Crackers usually document their releases with an NFO file, with characteristic huge and overtly complex ASCII art; no, this is not a file for Windows, but rather it's just a text file which contains observations, anecdotes, tales, haikus, kudos or insults to other people.

I'M SORRY SPYRO, BUT YOU SEEM TO BE PLAYING A HACKED VERSION OF THIS GAME.

A very special case is the Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon Cracktro. Known for infamously implementing very hardcore and almost unbreakable anti-piracy measures, Spyro 3 actually took a very long while to crack in the scene back then. It turns out the game used this draconian set of measures to determine that the game you were playing was legit, and if it wasn't (sometimes triggering false positives about this by the way), it would break the foruth wall about this and the in-game characters would talk to you about it, randomly delete your progress, and generally would make your life miserable while playing the game, rendering you unable to see the ending. I saw this screen waaay too many times while trying to figure this out back in the day.

Without discussing the ethical aspects of video game piracy and how what they do is pretty much illegal, let's look at cracktros for a while. Crackers are effectively convinced that "information wants to be free" and that "sharing is caring", and they're doing this as a protest against the establishment of sorts.

Valve Software's Gabe Newell once said that Piracy is a service problem: "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer (for free, mind you; paraphrasing mine), and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

So, perhaps cracktros can be seen as a sort of freedom fighter activity, trascending through our modded consoles and retro computers. Very poetic in a way. Video game piracy, for better or worse, has influenced the video game industry therefore and has shaped its path towards digital video game distribution and games-as-a-service.

Crackers produce very distinctive visuals and music. Their music is usually tracked in .mod format and played by the executable itself. Not a single kid who was on KaZaA back in the 2000s went by without listening to this song. That's because crackers also work on pirated releases of computer software, keygens or NoCD patches.

It is incredible to me that somebody would produce such amazing music, completely for the heck of it.

A lot of demoscene and crackers actually went on to found or work at Video Game firms to this day, but otherwise they are very clouded in mystery, don't hang out in the open and don't disclose their identities.

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Pikmin 4 - An In-Depth Critique and Review

Take a shot every time you hear "Pikmin".

I mentioned previously that Miyamoto was a taskmaster because this is what he truly is. From urban legends that he "upends the tea table" on projects at Nintendo to the nature of Pikmin itself, it's clear that his personality shines best as a manager, even though nerds worldwide regard him as some sort of Santa-like figure that shits rainbows and farts sugar and happiness. Even though Miyamoto's input is important from a seniority point of view, since he's someone who will drive and provide vision (and, I guess, back in the day... he also provided illustrations for things), he's not the literal code monkey that's slaving away at punching in the code for your bing-bing-wahoo at the shitty Nintendo thinkpads.

Pikmin 4 is the 2023 entry into the Pikmin series... I guess the Pikmin series only gets an entry a decade, right? Given that Pikmin 3 released in 2013; Pikmin 3 was my entry point to the series in Wii U, a damaged, UV degraded boxart copy of which I bought in rare leisure, in clearance, in a shitty dilapidated Blockbuster location in Mexico, back in 2015 or so --I saw it for sale for like 400 pesos or something and I figured why the fuck not, since Wii U games are usually around 1200 pesos or so.

My experience playing Pikmin 3 was very pleasant because I wasn't really expecting anything, but I walked away from it massively enriched: from its engaging, split-responsibility, time-management gameplay, to its luscious visuals (I still drool every time I look at the fruits in the Wii U version), I heard around that if Pikmin 3 is the ultimate version of Pikmin, Pikmin 4 is the ultimate version of Pikmin 2.

Pikmin is the passion project of Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, the Quintessential video game franchise; Mr. Video Game himself, a Character known to every single person in the World. Even though you could argue that the actual creator of Mario is Takashi Tezuka, because he did the nuts and bolts, Miyamoto is generally credited as the mastermind. Serves better for PR purposes: makes the Universal Studios attraction more profitable.

I guess his seniority at the company and his desire to transcend led him to come up with Pikmin, which is obviously his brainchild on a very personal level, and let me tell you that he loves the little Pikmin (Pikmen?) guys, from the abundance of merchandising in Nintendo stores worldwide, to the surreptitious injecting of Pikmin-related easter eggs in any other thing he does, this man is in love with his own franchise.

Why wouldn't he be? Pikmin is very appealing. It does suffer of a certain problem: it is a game that's too cozy and cute for hardcore gamers to enjoy, and it's too gruesome and stressful for casual Wii Sports playing casual scum to enjoy. I guess that just leaves the Nintendo ultrafan retards as the target audience --but then again, those kinds of kids (as they used to call me at Amazon derisively, because I was some sort of inferior, impressionable DEI hire that they had to put up with) are not people who are in tune with the intricacies of nature and animism, aspects of which Pikmin (and Shinto) heavily rely on. What do those “kids” know, anyway, right?: they've never spent a day in nature, nor they've tended to a garden, nor they touch grass, nor they've seen the bugs at work, nor they've planted flowers, what good are they?

It is commonly quoted that Pikmin is the product of Miyamoto's observations of bugs during his time spent gardening, which apparently is his hobby. Pikmin proclivity for working right out after birth, carrying stuff and fighting stem both from his careful observation of ants, beetles and grasshoppers, et. al., in his gardens, and the Asian collectivist Work Ethic.

It is historically known that the Pikmin series comes from the Super Mario 128 tech demo at Spaceworld 2000, which demonstrated the (as of then upcoming) Dolphin console (the Gamecube) as being capable of running massive amounts of tasks and render a huge amount of independent characters at the same time through the showcasing of a scene with 128 little Marios operating independently.

Miyamoto guessed something correctly: that the video game tech arms race was coming to an end soon, that Moore's Law in microprocessors would be coming to an end, too, and that the only obvious path forward in video game tech came in the form of concurrency and parallelism, through more effective usage of computational resources. That the video game industry had entered an era of diminishing returns in terms of clock speeds, and that novel experiences in video gaming necessarily had to come from an intimate, strong understanding of parallelism and other tech, and I must declare his observations to be right. That's why in the 2000s, if you remember, progress in processors came only in the form of Intel and their fetishism for MOAR cores, core 2 duo, core quad... etc.

So then, this whole artistic prospect of Pikmin... what even is it? Why is it worth my time?

Part 1 - Dandori as fuck, mothafucka

Pikmin 4 is a game which revolves around a single concept --Dandori.

Given that apparently, interleaving Japanese vocabulary in English is now seen as chic (I would never dare do it in the 2000s, by the way), I can now confidently state that Pikmin 4 is about understanding and practicing Dandori. Dandori translates to "delegation", but the game presents it as "the ability to order your tasks in the optimal manner for progression".

The story is pretty barebones as always: Olimar has crashed on Earth (again), like in Pikmin 1, but now we're responding to the SOS signal as the rescue corps. Alas! The rescue corps also crash-land on Earth while rescuing Olimar themselves. So, you rescue Olimar by venturing through a certain garden on Earth, playing a little bit with the concept of scale: the Pikmin people are diminute and they cannot breathe Oxygen, so they must wear spacesuits to explore our World, and things which seem mundane to us are insurmountable obstacles to them so that which seems as a single living room or a yard is a massive, sprawling piece of land to them.

Will the rescue corps rescue Olimar in the end?

オリマ (O RI MA) is マリオ (MA RI O) backward by the way.

The main gameplay loop trascends through gathering Pikmin, of which there are several kinds: red (who are strong to fire), blue (who can swim and can go in the water), yellow (who are resistant to electricity and are optimal diggers), ice (a new type, who can freeze enemies and bodies of water to change the layout of the land temporarily, and can float on water), purple (who have massive carrying and attack power, but are slower and heavier), flying (who can fly and are more efficient at carrying but are generally weaker), rock (who can withstand stomping and can break certain surfaces, being rock-hard), and white (who are poisonous and resistant to poison). Pikmin spawn from something known as an Onion; Pikmin you gather form your current squad, which starts at 10, and increases to your maximum possible squad come from gathering of flarlics in the game world, which reinforce the Onion by 10 more Pikmin. Pellets which grow every day from flowers can generate more Pikmin of the kind that carried the pellet to the Onion, and will yield as many Pikmin as the number they're labeled with. If the current amount of Pikmin in the overworld are less than the max amount of possible Pikmin in the squad, seedlings will burst from the onion, which can be plucked from the ground to allow Pikmin to reproduce. Bears mentioning that collected carcasses from enemies will also work like pellets.

Only three kinds of Pikmin can be out in the overworld at any given time, so since priorities can change, it is possible to withdraw and deposit Pikmin from and to the Onion, which will ensure that the same pre-selected amount of Pikmin of each kind exist in the overworld at any given time. And of course, there's also your cutie patootie new friend, Oatchi, your dog. He functions like a second captain that you can switch back and forth from, with special abilities, such as Jumping (which allows you to take different routes which were previously impossible in the series), digging, swallowing huge treasures, charging against enemies and barriers, sniffing targets, carrying Pikmin on his back, and attacking by bite. Oatchi accumulates XP through the game, which can be used to level up his skills. Olimar also has a dog called Moss, both of which pretty much steal the show.

Remember that era in gaming around 2015 or so where every single game had to had a heckin' cute pupper doggo?

The max squad size and the Pikmin type limits do not apply to the Caves, though. Being the main mechanism for content in the game, Caves function as this game's Zelda dungeons, where a series of challenges is presented linearly and concluded in a boss (one of which, the Unexistent Entity, will be an incredible surprise if you played 3: you're thrown into its lair with the wrong Pikmin type and you have to play stealth to avoid decimation by it until you can counterattack). Comprised of multiple sub-levels, caves have a completion rate influenced by collection of treasure. In contrast to 3, the game does no longer have a time limit, as in, a fixed amount of days that you have to finish your mission in (it is possible to unlock a postgame mode, Olimar's Shipwreck tale, which returns to the original three Red, Blue and Yellow Pikmin 1 types and 30 day limit). Even though an in-game day lasts 15 minutes in real life, time flows half as fast during the cave sections, to incite playing them like a Zelda dungeon again.

Treasure collecting serves as the main method of progress in the game. After the rescue corps get stranded on Earth, they have to rehabilitate their spaceship through the collection of Sparklium, which is their fuel, and is obtained from shiny artifacts they find on earth, which Pikmin 4, in traditionally whimsical fashion, determines to be common household items and Nintendo paraphernalia, named in an oblivious manner, much like an alien unfamiliar with life on Earth would name things, and that's how a delicious and plump Peach becomes a "Mock Bottom". I would like to commend the Pikmin team over how perfectly and deliciously they model the treasures' in-game models. However, the treasures coaexist with perils, obstacles and beasts, which will attack your squad if you're not careful.

The game tries to make interesting things with their locales to test your ability to explore them and Dandori around. Of note, there's a beach stage where the tide goes down after noon, completely shifting the configuration of the level and effectively giving you a second level to maneuver around. The game also adds an in-door locale, a new to the series, presented very cozily. The Pikmin 4 house is just so cute (not to mention that I still hunger for those tomatoes in the kitchen, and I consider it a huge flex in the better way that Nintendo keeps showing off their HD graphics prowess... Mario Party Steak, anyone?)

Finally, it is also possible to develop your gear, skills and abilities. You can even go and punch enemies yourself alongside the Pikmin! I am particularly a fan of a new addition which allows you to summon benched Pikmin back to your location, and the superspicy sprays which give you a temporary boost.

Special consideration must be given therefore to the order of operations; to what tasks are taken and in what order and which have or can be done in parallel or not, and which should be done by a certain kind of Pikmin or not, and how to do them efficiently, administering your resources well (since some tasks like building, consume resources which have to be mined); which tasks represent risks or not, and which risks to take and which ones to avoid to protect your Pikmin; which fights to engage in and in what order and how to exploit enemy weakpoints and with which troops, or even which fights to completely avoid; when to save a Pikmin or even when to sacrifice them and leave them for dead or use them as bait or as a distraction (and in a game like this, losses are going to be inevitable); which routes to take in the overworld and how, and which shortcuts to take, and under what abilities, every little single thing is important when fighting the clock and aiming to complete tasks, as you are in this game. There's no time limit, but the number of ellapsed days is counted.

Part 2 - Dandori Battles, Night Expeditions, Dandori Challenges and the Sage Gauntlet, oh my!

The thing that surprised me the most about the game is the massive amount of content, a rare thing for nowadays Nintendo. First of all, a new Tower Defense mode has been added in the form of the "Night Expeditions". Series veterans will know that you only get to explore and work in a level until sundown, at which point any Pikmin forsaken in the Overworld will get eaten by the beasts. Special night expeditions are provided for a spin, where a new Pikmin type, the Glow Pikmin, is presented. Glow Pikmin do not need to be plucked, immediately return to you after they reach the Onion, and can Glowmob enemies by amalgamating into a big fireball. Night expeditions are performed to gather medicine to heal characters infected by the "leafling" infection, who have become Pikminified and can no longer think about anything but Dandori, becoming obsessed with it. and it eventually is revealed that Olimar... has been infected too.

Leaflings will constantly challenge you to Dandori battles, the Multiplayer mode in Pikmin 4, where there's a single type of Pikmin and a dog for both teams, competing Mario Kart style, with powerups and all, to gather a certain amount or kind of treasure in the minimum time possible.

There's also special Dandori challenges, where you must retrieve every single treasure in a level under certain conditions, sidequests to make you sick, and a final gauntlet with the Leafling master, a mysterious character who will "teach you to master the art of Delegation", and who will actually make you sweat with his challenges. I really loved the Gauntlet part of it.

If you make a mistake, a Checkpoint system is available to ease the pain on the player, different to previous entries in the series. It is possible to "rewind time" if you want to an auto-save to try again or undo a mistake and this comes to no penalty to the player.

But in another regard, I hated the controls, and I'm burned even more coming off of 3 and its Wii Remote controls. To be accesible to newcomers to the series , they decided to implement an auto-aim system for the Pikmin you throw. This usually works fine enough, but completely craps out when there's several multiple targets in tight quarters and you want to make an specific decision as to what to attack or carry. It is impressive that they decided to release the game in this form and not provide us with a different control scheme or some kind of option.

Pikmin is Miyamoto's passion project and the culmination of the series so far. I can appreciate his dedication to the series and that he wears his heart on his sleeve about it. It is a game that will fascinate you and inspire your love of nature; Shintoism is the main cultural framework of Japan, and I dare not and will NOT disrespect it or misunderstand it, but from what I understand it revolves around animism: the idea that everything in the World is God. That the forest is alive, that every single tree, every single leaf, every single bug has an spirit of its own to be revered, and that everything is constantly in movement and active, in vibration. That's where Pikmin borrows its inspiration for its luscious locales and creatures, underpinned by the classic, almost stereotypical Japanese obsession for productivity, time management and optimization. It shines best when you feel very effective and when you see all of your little creatures going about it, fighting monsters in mobs, and coordinating to carry their carcasses or a heavy object --not to mention that Oatchi both opens up the game thematically and for mechanical innovation.

Pikmin 4 was great. See you in 2035.

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You ain't the problem.

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We are not your kind of people.

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I'm a dumbass

I have a Turing Pi V2 with a Jetson Nano and it's the bees knees but I wanted to clear out some space, so I removed the graphical environment and other packages from Linux4Tegra (which is what NVIDIA offers, basically repackaged Ubuntu 18 LTS with their drivers and facilities, which have been historically NVIDIA's weak point in Linux land).

But the tutorial says "remove network-manager and then reinstall it", and I thought "well, I'll follow the tutorial", foolishly unaware that I had disabled dhcpd earlier in the week due to another issue, so I had no backup.

I came down from 92% usage to 60% which is all fine and dandy but I lost the machine. I can't SSH to it now.

I reinstalled network manager but even so, the machine didn't come back up on the network after reboot, so now I'm going to have to reflash the OS on the machine, which is a pain. NVIDIA's support is a joke.

Funnily enough, the machine does boot and it does prompt me to login if I hook up a monitor to it, but for some God forsaken reason it is not possible to use USB keyboards on the Turing Pi V2 for Jetson Nanos due to a limitation. If I had some way to actually login, I could easily fix this problem by re-enabling dhcpd.

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Busybox for Kubernetes debugging

I ran into a problem with my Kubernetes homelab where, in PVC that I use to store Plex Media Server configuration, for some reason (probably a botched reboot), the Plex Media Server lost write access.

PMS: failure detected. Read/write access is required for path: /config/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server

In cases like these where one needs to "browse inside a PVC" independently of the pod that consumes it (since the plex pod would crash, I had no way to shell into it), a solution is to create a barebones pod, attach the PVC to it, then shell into it. This is easy to achieve:

This manifest can simply be applied with kubectl -f busybox.yaml, and then a shell can be started. From here, the permissions issue was easy to fix.

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[nullset2]

Your boss and your landlord work together

As we see rents getting higher and pay completely stagnating we see an interesting interaction between our bosses and our landlords.

Fundamentally, your landlord charging you more in rent is good for your boss. In order to pay your higher rent, you will have to work more. Your boss will then leverage this, consciously or otherwise, to further exploit you for your labour.

You'll be "offered" overtime, often as a gesture of "goodwill", or even other work, often for horrifically low pay.

Here in the UK, landlords can request to see your income as a "guarantee" that you can pay your rent. They will then use this to argue that they can charge you a higher rent on your contract renewal. Of course, they were going to do that anyway, regardless of any increase in income.

Thankfully, there are ways that we can collectively fight back. Join a workplace union, and join a tenants union, and push back against these masters. There is plenty more than you can do, but I probably can't get away with saying it here...

They're working together, so can you.

Solidarity folks. <3

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Dark Souls - An In-Depth Critique and Review

I cannot sleep, so I figured it'd be a great time to start writing my next piece.

We cannot talk about the "Barren Wasteland" game, as I mentioned in the MGSV review, without covering the primordial Barren Wasteland game: Dark Souls.

Hidetaka Miyazaki and FROM Software's Dark Souls is the 2011 Open World media darling that solidified the modern ARPG. It was such a runaway success that it created a genre of its own (Souls-likes), propelled FROM Software to International notoriety, made Japanese games relevant in the Seventh Gen, and other Japanese games furiously co-opted all of its design elements (and still do to this day) --when Nintendo themselves start designing Zelda titles around the Souls framework, you know you did well.

Ever since its release, Gamers revere it as one of the best games of all time, and that people who don't clear it are tasteless, stupid fucking eunuchs (it is still common to refer to particularly difficult games as the "Dark Souls" of their genre). Dark Souls is pretty much the second coming of christ for some gamers.

I got my copy of Dark Souls from someone who insisted that I should play it because I was too much of a pretentious Phil Fish (Fez) wannabe and that I wouldn't recognize an actual good game if it hit me in the face. The fact notwithstanding that I used to mostly be on a diet of PC Indies and retro games because we couldn't afford a good enough computer to run beefy games back then (it was an event at my house when we finally got Half-Life 1 --not 2-- to run that we went out to Tacos Pipe, a local shop, and I got ourselves some badass tacos with their characteristic Tlaquepaque style salsa, and we enjoyed Half-Life a whole bunch that night), I do appreciate that I was forced to move on, because it is truly foolish to remain stuck in the past --even though I still believe the retro game's value is majestic and it will never fade away, and that it goes beyond the aesthetic and NES Hard. In fact, retro difficulty in particular is something that I believe Dark Souls inherits from retro games and arcade games to great success.

Predated by cult classic Demon's Souls, Dark Souls excelled at one thing: whereas gaming had become a travesty by then, with stale, ultra-rehashed franchises full of hand-holding and dark patterns (such as Microtransactions or all of the Games-as-a-Service malaise that I abhor), Dark Souls reinvigorated gaming by, lo!, believing in its players' intelligence and, behold!, actually innovating. It was a breath of fresh air in an Industry which had and has become plagued by moviegames and yearly iteration Sportsball, FPS and Assassins Creed games.

But is Dark Souls truly all that it's lauded to be? After all, it led to so many other games that the genre has received the moniker of rollslop, due to the prevalence of the roll mechanic in games of its kind, such as the rest of the Dark Souls Series, Sekiro, Bloodborne and Elden Ring. Its Melancholic themes being punctuated by the perfecting of cool Internet-powered mechanics in what's come to be known as Seamless Co-Op, I will now explain why I do believe Dark Souls to be a worthwhile use of your time, even if I am a bit cynical about it still.

Part 1. "Fuck you": The Video Game

A visibly pissed off Gabe Newell, giving "I really don't want to be recording this stupid fucking video right now" vibes while signing the eye of providence/ok sign with his hand said recently in the Half-Life documentary, paraphrasing:

"And so, we had to come up with a definition of fun. We knew it was an ad hoc definition, and it was: "the degree to which the game recognized and responded to the player's choices and actions." In Behavioral Science this would be known as reinforcers, and what the reinforcement schedules were...

The point I would make is, if I go up to a wall and shoot it (and nothing happens), to me it feels like the wall is ignoring me. I'm getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me. So I was trying to convey to the player a sense of, “Yes, you are making choices; yes, you are progressing.” Which meant the game had to acknowledge that back to you. If you shoot at a wall, there have to be decals. If you shoot a bunch of Marines; the Marines have to run away from you, right? You have to have this sense of the game acknowledging and responding to the choices and actions and progressions that you've made. Otherwise it loses any sort of impact."

Games usually try to avoid Narcissistic Injury, making their games amicable, signing the praises of the player and providing feedback. Dark Souls manages to be appealing by going completely against the grain, effectively becoming "fuck you" as a video game. I've theorized even, that people fell in love with it out of an Stockholm syndrome situation, with how ruthless and unforgiving the game is. But it's not simply that, nor that there weren't that many good releases back then (this was the first "really difficult" game that released in a while back then).

Arcade games are about playing a risk-and-reward, high action game and clearing it with one credit. When I play an arcade game, I am placing rules for myself, that if I break I know are going to lead to a restart of the run. Then, I engage in a little dance, with a bit of memoization, which I rehearse little by little to improve my skills. Thus, arcade games are vastly recognized as the pinnacle of skill-based gaming: I am competing with the machine for my precious money; the machine is doing its best to take as much money as it can from me, and I am doing my best to not die and give it any more money, and if I lose a life I simply restart the run. If I lose a life in Metal Slug, I know it wasn't the game pranking me, or punking on me, or playing Jedi mind tricks on me, or being an asshole and oneshotting me (usually); it was my fault. It means I didn't do well enough this run, and that the run must be restarted if I want to achieve a One Credit Clear. It means my skills aren't good enough, but they can be if I stick with it for long enough.

This kind of gaming had vastly become extinct by 2011, again, in a toxic industry that believes more that the gamer should be fed narcissistic satisfaction with the least amount of effort possible. All players in the Industry are guilty of this, from the flashiest FPS of the era with their spelled out tutorials and Quick Time Events, to the piss-easy Legend of Zelda games which literally block off parts of the map and place big dumb fucking X markers on your map so you cannot stray from the next objective because Nintendo thinks you should be treated like a toddler, otherwise how are you going to look at all of the 80 hours of cutscenes they're prepared for you? It was even worse when games started coming out with features where little tracks are drawn on the ground to literally spoonfeed you where to go, like they do in Dead Space, or features where you don't even need to play the game anymore, it will play itself for you if you want to, and we'll label it a "Cinematic" difficulty.

Dark Souls, in contrast, is so ruthless and abandons you so heavily that a lot of people report never even passing the tutorial level, the Undead Asylum. Personally, I'm guilty of not being able to make it past the Taurus demon in 2013, then picking it up again and dropping it after the first Bell.

The game is not only ruthless skill-wise: sometimes the game simply is an asshole to you. Sometimes, even if you're high level, the game decides it's going to fuck you up with a small rat or an unarmed undead or another low level mob, because you walked into it at the wrong angle. Combat is stiff and tense, the boss battles are shocking and horrid and simply surviving is scary. Sometimes you will have 40,000 souls (the currency/experience points of the game which are actually expendable), and you will lose them all simply by accident. Sometimes it's going to be because you weren't careful and you swung your sword a fraction of a second too early or too late, but most often times it's going to be because you're on your 30th pass through an area and the game simply decided it was going to be an asshole to you that one time.

Here's the thing: even though Dark Souls claims to be hard, this is mostly just the illusion of difficulty. I will elaborate on this later.

How's your Narcissistic Wound doing? Is it looking rounder and rounder, like a circle, much as the emblem of the game?

Parenthesis: I like flotation tanks. I find them incredibly soothing and great for relaxation and recovery after workouts. One time, during a session, in complete pitch darkness and silence, I saw the Dark Souls ring in the dark.

In Dark Souls, you are an Undead: a being which by some mysterious condition is not quite dead but not alive, escaping from an overcrowded undead asylum in ruins commanded by the "fate of the Undead", a myth circulated among the Undead, that one is to be chosen to go to Lordran, the land of Lords, to fulfill their destiny. Undeads can go Hollow: pretty much a living corpse or a zombie down to the bones like a meth addict. Miraculously, you're still not Hollow, and if you play well enough you can still regain your humanity during your adventures in Lordran.

Grab yourself a brew? The Undead are dependent on Estus, a flask of which is one of the biggest staples of the game, which you have to drink from every twentieth step or not if you want to survive.

Here is where it starts getting crazy: bonfires, another one of the staples of the genre, are your main checkpoints, from where you will respawn if dead. The game being open world, it's up to you to find and kindle the bonfires you can find in Lordran at your own pace and with no guidance of any sort. At bonfires, you can refill your flask, level up and regain your humanity (which you find from corpses and after defeating enemies in the game world). Most enemies will respawn after visiting a bonfire, so you will have to deal with them all over again, which is risky but at least will allow for additional souls to be collected.

I could also say that bonfires are the "save points" of the game: however, shockingly, Dark Souls has no actual save system at all. Whereas other games usually allow you to Save and Reload your file (either at specific points, with the pause menu or with a save state), Dark Souls has none of this at all and it robs agency from the player. Every action you take in the game is irreversible and final. If you turn off the game while you're walking down a hallway, the game will simply resume from the exact same position you left it in the next time you boot it. It is impossible to avoid the consequences of a game over by closing out and reloading a save. This means that there's no cutting corners: the game is going to hold you by the bleeps, and you're going to have to make do with it.

Humanity is a vital concept. You're initially dropped in Lordran in a Hollowed state, in which you can't use the seamless-coop features in the game. You have to grind until you find humanity and use it a a bonfire, after which you will be able to summon players, either AI or from the Internet, and see signs. Humanity can also be offered to "kindle" a bonfire, which will increase the amount of doses you can fill your estus flask with at that point.

Control wise, the game presents a deceptively simple system. You have your left and right hands, which you can assign an item both to. You usually end up with a shield and a weapon, but weapons can be wielded dual-handed or single handed with the Y button.

Both hands have a low and a strong attack, performed with the corresponding left or right bumper and trigger respectively. Additionally, you can perform a kick attack if you hit the right bumper while tilting forwards on the stick, and a lunge if you hit the right trigger.

The parry, riposte and backstab mechanics are advanced. If you manage to deflect an incoming attack with a shield with just the right timing, this will trigger a parry, which usually leaves enemies wide open. If you successfully input a low or strong attack after this, this will cause a critical hit in the form of a riposte, and finally if you can strike an enemy in the back with a low attack, this will trigger a backstab to devastating effect.

The B button provides maneuvering abilities. Holding down B makes you run, hitting B while running forward makes you jump and hitting it while standing still makes you step back. Hitting B while strafing in any direction will allow you to roll, a vital mechanic since rolling provides you with fractions of a second of invincibility, critical usage of which must be made when fighting enemies.

Additionally, the character can also use items with the X button, such as your recovery flask, and perform Miracles (spells) with the up arrow on the directional pad. The A button remains a simple action button.

Here's the kicker: all actions are bound by an stamina meter, which slowly depletes upon taking actions and refills over time. Running will consume more stamina than walking for example, rolling will consume stamina, and strong attacks will consume more stamina than low attacks. Stamina will refill if you rest or refrain from attacking, but it will refill faster if you lower your shield rather than keeping it raised.

If you face a Game Over (and you will, hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of times), you will lose all of your souls and humanity and become hollow. However, if you return to your last bloodstain and touch it, this will allow you to retrieve your resources: this is why the game tends to be described as a "Rogue-like". You ought to be careful, though, because if you drop your souls and fail to touch your last bloodstain again, then they are completely forfeited.

Finally and controversially, there is no pause menu, and all decisions inside the start menu must be taken in real time. If you need to pause the game, you will quite literally need to quit to the menu screen, and return to your game. The developers were trying to go for additional tension, I guess, since having to use items while time keeps flowing makes you more vulnerable and enemies can flank you at any time.

My only caveat about the system is that, even though the game boasts about how great of an ARPG it is, it's not actually as much "A" as it is "RPG". Dark Souls clicked for me when I realized that I ought to play it as a resource management game, not as an action game, even though ARPG proudly displays a huge A in front of it. It's a game, like JRPGS, about numbers going up or down but with an element of synchrony. Sure, it sort of plays like a Zelda game with XBOXHUEG windups (which I've always found hilarious ever since they started becoming stereotypical in the Monster Hunter series, and which Zelda itself now also has by the way), where if you need to swing your sword it will take 1.5 seconds after you punch in a command for it to happen. The input buffers are massive and cancelling is everywhere, you can sort of imagine that you have a fighting game buffer behind the scenes and input commands into the buffer, and that's the only way that the game will make sense.

It is absolutely not an action game like Bayonetta, where twitch reflexes and flexibility are all that matters. I would describe it, instead, as a game about dealing with inertia.

Part 2. Don't Go Hollow --With a little help from my friends

Imagine The Legend of Zelda but you walk two steps and you get gangraped by a bunch of meanies every two minutes, and that would be an initial approximation to what the Dark Souls experience is like. You will continuously die, and die, and die; and they you won't die, and you'll walk into a new room, and you'll die again; and finally after much grief and sorrow you will not die, but then woops, it's time for a Boss Fight who will just spring up on you, and the Boss Fight will be a total jumpscare; and after dying ten more times, you will finally get somewhere with the boss, only to discover that he has a second or third phase and refills their health.

There's a certain Zen-like beauty in all of this grief. Even though Dark Souls wants you dead, and will not budge an Inch, even though it will not even give you a Map screen, nor it will give you any story blips or even a hint at all, the game is still enticing because you see yourself getting better at it with every retry, much as it happens with an Arcade game. This is why I've said that it's a breath of fresh air.

However, it is also possible for a game to be ridiculously unfair, so something surely has to work out in the player's favor at some point for them to not rip out their hair and drop the game forever, right? Well, enter Dark Souls biggest innovation: Seamless Co-Op and Async multiplayer features. Both of these concepts caused such a ripple effect in the industry that most games still implement them in 2025.

What? Going to people's homes and sitting down on a couch and playing games locally, what are you, nuts? Are you from the past? What are you, 30, gramps? We don't do that shit anymore, what kind of Maniac are you? We play over the Internets.

You see, once you acquire the White Soapstone item in-game, it is possible to lay down an invocation sign, and if you desire you can summon an online player to invade your world and play with you to fight through a tough boss or area... or they can join you to wreck you up and steal your resources. The game amazingly gives you the option to play PVP or PVE in a completely seamless manner.

Besides Co-Op, Dark souls also provides the ability to leave pre-formed cookie cutter messages in the game world, which can be rated up or down like social media posts. When you play the game you connect to a certain instance of the game where messages are shared by other players. Messages they leave in their game worlds will seamlessly appear in yours, causing a very interesting effect where people will actually try to aid each other, or celebrate tiny moments of joy. Even though the messages are very dry, sometimes they can have a quasi-cryptological personal feeling to them.

"Whoa, cool bosses!" is what people get out of this game, unaware of the finer undertones, of how the Elite, commanding a World of Undead, are willing to sacrifice it all before relenting their position of power.

Now, this is the part where I'd normally talk about the plot but I wish there was a plot itself in the game to begin with. The game puruse something called "Environmental Storytelling", a technique where story exposition is almost never cinematic or scripted, but instead it is up to the players, through exploration and careful analysis, to actually figure out what's going on with the plot.

They did this because they realized that they can have a boss simply yell a random name after dying or something incredibly vague like that, and this will make the fans go crazy speculating, to the production of endless hours of youtube video footage to discuss the story.

You meet a bunch of Undead also struggling in Lordran, and every undead you meet has a creepy laugh at the end of every paragraph --which is how they talk in Seattle by the way (ba-dum-tsh). Maybe the game is trying to say that we are all undead, and the ones who think are not are the most dangerous.

Since the lore is very complicated and I do not wish to spoil myself yet, I will write a second part with more observations once I actually have a better grasp of it.

[nullset2]

Hey everyone, I know it's going to be a busy day for a lot of people, but Google enrolled everyone over 18 into their AI program automatically.

If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.

Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.

I saw this over on bluesky and figured it would be good to spread on here. It only takes a few minutes to do.

[nullset2]

Birds are not real.

[nullset2]

TotK is a story about recovering from tragedy. Link is literally broken at the beginning of the hurt. He is haunted by Zelda's ghost everywhere goes. Every shrine he completes, every heart container he gets back, he expunges a little of the pain. He heals.

By the end of the game he gets a final redemptive chance to save Zelda where he failed before.

[nullset2]

Far from home, departed from kin, banished to a strange place; I wonder that my heart feels so little anguish, so little pain. Master Shang, I have discovered my true home in Nothing Land.

[nullset2]

Technofeudalism

This book is recommended required reading. It claims that the mechanisms of Capitalism actually expired long ago, and there's no more profit or productivity to be had because we've moved since to a more insidious, communistic version of capitalism which the author dubs Technofeudalism. Technofeudalism accelerated violently after the COVID world event in 2020.

Technofeudalism is a late-capitalist system where the billionaires amass cloud capital to control, modify and curtail human behavior, treating them like organic automatons that can not do anything but to till the cloud capital with their labor. This produces cloud rent, since the serfs can't do anything without the cloud platforms they depend on (Tumblr itself literally being another one of them). It goes without saying that this explains the humongous success of platforms such as AWS, since it offsets the cost of owning cloud capital into cloud rent, even more since no real alternative is ever provided.

The economy of attention is a direct derivation of this: we have effectively moved past the knowledge economy of the early 2000s, to instead move into a state where Truth doesn't exist anymore; the only thing that matters is what biases your favorite influencers seem to display. Have you noticed how X.com, reddit, youtube, twitch, tumblr, et. al., have all switched to paid models? The more labor you put into them, the more it is, supposedly, rewarded. It's all turned into sways of libido being poured into the digital, sacrifices to Moloch.

The book also discounts crypto as an empty promise out of this conundrum. Whereas the ideal is to eschew fiat currency, which people have lost faith in, in favor of crypto (surreptitiously enabling the "you will own nothing..." WEF agenda, again, since instead of actually storing wealth in tangible assets you literally have nothing but a few make believe numbers in a blockchain), the author claims this will not really lead anywhere, since blockchains are reminiscent of fiat itself, in a smaller scale.

In late-stage capitalism, the only other way to make money is through flat out scamming people. They're also going against the real estate market because it's the last remaining true store of wealth. For example, I bought coffee off of terminal.shop, The Primeagen's coffee shop that only works through ssh. Silly me, amused as I was by the concept, bought 44 dollars worth of coffee in January. To this date, they haven't sent anything and their support email, hello@terminal.shop, is dead. They also perniciously curate the comment sections in the Primeagen's youtube channel to delete any mentions of this actually happening. Sure, I simply made a chargeback, but I figured that it'd be even better to make an example out of this.

HOA fees, Admin fees, Security deposits, Pet fees, Bank fees, Tips, Crypto pump-and-dumps, Income tax, Property tax are rampant, all of which are nothing but scams: again, if it's not obvious how all of this is ultimately-zero sum, I don't know what else to tell you.

[nullset2]

I made a very rudimentary sliding puzzle game