SadStruggle92 [none/use name]

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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • while there is obviously a power dynamic between differently aged people

    IDK, I feel like that’s an incomplete proposition, to some extent at least.

    The things that typically make for an “power-dynamic” in a relationship, like accumulated personal wealth, social experience, social networks & ones overall position in society are all to some extent or another correlated with age to some extent. But y’know, none of those are necessarily guarantees; at least not within the specific age-range specified in the post at any rate.









  • I never thought about it before but Full Metal Jacket is kind of retrograde the way it portrays the guy who blasted his CO as a sobbing incompetent moron. In reality there was a lot of resistance and direct murder of COs by GIs during the Vietnam War, but it wasn’t done by antisocial mouth-breathing idiots but principled resistors.

    Well, Gomer Pyle is not supposed to be a depiction of a “principled resistor”. He’s supposed to be a depiction of a guy who is obviously mentally disabled, but got pushed through medical examination anyways due to lowering recruitment standards. As I understand that was also a hot-button issue at the time.

    That said, I would personally prefer that you did not speak so frankly on your opinions regarding Mr. Pyle. Comparison with the character is actually one of the ways people where I live used to use to try to get at me.



  • And already some of you have doubtlessly gone down to comment “lmao git gud”. Motherfucker it’s not about difficulty. You know what was a difficult fucking game? Sekiro. That game is hard as balls and I absolutely love it, precisely because its designed in a such a way that it fixes everything about Dark Souls that sucks.

    In Sekiro they fixed this. Instead of literally just dodging every single attack, you have a dozen different defensive options that you have to learn and apply to different attacks. Instead of knowing how every single enemy encounter is going to go down, you have a bunch of different ninja tools that have different effects that you can experiment with.

    Did you try a Magic build? That may be more your style.

    Anywho, I do think that what you’re asking for out of Dark Souls is something fundamentally different than what it actually is. In my opinion, Sekiro shares far more with older games like Tenchu, the Ninja Gaiden series, & maybe just a little bit w/ Metal Gear Rising than it does with most other games in the “SoulsBorne” lineage. It is at base a “Ninja Game” first & foremost, and I think it really only gets considered as similar to the rest of From Software’s catalogue due to shared developer parentage, and similar control formatting.

    Conversely, it’s well known that the “Souls’” both Demon & Dark, are spiritual successors & reimaginings of the old King’s Field games. Now anybody who knows anything about the history of JRPGs could tell you at a glance that King’s Field is obviously a console-centric adaptation of old Wizardry & Ultima-style CRPGs, in particular Ultima Underworld. In fact FromSoftware themselves specifically cite the commercial success of the Japanese port of the original Wizardry game for their 1990 pivot to videogames development (previously they made commercial business software). Just as well, Hidetaki Miyazaki has expressed in the past that he draws just as much influence from TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons as he does other videogames in terms of his own games design philosophy.

    Put another way; although this is rarely addressed in discussions of the games themselves, the “SoulsBorne” series in fact shares a direct “genealogical-design” link with Morrowind & Skyrim. Which I think is probably most self-evident in Elden Ring & reveals the whole game about why that specific game seems to work so goddamn well. They’ve been perfecting, incrementally, what Bethesda has been fumbling with trying to implement wholesale for the last 20 years; which is the question of how to correctly adapt the Ultima-Wizardry CRPG framework to console gaming.

    This also, I think, explains what some of your problem in “getting into” Dark Souls might be. A lot of people try to approach the games like they’re action games & get clowned on, they’re not. They’re Western-Style RPGs that happen to have been developed in Japan, and you need to approach them with that mindset I think, in order to really get any mileage or enjoyment out of them as games.









  • The big problem is that a lot of this is stuff that I’ve genuinely been trying to work hard on for the last 4-5 years, and not only has it not really changed anything socially about my life (although I have been slightly more stable in employment), it’s all come crashing down on me lately. I got a real bad leg injury (like, probably gonna require surgery to reattach something bad) in the course of keeping up with my regular weight-training routine & my work, and not only is it costing me a lot of money, but it’s also prevented me from moving forward with my life (i.e. getting my own place closer to work).

    I’m also someone who didn’t have a lot of opportunities growing up, I don’t feel. I come from, & still live in, a small & relatively poor community, and I myself lived in a trailer park until I was about 12. I’ve also got ASD, and it’s significant enough that I got diagnosed very young & spent nearly all my school years in special education; and where I went to school they were very big on physical restraint & isolation as punishments. My parents, just as well, had a lot of their own problems & were not generally able to pay attention to what was going on with me, or my sister (who has had a whole host of problems on here own). I never had a lot of chances to make friends with people in my time, and when I have tried most don’t seem to care for my company, or my particularities. Admittedly some of that is my own fault though I suppose, as I was not a very happy or positive person for a very long time, and in a lot of ways I’m still not most of the time though I still try & do what I think is right.

    I suppose for all of those reasons I don’t really have the ability to be as naturally “attentive” as people might ask or expect of me; and that makes me very dubious of my ability to ever really be a part of society.

    I’m not sure how I want to conclude this now as it’s close to my bedtime, and I’m running out of brain-power to formulate & connect ideas with; but I hope you can figure out what I’m trying to get at here.