For spoken English, I greatly recommend audiobooks and podcasts. They typically have better narrators, so are easier to understand. As a bonus, one can listen to them while doing household chores and such — for me, consumption of books greatly increased with audiobooks compared to snatches of books here and there.
It’s just that I made a resolve recently-ish that I need to properly get into stories in games. Unlike back in the day, when I played through ‘Half-Life’ 1 and 2 and gathered pretty much nothing about the plot. ‘Disco Elysium’ seems to be the type of a game where a lot of the story is in the details dropped by the characters, reading materials, etc.
I’ve been recently replaying the original ‘Deus Ex’, and had Denton crawl around every level for hours, reading each newspaper and poster he comes across. The papers do in fact frame the main story, clarifying the relations between factions and such.
An extreme case of this is apparently the ‘Elder Scrolls’ universe, with which the community gathered sizeable lore and history that goes several layers deep. I’ve never played the games (perhaps for the best), and only happened upon a tangential discussion about this, but the impression was that they’re deciphering it like ‘Ulysses’.
Stuff about the setting that I learn from the characters. Perhaps you have better memory than me.
Steam has notes built in
This is great to know. I need to see if Steam accepts my copy of the game, for which I didn’t pay to the company after what they did to the developers.
But he’s a professional detective, presumably with the skill to gather information and put it together. Meanwhile I’m a professional scatterbrain who writes down notes for programming projects that take more than a day. It would be unrealistic for me to roleplay as him, especially if I step away from the game for a couple weeks and forget most of the details. If I can code while hungover, he probably can do detective stuff while hungover.
I love everything about ‘Disco Elysium’ in isolation. Art style? Gorgeous. Grimy noiry mood, right up my alley. I love isometric RPGs, though it’s been a while since I played any. Writing is great, from what I’ve heard. Novel mechanics, probably beautiful.
Only, I get into a couple dialogs and realize I need a second computer on the desk, to type up notes. Ain’t no way I’m remembering any of that, especially since I tend to take long breaks in a playthrough. And I just decided in recent years that I need to pay closer attention to stories in games, which I neglected to do back in my youth.
I’ve put twenty notes into the phone (with swipe-typing, thankfully), and that ended my initial experience.
AI is a hallucination engine
Whiplashed by one of the works by great bassist and producer Bill Laswell being inadvertently mentioned in discussion of AI.
Dunno about the artstyle: a lot of 90s to early-2000s 3d shooters had that grimy look, perhaps to show off the textures. But the jacket and the casually lowered gun definitely factored into the recognition.
Haven’t played ‘Max Payne’ in twenty years, completely forgot what it looks like in-game, and still the first thought from the screenshot was “Max Payne”.
Thankfully, not much difference between those, eh.