Uncle Mike

I thought there was enough about Sallinger, and his ranting to the heroes (who just happen to be women) about their lazy cheating lying ways and so on that gave him a bit of a vibe. He obviously was a cut-price Dexter on the most obvious level, for sure.

There were some good parts of S3, though. Although it took too long, Trish, Malcom and Erik all provide good windows onto Jessica. Jones continues to be brilliant, and Sallinger is a top-tier villain, even if it overly-stretched belief at times.

Finished JJ S3 over the weekend. They've been so frustrating, these Netflix series. Some really good core casting (Jessica, Killgrave, Malcolm, Hogarth, Sallinger and Trish's Mom in this one - Daredevil, Kingpin, Father whatisface and the nun, Cage, Cottonmouth, Mariah, Shades, Colleen, the Meachums, Davos and, of course, The Punisher) with writers and overall stories that do a good job of putting these heroes under appropriate stress and challenge. Decent budgets and production values. (I really enjoyed all the, is it tilt-shift?, photography in this, where Manhattan looks like toytown.) Several actually good villains - something the cinema Marvel stuff has really struggled with. And imperfect heroes, with finite capabilities, facing appropriate moral challenges should be so much more interesting to watch. Kingpin, Killgrave, Davos, Sallinger and Cottonmouth/Mariah were all excellent foils and mirrors for their respective heroes. But then really and repeatedly hobbled by episode inflation and terribly numbing side-plots, and initially also hampered by the need to throw them all into Defenders, which was shit. There's a whole episode in this series of just an extended flashback of the previous episode. Fuck's sake. Who cares about Hogarth's ALS? She's a shit, and not even important. If they'd have used the flexibility of being on a streaming platform to make episodes and series of appropriate durations, and/or created enough story to fit the orders, they'd be so much better. As it is, we keep having these seasons where it's all resolved in episode 6, the villain gets away/dies/is jailed, we spend a few episodes doing something irrelevant and then either the bad guy comes back or we get a new surprise one. What wasted potential. And so they die to the Disney licence, not with viewer demand to bring them back ASAP, but having overstayed their welcome.

I bought this one recently, and it's great: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aresh-Controller-PlayStation-Controllers-indicator/dp/B01M9ILWT3

The deluxe version on PSN unlocks a couple of characters and karts you can unlock anyway with play, and then a few exclusives skins, maybe a kart, and a character or two. Feels unnecessary.

1 hour 8 for a brief discussion of loading muddiness and a demonstration of lag.

There's a great throwaway one-liner in the Eurogamer review that's going to generate a lot of fake outrage and wailing.

There's a second point of no return in a bit (you're still some ways away) then a further swathe of missions to the end. You certainly get your value for money in this game.

Spoiler for the end stages of the campaign:

I was pretty confident by the sawmill part. Set up the odd remote mine, threw a few mega and normal molotovs, the odd attractor bomb (or attractor/pipebomb combo) and massive machine gun whilst backpedalling into the nearby railway tunnel. That Breaker boss near the plane was the hardest part for me, followed by the cave Horde that pissed Thor off. I don't like the way starting again after a death resets the encounter/Horde, but drains your inventory of anything you'd used.

The e2e latency on an 8-bit console to a CRT is likely <50ms - the refresh rate of a 60Hz CRT TV is 0-16ms (because of its display tech) and because those consoles and computers were so keyed in directly to the CRT, they had to be incredibly responsive or it would all go to shit. JPickford would know a lot more about this than me, but either way it's very low. That's a world away from the e2e latency on a modern 30fps game like Assassin's Creed, which locally is around 160ms, and over something like Stadia in the 160-180ms range, from initial testing. There's a lot of latency for Stadia to hide in, and even then the initial reports from best-case Stadia testing are that the video gets muddy on occasion and latency is noticeable but not game-breaking. There are things Stadia is doing that will clearly work to mitigate against that sort of issue - for example, you're playing the 60fps version on Stadia, not the 30fps console version. Your controller is syncing directly to the Google cloud, not using the local hardware as an intermediary. It's all mitigation, and understandable. I don't think Antstream, because of its retro focus, has the same latitude. You do have an easier ride on the video compression, but you have a much tighter latency to work with. And you don't have any magic sauce to play with, either.

I understand you're on the defensive about this, but that's a lame counter-point.

Stuff like Spider-Man is as "film-setty" it's just you have no interest as Spider-Man in going shopping at the mall. Your indoors interactions are all separated by a discrete load and a very limited space. Something like Skyrim is probably the closest we have to non-film-set worlds - you can go everywhere you can see, and all the buildings work?

There's a bit in that Higton stream (when he's playing Cannon Fodder) where it really clearly chugs and suffers from lag to the point where Higton talks about it. And also talks about how on scene transitions and the like that the video gets quite muddy and suffers from (presumably) compression artefacts. That did seem to be the exception in terms of lag, rather than the rule, but I'd still want to see some data - dumpster's post a page back where he talks about how you might not notice lag directly, but then are surprisingly shit at the game (because of the lag) rang true, particularly in Higton's stream. In some ways, these retro games, whilst being easier to encode for video, might be harder to deliver for streaming as they were really designed for a zero latency world - they can't hide behind the surprisingly high local input latency of, say Assassin's Creed like Stadia can. 95% of these retro games don't appeal to me anyway, but that's a whole different question, and not one of interest.

I just finished the third book. It stays great all the way through, although the third book has to do a fair bit of heavy lifting to land the ending.