SO SMOOF!

Everybody makes mistakes. We're only human. Random stupid platitudes about how we're all born to fuck up. I get it. But there's human error and there's the Royal Mail. I get letters, which are supposed to to go a different house, a different street, sometimes even a different town. Every. Single. Week. Royal Mail owe me one birthday parcel containing used underwear, 8 gigs of RAM and a delivery of German food, none of which ever made it to me, because moving something to a place that is spelled out right in front of your face is super hard or something. But this time you've really done it.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how they managed to send this to my house. Yes, I live in 9 Station Road. But this isn't my post code. This isn't my town. And I don't live in FUCKING WALES! Again, mistakes happen and sometimes they send letters here that were meant for my neighbour or somebody with the wrong post code, but this isn't even the right fucking country. The only "match" here is the name of the fucking street. I have no words for this, but I'm starting to understand why half of my fucking mail never actually makes it here or reaches its destination. Maybe Mike Tyson had the right idea after all.

In other news, there's finally a translated version of Final Fantasy VII that doesn't suck. It's fan-made and people are bashing the poor fucker over the whole Aerith/Aeris thing like he's shitting on the bible in public or something, because Internet. Where you can invent a medication against cancer and people will hate it, because it doesn't come in Strawberry Flavour. Can we make that rule69 or something? If it exists, people will hate it.

It's sad, not only because the translation is a fucking MOD and you can choose to ignore it if some fan's dedication totally ruins your childhood. But the whole thing is also incredibly GOOD - he's not simply fixing typos. Portions of the original translation made no sense or failed to deliver details from the original Japanese text, making parts of the story incredibly confusing. And some fucks hate him for making things a little more coherent.

Because a translation that makes sense is somehow worse.

I've probably called FF7 overrated in the past, because stuff tends to annoy me when everyone goes all crazy about it and I'm not super fond of Square or some of their fans. But chances are there's no other RPG out there, which has stuck with you, moved you and inspired you as much as this one if you grew up playing it back in the day. We've all promised our girlfriends we'd become heroes one day and they probably dreamed about being the ones to rescue us in the end or some other one of the cheesy daydreams conjured up by Cloud's story.

I've purchased a bunch of quality kitty cardboard a few days ago:

Your authority is not recognized in Fort Kickass.

Fortunately for me, said cardboard also contained bits of hardware, so now I know how it feels to be playing GTA V at 60 FPS - or up to 150 theoretical frames, which my 60hz monitor cannot display. Hurray!
That's great for work, because now I can record footage in glorious 1440p or even 4k, depending on the game. What's not so great is how, at least on Youtube, I have to choose from either 60 FPS or resolutions above 1080p. I can't have both, so I need to figure out whether I want smooth and speedy 60 frames or clear and sexy 1440p for my Youtube channel.
And there is much recording to be done, since I'm finally writing that article on Warframe I always wanted! It's the only game that lets me play a space ninja who is also a dragon.

Who also owns a giant Foxbatbear... thing

This game basically turns you into some kind of Bruce Wayne of the future. You have this ridiculously massive, ever-growing collection of tools and toys to help you fight bad guys and you can customize and upgrade everything to insane levels. It starts with your character, your Warframe, which also serves as a playable "class" of sorts. There are 23 different warframes, many of which come with upgraded prime versions of themselves. They all have unique abilities and strengths and weaknesses. You start out with one, but you can craft and collect (or simply buy) all of them and switch anytime you want.

Then you customize their looks and abilities. Colours, sigils, emblems, cosmetic armor, alternative helmets, but also extra melee power, greater range or more power for special abilities, yada, yada, yada. You also get to customize your weapons, which range from rifles to dual pistols to katanas to massive two-handed axes and shotguns and bolt-throwers and kunai and a billion other murderous tools.

After choosing the coolest hilt for your sword or the best camo for your gun you get to upgrade them with elemental damage, cover-piercing ammo, exploding arrows and even fucking stances. Every melee weapon comes with three or four different fighting stances, which all use completely different movesets and special attacks. Don't like the hacky-slashy moves on your Katana? Change to a stabby stance, which also makes use of its hilt with some attacks like Mitsurugi on Soul Calibur. This game is the tits!

It still looks pretty decent, as well.

You also get to custimize your own little starship that takes you to missions and back, as well as a set of wings for battles in space. And, as you've probably gathered from these screenshots, there are also pets. Do you want a living, breathing pet or a machine? In the biological section there's the (mostly) canine Kubrow, with feline pets on the horizon. You have to raise those as puppies, there are different breeds with various special abilities and skills and they come in a ton of different shapes and sizes. Claire's dog looks like a fat, ugly pig with an ass so massive, it lags the entire server when it attacks an enemy. Which is why she is now using a floating mechanical pear, instead, which blasts enemies with a shotgun and vacuums up loot. There's also a floating cube of death that shoots lasers and a little Asian dragon thing.

Of course you can also "just play" and not worry about these things too much, but the game lets you customize the looks and abilities of your pets, if you're into that sort of thing. That's a whole lot of stuff to unlock and upgrade and customize. It may be a bit too complex for people who just want to jump into the game and punch things, but it's a great crazy crime-fighting rich person simulator. You know - what kind of powers, weapons, animals and vehicles would I bring if I had cool shit times infinity to choose from.

Just gotta figure out whether I want to upload 1080p footage in 60 fps, which is super fast and smooth, but the youtube compression is also rather ugly and full of artifacts:

Meanwhile, 1440p compression isn't so bad and looks absolutely fantastic on Youtube, but won't allow 60 FPS on there for some reason, so it's less speedy:

If we're going the 30 FPS route, anyway, I could also record in 4k. Doing so with Shadowplay reguires a GTX 970 or better, which I don't have (yet), so right now I'd have to use Bandicam, which isn't super great on the performance and makes my machine struggle to keep the 30 FPS steady in the first place. I'd also have to buy it to get rid of the annoying watermark. Hmm...

Oh hey, since we're already watching videos and shit - you've seen the Fallout 4 announcement, right? This one?

This is the most life-life dog I've ever seen in a video game! Fuck you, Riley! And fuck all of you, who are already bitching about how disappointed you are for some stupid reason or another. It's fucking Fallout. Being disappointed with the announcement of Fallout is like being disappointed with the announcement of sex. "We're gonna fuck tonight" is NO reason for disappointment. Unless maybe you're in prison or something.

Also, it looks like we may eventually return to Skara Brae. Whee!

There's some good shit coming our way.

-Cat