2025/11/14
As I was stopping doing anything and just idling, I decided to check my GOG account to see what I had in there. I've been a pirate all my life, but a few years back I decided to start buying games there because they don't rely on any third-party application to install or launch, and I can have a safe .exe to do whatever I want with it. I only buy games there when they're less than BRL$10 (about USD$2 at the moment), and I had bought Far Cry (2004) some time ago.
I was working in a Lan House when that game came out. I learned from an American friend that those places are very third-worldish and people don't really know what they are elsewhere, but in the 2000s not many people in third-world countries had a computer, and if they did, maybe it wasn't very good, and most people didn't have access to decent internet. So they would go to Lan Houses and pay to use computers. There were lots of people gaming, but also people using social media or just surfing. It was a very fun place to be and even better to work at. We'd often do this thing called "Corujão" (something like "night owling"), where, if enough people signed up, we'd open the place at 22:00 and stay until 06:00 (10PM to 6AM if you're American). So it was an all-night gaming session that I was literally paid to be at... and of course fuck school the next morning, I'd just sleep through the classes.
Anyway, I digress. I remember being very impressed by Far Cry's graphics at the time, but today not so much - and I'm still impressed by Need for Speed: Underground (2003) and Half-Life 2 (2004). Replaying today, I also don't think there's anything particularly engaging in Far Cry's gameplay, and its story... ouch, it's so painfully generic, like a bad '80s action movie that takes itself too seriously - unlike Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (2013), that one is great.
I beat the game, a bit annoyed by it. Time to play Far Cry 2 (2008), which I bought on GOG at the same time but never played before. Far Cry 2 is actually kinda great in a way. The graphics and gameplay are very good, the story and characters are somewhat interesting, and I found it way more engaging. The atmosphere is also great, and the jamming mechanics led to some very funny interactions and accidents too, but in another way, the game is not so great. It gets exhausting pretty quickly because the maps are too big, the fast-travel options are extremely limited, and the very places you accept missions are far apart - and then they send you even farther. There are enemies at every road intersection, and even if you're in a vehicle and try to just drive through, they'll jump in theirs and catch up. Even if you drive them off the road or make them hit a tree or something, they'll still catch up because the vehicles are faster when they're driving, so you're always forced to stop and kill them. The other problem is how fast they respawn. I was often going from the bar or the town to the nearest antenna to get missions, and I'd have to stop at a roadblock to kill enemies on the way, two minutes later, on the way back, they were already there again and I had to kill them again. Without an XP and skill system there's no real incentive for this pointless combat - yeah, I could sneak through the woods and avoid being spotted, but it takes longer than just killing them. Combat gets very, very repetitive.
With more fast-travel options and longer enemy respawn times, this game would have been top-notch.
Damn, my microblogging is really missing the micro part.
2025/11/13
For the last four years I've been consuming media very methodically to tackle my ever-growing Plan to Read/Watch/Play list, and for the past ten months I've been watching movies nonstop. Since I decided to stop my main blog and page, I gradually slowed my rhythm until it finally came to a halt. I currently have about 200 movies on my HDD waiting to be watched, but as I drift through daily life anxiety and frustration, which honestly makes me feel embarrassed when I read other people's blogs here, I decided to just "procrastinate" (on my entertainment consumption... somehow...) and kind of went back to mindless gaming. For now, I guess most of what I'll be posting here will be thoughts about the games I've been playing lately, or just use this as a diary - perhaps I should have left this entry for the end of the day instead of the middle of it.
Entry 02:
Sometimes I look at other sites I follow and find them criminally underappreciated. I mean, how the hell am I gaining on psychicnewborn in views? How the hell do I have almost double the views of Gold Hill Mall? KuroiOS is another fantastic site that barely gets any views. It's not just that they've been here way longer than I have, they're beautiful projects with tons of content that the owners put a lot of work into. One thing they have in common, though, is that they dwarf me in followers.
So I've developed a theory: what's getting me views is the fact that I have a real picture on my index page (did you know that if you click it, it changes?), and you're all damn curious to see what I look like... although I guess I'm not showing enough to get followers lol
Well, what did I do? I'm being a whore and putting those pictures on this page too since I'll be updating it way more often - and I'll show my hairy chest when I reach 100 followers \o/
... no... I won't... or will I?
... fear what hairy thing I might show if I reach a thousand...
2025/11/12
It's been weeks since I started thinking about making a microblog here, but I'm always too lazy to actually do it... obviously the motivation only hits when it's time to sleep, and I'm still deciding if I'm going to link it on my main page or not - but I'm liking the idea of people only being able to see it being updated on Neocities. Anyway, I'm only getting the page ready, and for now enjoy my screenshots :)