Fred and Loathing on The Internet

It Was In Fact His First Rodeo

2023-Dec-20

Although the process of building Flask views of different granularity has been quick in pace because I can attach styled templates to them, there is a lot of holdup when it comes time to figuring out where to place the functionality I develop into my codebase. I am often worried I am making dependency issues for myself down the road. They’re a difficult design step to blow past because they cause issues that are painful to fix. Those kinds of fixes usually require a few steps back in updates to get things aligned right.

The updates in the hopper today are, as stated in the past few blog posts, are all happening on a new repo that will come to replace the one being served at the time of this blog’s publication. Over there we have an individual artist profile page that shows info about an artist’s spotify data and their data on my spotify listening app.

I think I sidestepped the issue of dealing with peculiar spelling to artists' names. Motorhead being the test case I often use. Motörhead has the special character which really throws a monkey wrench into my string operations. Also just having spaces in a name throws in some obstacles. In a stroke of insight, I just went with the art_id as the attribute I use to link around artist stuff. To be honest I feel rather stupid for not coming to this conclusion so much earlier in my app’s development. No point commiserating for too long. Let’s get to reviewing:

Before I get to making a capstone review of Red Dead Redemption 2, I would like to commend Steam adding a year in review section, similar to the one Spotify releases near the end of the calendar year. I am glad Valve is doing anything to make Steam more than just a game launcher. Throwing some stats at me in a well curated infographic was what I always wanted. It showed me the big block of RDR2 time I had in the spring of this year. Total War: Warhammer 2 had the most total hours, but I know a lot of those were produced by leaving the game idle at a menu screen. RDR2 is the true personal #1 game in my 2023 chronicling, nudging out Cyberpunk 2077 (which doesn’t show up in my Steam Review. It’s on GOG).

It has been months since I picked up the controller to gallop around the fake Southwest of RDR2. The epilogue had proved to be much longer than I had expected, so I did not find myself going all the way to ‘beat the game’ by finishing all the primary campaign missions of the single player game. I had heard Micah, a duplicitous character from the game’s main story that was so portrayed so vile, that discovering that the chance to give that fictional character his comeuppance is too irresistible to pass up. I foresee my return to the game to find at least that mission.

This game is excellent despite putting a lot of impediments on the pace at which the player can proceed with the game. Travel distances are huge, with the option to fast travel being more inconvenient than a pause menu option. Rather you must fritter about in the game world to put up the pretense of traveling, like looking at a map to plan a journey or buying a train ticket. The game is ripe with story cutscenes that can be skipped yet I did not find myself doing that more than a handful of times. I open my concluding critique of this game with my caveats to enjoying it because it would take much less time to talk about what I did not like about the game rather than what I did. I am not a game designer so I do not know how the development team could have produced such a profound gem of an open-world video game without the occasional narrative tunnels you have to play through or without the slowed down animations that come with doing anything with the playable character in the ol’ West. This game is slow but it is beautiful. Riding about still doesn’t feel like a chore. Catching my eyes wandering a bit on sweeping vistas still happens after +100 hours of digital horse riding. Shooting animals or dozens of armed cowboys can still offer up new thrills. There is so much to this game as a sandbox to muck about it in. That’s really what I’m looking for in a video game. A chest of toys to play around with, rather than a storyline that sometimes requires a playable shooting section. RDR2 has plenty of those but not enough to make you forget the life on the range in between missions.