Streets of Rage 4 (2020)

5/5

Streets of Rage 4 is an amazing game. I haven’t played all belt-scrollers in existence, but I can make a calculated guess and say this is the best belt-scroller ever made. There are too many games in this genre anyway, and they all pretty much play exactly the same. I am sure there was an evolution in the genre, as regards mechanics, but after three decades there’s certainly not much room to further complexify the mechanics of such a simple genre. All that was left to do was to make the best game in the genre by adding kickass graphics and music to it, and cool enemies to fight against. And that’s exactly what SoR4 did.

Now, in SoR3 you could sprint and in SoR4 you can’t. That’s pretty much the only thing missing from the game, mechanically speaking. But I wonder how much sprinting would change the pace of the game. I am not sure if the ability to sprint would ruin the game because a character like Shiva can dash forward and this makes him super fun to play with (he’s my main).

I had so much fun with this game that I ended up getting its toughest achievements, like clearing the arcade mode on Hard difficulty (and I think I also did it on Hardest), reaching level 30 in survival mode, and getting an S-rank on all missions on Hard mode. These last two achievements were the toughest. This is because survival mode quickly becomes hectic, and the opponents get stronger with each level. By the time you get to level 30 it’s very tough to survive. As for the S-ranks, mission 4 was by far the toughest mission to clear with an S-rank because the required points to do so forced the player to make a perfect run on the mission, and to take practically no damage. This is because the points you get in a mission are proportional to the amount of hits you can chain on your opponents without getting hit yourself. The hit counter resets when you get hit, which means you lose all the points you could get otherwise.

But yeah, this game is stylish. The characters, the environments, and the enemies are beautiful. Some enemies are more annoying than others, but it’s okay. The music is sometimes good, sometimes very good. Streets of Rage 4 is a fun little game that is quite possibly the pinnacle of the genre. I just don’t see any other belt-scroller as beautiful as this one.

Back to the Age of Empires

I’m back to playing Age of Empires II, after over two years of not playing it. I stopped playing it back then because I got bored of playing it in the multiplayer mode. The game lost its magic after I spent hundreds of hours playing it in multiplayer mode and as my friends’ skill levels kept skyrocketing to what I consider absurd levels, playing it just became boring and even annoying. Having to click the mouse faster than your friends was what it all boiled down to, in the end. This is because there are practically only a handful of different, winning routines or strategies to choose from at the start of the game and then the heart of the game is just executing them as fast as you possibly can. If the skill disparity between players is too high, you get to ridiculous situations like your friends building an entire castle right outside your village’s gates while you still barely have an army. It destroys the illusion and the fun when the skill disparity is so high. And I never really bothered to study the professional players to learn new tactics and routines. I did naturally learn stuff because how could I not learn anything when my friends were getting so hardcore at the game? Meanwhile, a friend of mine who sucked at the game already has over 2 thousand hours of play time and he can now obliterate me before I’ve even reached Castle Age. All the more power to you, dude! But if you’re asking me to spend 2 thousand hours to get a little bit better at clicking buttons a little bit faster, you are out of your mind. Let me instead enjoy the game at my own pace and take the displayed beauty in.

Which is why I am playing singleplayer mode now. I want to enjoy the beauty of the game by playing its campaigns. Immerse myself in the history of empires. And actually face a challenge that I can deal with. This way I will still be able to “smell the flowers”, as icycalm wrote when he analyzed James Jacobs’ similar view.

Why I Keep Writing

Why do I still bother writing? I could have stopped doing it after I completed the first volume of this book, since there was already enough content there, in my view, to leave a mark and basically tell the world, “This is who I am”.

I still do it because it’s still fun for me. That’s pretty much the only reason. If the day comes when I feel like writing my thoughts and memories is annoying, I will stop writing. But as things are right now, writing is extremely fun for me and that’s why I do it. If you liked writing, and had stuff to write about, you’d probably also do it. After all, having fun is… fun.

But after a certain point, isn’t it a waste of time to keep writing when you could be expending your energy on learning a new skill, like for example music production, or starting a business or making money or doing sports? This all depends on your priorities and, of course, your desires (since without desire you won’t consistently pursue an activity). Besides, the learning curve to learning a new skill like music production is steep and it would take me thousands of hours to reach a level of skill I’d be proud of. After all, an artist like Száhala has been producing music ever since he was 12 years old (and that’s coincidentally pretty much the same age at which I started writing in English on the internet). Since I have spent practically zero hours learning music production, doing it would probably not be very fun to me. It’d take me at least a hundred hours of study to get to a level where I’d be able to actually compose and produce anything to my taste. I might do that one day, but right now this is not my priority. So the fact that I am comfortable with my writing skills also contributes to me still writing, no doubt. If I sucked at writing, I wouldn’t be writing. As for making more money, I am indeed working on that in addition to writing. I invest in opportunities whenever I can and indeed I am already making over 4k USD per month off of one of these investments, which is more than enough to live a comfortable life in my country. Of course, I want to make more money and eventually buy a house, but these things take time, and while I wait I can have fun. As for sports, I am doing a bit of bodyweight strength training every day. I am already able to do 30 consecutive pullups, for example. I could go back to boxing, since that’s pretty much the only sport I am relatively skillful at (as opposed to, say, surfing, which I suck at and moreover is a logistical nightmare for me because I don’t have a car). I simply don’t do it because I no longer feel a strong desire to do it. I am content with just doing a basic, quick bodyweight routine. Indeed, I feel the only thing missing in my life is a girlfriend, and lately I have been thinking more seriously about this and have started taking a little bit of action towards getting one (just thinking about it more obsessively is a small step that is bound to turn into massive action: I know myself and that’s how I am).

So it’s not like writing is taking over my life. I am currently able to balance all my desires in a healthy way. I will therefore continue to write as long as it is fun for me and I have anything to write about. So enjoy reading me.

The Limits of My Abilities

I’ve been thinking about testing the limits of my abilities. The one thing I believe I’m lacking is an advanced degree. I do believe this blog and my writing prove that, at the very least, I am above average, as far as intelligence goes. I also believe that if I put my mind to it, I am capable of understanding any problem. My writing style, on the other hand, might make it seem that my thoughts are simple and superficial, no matter how much time I spent to think and study to arrive at them. And I guess that when compared with the thoughts of proper geniuses, they are. But when compared with average people, they are not. I am aware my vocabulary is not rich, for example, and this might give the reader the illusion that I’m a mediocre writer. I am more concerned with ideas, though, and the style with which I express myself is a second thought to me.

But anyway, completing a tough engineering degree would clear any doubt that I can think about and understand abstract problems, to anyone who doubts me. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone after having written already nearly 400 pages worth of content in this blog, but I have free time and going back to university could be one of the things I decide to do. The most annoying thing about university when I was a student was finding solutions to the various problems the teachers gave us. Whether I tried to solve old tests and exams, or whether I was just trying to solve homework, it was the rule to have to do a lot of digging to find the answers. Textbooks like Lay’s Linear Algebra and Its Applications were in my view an exception. You could really learn any field if all textbooks were written like that. It explained the theory in a clear language, gave practical problems for the reader to solve, and also the solutions to these problems. But then you had 400-page calculus textbooks that were unnecessarily deep, and practically gave you no problems to solve, let alone their solutions. You had to dig to get the answers for the problems the teachers gave you, and if you missed class, as I almost always did, you’d be pretty much screwed. I have no idea how I eventually passed my calculus course under these conditions. I think the internet and Youtube helped.

Which leads me to my next point. In an age where powerful chatbots like Chat-GPT exist, the idea of getting through an advanced degree does not seem so annoying anymore. Apparently, it is possible to just take a picture of a given math problem, upload it to the chatbot, and the model will then give you a detailed, step-by-step idiots guide on how to solve it. If I had tools like these back when I was in university, I’d probably have aced all my courses. Because again and again, my problem was that I had to open up 400-page, unnecessarily deep textbooks to find the solutions to a problem, and I couldn’t bother doing that because it was just too boring and even annoying for me.

So I don’t know. Next year I might enroll in university again, or maybe I won’t. It is a complicated decision to make because it would be a very time-consuming activity. Even with Chat-GPT, getting through an engineering degree would require pretty much my total focus, and I don’t know if I am willing to take 3 to 5 years of my life to do that. Because the only reason to go back to university would simply be to test the limits of my abilities.

On Using AI in the Arts

Aleksi Sahala: “A few words about generative AI (Warning-O-Wall-O-Text). Lately I have been playing with text-to-image and image-to-video models and created a few more or less goofy background videos for my music, mostly because it’s fun, but as a positive side note, it seems to positively affect people’s attention when it comes to watching music reels. Static images are way more often skipped in a few seconds in comparison to videos.

Using AI has invoked mixed reactions (although generally positive). People from demoscene or with graphics design/3D-animation background have clearly a negative sentiment. The reasons for this seem to be mostly (1) the fluctuating quality in comparison to the state-of-the-art productions and (2) that creating such things is too easy and does not require a 2000+ hour time investment, nor the effort to create the actual content. The latter is in my opinion just as ridiculous argument, as would be telling someone that they should learn how to play French horn instead of using a synthesizer or a plugin for it in music production.

I personally feel that the excessively negative attitudes come from the fear of becoming obsolete and being concerned that the stupid masses won’t give the deserved respect to the people who do it “the proper way”. Before, I have raised similar concerns and whined about AI-generated music, and I’ve been pissed off when someone (who apparently had no clue about how tracker music is made) was not impressed at all about my 4-channel song written in a 1990s software. He told me that it sounded muddy and amateurish in comparison to other chip tunes (that were obviously written in modern DAWs without any technical limitations). The lesson learned here was that many people only care about the end product and couldn’t care less how much skill, hacking and creativity you put into making it.

In a few years AI will rival humans in creativity (yes, creativity) and production. It will generate videos that are almost on par with the quality that the top digital artists can create, and the same will eventually apply to music. It will become more and more difficult to recognize what is generated and what is not, and people will be able to simply hide the fact that their creations were AI-generated. This will ruin digital arts competitions, and it is obvious that it will hurt several people whose income depends on music or graphics, as everyone with access to the right tools can create what they want without the necessary skill set or even imagination, instead of having to order them from someone with the skills to create it from scratch.

All digital arts will be heavily affected by AI, and it is everyone’s freedom to either whine about it, or cope with it.

After being a whiner about Suno generated music for some years, I have changed my opinion recently. I personally think that these tools are great. They open creative avenues to people who simply do not have the time or interest in putting thousands of hours to learn these arts “the proper way”, but who want to create things. I think that the fear of “uncreative” people taking over the digital arts is not a relevant concern, since why would someone with no interest in arts create art even if it was easy? (After all, using these models costs real money or requires a fairly high technical knowledge to set up locally). The fact is that many things have been fairly easy to do since modern computers became available. Creating a techno track from loops has been literally behind a two-hour learning curve for two decades, and anyone can throw raw eggs on a canvas and call it modern art.

I now see AI as a tool that will primarily cut corners from people who love arts but do not like certain parts of the process or want to diversify their creations. If someone’s main concern about generative AI is that people will be doing stuff “too easily”, then it is a you problem. You can do it easy too if you want to. If it’s losing your job or the environmental impact of all these models generating useless content around the clock, I can understand you.

I can put 20 hours of my free time into just writing melodies that I never use or spend a night writing a song for Harpsichord that will get 500 listens in 10 years. I do it because it’s fun, and this is why most people do art. If you have fun doing it the traditional way or with generative tools, it really doesn’t matter. Personally, I would never replace the music composition and writing with an AI, but if someone wants to do it because they suck at writing melodies, I can totally understand. On the contrary, I would gladly outsource the engineering, mixing and mastering of songs to an AI model if it actually did a good job, since I never really liked any of those aspects of music production.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to image and video generators to improve and to give users more control over the creative process. I believe that once these tools become more flexible, there will be a learning curve to use them efficiently, and people will begin to notice the “human skill gap” in different generated productions, just as you can notice a bad writer, cinematographer or director in movies. These days the process is fairly tedious because the models are extremely inconsistent and your credits will be consumed, were the result as desired or not. First you have to deal with the image generation, often Photoshop them, use another AI tools to change the aspect ratio (which is again a random process, if you do expansive rather than reductive resolution changes), and then create the video itself from 5-10 second clips and sew them together.”

Uchiha Itachi

I read the Naruto manga but neglected the anime because I thought the anime was too slow-paced and annoying (every character has a million flashbacks and likes talking forever), though it does have its moments. And besides, I’m not a huge anime fan, anyway. But one character that I loved in the story was Uchiha Itachi. He sacrificed himself to protect his country, going as far as killing his entire clan to achieve this. His intentions were good, but his brainwashing was too strong and that’s why he decided to massacre his own clan. His tragic life could have been avoided if he had tried to lead his clan in the direction he wanted, which was the peaceful direction, which would have resulted in all the different clans of the country co-existing peacefully, and that’s what Naruto eventually ends up achieving, even across countries. Instead of massacring his own, and nearly wiping them all out from existence, Itachi should have tried to lead them with a bit of talk no jutsu. But because of his brainwashing and his silence he ended up despised as a traitor and criminal until the end of his life, rightly so.