Diecast #365: Book of PyCharm

By Shamus Posted Monday Dec 6, 2021

Filed under: Diecast 100 comments

I had a topic I meant to add to the show notes, but forgot. This week in my Paypal account I got a $500 invoice from GitHub. I spent a good while scratching my head and wondering what on earth would cause GitHub to think I owed them five Benjamins. Then I looked again and realized the name wasn’t actually Github. It just parsed that way, the way you might think that I’m talking about my podcast when I say “Diceast” or that “Batamn” is a famous superhero.

So… that’s a new scheme. I was really surprised to find that PayPal didn’t have a mechanism to say “I do not recognize this invoice as valid”. It did let me refuse to pay it, of course, but it didn’t give me a way to express concern or suspicion. A single report like this wouldn’t be a big deal, but if a new user sends out 1,000 invoices and 600 are ignored, 4 are paid, and 396 are marked as suspicious, then that might be really useful for detecting and combatting fraud.

I wonder if this is a one-off, or if this is going to be part of the meta going forward.



Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast365


Link (YouTube)


00:00 Social Media and Automated Caring

As part of a discussion on Reddit, my wife listed a couple of songs that she was into at the moment:

  • Everything I Love Is Going to Die
  • If You Ever Leave I’m Coming With You

The moderator bot saw that text and thought they were indicators of depression or risk of self-harm, so it sent her messages on how to get help. I leave it to you to decide if this is innovative and helpful, or Orwellian and creepy.

What interests me is coming up with other song titles to freak out the automated systems. Something like:

I thought to use Let the Bodies Hit the Floor, but like a lot of songs the title isn’t what the lyrics would lead you to believe. The title of that track is just “bodies”, which is a far less interesting title. Imagine if “Sweet Child O Mine” was just “child” or “I Shot the Sheriff” was just “Sheriff”. If you’ve got a strong image in your lyrics, you should use it in your title. It’s not like radio stations charge you by the word.

Anyway, feel free to come up with pairs of well-known songs that would trigger moderation systems to attempt to help / ban you.

04:16 PyCharm

We talked about IDEs for almost half an hour, but it wasn’t until now that I’m writing up these show notes that I finally get it. The name PyCharm is a snake-charmer pun. It’s the tool you use to charm Python.

I’ve seen a ton of “haha our programming language is a snake” jokes on r/ProgrammerHumor. You’d think I would have caught on by now.

28:46 Book of Travels

This art is amazing.


Link (YouTube)

39:58 Mailbag: Sound Design & Soundtracks

Dear Diecast,

Listening to great video game scores got me wondering, What would Shamus and Paul think are the best games when it comes to their sound design, scores, and the alchemical result of their fusion with the visual design, gameplay, and/or game’s subject matter?

Halo’s weapons tend to be appropriately punchy and zappy for both verisimilitude of the world and player satisfaction, and the soundtrack usually hits the mark in enhancing the scale of the epic journey the Chief/player is on, as well as ramping up excitement at the right moments throughout the game. And the music for the first Mass Effect beautifully boosts the sense of awe and wonder at this fascinating new universe in front of the player’s eyes, in addition to heightening the more tense and action-oriented moments, without breaking from the general tone of the setting.

Any games that stand out as particularly impressive or bewilderingly incongruous to you in these areas?

All the best,
Andrew

48:25 Mailbag: Hardware Shortages

This one is a two-fer:

Dear Diecast,

With all of the hardware shortages and no end in sight, do you think the big studios will have to start reigning in their bloated game dev costs? How can they afford to keep making a HD++ games when nobody has the hardware to run them?

Sincerely,

Craptop user & late gen adopter

And the second one…

Dear Diecast,

between crypto mining and certain global crises the price of graphics hardware is currently rather high, and the same goes for RAM.

Between the high costs and the opaque naming schemes, I feel like building your own gaming hardware is not very accessible.

Do you think this will cause PC gaming to lose out in popularity compared to consoles?

Of course neither can hold a candle to mobile gaming, but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Vale,

-Tim

 


From The Archives:
 

100 thoughts on “Diecast #365: Book of PyCharm

  1. Chris says:

    I think there are more confusing titles than bodies. For example song 2 from blur, or clint eastwood by the gorillaz. And if you want to talk about underselling a song by its title I would nominate Nine inch nails’s closer.

    As for songs that trigger the bot:
    Feel the pain – dinosaur jr.
    take me with you (when you go) – jayhawks

    1. bobbert says:

      I remember that song, from my time as young man. Granted, many of the words are mumbled, but I still have no clue what it has to do with Mr. Eastwood.

      Can anyone help me out?

      1. Soylent Dave says:

        They called it ‘Clint Eastwood’ because they thought the track had an Ennio Morricone feel to it, á la ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly’

        1. bobbert says:

          Thanks!

  2. Dreadjaws says:

    As part of a discussion on Reddit, my wife listed a couple of songs that she was into at the moment:

    * Everything I Love Is Going to Die
    * If You Ever Leave I’m Coming With You
    The moderator bot saw that text and thought they were indicators of depression or risk of self-harm, so it sent her messages on how to get help. I leave it to you to decide if this is innovative and helpful or Orwellian and creepy.

    I will tell you by personal experience that it’s the latter. About 5 weeks ago I commented on a Facebook publication with a picture of the “first time” meme. A couple of days later Facebook decided to believe I was suicidal, gave me some link where I could ask for help and banned my account for 30 days. So, to wit:
    – Facebook was incapable of recognizing a popular meme that has likely been used thousands of times each day for months.
    – It somehow thought it meant I desired to kill myself (even though the meme portrays an execution and not a self-hanging).
    – It decided that the best course of action for what it saw as a suicidal person was to cut off their access to family and friends.
    – It, of course, didn’t offer any chance of appeal. Not even their pointless “We’ll take a second look at this”, which just means they’ll run the bot through it again and therefore reach the exact same result but at least gives the momentary hope that they might actually do something useful.

    I hate this. I hate it with a passion. I hate that social media can get away with this sort of thing because they’re basically a monopoly and since they don’t have any real competition they feel no need to improve the user experience in meaningful ways. I hate this whole “Meta” thing that Zuckerberg is trying to force, as it’s basically him wanting to get the role of main chef when he very clearly demonstrates on a daily basis that he can’t even fry an egg, and the only reason people keep coming to his restaurant is that there’s literally no other alternative if they want to eat.

    1. bobbert says:

      It is an important lesson to learn, growing up, that talking about feeling can get you in serious trouble.

      1. BlueHorus says:

        Hehehe. Oh, yes indeed.
        Something that amuses/annoys me is the frequency I get asked ‘how I’m doing’ by people who a) don’t care how I’m doing and b) I wouldn’t actually want to tell them how I’m doing regardless, because I don’t like and/or know them well enough.
        It leads to this weird situation where I’m not just ‘fine’ all the time, but the worse I’m doing, I somehow end up being even more ‘fine’ whenever I’m asked.

        Still, Dreadjaws wasn’t actually talking about feelings at all. It reminds me a lot of YouTube and their approach to Copyright Infringement:
        A) Someone tells a tech company they should do something about an issue that arises on their platform, so they…
        B) …cobble together a slap-dash system that technically addresses the problem while causing them, personally, the least amount of trouble possible.
        C) This system causes a whole set of new problems? Fuck you, users, we’re only doing this because someone else made us. Deal with it.

        1. Fizban says:

          Hehehe. Oh, yes indeed.
          Something that amuses/annoys me is the frequency I get asked ‘how I’m doing’ by people who a) don’t care how I’m doing and b) I wouldn’t actually want to tell them how I’m doing regardless, because I don’t like and/or know them well enough.
          It leads to this weird situation where I’m not just ‘fine’ all the time, but the worse I’m doing, I somehow end up being even more ‘fine’ whenever I’m asked.

          This x1000. I have had probably at least a couple dozen people over the years at work who I eventually had to tell straight up that they do not want to ask me “how I’m doing” because it will just piss me off. Including ostensible supervisors. Even worse when instead of a coworker it’s some rando customer.

          1. Alec w says:

            My policy has always been if I don’t care especially about the outcome of the social interaction, to just answer honestly.

            The shocked reaction is delightful. Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.

            And once in a blue moon you end up having an important and deep conversation with someone who was a relative stranger until that moment.

        2. Randint says:

          Unrelated to the actual main topic of this thread, but jumping off of your comment regarding YouTube: recently, the was an indictment for the case United States of America vs. Webster Batista Fernandez and Jose Teran. The charge is that the defendants created a company (MediaMuv) and falsely claimed ownership of 50K songs, earning $20M over four years.

          I’m not expecting this case to change anything directly (for one, it’s the scammers who are on trial, not YouTube), but I’m hoping that if cases like this gain enough visibility it might draw attention to the current state of copyright claims on YouTube and result in some pressure for them to put claims under more scrutiny.

          1. BlueHorus says:

            I’m curious how the scammers ended up with the money here…
            My understanding was that when a copyright claim was made, YouTube put any ad revenue the video generated into a holding account while the issue was resolved. I get that a lot of people would have not bothered to dispute and claims made against them, but surely in the case of an unresolved claim Youtube would do something ‘safe’ with the money (like return it to the advertisers?).

            Was the system so lazy that it would just eventually hand over disputed money to anyone who made a copyright claim, no question asked?

            1. Sleeping Dragon says:

              At work so I can’t access any actual YT pages which may hold an up to date answer but some quick googling about monetizing content with copyright claims gave me this:

              YouTube usually tells you what you need to do, if anything. Most claims means the monetization of the video now goes to the claimant automatically with ads. If you dispute the claim and can prove you properly licensed the property in dispute then the claim can be lifted.

              Assuming this is accurate and up to date while this seems absurd (as demonstrated above with little effort I could claim almost anything) I’ll point out that YT has always stated that for legal reasons they need to handle DMCA claims with the assumption that the claimant is in the right, whether this is actually true I know not and have no legal competence to even try to figure it out.

              1. Chad+Miller says:

                for legal reasons they need to handle DMCA claims with the assumption that the claimant is in the right

                My understanding DMCA safe harbor does require that hosts immediately take down content in response to a DMCA claim or risk liability in a copyright infringement suit. What muddies the waters is that Content ID (Youtube’s automatic detection) and ad revenue redirection are not part of the DMCA but a whole separate extralegal thing built up by Google to appease IP rightsholders.

    2. Lino says:

      gave me some link where I could ask for help and banned my account for 30 days

      *ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED* Gotta Catch ‘Em All!

      1. Chris says:

        Also wouldnt cutting off someone suicidal from their social group make them even more vulnerable?

        1. RFS-81 says:

          I suspect this is about optics, like people discussing suicide plans of Facebook before acting on them.

        2. BlueHorus says:

          Yep. But as RFS-81 (and others) said, you’re working on the assumption that Facebook actually gives a shit about people who are suicidal, which is almost certainly not their main concern.

    3. Paul Spooner says:

      There’s a way to break the monopoly, at least personally. It’s painful, as it involves getting your family and friends to communicate off Facebook. There are alternatives. Facebook doesn’t have a monopoly on interpersonal communication. They just want to make it feel that way so you never leave ever for any reason. So you never even consider the possibility.

      Yes, Facebook should cut out being creepy and pervy and predatory. But if you don’t want to be backed into a corner by creepy pervy predators, don’t hang out in a blind alley. If you’re going to insist on having only one method of communication, don’t make that one method something with a monetized bottleneck.

      I’m still “on” Facebook in the sense that I have an account with them. But I don’t rely on them as my sole and exclusive method of communication any more than I rely on Twitter or Google or Microsoft or my ISP or my cell provider or the government mail service. Spiderman isn’t afraid of blind alleys. You can become Spiderman. Start today.

      1. Dreadjaws says:

        To be honest, I only really use Facebook for memes. I certainly don’t use as my only communication avenue. I don’t even have my family and most of my friends added on it. But that wouldn’t excuse Facebook’s behavior if I indeed was using it for communication purposes.

        1. Paul Spooner says:

          Agreed. Facebook’s behavior is inexcusable regardless of your use case.

      2. Kyle Haight says:

        I left Facebook about seven years ago. I don’t miss it at all. If somebody cares about me they can spend the effort to communicate with me using my preferred means. If they aren’t willing to do that, how much do they really value our interactions?

      3. Philadelphus says:

        Wait, so by virtue of never having a Facebook account, have I been Spiderman all along?? O_O

    4. Jordan says:

      Deplatforming people is all about avoiding the perception of any kind of responsibility on Facebook’s part. Helping people comes secondary to avoiding contraversy over being a platform for self-harm that does nothing to remedy it.

      There’s also a very slightly less-cynical, but probably less likely angle too: Ideation turns self-harm into a social contagion among people that have had those thoughts in the past. Posts about suicide are more likely to cause other people to hurt themselves. You might be able to argue that cutting access at least constrains the risk of self-harm to a single person.

    5. Moridin says:

      They didn’t cut you off from friends and family, they cut you off from social media (as best as they could, anyway). Which is probably an improvement.

  3. Trystan de Lyonesse says:

    Speaking of songs that might trigger that bot, I think Blawan’s “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” should hit the mark, not sure what to pair it with though.

    1. Geebs says:

      QotSA, “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret” springs to mind.

      1. BlueHorus says:

        Cop Killer, by Ice-T?

  4. Lino says:

    58:55 – Shamus was thinking of the Jedi Knight series – Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. And that system died in favour of the Souls-like combat system that is both ill-suited for the type of combat in a Star Wars game, and non-sensical within the context of the setting.

    But hey, Dark Souls sold well, so the naturally it’s the only way you can make a 3rd person action game these days.

    1. Geebs says:

      Jedi Outcast was notable for absolutely nailing the tone of the original Star Wars movies to an extent that wasn’t achieved again for about 17 years.

      Going back and playing it today, though, it has the same problems as basically all of those Quake III engine-powered third person games did. Jedi Knight, Alice and (personal favourite) FAKK2 all had the same odd-feeling camera, stiff character movement, weightless combat and horrible platforming (Rune was just as bad, but on the Unreal engine).

      You might also have forgotten how ridiculously unforgiving Jedi Outcast was. Its tagline should really have been “prepare to quickload oh you forgot to quicksave well in that case prepare to go back to the beginning of the entire level”. Knock-off Souls mechanics make no sense outside of an actual Souls game, but they actually end up wasting much less of the player’s time.

      1. Lino says:

        Different strokes for different folks, I guess – I actually really liked the feel of the combat in Outcast in particular – it felt just like the later movies where lightsabers are treated as being almost weightless, with all the implications that would have on combat. As for the difficulty, yes especially those first couple of Nar Shaddaa levels were brutal. You could argue that that difficulty served to drive home the point that just because you have a lightsaber doesn’t mean you’re invincible. But yeah, thank God for quicksaving! Even though there’s not really a way to test it, I still think it’s a much better system than the checkpoint BS used in Souls games. At the very least, it feels like it’s much more respectful of my time.

        Overall, to me the biggest sin of Fallen Order, brought about the slaving adherence to the Souls formula, is making lightsabers feel toothless. Like, this is a lightsaber I’m slicing you with! It is not a soft, fuzzy glowstick of love! Your should be off by now!
        Say what you will about the old games, but lightsaber combat felt lethal (especially if you also had saber_realistic_combat on). And don’t even get me started on the nonsensically respawning stormtroopers…

        1. Redrock says:

          I mean… I love Jedi Academy and Outcast, and I even like the former a bit more than the latter because, hey, we’re here for the lightsaber action. That said, the reason it’s gone has little to do with Souls and everything to do with being console-friendly. Remember The Force Unleashed? It actually predated Demon’s Souls by a year, and it already turned the lightsabers into glorified glowing sticks. Because that’s how a console beat-em-up functions. The sheer lethality of the Jedi Outcast lightsaber is only possible because it’s built for PC with mouse controls in mind. And like Geebs said, it’s not exactly perfect. The fact that character positioning is tied to the mouse means you can spin faster than General Grievous’ arms. Coupled with certain abilities you the mouse spin turns you into a veritable blender of death. Fun, effective, but not exactly cinematic.

          And, to be honest, Fallen Order doesn’t really play as similarly to Dark Souls as people say. A lot of encounters include parrying blaster bolts for a very satisfying insta-kill, which isn’t something you’d find in Souls. And, frankly, when it comes to dealing with mooks, Cal looks pretty badass, even when the saber doesn’t. There’re a lot of killer moves in his arsenal. The way I see it, the lightsaber feeling weak is mostly due to the lack of appropriate visual feedback, i.e. that sweet, sweet dismemberment. Not so much soulsified as disneyfied.

          1. Geebs says:

            If we’re talking about lightsabers feeling weak, KOTOR was already way worse than either Fallen Order or Force Unleashed. The person who invented Cortosis Weave did a better job of making the Jedi look stupid and ineffective than the entire prequel trilogy.

            1. Redrock says:

              Eh, absolutely no weapon or fighting style looks good in a real-time-with-pause system. You can have an unarmed brawler punch a dragon in Pillars of Eternity, and you would still be thinking “yeah, that probably wouldn’t be very effective, but not as ineffective as they made it look”.

  5. tmtvl says:

    Ah, IDE’s. The first IDE I ever used was BlueJ, but that one is entirely focused on programming education.

    The IDE I used for making something that wasn’t just for education was Netbeans, which I still like. I have used Eclipse, IDEA, Qt Creator, KDevelop, and Geany; and found that none of them really stick out head and shoulders above the rest.

    Of course there will also be the Real Programmers who say that Real Programmers use a text editor and a terminal, so I’ve used notepad(/gedit/kwrite), atom, vim, and VSCodium; and found that the non-Electron ones were nicer to use due to being more responsive.

    I have finally settled on Emacs, which fits with my being a million years old antediluvian. I suppose it helps that the big E sits nicely on the dividing line between text editors, IDEs, Operating System, and Personal Information Manager.

    1. John says:

      I’m a big Geany fan. Geany isn’t an IDE though. It’s a text editor with some IDE-like features, like automatic syntax highlighting. It doesn’t have the sort of features that I’ve come to expect from a full-fledged IDE, like real-time error checking. On the one hand, that’s good. Geany is very, very fast. It’s easy to just open and edit a file. On the other hand, that’s bad, because some of those full-fledged IDE features are actually quite useful, even if they’re also sometimes quite annoying. That said, you can configure Geany to behave in certain IDE like ways. In the project I’m working on right now, for instance, I’ve remapped the compile and execute toolbar buttons so that they execute Gradle scripts instead of simply trying to compile or execute the current file.

      My experience with full-fledged IDEs is limited to Netbeans, IntelliJ IDEA, and Android Studio. Of the three, I preferred Netbeans. IDEA was okay, at least until I ran into arcane Gradle issues that made it impractical for the project I was working on. Android Studio was the stuff of nightmares, though that may be more to do with the Android app API being the stuff of nightmares than anything to do with the IDE itself. I’m a largely self-taught and strictly hobbyist programmer. All three IDEs were full of features that I don’t understand and in all likelihood probably don’t need. As Shamus said on the show, IDEs aren’t really for people like me. They’re for professional programmers working in teams on much larger projects.

      For someone like Paul, who just wants to edit a few Python files, even something like Geany might be more than he really needs. I’ve noticed that many Linux text editors are capable of syntax highlighting. For example, both xed, which is the default text editor for Linux Mint, and gedit, the Gnome text editor, will recognize Java files and highlight syntax appropriately without any action being necessary on the part of the user. I believe that Paul’s distro, PopOS, uses the Gnome desktop environment, so that chances are pretty good that he already has gedit.

      1. Paul Spooner says:

        CudaText is the pack-in code editor in PopOS, and it works just fine. There’s a module class/function layout tree and everything. Even the basic Text Editor has automatic Python syntax highlighting. I really do appreciate the run-time introspection, code style rectification, and Git integration that PyCharm offers, so I’ll probably continue using it.

        1. John says:

          Your basic text editor is, as I said, probably but not definitely gedit. Linux text editors like to be coy about their actual names. Whenever I switch to a new distro, I often have to look at the text editor’s Help/About menu item in order to figure out what the editor is actually called, and even that isn’t 100% reliable. I wouldn’t mind so much, except that I sometimes want to open a text file from the command line and I can’t do that if I don’t know the editor’s program name.

          IDE features are nifty. Android Studio’s integrated debugger support is both unintuitive and thoroughly intimidating, but I’m glad it exists because the nature of Android is such that it is effectively impossible to debug Android apps without the debugger.

      2. tmtvl says:

        Yeah, I’m a KDE guy, so I haven’t touched gedit since 2013, but Kate (the notepad plus plus equivalent) and KWrite (the notepad equivalent) have syntax highlighting for a bunch of languages.

        I don’t know if other editors have something like Jedi (Python autocompletion) from Emacs, but I’m not a Python guy so I don’t know much about the ecosystem.

    2. Kyle Haight says:

      I too am an Emacs user. There don’t seem to be many of us left, sadly. I like using tools that are smarter than me.

      1. tmtvl says:

        There may not be many of us, but as long as we have wonderful people like Prot and Sacha Chua, I think we’ll be alright.

  6. Hal says:

    The “songs that trigger a bot” game vaguely reminds me of a habit people had in WoW. They’d string together spells/abilities/achievements/etc. in global chat to make amusing (i.e. dirty) phrases or sentences. The achievement “For the Children” came up a lot.

    1. Fizban says:

      To this day, I still have no idea why Dark Souls messages so often include “horse.” Most of them are elementary to parse, but the horse, I don’t get. (My best guess is maybe it’s a kanji thing?)

      1. Fred Starks says:

        I think it was supposed to be read as “whores”, but I don’t really know for sure.

        Be wary of beanpole
        Try using both hands
        amazing chest ahead

        The Dark Souls message system was pretty much used for nothing more than recreating the scrawls on the walls of public restrooms, but I can’t help but say there was something oddly charming about all this nonsense.

        DS2 had the ever legendary “don’t give up, skeleton!” of course. Which is more wholesome(?) than the messages usually got.

        1. Hal says:

          Perhaps there’s a filter being avoided? Like, “whores” might get rejected/deleted, but “horse” is fine.

          1. tmtvl says:

            Thing is, Demon/Dark Souls messages are composed of fragments predefined by the developers. You can’t type them in, you have to select elements from the lists.

            As an example, you are it Anal Rodeo, and have just beaten Pikachu and Snorlax. After grabbing the Lordvessel you may want to put a message on the ground, so you use the soapstone.
            From the list you pick “… ahead”, which opens a list of objects/landmarks, and you can select (for example) “amazing chest”.
            Then it shows you a preview of your text, “amazing chest ahead”. Afterwards people who find your message can give it an upvote if they find it useful.

            I seem to recall that getting a lot of upvotes gives you humanities in Dark Souls 1, but I don’t remember off the top of my head if that’s correct or what you get in the other games.

    2. Fred Starks says:

      Ah, I remember these. Making me nostalgic now,

      These were really the only reasons to even keep those chat channels open on my server, even if they fell into dark humor too often.

  7. RamblePak64 says:

    It’s a music-filled comment section this week!

    So firstly, Pumped Up Kicks is definitely along the lines of “Bodies” where all the lyrics are likely to raise flags but the title itself won’t. I’d also perceive that as not just Orwellian, but Helicopter… Concerning? Complete strangers relying on an algorithm so that a machine sends you a message pretending to care. It’s the sort of thing that my cynical, pessimistic brain perceives as a corporation or individuals doing so they feel better about themselves rather than actually doing some good.

    However, it’s also nothing new. Over five years ago I was at the hospital for something completely unrelated, and I inquired about with whom I could consult to discuss finding a therapist and whether my health insurance covers it. I had never looked for a therapist before and didn’t exactly know where to begin since just Googling it can lead to all kinds of options without proper curation. Not even an hour later I had someone come in and start asking me questions about whether I was suicidal or thinking of taking my own life or the lives of others. And now, I’m still dealing with such questions even for the mildest check up at the doctor’s office, despite the fact that I am regularly seeing a therapist (and within their own medical network!)

    I’m actually curious how many people that are suicidal or contemplating self-harm would just be willing to ask a complete stranger representing an institution that, yes, yes they do have these thoughts, and please send help, or if they’d put on a mask and pretend that everything is fine.

    As for game soundtracks, I’ve wondered if your thoughts and opinions on a good game soundtrack will vary based on what you grew up with, or just on personal preferences. It’s kind of like film soundtracks, right? The recent Dune film’s soundtrack is honestly pretty generic, including “woman wordlessly singing in that manner that makes Americans think of the desert” tropes. My brother said “What if Trent Reznor scored the soundtrack and wrote a song like Pilgrimage as the Sardakaur theme or for Giedi Prime?” and just… it fits. And then I began imagining a soundtrack for Dune by Trent Reznor and it just… it would have [i]really[/i] made the film even better. And it’s already a good film!

    But that’s just part of the discussion of composition for films and a lack of recognizable themes, like what Every Frame a Painting observed. Can you really compare any lone Marvel film soundtrack, even the Avengers theme, to the works of not just someone well known like John Williams, but James Horner? I know it’s a children’s film that’s been sequelized into garbage, but the opening theme to The Land Before Time is practically a suite of emotions and motifs that really helps draw the emotion out of the imagery on screen. This is the same guy that composed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which is just… so good! And Jerry Goldsmith was just as good for the original film when he composed the main theme of the Klingons, which is the song I think of when it comes to that warrior race. Then there are guys like Basil Poledouris, who seem to somehow be forgotten to time despite excellent soundtracks for Conan the Barbarian and Robocop.

    You listen to any of the above tracks after seeing the film, and it conjures an image of that film specifically into mind. Sure, if you never saw the film then you may get other sorts of images or inspiration, but honestly, you listen to Paul’s Dream from Dune and… it lacks such an identity… then again, that’s kind of Hans Zimmer, isn’t it? You get him for quiet ambiance before suddenly getting deafeningly loud without any sense of identifiable melody to identify it. It’s not bad, it’s certainly atmospheric, but that’s all it is.

    And I feel like that’s most game soundtracks these days. It seems like one or two people said “a soundtrack should be so good you don’t notice it’s there” and it became a cross industry standard, because, yeah, by time I’ve finished most games, I can’t remember a single note of the soundtrack until I go back. Ironically, very little of it has ever filled me with the sort of epic, cinematic Hollywood bombast as Star Fox for the SNES (whose own N64 sequel is… well, it’s certainly trying, but oddly enough maybe the synths trying to not sound like synths just wrecks the mood? I just know this isn’t doing anything for me, and the main theme of team Star Fox just feels like a limp-wristed wet noodle compared to the main theme/closing credits to the original, or the Danger Zone-esque-but-better energy of the opening stage of Corneria).

    Anyway, to shorten this up, my pick for one of the best new game soundtracks would go to Astral Chain. It can be ambient while maintaining an identity, fusing electronic and symphonic together and providing a beat for combat while relaxing on it for times of exploration and observation. It can also be a chill bop when you’re just hanging back at Future Sci-Fi Headquarters Land. But it’s always my favorite when it gets hard rock epic.

    1. Lino says:

      For what it’s worth, I really liked Dune’s soundtrack – especially the Sardaukar chant and the Atreides theme (and the music they used for Paul’s desert visions). I guess this speaks to how extremely subjective music is…

  8. Rho says:

    Favorite soundtrack of all time? Well, classic Total War has some great choices there. However, Baldur’s Gate is my winner here. The track sets ambience and a variety of moods but still works as music and has that special kind of bombast to bring on a smile, even without the nostalgia factor.

    1. Zekiel says:

      I do love that music when you’re out in the idyllic wilderness outside Candlekeep.

      (Just before a wolf eats you.)

  9. Jamey says:

    The Diecast #365! Now, I can listed to one every day for a year. This was technically already possible (see below).

    In MP3 form, my “The Diecast” folder is 22.3 GB in size. It contains 370 files:
    diecast_bioshock.mp3
    diecast_gdc2014.mp3
    diecast[1-151,153-365].mp3
    diecast152part[1-2].mp3
    diecast175-Until Dawn EP10.mp3
    diecast342.5.mp3

    It all started Feb 14, 2013, so we’re coming up on 9 years.

    Why do I still have them saved? That’s a really good question. Because I have the space? IDK.

    Here’s to another 9 years of The Diecast!

  10. Jamey says:

    “I leave it to you to decide if this is innovative and helpful or Orwellian and creepy.”

    – Why not both?

    Also, my answer assumes an intended comma between helpful and or, because otherwise it’s a strange sentence.

    Favorite game soundtrack: Easy, Mechwarrior 2 (1995).

    1. ContribuTor says:

      Honestly, both is almost certainly always right.

      Targeted ads started on the theory “hey, the people who provide all this content to you need to get lid somehow. Wouldn’t you rather see one ad than 20? Content providers can cover their end in fewer ads if they could charge more for them, and advertisers would pay way more to advertise to a targeted audience than scream into the void. Everyone wins!

      Until the folks with the huge database of targeting data realized they could charge exorbitant fees for using their datasets. And there was never really a reason to show you fewer ads anyways. More profit to us!

      1. Paul Spooner says:

        Typo in your comment: “lid” should be “paid”
        On the whole, I prefer targeted advertising over demographic marketing, so it’s a step up. And I don’t begrudge the advertisers for making more money. It’s an efficiency improvement, so that’s a win too.

        I do wish that advertisers wouldn’t keep trying to push their products with pitches that I have religious objections to. I’d probably purchase more of their stuff if they just stuck to the features and let me decide on the motivation.

        1. Gareth+Wilson says:

          The most disturbing example of targeted advertising I’ve heard about was the woman who kept getting ads for baby clothes, cribs, and so on. If your algorithm knows I was pregnant with me saying so, she asked, why doesn’t it know I had a stillbirth?

          1. Paul Spooner says:

            And yet, it would be even worse if it knew you were going to have a stillbirth before you did.

  11. Bubble181 says:

    Hey Shamus, please report such spoofing/faking of invoices through [email protected] and/or the resolution center (option “potential fraud”).

    I agree there should probably be a “flag” option next to “pay” and “dispute”, but hey…

  12. Christopher says:

    There are too many video game bangers to mention, so I’ll just shout out a lesser used example with Ninja Warriors Once Again, which has a solid OST and a really hype final boss track. It’s a remake of an SNES game, Ninja Warriors Again but wishing no offense to the original, I think the remake has a better take on those tracks.

    The SNES game itself is a sort of remake of the Arcade game The Ninja Warriors. The OST in that game is much less impressive, but it does have Daddy Mulk, which I’ll link the live version of. It’s got a shamisen solo. It’s pretty sick.

  13. John says:

    I don’t usually notice the sound design in games one way or the other, but there are still a few games whose sound design stands out to me.

    The first is Tie Fighter, the DOS version from 1994 and not the Windows remake from 1998. The DOS score is dynamic. It uses bits of the Star Wars soundtrack as cues that new ships have arrived–and it’s a good thing too, because otherwise the only indication the player may get is a bit of text at the bottom of the screen and that can be easy to miss if there’s a lot going on in the mission at the time. The Windows score just cycles through a bunch of CD audio tracks. I’ve told this story before, possibly in comments, possibly in the late, lamented Twentysided forums, but once, when I was out shopping, I found myself growing unaccountably tense. It took me a few minutes to realize that it was because the store was playing the Star Wars soundtrack and my subconscious mind was on the lookout for Y-Wings making torpedo runs on my mothership.

    The second is Shadow of Mordor, which is notable for the things you hear orcs say as you skulk around Mordor. A lot of the dialogue is just orcs being orcs, but some of it is clearly intended as gameplay tips for the player. “Orc Type B has spears!” says one orc to the other. “He can throw spears at people from a distance! That’s why I like Orc Type B so much. But he has to watch out if Some Guy tries to do Gameplay Thing!” I found this kind of dialogue awkward and immersion breaking. That’s partly because it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that orcs would just casually say to one another as they were going about their business. The dialogue bits where they’re just complaining or boasting seem much more natural to me. But it’s mostly because it’s impossible to tell either which orc is saying it or to whom. As far as I can tell, non-mission dialogue is just something that happens in the vicinity of orcs without any specific orc or orcs being responsible for it.

  14. ContribuTor says:

    It still amazes me, given the massive training datasets on actual customer behavior, and billions of dollars spent on innovation, how utterly simplistic AI bots are. Even ones where the creator has strong financial incentive to get this right.

    I bought a circular saw on Amazon. Amazon’s “recommendations” bot sees this and thinks “he must be into circular saws! Let’s show him other recommended circular saws he can buy forever.” That’s not just annoying. That’s objectively dumb.

    Why they should be doing is thinking “this guys does woodworking, and probably DIY home repair. So offer sanders. Or nail guns. Or, y’know, circular saw BLADES. Obvious stuff that go with that interest.

    Or, if you want to go with actual logic, maybe show me other stuff that’s adjacent to DIY as an interest. Show me lighting fixtures and appliances. Maybe gardening supplies.

    Nope. Just circular saws. It’s baffling.

    1. Jamey says:

      Similarly, there are many, many products that, I would assume, would only be bought once in a great while. Like, I bought a fancy computer chair. Then I bought a table. How many computer chairs and tables do they think I need?

    2. GoStu says:

      I wonder; does the advertising algorithm incorporate the fact that you purchased the saw?

      I imagine a lot of window-shopping happens online; for every purchase, there’s probably many times that many people that just click on a few items. So the advertising software is just tuned to bring you more of the same, because it assumes you probably didn’t buy that saw yet. That assumption may be true the majority of the time and they’re tuning ads to secure

      This would also work well with consumables. If you bought that thing, bring that thing up again.

      1. ContribuTor says:

        Sure. But that’s my point.

        I probably did click on several saws before choosing one. So for the one I bought, there are half a dozen I clicked on and didn’t buy. So sure, there was “interest expressed” in this I didn’t purchase.

        But saws are different from consumables. And if you’re Amazon, you have certainly got the data to tell which kinds of items people purchase repeatedly and which they don’t.

        Like I said originally, given the awesome breadth of their data and billions of dollars spent, I’m shocked they’re so bad at the PREDCICTIVE element here. Given what I’ve shopped/bought, what am I likely considering buying right now?

        1. Sleeping Dragon says:

          I was buying a new mattress last month and for a little while the ads did assume I was now a mattress collector and afficionado. I assume this was because they can track my searches but whether or not I made purchase is probably not accessible to the ad providers. About a week or so ago they did decide to start selling me on gravity blankets I don’t know whether the algorithm “guessed” that me no longer looking for mattresses means I bought one or if it’s a complete shot in the dark.

    3. RFS-81 says:

      Some years ago, my dad bought me “The Annotated Turing” for my birthday, and he was haunted for a long time with recommendations for computer science and mathematical logic textbooks. Same thing happened when I bought mangas for my brother. It’s not only dumb in that it goes “You bought $THING so you want more $THING” for literally everything, it also takes really long to take a hint that you, in fact, do not. I’m sure there’s a way to tell it, but I don’t feel like doing Amazon’s job, and it doesn’t really bother me.

      It’s even more ridiculous when it tries to be smart. I’ve recently bought something from Amazon for the first time since Shamus’s latest book came out. That got me two e-mails asking if I want to make an Amazon Business account because it apparently looks like I’m making purchases for a business.

      The purchase in question:
      * Artist soap for acrylic paints (I got into miniature painting!)
      * Two tubes of laundry detergent for hand washes
      * An antibacterial spray for shoes and clothes.
      * Some comic books (These were the reason why I ordered on Amazon in the first place, I couldn’t find them elsewhere)

      Please tell me what business you think I’m running Amazon!

        1. RFS-81 says:

          That’s a good one!

          I’ve found that sometimes, when you look at more obscure things, the random interests of the people who buy it don’t properly average out. But I never would have expected that to happen with GPUs!

    4. The+Puzzler says:

      Maybe there are people who spend so much money on bulk-buying circular saws for industrial purposes that it makes up for the 99% false positive rate..

  15. ContribuTor says:

    Also, AI moderation bots have become largely self-defeating, for the same reason “gamification” was an actual thing before the buzzword marketing folks got hold of it.

    Say I’m a troll that wants to post something abusive online. A mod bot reads it, recognizes the abuse, and blocks me.

    Normal person reaction: ok, I guess I crossed a line there! Maybe I’ll calm down and say something else, or nothing at all.

    Abusive troll reaction: oh, your cute little bot thinks it can stop me? I will pour hours of time into figuring out what you will and will not allow, until I can say something just as abusive that gets around your filter. No one can stop me!!!

    For some reason, AI moderator bots seem aimed to stopping person 2, but seem to expect a person 1 reaction. Instead, we get a “weapons vs armor” arms race to build ever more sophisticated moderators to stop ever more virulent trolls.

    And as part of that arms race, there’s inevitable collateral damage when the bots get unbalanced in favor of “stop trolls” over “allow normal conversation”.

  16. Daimbert says:

    For musical scores, Persona 4 is really good. I listen to both it and the Persona 3 soundtrack — along with a number of others that I have — and while the Persona 3 soundtrack is, in my opinion, better musically when I listen to the Persona 4 soundtrack it always reminds me of the specific dungeons and so the specific character that the dungeon is built around, which means that while they aren’t as great of music they are really personalized, and so support the game that way.

    Also, after one of the big twists the music gets really subdued and fits the feelings the MC and the player should be having at that point as they return home.

    1. Syal says:

      And of course Squaresoft RPGs from, like, FF3 onward. The Another World theme from Chrono Cross still sticks.

      (Was funny to hear Shamus say Silent Hill 2, because that was my first thought for “bewilderingly incongruous“.)

      ((Spoilers for Silent Hill 2 by the way.))

  17. Ed says:

    Total Annihilation (1997 PC) had an outstanding soundtrack.

  18. Tuck says:

    I like the music in Witcher 3, particularly in Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine (although the latter is a bit repetitive). Thronebreaker also has great music. But in a lot of games I find myself turning the music off completely…

  19. Steve C says:

    The first game that ever nailed sound design is Star Control 2. The music representing each alien and their ship sound effects were perfect. It was necessary for characterization. The music WAS their personality. And IMO 29yrs later, it is still the best ever made. The perfect “alchemical result of their fusion with the visual design, gameplay, and/or game’s subject matter.” Can’t beat perfection.

    1. Philadelphus says:

      [sound of terrifying homing serrated disk being launched] :D

      That, and the original voice acting (does that fall under sound design?). Every single species has so much of their personality come through in the voice work. The scene of the Yehat discovering that the Shofixti aren’t extinct after all and being driven by shame to start a revolution to overthrow their quisling queen is indelibly etched into my brain.

      1. Steve C says:

        And the voice actors were just the developer’s D&D gamer friends!

        1. Philadelphus says:

          Ah, so that’s where they got the practice playing characters! It all makes sense!

  20. Dragmire says:

    Hmmm, can’t really nail down a singular game with specific the best sound and music. Maybe by console:
    Nes: Either Zelda 2, Batman, or Guardian Legend. The Megamans are a runner up here. The early Castlevanias had good music but I never played them.
    Gameboy: Kirby, or Link’s Awakening.
    Game Gear and Genesis: Sonic. Didn’t have many games for these systems.
    SNES: Reeeally tough call though probably Chrono Trigger overall. Megaman X, FF2(4), FF3(6), Mario RPG, Star Fox, Zelda:ALttP, Mario World, Super Metroid and many more have excellent soundtracks but may have a drawback or two in limited song selection/repetition or SFX that grate after a while. They’re all close though, on a different day I might have a different top pick.
    N64: Zelda OoT. Didn’t play much from this system.
    PSX: Probably FF9 or FF Tactics though I have a soft spot for Legend of Dragoon.
    PS2: Soul Nomad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB6KVll3Hcw
    Extremely unique sound and a standout amongst this list. Nostalgic as hell to me especially as I’m replaying it now.
    Wii: Mario Galaxy
    PSP: LocoRoco or Patapon. Honestly, having trouble remembering notable sound/music
    NDS/3DS/PS3/PS4: I’m staring at my collection and trying to remember the games exclusively by their sound and music but nothing notable is coming to mind.
    Switch: Octopath Traveller
    PC: Starcraft/Broodwar. Runner up Worms Armageddon and Plants vs Zombies

    List is limited to what I can remember without looking it up. Figured a best of anything should be memorable.
    Also, rhythm games are excluded. Guitar Hero/Rock Band/FF Theatrhythm etc.. seems like cheating.

    1. RFS-81 says:

      The Super Metroid soundrack really sticks with me. Doesn’t matter how long ago I last played it, it just pops into my head out of nowhere. I’ve just searched up the Lower Brinstar theme on YouTube. Took me a bit because I thought it belonged to Maridia.

      Also, I had a bit of a Berenstain Bears moment. I’m from an alternate timeline where Marida is called Meridia.

    2. Olivier FAURE says:

      You don’t remember LocoRoco music? I don’t see how the laws of physics even allow that.

      1. Dragmire says:

        Nah, I mean other than LocoRoco and Patapon, I don’t remember much other music from my other PSP games.

        Though, looking through my collection again, I remember Wild Arms XF having good music so that would be the runner up there.

  21. tmtvl says:

    So many videogames, so much great music.

    Shadowgate, where the GameBoy porters when they made Shadowgate Classic they had to keep the music.
    Embodiment of Scarlet Devil for being the first in the series that had a better sound system than the PC98.
    Homeworld used Barber’s Agnus Dei to amazing effect and the entire soundtrack matches the theme.
    Chrono Trigger may be the best the SNES has to offer.
    Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arisen works pieces of the main theme into all the incindental tracks.
    Shadows of Amn has a great main menu theme and the ambient tracks are very atmospheric.
    Symphony of the Night has an amazing track list that conjures up images that fit with the associated locations.

    There are some big names in there, but my absolute favourite is a silly little thing by name of Maristice, which has a very small track list, but the music works so well for ambient listening that it does not grow stale even after hours of running and jumping around the mansion.

    1. Zekiel says:

      Anything by Supergiant Games
      I adore Bastion, but I probably wouldn’t remember it without the music and narration.

      Also Kentucky Route Zero, whose songs basically form the centrepiece of each Act.

  22. Lino says:

    For gaming soundtracks, there are a lot I really like. Some of my favourites include Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Warrior Within. I really don’t know which one I like more. During high school, it was definitely the latter, although Sands of Time has always held a special place in my heart.

    Witcher 3 is an obvious choice, especially since a couple of the songs sound really similar to Bulgarian folk music.

    Among the more obscure games I like, one of my favourites is the one for RC Cars (https://youtu.be/1aPbm1_2Yro). There were some songs (most notably the one in the link) where I would race better when a certain track was playing! I still listen to some of the tracks whenever I need to pump myself for something.

    As for overall sound design, I have to go with Blade of Darkness. It might be just my nostalgia, but the sounds in that game are something else. The crunchy sound of a blade cutting flesh, the overwhelming sense of dread as you hear a monster breathing while ominous music plays… It still gets me, even to this day!

  23. RFS-81 says:

    So, the song title game… My first thought was, I’m a metal fan, that has to be easy mode!

    My second thought was, wait, how does this bot work? It’s just some reddit bot, I doubt that they threw a neural network at the problem, but it seems to have some sense of context. (Unless it just always flags “die”, but that sounds extremely stupid.) So, is it enough to just throw enough negative words at it? Or do I need to pick something that an actual person might seriously say? That would be hard, actually!

    So, I don’t know if these would work:
    Legalise Drugs and Murder (Legaliiiise trucks in Mordor!)
    I will kill you, you will die!

    1. tmtvl says:

      Eh, most of the stuff from Stained Class would probably work. After all, that’s what Priest got sued over (funny thing, they were sued over Better By You Better Than Me, which is a cover of Spooky Tooth).

    2. Syal says:

      Numb. Comfortably numb. No more tears. Hurt. The happiest days of our lives. Waiting for the worms. Goodbye cruel world.

      One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces. Kill EVERYBODY. Run like hell.
      (Careful with that ax, Eugene!)

      …huh, Pink Floyd makes this pretty easy.

      EDIT: Bah, apparently that’s just “One of these days”. I need a new middle for the Homicide Route.

      1. Syal says:

        EDIT EDIT: No, it got renamed! Homicide Route stands firm!

      2. Zekiel says:

        The Final Cut

  24. Fictrix says:

    You joke about the IDE writing code for you, but Github Copilot is under development as we speak. I personally think that it’s going to generate bad code, though it can’t be worse than a junior programmer copy/pasting from Stack Overflow. There is some vague and worrisome hand-waving in the official docs about code ownership, accidentally leaking personal data and producing offensive output.

    I suppose this is standard procedure for platforms these days. It’s not enough to get the job done and stay out of the way of users. All that harvested data has to be exploited somehow to keep stakeholders happy.

  25. Sufflecat says:

    The Silent Hill series is famous for it’s soundtracks’ very specific vibe that the games’ atmosphere is inseparable from.

    The Metal Gear Solid series has great soundtracks that suit the “cold-war military techno-thriller” genre to degree that rides a knife edge between “perfect”, and “is it that OTT sincerely, or this parody?”.

    Saints Row II and III had some REALLY good integration of licensed tracks. The penthouse raid set to Kanye West’s “Power” really sticks out in my mind. I don’t even like Kanye, but that not only worked, it actually had layers to it. Even the radio tracks get in on it: how appropriate is it (in this franchise) to go around blowing stuff up in a helicopter to the tune of “Sports!”, or be running and jumping around the city at full super-powered speed when the instrumental part of “All My Life” hits.

    Oh, and one of my favorites needs a little set-up, because it’s not just good in it’s own right, but also I think a kind of musical Easter egg:

    Do any of you remember the sound effect from “The Six Million Dollar Man” that would play whenever the Bionic man would use his super strength or speed or whatever? Maybe not: I’m middle aged, and the show was before my time enough that I only know the sound effect from pre-internet era meme references. But here it is, for those who don’t.

    Hold that sound effect in your head for a moment. Let the taste of it soak into your mental tongue. Now, with that still in your head, listen to this.

    And that’s not even the only media to use that specific musical easter egg! This is an even more blatant example from a few years earlier.

  26. Moridin says:

    Re: automated caring
    Google used to show you stuff about suicide prevention if you googled things like “how to tie a noose” but it appears that they no longer do.

    Re: directories
    I suspect the problem is that ~/ is short for /home/{username} and I guess one of the things you were using has it’s own user, so instead of looking in /home/paul it looks in /home/pycharm (or whatever)

    Re: Sound design
    I don’t know whether the sound design in general is great, but the soundtracks of Paradox games tend to be very good, in my experience. Of the ones I’ve played, Crusader Kings 2 in particular has great soundtrack.

    Re: Football
    Pro Evolution Soccer had a good physics engine… Then Konami decided to dumb the entire game down and rebrand it as eFootball.

    1. Philadelphus says:

      I’ve put over 1400 hours in Europa Universalis IV and I’ve yet to tire of the music. Same for Stellaris with over (coming up on? I forget) 500 hours.

  27. Redrock says:

    Okay, music, easy: Transistor, as well as every other game by Supergiant Games. But especially Transistor. Most of the songs from this game have a permanent spot in my everyday playlist. Darren Korb is a legitimately great composer.

    Other than that, I really enjoyed the soundtrack in the Final Fantasy VII Remake. I like the music of original as well, and also VIII, but the jukebox tracks in the Remake led me to discover the Square Enix Jazz – Final Fantasy VII album, which is a) a thing and b) bloody brilliant. If not for the jukebox songs, FFVIIR would have been just okay, musically speaking, but because it introduced me to the world of FFVII jazz I remain eternally grateful.

  28. For Audio in games, as much as I hate it I have to give it to Hunt: Showdown . No game I have ever played has anywhere near the aural fidelity as that game does. You can tell each weapon from each other by its shot’s audio cues.

    As for Soundtracks:
    Betrayal at Krondor was one of the first games I played on PC that had a soundtrack that needed more than a basic sound card to play; I can still hear the menu introductory music

    I remember the first time I heard licensed music in a game (it might have been Mech Assault 2: Lone Wolf with Papa Roach and Korn tracks for boss fights, but even if it wasn’t that game still had an awesome soundtrack).

    Run Like Hell was a PS 2 sci-fi survival horror that nobody played with a great VA cast (Lance Henriksen, Clancy Brown, Michael Ironside, Kate Mulgrew, Brad Dourif, and a bunch of veteran voice actors), that marketed Breaking Benjamin to a bunch of tracks for the game

    Which leads into Halo:CE (by way of Breaking Benjamin doing Blow Me Away for Halo 2). Halo’s theme song got me through Basic Training back in 2002 when I knew I was going to be going to war in a couple of months. I would play it in my head as I marched or fought, or struggled to stay awake

    As people above have said anything by Supergiant’s Darren Korb. Hades really hit me in the feels with the emphasis on family; I really love both “In the Blood” and “Good Riddance”

    Wasteland 3 had some great music and some really interesting covers of songs

    For all that people shit on them on this site, Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4 all had awesome soundtracks

    Final Fantasies have all had amazing soundtracks going all the back to the OG’s opening theme, but FF7’s (the original) “One-Winged Angel” made Sephiroth one of the most epic boss fights ever

    For an outlier Dungeons and Dragons: Tactics for the PSP had some seriously amazing menu music. I would just leave the handheld running while I would go to sleep

    And lastly, CDPR. Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk:2077 vie for my favorite soundtracks of all time. Both have tracks that get my blood pumping as well as much more mellow and emotional pieces. Cyberpunk gets more play lately because I absolutely love Radio Vexelstrom, but Witcher has had much more play time in my radio

  29. Redrock says:

    The Wasteland 3 version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic is just amazing. That, and Blood of the Lamb. I wasn’t really feeling it as I made my way through the tutorial area, but then the first major battle started, Blood of the Lamb came on, and I was like, “Oh. So I guess we’re doing that for the next threescore hours”.

    1. Gautsu says:

      I really like the Wang Chung remix in the Cannibal Jamboree area

      1. BlueHorus says:

        Also, there’s a (gleefully incongruous) rock version of ‘Down To The River To Pray’ if you make a certain moral choice in the game. It plays while you’re killing a load of terrified, panicking teenagers following a botched execution.

        Some of the musical choices in that game are brilliant.

  30. Functional_Theory says:

    I don’t want to start a thing, but the “You need to put some autism cream on that” joke at 29:30 wasn’t nice. I know it was a throwaway comment, but it’s not nice for neurodivergent folks. :(

    Just wanted to mention for future.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      Shamus and I are both on the spectrum too. If we can’t make a joke at our own expense just because you share the malady then, well, maybe your autism is flaring up.

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