Rosalia Rambles

Category: Gaming

  • Redundancy Review: Day 337, “The Day Everything Changed”

    Redundancy Review: Day 337, “The Day Everything Changed”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning hermits and recluses, welcome to Day 337 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Today is 13th May 2026. One year ago, my life changed in ways I still struggle to fully comprehend.

    Whilst the one year anniversary of being made redundant is coming up in about a month’s time, this day marks when I got told that the company I was working for had entered financial distress and that falling into administration looked likely.

    The memory exists so clearly in my mind still, to the point that I can recount the entire thing when I would struggle to do so for other significant days.

    I started later than usual, around 9:30am, because of needing to do an early morning blood test. Back then I tried to start my days at 8am so I could finish earlier in the day and have more evening to evening with, and I did not particularly want to spend my lunch hour getting my blood stolen, so shifting around my day was the play.

    It flowed like any other day. We had our standup, and specifically I was invited to a meeting to start playing around with a new tool the development team had been working on for a little bit, one that was hopefully going to form part of a new proposition.

    After using it for a little bit, I had a lot of faith in the tool, and I found myself wanting to position myself as the owner/manager of this tool, wanting to take on more responsibility at the company and figuring this would be a good way to build myself up and learn more about being a producer.

    Even as some friends came down to visit me I was talking about excitement for the future with what could be coming next. Of course I still had nervous whispers in the back of my mind about what the future could hold, but I figured we would at least have till the end of the year to get things sorted.

    Then the anvil dropped.

    The CFO/HR person messaged me.

    “Hey Rosa”

    “Are you free for a quick call please”

    No preamble.

    No pleasantries.

    A message that reads as a death knell to all in the tech world, with my worst fears being realised when I got onto the call and I saw both the CFO and COO with solemn looks on their faces.

    With the gift of hindsight, the gallows humour approach would have been to say “Well I am getting fired or we all are” once I figured out what was going on.

    But I was a very different person back then, and I instantly knew what was likely going to happen. All I managed to muster was an “ah” before the news was delivered.

    I tried to keep a strong face, minimising how much I spoke both so I could understand what was being said to me and because I knew if I spoke I would start to cry my eyes out which would set the other two off.

    Not that it really mattered, but I said I would be taking the day after as an off day, before finishing the call with “I am gonna go hug Joe”, because in that moment all I wanted to do was cry my eyes out and wonder what the fuck was going to happen next.

    My running joke is that I survived layoffs so many times that it obviously would take the foundations collapsing in to finally get rid of me, but that mainly served as a deflection for survivor’s guilt – a sadly all too common phenomenon within the tech and games industry, an almost paralysing paranoia that you did not feel good enough to survive the axe when all too many talented people lost their jobs instead of you.

    The initial moments afterwards hurt. It was so bad that my anxiety response of vomiting almost triggered and I had to explain my feelings knelt in front of the toilet bowl in case it somehow got too much for me midway through.

    It was only a small consolation that I was not alone in this sensation, in that everyone in the company had received the news and had to process their next steps as well. It was a small positive that we kept daily standups going, if just to share potential job opportunities and talk about whatever we were feeling. I specifically remember rambling to a colleague of mine about Eurovision partway through the whole uncertainty process just to take our mind off things.

    Even today though, the scars remain. If anything they are more pronounced than ever because of yet another layoff hitting me just as I was starting to find my feet once more and push towards the projects I wanted to work on again this year, now instead I find myself trying to figure out what to do next whilst navigating the utter quagmire that is a mind plagued by depression and negative thoughts about how loyalty ultimately means nothing when my position on the landscape is not up to me.

    Getting dangerously close to breaking professionalism there, so I am going to move on to the review topic instead, which… admittedly is not Warhammer Wednesday because there was something that kicked off a year ago today alongside everything that happened to me on that day, which gives me a lot of mixed feelings. 

    Because yes, I did lose my job, my sense of self and purpose, and all notion of stability in my life…

    …but the Helldivers 2 ARG ended with the arrival of the Illuminate Great Host, heralding the invasion of Super Earth, which y’know, is kind of equally important as having a job.

    This ARG was extremely fun to watch across the four or five days it was live, seeing the community slowly work towards restoring the station to full functionality through minigames themed to actual terminal tasks in game – not knowing what the ultimate result was going to be

    I also have to give a shoutout to CloudPlays on Youtube for this stream title when the ARG first started. The sentiment was there my guy, but considering it took from May 9th to May 13th for things to finish, making such a content-brained declaration was certainly a choice.

    It was great to see the community come together to solve these puzzles though, even if during the pipe alignment minigame there were multiple moments where the blob kept moving a pipe out of alignment which undid a bunch of progress, especially when we had already solved the puzzle and just needed it to wait, leading to multiple messages of “HOLD” sent to the Satcom chat in the Discord, which was how players interacted with the ARG as a whole.

    This did lead to quite a few interesting moments, from the Discord API timing out because of the sheer volume of requests to the… various creative ingress bytes that the Helldivers community attempted, with the pipe shuffling incident also generating a beautiful message from one of the community managers saying “Satcom has lost all hope in the helldivers”

    Side note, no matter how hard I tried to track it down from DMs I shared with people during the ARG or things posted on Reddit, I could not for the life of me find the invalid ingress byte of “femboy feet pics”. 

    After the ARG was solved, it took a day or so for the ending to play out. This ending started around three minutes before my main meeting of that day, and I am someone who absolutely does not like being late for any meeting, so I was watching the invasion fleet arrive with absolute suspense and horror whilst also going “HURRY UP I NEED TO BE IN MY MEETING SOON!”.

    There is a certain dread that came from seeing so many Illuminate ships arrive at once, fully in the vein of the “Slipspace Rupture Detected” scene in Halo: Reach, compounded by the graphic of how it was shown in game.

    My intention is to do a couple more Helldivers 2 retrospectives around the invasion of Super Earth. I played a lot of the game around this point due to my unemployment and it forced me to evolve my strategy in game, which eventually became the foundation of how I play the game today.

    That should cover everything for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are having a good week. The weekend is not too far away if you are having a rough one, so I hope you can relax up until that point.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 331-333, “For Those Who Come After”

    Redundancy Review: Day 331-333, “For Those Who Come After”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning the ones that came before and those who come after, welcome to Day 331-333 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    First off, cause I have friends who have not got that far in Expedition 33:

    This article is going to talk about the themes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in a fair amount of detail and this is your only spoiler warning before I start as all significant details are going to be unspoilered for the purposes of discussion. If you have not yet played Clair Obscur, please do, the TL;DR of this is that it is a modern masterpiece of a video game.

    Right, now that I have probably shooed off a significant number of people – except Aaron, say hi to Aaron everyone – let us begin.

    Dim dam talé lam vacarme
    Redundancy Review begun
    And Rosa shall ramble on
    Dilim dili lili lam
    So much to say this is just a “part one”

    Dim-dim-dam-dada, dim-dim-da-dada, dim-da-lilam

    Dim-dim-dam-dada, dim-dim-da-dada, dim-da-lilam

    I love the opening of this game. The opening view of the twisted spire of Lumière with the eponymous song playing in the background helps set the tone of a dark yet optimistic story, with each individual frame of the game being as beautiful as a painting, but with credit going to the phenomenal motion capture work of Maxence Cazorla for helping to make Gustave such a relatable character from the get go.

    That said, Charlie Cox also deserves his flowers. His background in traditional acting means he delivers the majority of Gustave’s lines in a way an on-screen actor would in a natural conversational style, bringing a down–to-earth charm to the somewhat introverted inventor. He is only in a short segment of the game, but it is no surprise he was nominated alongside the monolithic talents of Ben Starr and Jennifer English for awards.

    Side tangent, as much as Jennifer English deserves the world and so much more, I really wish Andy Serkis at least got a nod for his performance as both Painted Renoir and Real Renoir, the ability to portray the same character from two drastically different perspectives has not been celebrated enough, playing two different antagonist characters would be hard work for any seasoned actor, and he made it seem effortless.

    Jen herself performs fantastically as Maelle, delivering a performance that balances the perfect mix of youth exuberance but with a weight of maturity behind it, reflecting a world in which children are forced to grow up way too fast thanks to the Gommage, Maelle carrying the weight of being orphaned multiple times before she even reached sixteen, but still wanting to join the Expedition to try save her home.

    Oh yeah, should probably explain the Gommage, which is the main inciting incident of the game.

    In the distance, visible from Lumière, there is a monolith where a lone figure sits motionless for the majority of the time. A number is painted upon it, with the number “34” being visible at the start of the game. The figure is referred to as “The Paintress”, and every year she will paint a new number onto the monolith, decreasing by one each time. When she does, everyone above that number in age will vanish into a cloud of petals, being “Gommaged”, leaving behind friends, family, and loved ones of all description.

    How the various denizens of Lumière react to the Gommage is rather realistic, with everyone taking a different approach on how to spend their final minutes. Some accept their fate with dignity and decorum, staying strong for those around them. Some choose to “enjoy life”, spending their last moments in the comforting embrace of their partners. Finally, some do not react well at all, taking to drinking and slamming the efforts of the Expeditions as pointless busywork when the Gommage keeps happening.

    This is the first main exposure to what is the main theme of the game as a whole: the cycle of grief.

    When I first started playing, my partner refused to tell me anything about the game except that it was “a game about grief”. Right from the beginning, you see how Lumière is a city that has been utterly traumatised by a regular cycle of grief – death is a constant, reoccurring factor for them, to the point that traditions around the Gommage have been established with almost everyone going to the harbour to mark their final moments.

    But there is also a beautiful moment hiding in plain sight that is beautiful foreshadowing to this overarching theme, which I wish I got a bloody screenshot of but the transcript will have to do:

    Sophie: “Sometimes I feel sorry for her.”
    Gustave: “Who, the Paintress?”
    Sophie: “Look at her. She looks sad. Maybe she’s a prisoner too. Stuck in the same cycle as us.”

    On the first playthrough, you may have no idea what Sophie is talking about. As far as the player knows, the Paintress is responsible for the Gommage, and her constant cycle of death is all that both the player and the characters know.

    But then you finish Act II, and become witness to the fantastic, if a bit divisive, twist that everything you have played through is in a painted world, with a family stuck in their own twisted cycle of grief being the main antagonist forces behind what is happening within what is now known as “The Canvas”.

    The Paintress does not want to go through with the Gommage. With each passing year, her available supply of Chroma – the source of a painter’s power, diminishes thanks to the actions of the real Renoir, who is trying to force the Paintress out of the Canvas because she is his wife, choosing to stay in a fantasy world with a painted copy of her dead son at serious detriment to her own physical health.

    Grief is ultimately what drives all characters forward in this game. Each of them have their own complex motivations as to why they move forward, but each initial Expedition member has their own flavour of grief pushing them forward:

    • Gustave lost Sophie, his lost love who he only managed to reconcile with before she died
    • Maelle lost both her original parents and her foster parents, leaving her only with Gustave as her adoptive brother
    • Lune lost her parents on a previous expedition, and hopes to find out what happened to them as part of Expedition 33
    • Sciel lost her husband Pieree, and subsequently lost her unborn child during her suicide attempt driven by the previous grief

    In spite of their grief though, they move forward, regardless of the consequences.

    I have already used one set of arc words as the title of this article, but there is another set there are equally important to the story of Clair Obscur:

    They are just “Tomorrow Comes” but I have this Sciel screenshot saved so I am going to use it because this is another instance of something becoming way more tragic on a second playthrough – specifically that Sciel tried to kill herself via drowning in the ocean, giving her a fear of water moving forward.

    Even when grief feels overwhelming, even when it feels like the world is collapsing in on yourself, even when you lose your job for the second time within a year meaning you start experiencing regular crashouts that disrupt your writing schedule and general routine: Tomorrow Comes. There will always be another dawn after the dark, and even when things feel overwhelming, there is a comfort in knowing that a tomorrow will always come. Struggles may remain for a long period of time, but it is a blessing to be guaranteed a tomorrow in the face of adversity.

    But, I made the title of this article “For Those Who Come After”, and as such, I should probably talk about what those arc words mean within the game, and what they mean to me.

    It is actually a shortened version of a longer line, which forms part of the oath Expeditioners take before embarking, something which Sandfall Interactive has not posted in full when I really wish they would. The full line is:

    “Learn from the ones who came before, and lay the trail for those who come after.”

    Within the game, this takes the form of all the expeditions that embarked before Expedition 33. You will be able to find their journals scattered around the game world which tell how they met their end whilst also informing you of how to navigate whatever danger they succumbed to… or in some cases, you find the journal after navigating the danger making you exclaim “well that would have been helpful five minutes ago”, but each Expedition before yours has laid the trail in some way, either through the grapple points or climbing handles, or dealing with an obnoxiously large threat long before you appeared.

    The Expedition is also a sign of hope for Lumiere, even as cynicism grows within the populace over the effectiveness of the effort as a whole, it shows that there are still those who are willing to navigate into a hostile world in an effort to try secure a better future for those who remain in Lumiere. Gustave specifically thinks of his apprentices, uttering these very words each time he finishes a journal entry:

    What do these words mean to me though? How do I take these arc words and apply them to my day-to-day experiences?

    Well, I have talked about it at some length in the past, but my goal as an artist is to act as inspiration for younger LGBTQ+ folk who have their own worries, concerns, or serious amounts of anxiety about living in a world that is very often hostile to them.

    I try my best to learn the history of LGBT rights as a whole, who laid the trail for people like me today and started to build a world where we can all be accepted, and I use that to inspire myself to try to do the same for others in whatever way I can.

    This is especially true for living in the UK, a country where trans rights are completely ignored by the ruling party at best, and at worst there are those who actively want to remove us from the public perception whilst simultaneously destroying our access to the life-saving healthcare we need.

    Even as economic conditions become worse and political forces start to work against me, I refuse to back down.

    I will not abandon my home.

    I will not leave behind those like me.

    I will do what I can to change things for the better for people like me, even if I do not live to see what this world will look like. 

    My art may not ever make enough money for me to live off, and it may not even reach the vast majority of people.

    But if I can inspire even one person to take the plunge and see how good their life could be when they choose to be themselves, then I can be proud that I did something good.

    For Those Who Come After.

    Plus I just had to write about Expedition 33 on Day 333 of the Redundancy Review. Even if this is not my full final write up on the game, and believe me I have a lot more to say I just do not have the screenshots or time to back it up right now, this serves as a good prologue to discussing the game at length – something that is still a goal of mine for this.

    That will cover everything for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope the weekend will treat you well and you can take some time to relax. Partake in things that make you happy, or work to improve the space around you.

    Whatever you do, I know you will smash it.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 319, “Eepy”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning baristas and bartenders, welcome to Day 319 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Being upfront, I am knackered right now.

    Saturday is normally a sleep-in day for me anyway, but things moved slowly up until I got the impetus to go shopping for the supplies needed for tomorrow night’s dinner and snacks for a film night with good company – said film night then taking up most of the time I could work on writing afterwards and now I am just lying here in bed typing out whatever my brain will allow me to.

    Which is not a lot, honestly.

    So uhh…

    Here is one of the megastructures I have built in Satisfactory. I refer to it as the “Basin Shell”, because it is built over the basin of a large waterfall and whenever I build a structure in Satisfactory over water I tend to append “Shell” onto it after the Big Shell in Metal Gear Solid 2.

    This was built as I severely needed to upgrade my power infrastructure going forward in order to accommodate the amount of structures I would need to construct and wanted to avoid brownouts or the fuse blowing wherever possible… there is a slight possibility I went overboard in this construction project as I was able to support a large factory in my home base and then build a massive shell project over another body of water, fully rig that up with power, and then nowhere near run out of power until I upgraded the grid yet again.

    Building megastructures is the thing I enjoy the most in Satisfactory. I know the overall goal is “the factory must grow”, and Part A needs to make Part B and Part C, but there’s a certain satisfaction (get it) in building a massive structure that only fills one purpose rather than having new components introduced to an already spaghetti-like machine.

    Maybe when I finally finish it, I will talk a bit about the other shell project and how it came together.

    In the meantime, that will do it for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you can rest as well as I am going to tonight.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 209, “Flipping Freezing”

    Redundancy Review: Day 209, “Flipping Freezing”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning hyperboreans and cryomancers, welcome to Day 209 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    As per the title, it is flipping freezing, one might even say fucking freezing… one is me, I think it is fucking freezing, I just do not like to put swears directly in the titles of articles.

    Swearing within the body? Will do so to my heart’s content, but profane titles are off limits.

    I guess I can use today to talk about my relationship with swearing. If you read enough Redundancy Reviews or know me in-person you know I am no stranger to flowery language, dropping “fuck” in every second sentence and having a love of a good “shit”, but where did my sailor mouth come from?

    In a few short points:

    • Family
    • Work
    • ADHD

    The first one is pretty obvious, whilst they started off pretty well with not swearing in front of myself or my brother, things eventually turned to infrequent swearing in front of us yet at the same time not wanting us to swear, before all pretense was dropped and swearing once more became a common feature in our household. 

    This alone was not enough though to get me to the level of swearing I am today, which is where work comes in, specifically, my old platform lead when I worked at Codemasters who went by the name of “Rye”. Was a lovely guy, really helped me out in the early days of me working there and was generally understanding when I messed things up or needed additional guidance.

    Being from Coventry however, he was someone who dropped swears like they were treat-size chocolate bars on Halloween, and considering after a period of time I was working with him quite closely due to the Live Ops team being a smaller group, it was only a matter of time until I picked up his habit of profane language.

    That said, he was not entirely responsible for me picking up that habit, and if anything, the line of work we both found ourselves in almost necessitated swearing as a coping mechanism for dealing with the deluge of shit we encountered on a near-daily basis. It was a running joke in our Teams chat that if it were not for the security locks holding our devkit consoles to our desks, they would have been thrown out the window long ago.

    Quality Assurance is a field of expertise that requires a steady mind to stay focused on getting a bug replicated or an issue to occur on a long playthrough – cussing out whatever you are testing is a good way of stopping your brain from shutting off during the necessary repetition that this brings, which is where the final point of ADHD comes in.

    It might seem confusing for me to correlate neurodivergence with swearing, but bear with me for a bit. My area of specialisation is within the Extended Reality (XR) industry as a QA tester, this often means I have a moderately heavy lump of circuitry and screens strapped to me head with a non-breathable cushion of foam pressed right against my face, leaving only a small gap where my nose is for moist air to escape.

    Given that sometimes the experiences I am required to test will last me up to forty minutes at a time with very repetitive tasks or a large number of tasks, the only thing that can keep my focus is muttering swears under my breath or, as is often the case, venting my frustrations at the virtual avatars around me to once more stop my brain from turning off.

    These mid-test vents eventually became a source of comedy when it came to watching back my test footage, as my creative application of language would often get caught by the Slack auto-transcriber, leading to questions about the suitability of the content if it featured such harsh language… before they realise that, no, the experience itself did not have swearing, the idiot behind the headset was the source of all that.

    A lot of people consider swearing a dirty habit to have, especially in a professional context, but to me swearing comes part and parcel with the stresses that any job can bring, be it retail or corporate. The important distinction is knowing when it is the appropriate time to use curse words and when they should not be said under any circumstance. To reiterate a piece of advice I was once given and have brought up in a previous review:

    “Professionalism is delivering your points clearly and not saying fuck.”

    The line has often blurred for me given the fact I have been working remotely for so long, which I do worry has negatively impacted my socialisation skills for the day I might have to return to being in an office full time, but for now I enjoy the benefits of being a remote worker whose line of work allows her to curse to her heart’s content – which is a lot.

    I did not plan at all to launch into an unscripted diatribe about the origins of my swearing habit along with defending the character of those who do swear in professional scenarios, but that is the beauty of the Redundancy Review. We have random topics at all times and sometimes they take on a life of their own.

    It probably does not help my current situation that I am quite attentively playing through Nier Replicant “Ver 1.22474487139…”, speech marks added so as not to confuse the ellipsis that is actually part of the title with my habit of adding ellipses when a thought needs dramatic impact.

    Through playing Replicant, I have once more come face to face with one of my favourite characters in gaming, a lovely, wholesome individual that goes by the name of Kainé…

    …who has some of my favourite profane dialogue in all of gaming.

    She is a character you encounter fairly early on in the course of the story, who eventually joins with your party after defeating a boss she wanted revenge on. Her NPC AI matches similar to what the player character is intended to be, a spellsword brawler who can dish out a good amount of physical damage whilst also using magic spells to support longer combos or enable quick executions.

    True to form with any Yoko Taro game though, she has hidden depths that come to light as part of the multiple playthroughs required to fully understand the story, with her even getting an extended story in “Ver 1.22…” after completing the entirety of the original game. 

    Fun fact, this game is the sole reason that “hussy” features so prominently in my lexicon, due to the acidic banter that exists between Kainé and Grimoire Weiss, your floating magical book that is the source of all your spells.

    This does remind me I should take more screenshots of the game after I make it through my first playthrough so I can have some material ready to use when I eventually want to talk about this game after 100%ing it, but at least I can use this review to post another one of my favourite lines from Kainé.

    There is one more line that I consider my absolute favourite, but I will wait until the proper review to share that one.

    I think that covers it for today, thank you for reading this surprise discussion of swearing in real life and swearing in video games style Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope the Monday blues of the first working day back of the year have not brought you down too much, and if they have, try turning the air blue with a bunch of swearing, that always makes me feel better.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 114-117. “Attempting to Stabilise”

    Redundancy Review: Day 114-117. “Attempting to Stabilise”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning rudders and canards, welcome to a big catchup post covering Day 114 to 117 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    So on top of my period destroying my body entirely, this week was also one where my day job decided to massively ramp up for various deliverables, which obviously takes priority that day over my unpaid writing practice.

    Usually, I write the Redundancy Review during my lunch or working on it whilst I wait for apps to upload or process, with the final touches coming after I finish – such as getting the piece into WordPress and adding in the images before publishing & uploading to BlueSky.

    But given the intense stress of this week, I reprioritised my evenings into focusing on rest, even reducing the amount of complex cooking I was doing during the week and instead put my energy into making meals that did not require much effort.

    And even now when trying to write this out, I feel exhausted. Both mentally and physically, I am still trying to catch up with what happened this week to try get myself back into the mindset of writing every day to keep myself sharp.

    There are a lot of topics I still want to cover in my style, and I still have a lot of stories to tell, but for now, I think resting is the priority.

    Hence why today’s review is going to be a bit ramshackle due to the fact I will be pulling screenshots off of my hard drive from ages ago to help make my points.

    In the dark recesses of Rosalia Rambles history, there exists a review of Ace Combat 7, you can read it here if you so wish, but considering it is nearly five years old at this point, I think it is time I do it justice in my new style and with less of a critical stance & more of my ‘review’ stance.

    When it comes to niche Japanese franchises, Ace Combat is definitely up there for me. I got introduced to it by an old friend back during my uni days and, despite being very skeptical that I would enjoy the game, it instead became one of my favourite series of all time.

    Wherever you are, old friend, I hope you are doing well in life, and that you are happy. It really was all I wanted for you, even if I could not provide it.

    Ace Combat 7 is the most recent entry in the franchise, coming out in 2019, and whilst I have a very respectable playtime on PC; my first experience with the game came on PS4, which I think goes to show how much I enjoyed the game that I decided to rebuy it on a different platform and play through it all again.

    The goal of the game is good, clean, arcade-style flight simulator fun. There are twenty campaign missions ranging from your standard “take down bombers and escorts attacking your base” to “destroy the required amount of enemy assets in time”.

    Though, I do want to highlight the story of the game along with re-emphasising the year it came out. For coming out in 2019, there is a heavy focus on the usage of drones in war, including the inciting incident of the game being an autonomous drone attack being carried out in the “protagonist” nation using drones hidden in shipping containers.

    Considering that exact scenario has played out in the Ukraine/Russia conflict with the former side using that exact tactic on the latter, it feels almost spooky to revisit some of the themes in this game.

    If you care about spoilers, here is your small-scale spoiler warning for Ace Combat 7, skip ahead until you see an image of a glowing fighter jet, where I will change topic.

    During the game you see cutscenes of your rival ace, Mihaly, taking part in experiments that are providing training data to the drones. Once you get to the final mission, two advanced drones are revealed that are carrying Mihaly’s data, with the objective of uploading that data to drone factories around the world to mass-produce these AI-powered war machines.

    Again, this game came out in 2019, and to me having a plotline like this in a game about fighter jets feels ominously prophetic, bordering on Metal Gear Solid 2 levels of a plot being way ahead of its time.

    Simultaneously, there is writing that echoes the anti-AI sentiment of today through the message of drones versus human pilots:

    Screenshot grabbed from Ace Combat Fan playing Mission 18 on Youtube: https://youtu.be/l-f8ObKfJh0?si=MkBzUIw5sqsVHQHs

    Like with most games with a modern military setting, there needs to be a level of media literacy to both appreciate the themes whilst recognising that the game is acting as propaganda for various companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, this is often why when I talk about these games my general mantra for discussing them is:

    “War bad, planes rad”

    (thank you to Oboe Shoes Games on Youtube for that brilliant phrase)

    Even in the mission where the above sentence is spoken, you as the “protagonist” are in the midst of committing a war crime by attacking a site of historical slash cultural significance to pillage their supplies, so, the ahead of its time message is balanced out by the horrors.

    Anyway, that is enough story discussion, time to put up the signal that people can come back.

    Ahh, glowing X-02S Wyvern, you are one of my favourite stupid additions to the game in the form of DLC.

    Once again I show I am not immune to propaganda, but that does not minimise my love for this game. Planes are indeed rad, and getting to fly them in video games is one of the most exhilarating experiences I have ever had the pleasure of partaking in. Ace Combat 7 pushed me to my limits as I tried 100%ing the main campaign, doing all the side objectives, hidden aces, and in-game medals. 

    I still need to properly immerse myself into the multiplayer to bring up my Steam achievement count to the top, but I have proven myself in the way I want to, and that satisfies me.

    Ended writing way more than I anticipated about a plane game, but I think this has done what I wanted it to in getting the juices flowing again. Thank you so much for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review, wherever you are I hope you are able to make the most of a relaxing Sunday before the Monday blues come back at you.

    Ace Combat 7 is available on Steam, Xbox, Playstation, and Switch, so if my review has made you at all curious, give it a go!

  • Redundancy Review: Day 110-111, “Shark Attack!”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning hammerheads and nurses, welcome to Day 110-111 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    After a long relaxing weekend where nearly nothing was able to bother me, I now return to my desk full of one thing…

    …estrogen.

    Yup, the best way to end a fantastic set of days in which I felt the best I have in several months is me entering into the week starting my period once more which brings paranoia and overthinking back into my mind. Yum.

    You would think after almost three years of being in this cycle, there would be some measure of “used to this” with the fact my body decides to destroy itself whilst throwing my emotions into flux for up to a week, but nope – it still hits like a truck each time and brings out the worst of my inner monologues to put me in a funk.

    I carry on though, in spite of everything that could hold me back, to continue writing the part of my story that I currently find myself in the midst of: one girl trying to find her way in a world that is rapidly changing around her, all the while trying to keep herself on a good mental path.

    And sometimes, part of that story is having a brain that decides you need to feel inexplicably worse about everything going on in your life as if there is not a long history of things going your way.

    So, rather than go into any of the thinkpieces or in-depth stories I usually like to tell, I am going to go straight into the review section of today, and in honour of Title Update 3 coming out for Monster Hunter Wilds, it is time to go over one of my favourite musical tracks from the game that got me into the franchise as whole: Monster Hunter Rise.

    Not only is this one of my favourite tracks, it belongs to a monster I think is in contention for being my all-time favourite within the series as a whole – Crimson Glow Valstrax.

    For those who might be unaware, I have a massive fascination with fighter jets due to playing a large amount of Ace Combat, and this interest made me fall in love almost immediately with Valstrax’s design, being a peregrine falcon crossed with a dragon and then because that was somehow nowhere near badass enough, throwing a fucking F-22 Raptor into the mix to form an absolutely gorgeous design.

    And that is just its base design, as the Crimson Glow (shortened to CG for ease) variant in Rise takes the base form of Valstrax, adds in an unstable core of dragon energy to increase its aggression, and make its theme a thousand times more terrifying – especially if you are fighting the Risen variant found within the Sunbreak expansion.

    If it were not for Rey Dau coming into the mix with Wilds, Valstrax would be my definitive favourite monster outside of my meme pick of Dodogama, but that is a debate for another time.

    As additional comparison, I will be comparing CG Valstrax’s theme to the original Valstrax theme from Generations Ultimate, found here. Note: I have not played GU (a cardinal sin, I know), so my impression will be solely based on how I react to the music.

    Right from the start, CG Valstrax’s theme presents an aura of intimidation with a choir coming in to herald the arrival of this magnificent creature before launching into the main body of the song, which honestly makes me feel as if I am being relentlessly pursued by an apex predator.

    This differs from how the original theme makes me feel, as the progression of the song makes original Valstrax feel like a regal creature – one that is still completely capable of destroying you, but one that views your encounter more like a dance, a coordinated exchange of blows with two equally matched combatants. 

    CG Valstrax has no such illusions, they are driven solely by the amount of dragon energy coursing through them, and they want you dead.

    This is best exemplified during what I refer to as “the chase” section of CG Valstrax’s theme, shortly after the chorus concludes. In the GU version, this starts at the timestamp of 1:15, and honestly, I think there is nothing much to say about what plays out here before it returns to the start of the song.

    There are strings, there is choral singing, but this section of the GU theme honestly lets me down compared to how the CG theme plays out at the timestamp of 1:40.

    It is entirely possible I am blinded by bias, but you cannot deny how much more impactful “the chase” section of the song sounds in CG Valstrax’s theme, this version is the whole reason I call it “the chase” because it actively sounds as if you are being chased down and the rapid notes of the choral singing is your hunter panicking as this out of control creature bears down on you.

    Ultimately though, I love both versions, as I love both versions of Valstrax for what they represent for Monster Hunter. Crazy ideas that sound silly on paper, brought to life through detailed ecology.

    Some might disagree and say that Valstrax goes too far along the line of silly, but when you look at the similarly bizarre but beautiful designs of “T-Rex with a flaming sword for a tail” and “wyvern that creates explosive scales out of excreted oils”, I think a peregrine falcon dragon fighter jet is right at home.

    That will do it for today, I need to get back to my day job. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope the Monday blues are not bringing you down too hard and that you can find some time to relax today.

    As a little bonus, OG Valstrax’s theme won the Hunter’s Choice Best Monster Theme award over a year ago now, and in honour of that it got an EDM-style remix which, like the main themes, sounds absolutely fantastic.

  • Redundancy ‘Review’, Day 104: “Despite Everything

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning humans and monsters, welcome to Day 104 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    For someone who consistently wishes that the Monday blues do not hit people too hard whenever she signs off a Sunday article, god damn do I feel like I have been hit by a truck today.

    All of a sudden last night my impostor syndrome flared up something fierce, not only making me doubt the efficacy of whatever I am doing on this site, or if I am even worthy enough to hold my current position within QA.

    The answer to the latter is simple: yes, yes I am. My brain is just stupid and exhausted from constantly worrying about the situation I am currently in which causes me to ignore my track record as a QA professional and that I would have not sustained a close to five-year career if I did not have some amount of pride or professionalism in my work.

    That, and I am a magnet for bugs no matter what I play… though it seems to happen a lot more randomly in EA games which is very thematically appropriate given my history with the company.

    One way to prove that taking time to rest is helping my brain redshift on what things mean to me is that my body’s response to these feelings is not feeling the need to push myself further, in fact, it is quite the opposite – I feel myself slowing to a crawl, but still trying my best to move forward.

    I think that is all I can really ask for given the year that I have had, that I can keep moving forward and do so with the acknowledgment that I am still here today, even when there was so much that could have brought me down for good, not only in this year, but in so many years prior.

    Considering Undertale’s tenth anniversary was over the weekend, I think the image is pretty thematic.

    Even though I was never really part of the fandom surrounding Undertale and everything that came with it, it is hard to believe such an impactful game is already ten years old. Ten years ago I was in sixth form (name for British education from 16-18 in some schools), possibly some of the worst years of my life due to academic stress, identity worries, and trying to navigate a much lonelier world than I had before.

    When one day, I reconnected with a friend on the bus home from school, talking about some of the stuff I had been up to and what he had been up to, with the conversation eventually turning to Undertale. I mentioned I had heard of it but had not really seen anything about it at all.

    It was given to me as a Steam gift later that evening from that same person… wherever you are right now Sam, whatever you have been getting up to… I hope you are living a fantastic life, and know that I still treasure the memories of our friendship.

    Undertale appeared at one of the lowest points of my life, and even if I only played through it once (neutral route into Pacifist, cause good god I did not have the mental fortitude to do Genocide back then and I certainly do not have the cojones to do it now), the experience still left an impact on me. 

    I still listen to the music, and those immortal words in that screenshot still stick with me today.

    Despite everything, I am still me. I am still keeping on, even if the last ten years have changed me drastically. And that is something that is worthy of celebration.

    Not really a review per se, more just a story that still holds significance in my mind and in a way is topically relevant to recent events. Fuck it, I will put the inverted commas on and post this up, cause I appreciate what I wrote today.

    And I appreciate you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope your Monday blues are not hitting too hard and that you are still able to get things done today.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 92 & 93, “Still Processing The Con”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning scribes and ghostwriters, welcome to a double feature for Day 92 & 93 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Feels weird to say but even after returning to normality today by getting back to work, my mind is still dwelling on VExpo and everything I got up to during that time. I find it funny, that even though there was a lot of organisational scuff and my energy did not sustain me as long as I wanted it to; I would still do it all again this weekend.

    In a way I am trying to ride the high while attempting to convert post-con depression into post-con motivation. I returned to playing Beat Saber yesterday as a form of exercise and, whilst I am most certainly out of practice, half an hour let me work up a good sweat which should hopefully build into doing more exercise like that in future weeks.

    I also find myself being a little bit more aware of my diet, committing to smaller scale lunches than what I would normally eat in the hopes of slowly but surely slimming down my waistline. Whilst I still feel I will not be able to fit into the majority of off-the-shelf cosplays, there will still be some benefit in feeling better in my body wearing whatever custom creations I end up getting, along with fitting into my current wardrobe better.

    The main two things I need to keep in mind are:

    1. Progress is slow
    2. Progress is not linear

    Or, to borrow a very impactful quote from Bojack Horseman (great series, do not think I can ever rewatch the whole thing):

    “It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day, that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.”

    So long as I can try commit to doing some small amount of exercise each day, I can push myself to being in a better position a few months from now, which should hopefully put me in the best position possible by the time the next VExpo comes around.

    Do not think there is much to say beyond what I have said, my mind feels oddly foggy over the last two days and whilst I keep myself moving, I find it hard to write about the last couple of days emotionally – so I am going to jump into the review segment and do a… sort of song review, it is hard to sum up what exactly this classes as.

    When I did my initial Helldivers 2 review, I focused primarily on the gameplay loop rather than any of the narrative theming as I wanted to explain the core game succinctly.

    Reviewing the Super Earth National Anthem is my way of making up for not talking about the narrative, because the satire of militaristic fascism and how consistent Arrowhead are with making bombastic propaganda is one of the main draws of the game in my opinion.

    And “bombastic propaganda” is exactly how I would describe the National Anthem, right from the start it launches into justifying Super Earth’s campaign of liberation:

    “Freedom must reign over every last star.
    Through citizen’s blood spilled in our righteous wars.
    Honor their deaths, do your part for the cause.”

    It is a hilarious juxtaposition within the world, as it acknowledges that the “freedom” that Super Earth brings comes with an inordinate amount of civilian casualties, to the point that accidental civilian deaths in game only account to small fines to the basic currency acquired for completing objectives. 

    There have been several points in game where a minefield I have placed down has absolutely destroyed a group of civilians and all I get is some requisitions docked and a small reprimand from my Democracy Officer… yes, Democracy Officer, again, this game oozes political satire from every orifice.

    And it ramps up even further within the next verses after these ones, but I want to in particular highlight:

    “No questions or doubts shall be allowed
    Traitors will all be disavowed”

    Not even just doubts, merely questioning Super Earth is enough to make you a traitor. 

    Kill a bunch of civilians with a napalm barrage? Slap on the wrist.

    Ask why Super Earth’s elite have access to napalm barrages? Face the wall.

    I could honestly go through each verse of the anthem and explain the brilliance behind the satire, but I think I can sum up the entire song briefly: it works.

    As a piece of propaganda, the Super Earth National Anthem works because, despite the horror of the lyrics, it makes me feel patriotic to Super Earth and makes me want to dive on the fascist bugs, the socialist bots, and the xenophobic squids…

    …I initially did have a screengrab from the video itself prepared as the thumbnail, as I usually do, but I had a brainwave as I was writing that previous paragraph and, as the song says, anything less will not suffice.

    I am most certainly not immune to propaganda, but so long as it is only fictional nations that I am falling under the sway of, I think I should be fine.

    That will do it all for today, thank you for reading this, as usual, emotionally confusing edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you can find some time to relax, the weekend is not that far away so I know you can make it.

  • Redundancy Review: Days 70-74, “Small Victories, Big Losses”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia’s Rambles)

    Good morning bassists and drummers, welcome to a massive catch-up post for a bunch of missed days of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    A lot of what I write for the review is self-indulgent. I talk about my emotions, things that make me feel happy, and food I have eaten that tasted good. The entire series is a reflection of myself written down as a living record.

    And so, given the fact I took a very hard loss over the last week, I am going to take today’s catch-up post to let my emotions fly a little bit, because fuck me do I need it.

    There has been a lot that has gone wrong in my life, wasted my degree years due to stubbornness, losing friends cause of a lack of emotional intelligence, and going through severe periods of distress due to transition related issues.

    But I can comfortably say that the last three months of my life have been the worst period I have ever experienced – and that is fucking saying something considering how dark my mind got during my university days.

    Ever since I got the news that the company I worked for was in the shit, I have been fighting every day to try get small victories, and I should not minimise the fact that even small victories mean a lot when I have gone through what I have gone through.

    But for every small victory I feel like I take a big loss alongside it, and I am really fucking tired of that happening.

    Even in the last couple of days I have taken a small victory and a big loss simultaneously with my custom cosplay order falling through two weeks before my convention. The seller was courteous and offered me a full refund for my disappointment, which is the small victory, but the big loss comes from the fact this outfit felt like it was going to be the centrepiece of my convention holiday – something I have been looking forward to all year and now I have to go put together a backup plan in a short amount of time.

    I am not going to name and shame the seller. As part of the refund I agreed that I would not leave a negative review, and I am sticking to that. I would much rather move on and try make something positive out of this mess… finding yet more small victories.

    Every day feels fearful to me now, as if something has changed in my brain that has shifted my outlook from nervous optimism to outright pessimism. I had a breakdown on my partner last night and when I started talking about some of the fears I have about upcoming things, I said a line that breaks my heart even now to repeat:

    “I am wanting to prepare for the worst because that is all I can expect nowadays”.

    Making the best out of a bad situation should be an admirable trait, one I can take pride of, especially as someone who has lived in startup culture for the last three plus years and has made a name for herself of trying to be adaptable in times of crisis, knowing how to problem-solve my way out of anything.

    But I resent the fact I have become that person.

    I resent that I can never go long without needing to put out a fire.

    And I hate the fact that everything I am going through is making me a colder person and I do not know what to do to stop it – which I am not even sure I fully agree with saying cause the main thing that differentiates this period of time from the previous absolute worst time of my life is that I actually recognise I have people to live for now.

    I will keep going, I do not want to stop… but I am absolutely praying for a better season to come my way, because quite frankly, this summer has sucked.

    Going to keep it simple with a different review today, talking about another Stardew Valley save of mine that I have with a friend, this time on the Forest Farm layout.

    I have mentioned it in passing before, but I have an obsession with building infrastructure in video games. Paths, roads, transport structures, all of it is fair game for me wanting to make neat layouts & patterns in whatever I play, and Stardew is a game I find surprisingly useful for that purpose, especially when presented with the challenges of any of the nonstandard layouts.

    Forest in particular has been an interesting challenge, in trying to find the perfect blend of farming crops, farming animals, and utilising the main feature of the farm – that being renewable forage and hardwood options.

    Initially I had struggled with this task, especially when it came to building layouts that could work with the sprinkler patterns I usually use without actually having the sprinklers to plan out the infrastructure.

    But as with my mind itself, things start to make a lot more sense around Winter in this game, and without needing to worry about (much) crop watering and focus more on getting stuff organised for the next year, I feel a lot happier plotting out paths and working out where things need to go.

    On this map in particular, it is evidenced by the massive tree farm I am trying to establish in the top middle of the map. This initially started small scale with each tree type being vertically aligned which made collecting forage from the tappers a nightmare, but once I had established where the animal pasture needed to go a lot of space opened up which has led to the larger scale farm pictured above.

    There is definitely still a lot of work to be done on this farm, but considering this is only the end of Year 1, I am extremely excited to see where this goes next.

    Here is where I would usually say something about getting my rhythm back, but honestly, as much as the Redundancy Review will keep going, I am not sure how well I will be able to write individual days depending on my mood – I definitely want to try chronicle my convention holiday each day, but, we will see how it goes.

    Thank you for reading this far if you did, I hope you are able to have a relaxing weekend, a longer one than usual if you are in the UK.

  • Redundancy ‘Review’: Day 55, “Titles Are Hard”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia’s Rambles)

    Good morning placeholders and seat fillers, welcome to Day 55 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Being fully honest, I have not had the headspace to write today.

    So I am going to share a picture of the rad Stardew Valley farm my friend and I are working on as a regular gaming sesh.

    It is a Meadowlands farm type, and the infrastructure is slowly coming together. There is a fair bit I want to refactor in here but I am excited to finish this all off.

    Have a good day slash evening slash night everyone.