I'm extremely late to the game on this one, but the mobile version of the solitaire collection was released recently and it's really good? I played and beat each of the "minigame" solitaires once, liked a couple enough to play them again (Shenzhen Solitaire in particular really interested me), but then I got to the Fortune's Foundation, the Hard-Mode Tarot Solitaire and, uhhhhh... let's just say it got a hold of me.
I spent a week or so playing it occasionally, struggling and resetting early a bunch. I got about 8 wins over that time but didn't really understand it.
Then on Thursday it just clicked. 15 wins. 20 wins. 29, 36, 40...
This shit is goooooooood.
I played a bunch of solitaire when I was younger, but it's fair to say I've never thought about a solitaire as much as this one. It just hits the sweet spot of requiring attention but occasionally just being an easy deal. You can still screw up the easy ones, but once you learn to spot the standard pitfalls - overconsolidating, creating knotted piles, throwing away empty spaces - it becomes very natural while remaining a challenge on less perfect deals. I'm typically not a fan of move-1-card solitaire modes, but I'm very glad I didn't hit the settings option for "move stacks" because I think it would have ruined this game for me.
My 39th win had no cards put away for the first 10 minutes or so - this was a shot at my first 3-win-streak, so I agonised over the moves only making a few dozen in this time. Everything was tied up under their partner cards. Eventually, I had a couple of large stacks primed to go, but almost all of the trigger cards (2s, 3s, high and low major arcana) were at the bottom of the piles. For a good 15 further minutes, I painstakingly untied this gordian knot, moving 3-4 cards at a time just to get access to more space, then before I was aware it was happening, the knot fell to pieces as if Alexander the Great had got his sword involved, all the hard parts cleanly severed and it was a formality to finish.
I'm talking like this about a Solitaire game.
Anyway I highly recommend the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection if you enjoy puzzles, or just have ever enjoyed solitaire. It's much better to chill out to than a clicker or match-3, and there's a real sense of satisfaction in learning to spot the core patterns that make them up. Even if the hardest game mode doesn't appeal, there are many other easier (and shorter!) modes.
"Not being on Twitter anymore really has really changed my life for the positive in a bunch of small ways. For example now when I see someone say or do something wack I just say "that's crazy. You sound like you're 12 years old" and move on with my day" - dante
Saw this repost on the feed and it hit hard - my partner took a twitter break a couple years ago and I found myself half way through explaining Bean Dad before seeing myself in the 3rd person - and I just sighed and stopped. There was no point to either of us knowing about this.
It was a good setup for joining Cohost a year or so later, and leaving Twitter and its vicious neuroses behind. My partner is also off Twitter permanently now but is active on SpaceBattles, the creative writing forum. Occasionally she'll show me some bizarre little argument happening on there and we both have the distance to say "what a weird thing to say/do" and not let it affect our day.
In a very real way, Cohost has improved my life. I haven't done a great job at building/taking part in community on here, but it's been an incredibly comfortable place to spend some time seeing what people care about enough to post. But really, the change Cohost made was in my own perception of online presence, and my habits interacting with it. Infinite scrolls are so uniquely bad for my mental wellbeing - algorithmic feeds have led to me spending literal hours doing nothing, feeling nothing, and the way social media has been built around strong-arming people into using them feels explicitly exploitative.
Cohost is a project and a place that makes me feel genuinely optimistic about the future of the internet - not because I think we're all going to break out and change the world, but because we don't have to. This website broke a lot of bad habits and deprogrammed some awful behaviours and all it took was a site structure that didn't revolve around metrics. Posting here is about expression in whatever form feels appropriate, and damn the response or lack thereof.
A big reason I want to keep in touch with the people here is that I believe the lessons learned here will have value to someone in the future who wants to do a similar thing, build a social platform revolves around its users without commoditising them. I don't want to be out of the loop when that happens. While I'll miss seeing certain names that are going other ways, if I'm brutally honest the FOMO I'm feeling is about a second chance at this thing.
What took this down wasn't a content war, or cyber attacks, or corporations gaming the system until the space was unusable. There was a relatively wealthy benefactor, but not so wealthy that they could keep it going forever - that's frankly not unreasonable. It's frustrating that we lose this place due to what amounts to a rounding error in Twitters annual costs, but look at it this way - they have the literal richest man in the world bankrolling them, and they still have a collapsing website nobody likes. All we needed was a benefactor 1 rung further up the "damn that's a lot of money" ladder and this could have worked. The financial issue Cohost faced is endemic and structural to social media - but unlike Twitter the website itself was good. Did good. Is good.
I'm still not 100% sure what post-Cohost online life looks like for me. I don't know that I want to go and try to "do cohost" somewhere else. I'm pulling together a Neocities page but it's taking a while - I'm an enthusiastic computer toucher but incredibly uncomfortable with web stuff, and have been dealing with migraines this week. I really don't know how much of the heavy lifting I want to hand over to an Organisation but at the very least I know I'm happy to let someone else deal with hosting things. I am extremely open to suggestions for better alternatives, but I've been through a lot of options and the main problem is that I don't know what I want to do with it! Neocities seems to offer the best balance at the moment, and a lot of flexibility to change my mind later. I have never interacted with a CMS and they scare me for some reason.
I won't lengthen this post much more with why the other alternatives don't appeal, but suffice to say for now that I've thought about Discord, fediverse stuff, and Tumblr. I think my future in those places would be a step back. I might hook up something to keep up with individual posters but we'll have to see. I'm learning a lot about RSS this week.
I'm not going to lie, I'm grieving. Over a fucking website. How embarrassing.
I don't think he has any aspirations of making "the best game ever", but he has a real talent for finding a tight conceptual space and exploring it fully and concisely.
So many of the figures from my early indiegame culture days have gone on to massive corporate positions, become programming purists, or given up the job. I started following Tom's work and writing during a very formative time in the development of my taste in games, and was on the beta-testing list of Gunpoint over a decade ago. He is, entirely without his knowledge, a link I have to my younger self. Browsing pentadact.com again for the first time in years feels like revisiting the internet we all yearn for in the 3-websites-but-theyre-actually-apps era. Then I went to check out my first indie-game central repository in tigsource.com, and now I'm sad again.
I don't think he'd take it as negative when I say his games still have that same feel as a decade ago. His voice is still present in all his projects, as is his love of lobbing cunts out windows - a love I share. They've increased in scale over the years but never in a way that felt like stepping outside of the space Gunpoint occupied. I've played 6 hours of Tactical Breach Wizards since yesterday, in 5 sessions, and I'm loving it. I keep sending my partner screenshots - I'm sure she loves that! It's funny and sharp, the tactics are crunchy but forgiving, the difficulty is interesting and optional. A slam-dunk really.
I've struggled to connect with smaller games lately. Something about the extremely finite quality of time I have outside of work means I confusingly want BIG games with BIG narratives that MATTER. I don't want to "waste" an evening or weekend playing a game that isn't going to "do" something. This is a flawed perspective on many levels, but we're not talking about rational thoughts here, just the ennui that means I end up rewatching an old youtube series rather than doing something I actually enjoy.
An aspect missing from a lot of the "powerful computers vs game development" conversation is like...
I would like to run games in a way that doesn't cause my room to hit 40C in summer. I don't know that we need >200W constant energy consumption in The Current Climate, let alone the 600W+ PC gaming typically approaches.
"Our job is so much easier now" is nice but making games with the tools available is "your job" while playing them is a hobby that is getting prohibitively expensive to keep up with year on year while wasting a collosal amount of energy - and by extension, fossil fuels.
I'm loving what better tools have meant for the industry in that sub-AAA space, the results speak for themselves, but it's kind of tiresome to see people just list the points that support their main view while neglecting that upsides for one group are usually a compromise for the rest.
If you sell 100k copies of a game, and the average player puts 10 hours into it, optimisations that save 10W make for a megawatt-hour of energy - that's quite a lot? Thousands of miles in a typical electric car. It's also less air-con to counter the extra heat produced, possibly less demand so weaker/cheaper/older GPUs can be used at less environmental cost.
I know these aren't the considerations that developers typically make, it's all too distributed and driven by how players choose to play, but thinking about it has been my job lately, and it's hard to appreciate how much damage our games are doing, entirely passively.
Held onto any political ideation until I'd had some sleep
Slept like a baby, so maybe I'm onto something here.
All in all, I think "Labour win a landslide" is the worst of the likely outcomes of this election, and the 2nd worst of the technically-possible outcomes (I mean they could have fucked it somehow and failed to secure a majority?)
I will obviously take this over an extension of Tory rule, but the way the party has lurched to the right over the last 4 years while abandoning any pretence of ambition means I consider a landslide electoral victory a really bad outcome for anyone with an interest in improving life in this country.
This victory has been projected for literal years at this point, and with a dead-cert win on the cards any progressive party worthy of the category would have put some ambition into its campaign, some kind of radical adjustment into it's policy, but instead Labour went hyper-safe into right-wing "secure borders," "antisocial behaviour," and "we love financial services" rhetoric and was rewarded with a Tory collapse to vindicate their cowardice.
We won't see an ambitiously left-wing Labour party in our lifetime.
Anyway I'd love to be wrong, I'm really praying the manifesto was just a way to guarantee a mandate so they can go hard on public services, but their manifesto drained the joy from my body. I'm fine with people celebrating a victory over a Tory party that propped itself up with literal fascism, I just can't share the optimism.
Extremely battered Stats Hat on for this one.
Having done a bit of number scanning, my key takeaway is that my expectations about the mechanics of this election were about right - this is less a Labour resurgence than it is a collapse of the Tory and SNP vote - both losing about half the popular vote they had in 2019.
Hell, Labour got fewer votes this time than in 2019 - 9.7M (final counts pending) vs 10.2M.
This does not bode well for UK politics.
The clearest indicator of this collapse was the "resurgence" of the Lib Dems. They're currently tallying fewer votes than 2019 (3.5M vs 3.6M) but have gone from 11 seats to 71.
Overall turnout dropped from 67% to barely 60%.
My hypothesis is that people just broadly did not give a shit, and Tories would rather stay home than pick an alternative. I may grab a dataset to try to back this up later.
I forgot to mention the wee fascists in this post
They hoovered up a bunch of Tory votes, so thanks for that but honestly fuck 'em.
The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best
- The Communist Manifesto
thinking about how it's pretty common to critique the total failure of systems that are naïvely described as "merotocratic" to actually elevate the most meritorious people, when in fact the whole idea of meritocracy is in fact born of the false belief that people can have an absolute "merit" (let alone that it determines how much power they should be able to exert) - nex3
A key moment in my professional and personal development was when I was reading a ton of data science / machine learning articles for work, I found one in which the author outlined a very solid approach to comparing model performance, then completely undermined it (intentionally) with a paragraph on the inadequacy of "merit" as a concept.
He wasn't simply attacking overly simplistic ML assumptions, but tied the difficulty of defining "merit" in a sterile computational system to professional, social, and political ones - if we're losing sleep objectively defining the quality of a statistical construct, how could we ever be comfortable applying that logic to the messy systems of human interaction and governance.
It was a relatively short aside in a fairly unimportant article, but the comfort with which the author pivoted from technical to fiercely political was genuinely inspiring to me, and still informs a lot of my thinking.
A dragon and gryphon both on hind legs roaring, with a cool and sexy protagonist in the foreground looking cool and sexy and slightly off-balance in the foreground.
I took a bunch of screenshots during my playthrough, as I did in the first game. Mostly action stuff, but this is the last one I took because honestly I felt like there was nowhere to go from here. It occurred at a perfect moment in the game, at the end of a series of events nobody is interested in hearing, and I think it looks neat.
Kaze understands the N64 better than pretty much anyone currently active, and has been working on a complete engine rewrite of SM64 and a commensurate game with it, and answers the questions most of us had after watching pannenkoek's video: How hard would it be to patch the SM64 ROM to fix these?
The more I learn about financial systems, and specifically the artifices that support the modern economic system, the less convinced I am that we ever should have allowed any kind of value-abstraction into our lives.
It's not so far past "International Trade Agreements are kinda bullshit as an incentive structure" to get to "I wonder if we should never have allowed the concept of a company as an entity with rights," and then it's just a matter of time before you conclude "maybe ~money~ is the problem."
Video here, but long story short (I'm not an expert, just tangentially aware of goings on):
The Super Mario Maker servers are getting shut down (just for the first game) on April 8th - a bunch of SMM players are on a campaign to make sure that no levels are left without a successful clear on the record books before "zero day".
There's 1 level left, a 10 second level from 2017 called Trimming The Herbs by a well known and liked SMM player/streamer who no longer has an online presence - naming them doesn't seem all that valuable to the story. Thus far nobody has beat it, with a few of the best players clocking 10s of hours so far.
There's some highly circumstantial suspicion that this may have been cheated, primarily from the player who's put the most recent time into attempting to clear it - the most damning detail comes at 3:07 in the linked video - the run is shown as if it is the first attempt after loading the level from the menu. This was standard practice at the time, but there would be a clear cut in the video where they removed failed attempts. This clear video contains 0 evidence of any cuts, implying that it was the first attempt after loading from the menu.
It's just incredibly hard to imagine how that would happen on a level that would have likely required 10,000s of attempts to complete in 2017, if not more.
The logistics of how cheating could have been executed are unclear at the moment - there are some known methods but none line up tremendously well with the existence of the clear video. As the linked video states, it's known that a hacked WiiU can be used to upload a level without actually beating it legit, but that wouldn't produce a clear video like we know exists for TTH. WiiU TAS tools weren't available in 2017 (quick google... they still aren't I think?). The player had AutoHotkey installed, but that's almost anti-evidence - it sucks at TASing because of inconsistency in its timings. My best bet if cheating were confirmed would be some kind of slow-down to record the clear vid, combined with a WiiU hack to get the level uploaded - i.e. two separate clears - one for the video, one for the upload. It doesn't look like slowdown is easy/doable on 2017 emulators, but it's my strongest guess.
It's all highly circumstantial (including a bunch of other individually weak components mentioned in the video, like "idk he kind of wasn't that good at SMM") but for me the story vaguely clicks together as - if you were looking to cheat in a game with no, what's the first thing you'd try? Tell me it's not AHK with an emulator lmao. When that doesn't work you move onto something else and maybe that works, idk. Like I say, all extremely circumstantial, and probably moot if they end up clearing the level in the next few weeks - which I suspect they will.
This is all wooly and unclear enough that I won't be tagging it at all, no interest in discoverability here, just thought the kind of people following me might be interested.
It makes sense, to him it doesn't seem like he thought too much of it beyond wanting to make cool hard levels - he couldn't have foreseen it becoming a massive community-wide problem, and given that he pretty much vanished from the scene after posting it, I don't think you can call it a clout thing. Just an unfortunate result of seemingly harmless sleight-of-hand.
I'm calling this a win for expert opinion because the comments on every post/video about it being faked are rife with "evidence is flimsy, come back with hard evidence" comments, and this happens every time someone opens their mouth about their suspicions - it's hard to get hard evidence if nobody acknowledges the possibility, and it's usually very easy to disprove once the question is in the air if a person is being falsely accused. See this Trackmania case, where someone got too gung-ho with accusations and just talked to the person in question to resolve it.
Openly raising a question without malice is the easiest way to resolve it once harder evidence becomes impossible to gather. Just don't be weird about it.
I know there's already a well-established backlash against the word - it's corporatised marketer-language that's seeped into the common parlance of online creators in a way that's distasteful to everyone - but I don't just think it's damaging to the media it's applied to, but to the literacy of people who engage with it.
I've come to see it as a condensed version of a thought-terminating cliché. It's just a general word to mean "more stuff to consume" with no value associated with it, but can encapsulate anything from "the good shit we're all here for" to "grinding for levels" - it's basically meaningless.
When a review suggests a game "lacks content" - what does that mean? I know that in the abstract, they're saying "I want more of this game" but how could anything actionable come from that statement? Are achievements content? Combat barks? Party banter? Challenge modes? Is paid DLC content (it's in the name...)? Cosmetics? Paid cosmetics? Randomised cosmetics???
I once saw One Piece described as "a lot of content" as a negative and like... I had a writing lesson in school when I was about 8 where we were instructed to describe things (shoes, cars, houses, books, whatever) but we weren't allowed to use the word "nice" - "nice" is a filler word that implies substance but conveys nothing about the subject, and when you aren't allowed to use it you end up actually describing things, often in distinct and personal ways. Shoes being "beautiful" or "pretty" or "good" or "smart". Shoes can be all of those things, and one might see any of those traits and write "nice shoes", but they're not the same. What do you mean when you call them "nice"? And in the same vein I have to ask - what is One Piece a lot of?
If "content" is a good and desirable thing to have, then why would One Piece having a lot of it be a drawback? If it's not a good thing, then why is "more content on the way" such a go-to phrase for game developers and YouTubers? I know what the One Piece person is getting at - it's a big time commitment, there's a lot of characters, a ton of tie-in nonsense, decades of fan-culture, competing translations - but in calling it "content" the conversation starts two steps behind the line.
I think when people talk about "content" there's a certain insecurity at play - not only is the word current and relevant, not only is it being used by all their peers - it's safe. It means nothing, but is an umbrella for anything. It's stuff. "More stuff on the way" doesn't sound quite so professional, but it's the same sentence.
In calling media "content" I don't just think we devalue the work - we abstract away the substance. It's not art, or entertainment, or comfort telly, a guilty pleasure - it's just nice.
I'm so glad random encounters are mostly dead. I know this is actually an extremely lukewarm take (misled you with the title, to be honest I feel terrible about it) but it bears reiterating how nice it is to be at least partially responsible for the decision to get into a fight in these games.
I'm sure SMT3 is very good, but trying to play it immediately after SMTV was utterly unbearable. I've been playing Tales of Arise and it also takes the "dodgeable overworld entities" approach and it's just so fucking nice. To be able to sprint through areas. I've already been through. Without losing my train of thought.
I'm not enough of an aficionado on JRPGs to know how much the ratio of random/non-random encounters in them has changed over the years, but it feels very much like a throwback stylistic choice for a modern game to do it, rather than a pure genre expectation like it was 20 years ago.
Sure, exceptions have always existed - been a hot minute but I'm pretty sure Chrono Trigger has non-random encounters - but I can't describe how unpleasant I find walking down an empty corridor and having 3 battles that all trigger with some loud noise and a movie-maker transition. It's a trope worth killing imo.
Sometimes I'm just grateful for the arrow of time, yknow?
But I took one look at the gameplay loop and knew it wasn't for me. Not sure if it's the reset-heavy nature of the scaling, or the lack of look-ahead info, or the way it favours plays that feel bad over plays that feel good, or...
Well it's probably all of that, but odd that I could see that without playing it myself and was able to dodge buying it. A rare moment of self-restraint.
i know i'm not saying anything revolutionary here, but:
any "progressives" or "leftists" who you can compel into doing the "LGBTQ+ people are degenerate faggot groomers" shtick through framing it in cushy, progressive-sounding language is someone you should just assume has "correct politics" through moral luck and not actual principles. if they had met the wrong person at any point in their life they'd be fascists in Nick Fuentes's stream chat or posting on Kiwifarms—and accordingly you should not trust them with anything sensitive, ever - alyaza birze
"Moral luck" is a great phrase for it.
I've mentioned this before but there are clearly people in the world (some with very prominent platforms) who've just blundered through life with mostly good opinions and so have never had to do any self-reflection on it. I think the last time I said this was about Adam Ragusea.
When these people have a shitty opinion on instinct, they will lean on their decades of being basically right and just assume they're doing nothing wrong - it's not them that doesn't understand the situation, it's you the outsider to their golden instincts.
It feels like to be a genuinely decent leftist, and especially a decent ally to an experience not one's own, it helps massively to have held some moderately shitty views that have been challenged and overcome. Like, not "I used to be a nazi but I got the tattoos turned into flowers and pride flags" shitty, but something meaningfully mean-spirited that you've interrogated and removed from your heart.
I could just feel that way because I was a total asshole as a teenager though.
Watching a Persona challenge run video and... look, I'm just interested how you went about doing something I have no interest in doing myself. You whined about failing fights a bunch with your ruleset, but fuck it man, you did the work I didn't so I'm not about to give you shit, armchair quarterbacking your decisions.
But buddy, when you look at dozens of articles by queer people disappointed in how P4 handles queer themes and say they're getting it all wrong - buddy. I'm gonna vague-post about you, and you're gonna have to live with that shame.
The whole fucking persona thing is literally bookended with "Thou are I, and I am thou". There's no ambiguity there. The shadow versions of them are reflections of their true selves, not exclusively other people's perspectives of them. They have to live with those aspects of themselves whether they want to or not, because that's who they are. Kanji alone disproves the idea that it's external pressures driving their self-denial.
That's so incredibly core to the theming of the first 99% of Persona 4. That's why the epilogue is a kick in the face to queer folk - every queer narrative is resolved with "ah, but it's so much easier being normal with my complementary gender romantic interest."
Look, I love P4, it's the first one I played and it still scratches the same itch it did in 2009 - but you've got to reckon with how that biases your reading of it if you're gonna post about it in your video.
Buddy, I was gonna follow you until you decided to bring your "I could write an essay" shithead analysis into your unrelated challenge video. You didn't have to say shit about it, but here we are.
I know it's cringe to enjoy things with sincerity, but the pacing and arrangement of these clips works extremely well, made me genuinely emotional having so many classic early RLCS goals where I knew the exact movements ahead of time, against the utterly disgusting mechanics of the modern game.
Garrett's fake while Fireburner gets the demo, I did a little hop in my seat right as Garrett does the double jump - it was just a move to make sure the ball stayed clear of his teammate, but it's a genuinely iconic button-press embedded in my psyche.
Really recommend the whole thing even if you're not wild about RL, it's a great video.
thinking about how the sequel to one of the tightest, simplest platformers of the 3D era was a story heavy, open-world prequel crammed with side-nonsense and backtracking
thinking about how if they'd just implemented the (good) mechanical improvements and made another 6-hour parkour game, it'd probably be one of my favourite games of all time as Mirrors Edge is already
thinking about how the AAA need to make everything bigger and more complicated and open-world robbed us of what could have been a mainstay modern franchise with like 6 games by now. tight, clearly scoped, fun games
thinking about how the big western developer/publishers so rarely are willing to iterate on an idea naturally, and will simply cram every successful new idea into the existing highest-revenue mould
thinking about how they kill genres before they have a chance to become idioms
genuinely wild to me that nobody took that concept and ran with it
the just cause games superficially ape the aesthetic of destruction and hugely amp-up the mayhem aspect, but there's no room for the careful planning of RF:G
teardown is the most obvious comparison, but it's just on a completely different scale. I don't need full voxel-level destruction, I just want structures that can collapse in a way that my CPU finds taxing
hardspace shipbreaker honestly scratches a similar itch, but it's a shade too controlled and the lack of gravity is a real let down (he he he)
in my view a true successor would be of a similar or greater world scale, with larger and more intricately constructed buildings, and a plot that gave you reason not to simply use a rocket launcher from 100m away. the tools RF:G had were honestly great, I don't know that you'd need to go too far beyond what they offer. further simulated chaos would be great (visions of turning a building into a wrecking-ball swinging from another building...) but not necessary I think.
idk I can't be tripping here, it feels like this should be more doable in 2024 than it was in 2009
I've got nothing directly against Tom, I've watched a couple of his videos and they're very good, I just don't like his style of writing/speaking. No big deal, but enough that I basically decided to skip his videos unless they covered something particularly interesting or important.
But motherfuckers I feel a deep compulsion to click on this video. This seemingly pointless video about a tiny aesthetic trend, that I've already noticed and strongly dislike.
Because why is it an hour long???
Bravo Tom, well played.
Yeah I got weak and watched it
It's decent. It's like 20 minutes too long, he reiterates the same points more than I think was necessary. He also got entirely bodied by a comment raising a much more interesting angle - Tom focuses a ton on the idea that it's a cultural response to overproduced interlopers, but I think it's more about not appearing "out of touch" with their peers, and holding the mic is a simple way to look less professional while also saving yourself some work (and having to figure out what to do with your hands). Being a try-hard is good until you're successful, then it becomes cringe.
Anyway, the comment rules and feels like it gets closer to the point than the whole hour long video.
nobody has ever chosen the mimic out of desperation before, gotta be a good sign
For real though, this was my 2nd win for the Hard winstreak achievement and it was a clusterfuck from start to finish.
Had the dragon as the final boss and he rolled the 15 attack every turn, killing one party member at a time until the mimic was all that was left and he rolled the smaller attack. Mimic blocked and let the single point of poison finish the job.
Basic attack Yellow is goated though, carried the run doing chunky damage every turn.
for what my opinion on the youtube plagiarism thing is worth (nothing, but I'll take it), I really enjoyed the slow dawning realisation that pretty much ever word somerton's own creative mind put in his videos has the voice of an asshole.
like, that's how you spot his original writing - is it snarky, flippant, or mean? probably him
he has the writing voice of someone who learned what sarcasm is from a friend's older brother and just ran with that as a personality
it's just so amazingly unappealing to listen to, i'm amazed this guy survived doing livestreams for any length of time
I'm not about to recount the whole thing because that's not really the point, but it's resulted in one of the best videos around on statistics and the idea of comparing ones own performance in a videogame to that of others.
Related to my last post, I've been wondering about the idea of modelling a speedrun as a markov chain or some other stochastic model.
It's always been how I think about them, a series of steps with a few possible (sometimes recursive) outcomes and a set amount of time associate with each.
The idea may have legs as an educational tool at best, but honestly I'm really interested in the idea of comparing high and low-risk strategies across many attempts.
I would love a fan wiki designed to be anti-spoiler
So I've been watching Babylon 5 a tv show from the 1990s, but I'm still on the first season. It's almost impossible to look anything up without being spoiled on subsequent seasons so I just don't look anything up at all.
I wish there was a way to set my current progress through the series and just have anything past that be spoiler tagged. This does not seem to be a thing on any series fan wiki but it would be cool if it was.
This is also the case with One Piece where I'm up to date with the english dub, but the Japanese anime and manga are far enough ahead with existing characters I might want to look up that I don't feel good about looking up anything. - tekgo on cohost
Not to derail an (entirely correct) point, but One Piece is specifically what changed my habit of looking things up constantly, because even being up-to-date with the JP anime leaves me a year or so behind. It helps that the OP community is historically very good about not posting spoilers in open forums.
Not at all saying you shouldn't be looking things up, but I'm much happier with a less curatorial approach to media.
At this point we'll be watching an episode and my partner will be like "Wait, Brutus McGrutus? Isn't he Señor Planetfucker's secret son? I'm sure they mentioned that 700 episodes ago" and instead of digging into the question I'll just think back and be like "Well it wasn't in the pre-episode recap, so either way it isn't relevant here."
Then 3 episodes later McGrutus will be like "This is for you, Papa" as he dons a sombrero and it's a win-win: my partner gets to be all smug about remembering that detail, and I get to experience the twist without google showing me a bunch of images of him in his new outfit.
It helps that the OP community is historically very good about not posting spoilers in open forums.
Incidentally, the use of the word "historically" is a bit of a cop-out, as a big reason I started unfollowing people on Twitter during covid was a big influx of new fans who only know how to enjoy things by posting about them.
I'm very glad you're enjoying meeting Sanji for the first time, but please think twice about joining a fan discord then reposting their art across to other sites with captions like "holy shit I can't wait to see this happen" for some massive reveal that happened within the last couple of chapters of the manga.
This happened multiple times in 2022, and I've only just cleared those parts in the anime.
Every time I open twitch at least one of the 6 Recommended Channels is one of those "girl doing just-barely-not-sex-acts in a thumbnail-friendly way" streams (which the record will show I've never once clicked on), and I have to wonder what the end-game is here
I can't be mad at them for doing this on a gaming website - the website seems fine with it, and these women open themselves up to a lot of risk doing it. Get that bread, and whatnot.
idk it just feels like an arms race, and the optics of these channels being so heavily recommended indicates that twitch is losing it. I've said for years that twitch should just be adults only and stop with the coy "please don't do actual porn but honestly be as porn-adjacent with it as you want as long as we can't make out any of the traditional sex organs in the video" bullshit.
It just seems like losing this arms race would be worse for twitch than giving up on the ad revenue of children - who are also watching these streams because twitch's age protections are appalling. I can see this getting extremely messy as a result of twitch's cowardice.
Razbuten has a lot to say here, and kind of comes to the "idk man there's no perfect answer" conclusion, entirely fair imo. I've never really bought into the "just add difficulty settings to Dark Souls" idea because like, cool, now you have 3 games to balance, that'll be fun to make.
I think it's fine and also good for some games to require more from the player than they initially want to give, and I also think it's fine for players to bounce off of that. "Not everything should be made for everyone" is a bit trite, but if games are on any level an artistic expression it should be acceptable to design them in a way that repels some portion of its potential audience.
What I really want to get into though is the way this always centres around real-time combat mechanics as difficulty - that makes sense, it's the most obvious thing that will stop a player continuing with a game they otherwise enjoy - but there are other barriers to entry that don't get the same kind of attention.
My brother is on his 3rd playthrough of Disco Elysium. I cannot play that game. I know it's a masterpiece, I love the aesthetic, and the writing is frankly delicious. But each of the 4 times I've tried to get into it, I've got an hour in and my brain is melting from all the text. There's just so much writing. And you have to read all of it or you're not really playing Disco Elysium. I'm enjoying what's written, but after a couple thousands words of text-on-screen I have a near-medical need to do something purely mechanical like play Rocket League before I'll even consider going back to read some more, and that could take days to recover.
This isn't a dyslexia thing, it's maybe something of an attention disorder thing, but it is nonetheless a barrier to entry that I could only overcome by playing the game in a way that's either not fun or antithetical to the design.
These aren't so much a coherent argument or conclusion in themselves, but a bunch of axioms that inform my thinking about it.
We all know video streaming is prohibitively expensive, in a way that scales fairly linearly with bitrate and usage. Storing video is generally expensive, but distributing it is moreso because you have to pay every single time it's viewed.
bitrate scales very unfavourably with resolution, and successful youtubers have an unhealthy obsession with pushing higher resolutions because (heavy opinion) "video """quality""" " is an easy metric to improve without relying on algorithms to push videos.
YouTube should never have offered hosting video greater than 1080p for free - they started allowing 4k video in 2010, when their annual revenue was <$1B. They were already the de facto video hosting site.
An extension of the above - YouTube already has to transcode 4K to its lower resolutions as it stands, this could have easily been integrated into their uploader - "Your video is too high resolution for a free account - we'll still host it at 1080p but if you upgrade you can keep the original quality!" Easy upsell.
Hell, they could have even offered to trade 4K hosting for a 100% ad-revenue share. We'll host it, but you essentially give up the commercial control of it - if it goes massively viral you lose out, which would probably be enough to stop people posting 4K video where it isn't needed.
The key point is that they didn't need to do much here, and this is a cost to the user directly associated to the cost to the provider. It's normal commerce.
YouTube's approach to monetisation has never been to link the user cost to the platform cost. YouTube Premium offers nothing that makes the service more expensive to provide, just basic quality of life things on mobile that other services were able to provide for free before Google sued them.
Arguably, being able to download videos for offline viewing makes things cheaper for YouTube compared to streaming a video in multiple sessions and potentially duplicating work, and they have people paying for the privilege of reducing a megacorporation's overheads.
YouTube doesn't need to be directly profitable to be worthwhile to Google, for the same kind of reasons that public transit doesn't need to be profitable - their usage benefits the ecosystem as a whole.
To that point, if YouTube suddenly made $0 revenue, would google shut it down? I'm not entirely convinced they would, because it's worth too much to them as a brand.
Funny to see people doing "Enshittification" discourse (i.e. "is it a useful term? people keep using it wrong!") last night, literally in time with me talking about it with my brother over dinner. He has a degree in economics but isn't exactly on the pulse of internet discourse, so he'd only just heard of the term a couple of days ago in reference to YouTube's latest ad-block crusade, and didn't really love it until he saw it described as "a form of rent-seeking" where it suddenly clicked for him - it's not about the term being uniquely defined, but specifically applicable to the online services platform. He understood implicitly from his expertise what was going on, but seeing it framed that way clarified the true purpose of the term - shitting on corporations for being bad at business.
I get why people get annoyed at terms being used inaccurately - Netflix is indeed not enshittifying when they cancel a show - but that's just the internet, people are exposed to ideas in the form of headlines and consider themselves experts without reading any further. They do this with everything remotely approaching jargon, so if this is the first time you've got mad about it it's probably just because you're an economics dork. It's cool, the 10th or 11th time you see a word of relevance to you get completely butchered, you'll be numb to it.
I think "enshittification" has a particular use in being utterly disrespectful to those it applies to. This isn't "segmentation of services" or "aggressive monetisation", no - you're making your product shitty because it's not profitable enough. Or more likely because it's not profitable at all. That people will apply it to other ideas doesn't really faze me, because it's become a bit of an alarm bell - accurate or not, it'd be good for a phrase like that to be something companies don't want applied to them.
I could go on about this at length, but just generally - people inaccurately shitting on the people who created the modern corporate internet is better than having even the smallest amount of deference to them imo.
The trends mean nothing unless you want to imply that before the change things were already trending towards upwards towards what would become "the post-QI normal". Why would it be upward initially, then downward/flat after? Did Scrabble stop improving suddenly? Or maybe...
The sample is fucking tiny. You have thousands of matches over decades well recorded. Why are you only looking at weekly averages for a single year?
Using the simple uncertainty calculation built into ggplot really oversells the confidence of the trend - 20+ point variations week-on-week make a <3pt uncertainty academic at best.
There are clear high-leverage outliers in the data, which obscure the real story when you focus on means and trends - adding QI to the dictionary made it less likely for players to get shafted by bad luck - it made it a more consistent game, rather than a simply higher scoring one. Bulk averages are far less interesting than the distribution - which the plot could be highlighting with the exact same data.
Par for the course with 538, I know, but still annoying to see it referenced elsewhere.
Responding to nex3's Wildfrost review on backloggd
That trinity of deckbuilder roguelikes is the three games that I've tried, enjoyed, and recommended to my partner with great success. Other games have been interesting to her, but those three have all racked up dozens or hundreds of hours for both of us. I really love these games.
I played Wildfrost a few months ago, so it's possible there were some changes, but while it's easily a top 3 of the genre, it sits in third for me because it's much harder to read than the other two. I posted about this on the other site when playing:
"Man I really enjoy Wildfrost but it really needs that Monster Train "you're gonna fucking die if you end your turn like this" UI element.
A game with this many interactions really needs to help the player out imo"
I found myself leaning heavily towards simple non-chaotic strategies in Wildfrost because of this, and that frankly made the game less fun. Monster Train is a much more complicated game at its core, but the UI gives incredible feedback on what different moves will do, and that really elevates it imo.
I'll be taking another look at it to see if this has improved, but if losing hour-long run to a third-iteration interaction you didn't see coming sounds like a bad time, I'd recommend you play this game pretty safe.
I'm always fascinated by "Guy who plays [GENRE] games for a living reviews [GENRE] game" stuff, because it offers an interesting window into why people might choose to do that for a living, but also why most people don't.
A few months ago when Age of Wonders 4 launched this happened - I follow a lot of strategy game youtubers so I saw a lot of talk about it, but when I came to play it myself I found I just don't have the depth of experience in the genre to really access what they were talking about as a new pinnacle. It's very good, but I'm just not getting why it's amazing - I need to sink a few thousand more hours into strategy games before I can really appreciate the multitude of choices without massive decision fatigue.
Lies of P looks like it might be a similar sort of deal. IronPineapple is concerned that the wider gaming press may be engaging with it poorly, giving it praise while still approaching it as just another soulslike a la Mortal Shell, and attempting to squeeze it into the boxes they already understand - playing it like Sekiro and getting frustrated with parry timing, or like Bloodborne and getting frustrated at how punishing health-loss is. He makes the case that it's a synthesis of the two that requires the player to really engage with all the game's mechanics and consider options at all times and, well...
That's a really "Guy who plays [GENRE] games for a living" kind of thing to praise.
But also, maybe major outlets should recognise this limitation when reviewing niche genre pieces like Lies of P? Elden Ring might have sold 10s of millions of copies, but it's wildly accessible compared to the rest of the Soulslike genre, and a big evolution in something From has been doing well since Dark Souls - it lets you fuck around. Elden Ring is happy for you to become an expert on one stupid game mechanic and just ride that mechanic through to the ending, just having fun in the various glass-filled sandboxes they lay out for you. Sure, it's hard, and learning attack patterns helps, but you can also just go grab one of the dozens of massively OP weapons and adjust your build to fit if you want to cruise for a bit. Or call in some help. Or spam jars, or aromatics, or...
Anyway Lies of P isn't that game. This is the best justification for dropping the Soulslike genre tag I've seen to date, because it's mechanically similar, but the design is totally different. It doesn't want you to perfect the one mechanic it's built around - it wants you to learn every one of the dozen mechanics they put into it, and they've designed the boss encounters to keep exploiting any potential weaknesses you might have in that knowledge. It's 80% parry 20% dodge/roll, and you need to fucking study if you want to pass that test. You will need to be aggressive to recover health, you will need to understand how blocking aids health recovery, you will need to learn charge attack timing, boss attack windows, item exploitation...
The whole Soulslike genre is built on ideas like this, and it's just not very like Dark Souls. If you love From games there's just no guarantee this is going to appeal, because you probably cheese your way through them, and these genre games are made for the freaks who don't. A normal person who sunk a hundred hours into DS3 isn't going to suddenly click into a non-From Soulslike game like they did Elden Ring.
I think reviewing them in the same breath is just the wrong approach - the audience just isn't the same. Lies of P outwardly appeals to people who loved Elden Ring and just assumed a high-quality Soulslike would be a similar experience, and while the coverage is probably better than they could have expected if they hadn't leaned on that reference, it's not going to do wonders for their review metrics.
From what I can tell Lies of P is really good, but only if you're that particular kind of freak.
I've been happy to give Starfield a fair shake so far - it's a Bethesda game, and people expecting some kind of Red Dead Redemption Man's Sky ultra-game were deluding themselves into disappointment.
I had clear expectations - some chunky combat, interesting systems, make-your-own-fun, and mostly terrible companions. And it delivered on that nicely in the first 20 or so hours.
But since then it's been a bunch of roadblocks. Mostly mechanical stuff and systems nonsense that I've been able to trudge through and find my own fun (nailed the third tenet there, Todd!)
But I just did a mission that actually made me put down the controller, lean back in my seat, and sigh "dude this game suuuuuuucks"
Minimised: Description of a mission that suuuuuuucks (it's... a long one)
So I have to Aqcuire an item from an eccentric's collection, deep within his lair.
Alright, this setup fucking rules, I love this bullshit.
You can fight or talk your way in, love that for me. My mandatory companion can chime in and "ruin" things, but you can just talk your way around that as if it didn't happen. Ok fair enough.
Once inside, you can fight or talk your way further in. Alright, there's layers, we're still cooking.
You can talk to some unscrupulous guards, who offer information about a distraction and a hidden way into the vault. FUCK. YES. We are cooking. What's more, I can bribe them to join me should a fight happen to break out. This rules.
Then you meet the big guy and can fight or talk your way all the way in... or let the mandatory companion talk you in? Ok that kind of sucks though, if the companion can do this in an unmissable way, why not just make that the whole plan? Or like a fun missable option if you don't bring them along when they ask to be brought? I'm just not allowed to miss anything, ok. After Baldur's Gate 3, that feels very jarring but hey, different game, different goals, we roll with these.
He walks us the long way down after we sweet-talk him, and shows us the item and refuses to sell. So we have 2 options - grab it and fight him, or fight him and grab it. That's all the game presents.
Ok so I back out of the conversation and walk away, go find the hidden way into the vault and... he's just standing there by the item in the vault. With nobody to talk to, just... looking at the item.
Ok, clearly I was supposed to do this without walking with him to the vault - his guards seem chill with me, so I reload a save, don't talk to him, wander down 90% of the way to the hidden way into the vault, where a guard suddenly goes hostile. Oh shit, so this area is off limits. It's a vault I suppose? Figures.
But this guard is posted staring at the only door you can use, so I cannot get past without a distraction. OH FUCK THE DISTRACTION!
So I set of the distraction, people are fighting and dying all over the place but they haven't gone hostile to me! BINGO! I save-scum sneak past the guard, through the hidden way into the vault, gently open the case, pick up the item...
And everyone goes hostile, magically recognises that I've stolen it, and all the exits are being watched like the previous one so I'm forced to fight my way out through his dozens of guards.
What was the fucking point of any of that?
So I fight my way out, it's a fucking massacre, I one-shot like 20 guards and decide "in for a penny, in for a pound" so I might as well go kill the captain. 20 more guards later, I shoot him a bunch and when he hits 0HP he surrenders... and I can tell him to make his guards stand down.
And my brain goes into overdrive. Hold the fuck on a second.
I reload my save where I'm standing in front of him, about to speak to him for the first time. I pull out my hand cannon, and I blast him in the fucking face. He immediately surrenders, no other shots are fired. He tells his crew to stand down. And I get to grab the item with only a minor bounty that you get with ANY of the possible options.
That's the cleanest solution to this quest, in terms of body-count and time.
So the top-level summary here (this is how I make you go back and read that screed, because there's just no way this is true, right?):
They set up and demonstrate the idea of multiple paths through.
They set up multiple avenues of attack beyond simple brute force.
None of those options work.
You have to fight.
The pacifist solution is to shoot the boss in the face without speaking to him.
My first boss in the stats/data-science space loved spreadsheets - we basically never used them in our work, we did our crimes in R, but he always talked about how good they were at making a normal person sift through and comprehend massive tables of data like one of us weirdos.
It meant that when we were able to do work with Big datasets that wouldn't work in a spreadsheet, execs had a frame of reference to (over)value what we were doing especially when we could squeeze the results into an xlsx, basically giving us a job for life.
Since then I've done a ton of spreadsheet crimes myself so I respect them in a different way, but that point of view stuck with me.
My one piece of advice to cohost newcomers is to understand that everyone one here is trying to post in the exact way they did on their favourite defunct pre-cohost website, and everybody who doesn't share that favourite website kind of hates it.
Anyway just have fun. Who cares if people don't like your chosts. It's just a website.
Rocket League started a new season recently, and Psyonix included an update to the ranking system that, put simply, attempted to redress the ranking drift that had happened over the last few years leading to inflated and deflated ranks in 2v2 and 1v1 respectively. It's well explained by NorthstarUK here.
It's been a controversial move, but I put together some plots from the published data from Psyonix around rank distributions in different modes (reddit post here), and they pretty clearly show how imbalanced the ranks have got over, with D1+ ballooning in 2v2 recently, and collapsing in 1v1.
It feels terrible to suddenly be 2 ranks lower than you were last season when you feel like you're playing well, and Pysonix clearly needed to communicate this better (it was only mentioned after the fact in patch notes), but I hope this shows how necessary something like this was.
TMNF (2008) lost a huge chunk of player when TM2020 released and finally replaced it as the "default" TM game.
Not long after this, a Tool-Assisted Speedrunning tool was released that allowed tick-precise input manipulation with full analogue steering to create theoretically perfect replays, and it revitalised the game into one of experimentation and scientific dismantling of an already well-understood engine.
Over the last couple of years an enormous community effort has resulted in this - a sub 1-hour TAS of all 65 campaign tracks. (WARNING - SOME FLASHING LIGHTS AND RAPID CAMERA MOVEMENT): link
When you consider that the human WR for the final 60-lap track E05 is 53 minutes, you can appreciate how much went into this. Some "been watching this develop for years" commentary under the cut.
There's still a minute or two to be shaved off, but they're into extremely grindy work now - the E05 TAS is where most of that can be found.
The Current strat is to 10x repeat a 6-lap block of highly optimised bouncing followed by a hard-reset that costs ~10s each time, but each time they extend the length of the block they get less time-save from it. Making it a 7-lap block would reduce it to 8 resets from 9 (as you can't avoid the first lap being slow), saving ~10s, but beyond that things get Sisyphean - to go from 5 resets to 4 requires going from a 10-lap block to a 12-lap one, and the effort to add each new lap is like starting from scratch as the techniques used are extremely chaotic.
You might attempt to make a consistent copy-pasteable lap, but you'd need to start and finish with float-precise identical position and velocity otherwise the various bugs and bounces won't line up - it's just not happening.
At that point, you may well be better off optimising what you've already got - you could TAS a whole new lap to perfection to save 10s, or you could improve the existing 6 laps by 1s overall and save 10s over the many repeats. I don't blame the TASers for calling it done at 6 laps for now.
Very cool achievement overall, wild to see how far TM-TAS has come.
Well, when I say "running", I mean I've found a 2km route from my house that I can walk there and back again, private enough to encounter a maximum of 2 witnesses to my asthmatic incapacitation when I find the hubris to break into a jog for 100m. I have never had any kind of exercise routine beyond working as a restaurant KP, so I'm extremely bad at keeping these habits, so I'm being a little posty about it, apologies.
Anyway I'm only a week in so I'm seeing no benefit to my pain as yet, except the part where I'm suddenly enjoying my mornings???
My partner has a job that involves waking up before 6am, whereas if I'm required to wake up before 8am it usually results in me zombie-ing around for several hours until I can justify a second cup of coffee. So I often don't wake up with her, and end up with a sleep cycle a couple of hours removed from hers.
But I fucking hate exercising in public view and live in a fairly well-off (i.e. jogger-heavy) area, so the only time I can go for a "run" (pacey walk) without half-assing it out of embarrassment is early morning.
So here I am, having woke up at 5:45 and made breakfast for my partner, been out for a run, and had a shower, enjoying a fresh cup of coffee and browsing the chosts because it's too early for me to get credit for logging on to my work laptop at a time when I'd usually be snoring before hitting STOP on my 2nd of 7 morning alarms. I'm not even hungry yet??
bought a bag of coffee while on holiday and it's really extremely fucking delicious, so now I have to consider spending £16 on a single 500g bag of coffee delivered from a rural fucking island when I run out.
it's just that good.
For my sins I got really into coffee shortly before Covid kicked off while I was living in London, and when I moved back to Scotland I really struggled to make the kind of quality coffee I was making previously, even with the exact same expensive London beans. Eventually I realised it was because the water is entirely different - London has very hard water, and my area of Scotland is extremely soft, we're talking trace minerals. It turns out that the ingredient that makes up 97% of a cup of coffee really matters. Soft water gives worse extraction, and tends to make the coffee a bit sour, in a way that's hard to compensate for.
I played around with using bottled water, and it improved things but the expense was prohibitive. I found a couple of local roasters, one of which made the most delicious cup of coffee I'd ever tasted when I went into the store, and I've been using their stuff reliably for the last year or so. It makes sense right, a roaster in a soft-water-region is probably making coffee that brews well in soft water. If you're in the area, Stirling Coffee is very decent and reasonably priced. They make their coffee mostly for espresso, but they have a range of roasts that make good filter. Their decaf in particular extremely good.
But I went to Skye last week. And there's an artisan coffee place there called Birch. And they roast their own coffee Aussie style. I liked their espresso drinks, so I bought a bag of their filter roast to take home. As a treat, you see, at 50% above my usual price. London prices.
And it's fucking transcendent.
Coffee Update (2023-09-21)
Just threw the dregs of a 6-week old bag of beans into my aeropress to fight off an extreme urge to nap during the workday, and it's one of the best cups of coffee I've ever made. Easy top 10, blows everything else I've made in the last month right out of the water. It's definitely not just the context, I did a full "hang on does this actually taste this good?" analysis, it was fucking exceptional.
I had a feeling after watching a youtuber play it that I wouldnt like it much, and was pretty sure of the reasons why - I've played a lot of different idle games over the years, and the was VS manages progression is just pure idle game mobile design.
That doesn't make it bad by my standards, it's just kind of an uninteresting puzzle to me these days. That is, there's basically no puzzle, the numbers will be going up, and we have a schedule to keep to.
This relates to my "managed progression in roguelites" thing but honestly is so much more distilled - there's really not much game outside the progression here.
I feel like I could talk in excessive rambling length about this but the pursuit of balanced, consistent meta-progression in roguelites really has stifled the genre for me, and has me continually going back to the GOATs like Isaac and Slay the Spire.
Hades was the first one to really hit me with the Pokemon-game realisation ("the numbers just get bigger no matter what I do") that usually precedes me losing motivation and dropping a game, but it's definitely becoming more common with stuff like Vampire Survivors getting impassioned "GOTY snubbed" calls.
These games are clearly great and I'm glad people are enjoying them, but it does feel like it's getting hard to find a solid roguelite with a new idea that actually wants me to play it for myself.
I finally got round to finishing Forbidden West this weekend, after dropping off of it for 80% through the main story about 8 months ago.
It's a cool game, but one where it feels like they backed themselves into a corner with the scope - they made a really big map and progress through it really falters.
The opening area (maybe 10% of the map) is packed and took days to get through. The 2nd major zone feels really nicely laid out - I happily chugged through this, doing meaningful exploration and learning without feeling like I was letting the END OF THE WORLD main quest stall out.
But that third major bit, far West of the main base, when you're hunting down the last pieces of the puzzle... there's just so much ground to cover and so little reason to take your time because you need to STOP THE END OF THE WORLD. Which is IN PROGRESS BY THE WAY. That last chunk of the game before the true endgame was a real slog.
The endgame itself is very cool though, honestly wish the game had been more focused on those set-pieces than the vast array of crafting, tiered-gear, and minigames. This game needed 10x more "the crew ride off on a mission" cutscenes.
It's a really cool game and one I have a lot of affection for, but the scope and pacing seem entirely off - it was a 50 hour playthrough of a game I really like with systems I enjoy, and it felt significantly longer.
| The final boss
A dragon and gryphon both on hind legs roaring, with a cool and sexy protagonist in the foreground looking cool and sexy and slightly off-balance in the foreground.
not even close
cowardice or discretion, who can say?