TF2 was the original gacha game.

If I’m going to put 100+ hours into a game, there better be a setting to mute BGM, because no matter how good the OST is I will eventually tire of it and want to listen to something else.

Grinding evasion by dual wielding shields and attacking yourself is peak game design.

If you’d read the article, Valve says they’re working with anticheat devs to come up with a solution together. This can only happen with their cooperation, if Valve somehow could bypass it on their own that would represent a vulnerability that should and would get patched.

TBH, I kinda get the feeling that’s what most of the hype surrounding the Machine is. People hoping it sells well, but not necessarily people planning to buy one for themselves.

If devs want to support one, it’ll be no problem to support the other. But I doubt devs who already refused to support one will suddenly change their minds.

I wouldn’t expect the Machine to be any more popular than the Deck, which already wasn’t enough to convince holdouts. In fact I would bet the Machine will sell much less than the Deck, since that had a more unique niche carved out for it.

Points of no return and anything else that’s permanently missable. No, I am not doing a second playthrough of a 100 hour JRPG.

That would be the original Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan

Portrait of Ruin

As someone who played later entries first and then went back to SotN, IMO it’s a bit rough around the edges in comparison. Still a fantastic game, but I think later games managed to improve on it.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. IMO this is where the series peaked, perfected the formula and delivered a game packed with several large maps and three sets of bonus characters to replay the game with.

• Puyo Puyo Champions - Extra selfish pick, in this scenario now people would have to play it and we’d have a healthy playerbase again. I’d finally get to fulfill my dream of large offline tournaments.
• Skullgirls - See above.
• Stepmania - I was tempted to say Wacca or Chunithm, but in this scenario Stepmania would be ideal for nearly infinite content, as well as offering both keyboard and pad playstyles in one game.
• Slay the Spire - My pick for casual second monitor content. I’m also assuming the modding scene is allowed to continue, in this scenario it’d suddenly have everyone making tons of new characters.
• Super Mario Maker 2 - Actually took me a bit to think of what the last game should be. Gotta be an endless game, but I didn’t want to duplicate genres by just adding another fighting game or puzzle game. Though if we’re allowing romhacks to count as part of the game, if new romhacks can continue to be made, substitute Super Mario World instead.

Languags don’t get designed in a lab by a creator who comes up a consistent set of rules. Languages constantly shift and change as the people who speak them do. Languages borrow loanwords from each other, then proceed to mangle them. Slang arises, becomes part of the lexicon, becomes passe. Regional dialects drift apart but then mingle again.

And at no point does logic ever enter into the equation. Change just happens haphazardly.

There’s a pair of concepts in Linguistics referred to as prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivism refers to trying to declare a set of rules for how language should be. If your teacher ever told you that ‘ain’t’ isn’t a real word, that’s prescriptivism, and it’s bunk. Descriptivism is just a best effort to describe how speakers of a language actually use it. If English speakers regularly say ‘ain’t’, then it’s an English word. The fun thing about descriptivism is that there will always be holes and inconsistencies, because not all English speakers are necessarily speaking the same way.

Compare the English we speak today from Ye Olde Englishe. Many words are now spelled or pronounced differently from how they used to be. Many old words have been replaced by completely different ones. Syntax has changed quite a bit. And if you go far back enough, English used to be written with a different set of characters from the Latin alphabet we use now. But this all happened so gradually you can’t establish any clear dividing line to separate these languages, there’s no date on which you could say everything prior was Old English and everything after is Modern English. And if you look towards the future, 100, 1000, 10000 years from now, English won’t be the same as it is now either.

As others have pointed out, memories are extremely fickle. Fickle enough that I do not think it could be feasible to have any kind of fine-grained control over what to delete or replace. It’d be a bull in a china shop.

I think the only way it could potentially be done safely and properly is with a computer several orders of magnitude more powerful than a human brain, capable of copying the patient’s brain, running all kinds of simulations on it to figure out how to make the exact changes without touching anything else, then writing those changes back to the host. If we’re talking eventually, that could be an eventually, but a very very big eventually.

The memestock thing started because people realized they could try to make a quick buck by betting against those who were shorting the stock. But the stock was being heavily shorted for a reason, GameStop is a dying business, one that likely would’ve gone bankrupt by now if the apes hadn’t rushed to prop it up. Anyone who didn’t cash out at the peak, anyone who seriously believes GameStop has a long-term future, is a sucker.

Legally speaking, you own the physical cartridge, but you only own a license to the software on the cartridge.

Practically speaking, no one will break into your house to control what you do with the cartridge.

Console manufacturers sell at a loss because they need to sell the console first before they can sell anything else. They can expect to make that money back on software the user could not have bought without the console.

Valve doesn’t need people to buy Steam Machines to get them to start using Steam. In fact, I suspect most units sold will be to users who are already invested in the ecosystem. Selling at a loss would just be a straight loss to them.

Two years ago, one of my favorite games made some very minor cosmetic tweaks, and that was enough to attract a horde of post-Gamergaters crying that this is the downfall of western civilization. Two years later, the board for that game is still under seige by trolls that have rendered it unusable for anyone who actually wants to talk about the game. Every now and then a Valve mod will lock one thread, and then the trolls just make another and it continues.

I want to see The Year of the Linux Desktop™ as much as anyone else on this platform, but I think you’re living in a bubble if you believe there’s any universe in which this could suddenly dethrone Windows.

It’ll carve out a good niche for itself, but that’s really all it will be.