And honestly I would not be surprised at all to hear a demon in SMT tell me that my mother sucks cock in Hell. And then I’d say something like, “she’s better at it than you” and there’s a 50% chance they like my attitude and decide to join my team, and a 50% chance they get offended and take a free turn.

They are really making it hard not to say “Silksong was the best game of 2025, and it was $20, and the DLC is going to be FREE” every time almost any other game announces its pricing, aren’t they?

I don’t think that’s really the same. The repackaging of Wii U games was because the Switch’s install base was several times larger than the Wii U’s, so they could sell them to people who had never played them before. The “Switch 2 Edition” updates are a way to try to extract some extra money from people who already played the games, but they’re not going to fulfill the same strategic goals as, say, Mario Kart 8 DX, partly because they aren’t going to sell as much, and partly because most of the people who buy them will already own the game and therefore only pay the upgrade price. I think from a strategic standpoint they’re basically filler.

I’m sure they’ll make one eventually. They don’t have anything else in exactly the same niche, and ACNH was incredibly popular. This seems like the kind of update you put out to make sure people keep the brand in mind while your next title is still too far out to announce.

I am surprised by all the ADHD responses. I have ADHD and being able to see all the tabs I’m not using makes me anxious. I have to close them. If I really need them, I move them to a separate window and pretend it’s not there.

I played one zoi through most of the idol career track. The career gameplay is very similar to Sims 4, in that you go to your work lot and try to perform all your work tasks before the end of the day. Similarly to Sims 4, I didn’t feel like there was a meaningful sense of progression in my skills and career. I went from having 0 in the career relevant skills like singing and dancing to having them maxed out in, IIRC, a little over an in-game week, in which time I didn’t perform in any idol shows because that didn’t seem to be implemented: work was always training, never performing. (It’s possible this has been updated since I played, which was in April, or that performing is hidden behind the very last level of the career track, which I don’t think I reached.) Like Sims, you never struggle to advance a skill or have any kind of challenge to overcome, you can improve at anything indefinitely by practicing alone. I started a romance with a coworker, but it wasn’t very interesting: it didn’t cause drama at work, it didn’t affect how my other coworkers thought of me (which was mostly “not at all”), and it wasn’t clear to me if the other zoi had any skills, interests or hobbies outside of work. Similarly to the Sims, I think we were at the point where I could have proposed after only one date, which mostly consisted of hanging out at the park. It seems like, similarly to Sims, the actual game mechanics are fairly basic and you need to invent a good deal of your own fun.

I liked being able to customize items by importing textures. The AI texture generator isn’t any good, but the option to noodle around in GIMP and then put my texture on something in the game is neat. I also imported images to make custom posters for my zoi’s room. There is also an option to turn a photo of an object into a 3D model of a decoration to place in your house or wear as an accessory, which I had mixed results with but was at least novel.

This article is about the big gap in similar games that occurred after the release of Icewind Dale 2 in 2002. And as the article says, it has nothing to do with their popularity among gamers, it was due to retailers throwing their weight around. There weren’t as many good options for direct-to-consumer sales at that time, so you had to sell the game to retailers before you could sell it to customers.

I have so many good memories of playing Rock Band in college. I just picked this up for PS4 for like $10, but it looks like the instruments are going to cost an arm and a leg…

I thought I knew which study this was talking about, and I was going to say “Yes, it’s to help with situations where surgical intervention is needed to put the bone back together” but I went and found the article I read and that one was a team of American and Korean scientists, so I actually don’t know about the Chinese one. I assume it’s the same idea, that it’s for use in surgical situations.

The one I thought it was talking about was this one, which is a cool idea but still has some kinks to work out.

There is a section in this video where he talks about game elements he thinks are “bullshit” and I don’t know if I agree about any of them. But I will also admit that playing NetHack at an early age, where

You fall into a spiked pit! The spikes were poisoned! The poison was deadly! You have died. Do you want your possessions identified?

was a completely normal and expected way to lose a run, may have warped my sense of what counts as a fair game mechanic. ^_^;;

What’s unfair about getting booped into spikes? That’s a classic video game death!

They’re not saying they’re tricked that it’s real, they’re saying that after taking off the headset the real world also doesn’t feel real. The feeling of things being wrong persists after removing the headset.

I’m not saying they definitely weren’t cheating, but I have definitely hit some shots in my time that seemed impossible. If you fire enough rockets at corners that you think someone might come around, or in games with snipers that penetrate cover, take blind guesses through walls, you’re going to get lucky eventually.

Edit to add: just saying, the line is blurry indeed. But I think if I got kicked over it, I’d be a good sport about it! “Got kicked for cheating because I was too l33t” would be such a good story. I’m sure some people have had it happen.

He absolutely would have sold your data if there were any buyers for it. Microsoft was still a terrible company in the Clippy era, there just were fewer opportunities to be terrible in this particular way at the time.

These lists of red flags make me feel like I must be a replicant. I wrote a comment just like that one, em dash and all, on a different site just the other day, with my own organic brain!

My first instinct was to use an em dash instead of that last comma, but it seemed too on the nose.

Oh cool, I guess I just didn’t see it!

With regard to vehicle combat, I find it very strange that the very first NPC we meet has a man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher, but there don’t seem to be any anti-vehicular weapons that players can use.

Or at least I think there aren’t; I’m not nearly as far as you are, but I looked ahead in the research tab and didn’t see any.

The videogamey parts are really funny to me. I laughed my ass off when I saw Thufir Hawat standing around in the heat outside the Leto residence in Arrakeen because I guess players have to talk to him at some point, and the interior of the residence doesn’t exist in the game, so he has to stand around under an awning in the parking lot like a valet or something.

I am about 4-ish resource tiers in out of 7-ish or so, and I don’t feel like it is especially grindy by the standards of survival crafting games. There is obviously some grinding for resources, but there is also a good amount of exploring and doing quests, during which you can pick up a lot of the things you need. Getting through the iron tier was a little bit long because you don’t have access to a large vehicle inventory yet at that point, but I also took that time to reveal a bunch of the map, clear out bandit camps, etc. so it didn’t become too monotonous. There are a good variety of secondary resources that will keep you visiting different kinds of locations (wrecked ships, old mining operations, etc.) so that even if you just want to farm resources, you won’t just be spending all your time running between ore nodes.

If your friends would be playing together, they could also do things more efficiently by sharing bases so that they don’t each have to build their own infrastructure, and eventually you get access to a mining buggy that is faster to operate with two players (a solo player has to switch between the driver and mining laser seats).

The kids are alright.