Is that date important? I forget

FF10 is like a personality test for sexuality:

Lulu - goth dommy mommy

Yuna - good conservative religious girls

Rikku - young and playful girls

Tidus - fuckboys

Wakka - athletic twinks

Auron - yes daddy

Kimahri - 😻

I’m a little embarased to say–I mean I was a preteen boy at the time–but I spent way too many hours fantasizing and lusting over the picture of the Rogue class in the Diablo 1 manual.

Those pixelated succubus titties in the Hell stages were really something too. Kids today just don’t know how desperate we were for even a hint of nudity.

See also, the other love of my young life, Samus Aran.

I truly have no idea and wish I did, haha. It looks like a shorthand for which operation is being followed, maybe like a group theory thing, but I really don’t know.

That would be the symbol\operation called TRUE or TOP or “tautology” which is always true. They’re actually missing quite a few of the weirder ops, including implication and biconditional\iff\if-and-only-if. (Edit: Actually I think XNOR is also the biconditional. I guess pretend like I said “material implication” and “reverse implication”. Fricken booleans man!)

I’m feeling like a lot of y’all. My backlog is already immense, and i don’t even need DLC for the games I have, which are mostly all huge and never ending anyway. Have we reached peak gaming? Are we now making games faster than anyone can play them?

CB 2077 is really good and probably worth it if you enjoy open world games like GTA, skyrim, or RDR.

Atomic Heart I have been having a hard time getting into, for all the commonly cited reasons. The game looks gorgeous and its a fun setting, but you actually spend a lot of time in boring grey hallways fighting the same robots, and the combat just isnt especially great. Performance has been real hit or miss as well (I’m on Linux through proton).

I’m pretty early into the game as well, so I almost didn’t say anything. But even if theres a charm that adds HP bars later, I would be annoyed about it. Why wait so long? I’m over 10 hours in. Why take a slot with it? I get similar annoyances about the compass, but at least that one I can understand because maybe some people like the challenge of landmark navigation using just the maps. There is a skill there, and it is part of the skillset of Exploration (a major pillar of design in any metroidvania).

The yellow tools, in general, I’m iffy about the design of. So far I only have 3: compass, more shards, and auto-collect beads. Of these, auto-beads is the most obviously useful. You need many beads, and they get lost pretty easy. Shards are super common and don’t have many uses. But none of these are essential, and all of them get less useful the later into the game you get. The tradeoff is only meaningful early game, and seems to encourage a balance between memorizing the levels and grinding, neither are amazing activities.

Having the compass charm tied to ALL map markers would certainly up the utility of it, though it’s gating another feature behind both a purchase and a charm. I’ve also only found 1 semi useful trap\red-charm so far. Maybe having more traps and skills that required shell bits would put more pressure on needing them and make the charm that gives extras more appeal for a trap-heavy play style?

Again, I grant that maybe I’m too early in the game yet, but I feel like these systems should be coming together and cohering more after a half-dozen bosses and 10 hours of play.

The runbacks don’t bother me too much so far. I do think there’s some skills in the runback, but it relies heavily on the level designer as well. An ideal runback:

• is relatively short, you should have time to reflect on the boss, but not get sidetracked
• has enemies that drop currency, so repeated runs slowly build you up (assuming you always collect your shade)
• has enemies that train you on the bosses timings or counters (if the boss is parry heavy, put a tricky-to-parry enemy enroute back)
• has a “speed route” that let’s you bypass most or all of the run once you’ve figured it out

These factors make a run both interesting game play and still a form of progression. A badly designed run lacks these factors, being just a slow slog to get back into the boss fight.

My biggest complaint so far is the double damage. Every boss and so many common enemies do nothing but double damage. Why even have 5 HP instead of 3? And it being 5 (and bind healing 3) have compounding effects with this problem. Taking a single hit on the way to a boss actually costs you an entire “boss hit” so runbacks are worse all around. Trying to heal mid boss only gets you “one and a half” hits back which takes a lot of silk to build up and probably is a worse deal for you than just using the silk to power more attacks.

Double damage would suck a lot less (and be a better mechanic) if you had 6 HP to start, or if you healed 4 at a time, or if bosses didnt always do 2 damage. There’s no tension to avoiding punishing hits because every move is equally punishing. It makes fights feel very conservative which is maybe intentionally meant to evoke Hornet as a careful hunter, using traps and plans to take down big foes.

I find the opposite though, she feels fragile and reactive. I wish starting damage was higher too. I had this issue in Hollow Knight as well, everything takes too many hits. Common enemies are spongy, bosses take at least 33% too long across the board. Especially it gets annoying since a lot of bosses so far get spammier and faster towards their final phases, so you spend so much time dodging the same attacks and looking for openings to chip hits in. Skills and traps don’t do enough damage to feel especially useful either.

I also hate, and this is another compounding factor, the complete lack of enemy HP bars. On regular enemies this is annoying (gotta count my hits) but on bosses it feels negligent. Bosses have multiple phases and take so long to kill, it would be nice to know if my last run was just a hit or 2 away from the end or if I still had a 3rd phase to plan for. It adds to the poor perception of skills and traps as well. Sting Shard and Thread Storm both seem to hit several times, around a half-dozen, but neither seems to do much more damage than a couple of regular hits.

Overall I’m really loving Silksong, the art and music are top notch. The DLC for HK convinced me that Team Cherry and I disagree about some fundamental ideas in game design, and HKSS bears that out.

You’re understanding of “gig work” is comically outdated. You sound naive or trollish. “Jobs for teens” like fast food work, grocery clerking, and working at movie theaters have always been taken by people who need “real jobs” and not just teens looking for extra money. So you’re wrong that these careers exclusively for kids to get pocket money ever existed, certainly not in living memory.

Secondly, OP isn’t talking about working the carwash for the summer. He’s talking about Uber and AirBNB. Maybe you heard of them? Over the last decade, they’ve caused massive disruption of the hotel and taxi industries by allowing thousands of unlicensed and unregulated “micro entrepreneurs” 🤮 to create a new economy of pay-per-task workers who end up owning all the physical assets (which rapidly deprecate in value) but none of the infrastructure or investments (which do not, or do so on much different schedules).

Houses being bought up for short term rentals has contributed to the housing crisis. Its caused economic harm to inner cities. It’s a looking part of the polycrisis destroying the practical economy and the planet’s livability. But yeah man, the real problem is lazy people just don’t want real adult jobs, give me a fucking break.

Rich people always threaten this and never do it, because it’s a John Galt problem. Rich people need poor people to trickle money to for services and goods. If they all move to “Rich Asshole Island” where there’s no laws or taxes, they quickly discover there’s also no workers.

Fuck all of them, I dare every millionaire to leave NYC. They almost certainly cannot. All their wealth is actually tied up in business and assets. In NYC. They could sell them, but to whom? All the rich are fleeing right? If the city or collectives of workers buy them, thats more socialism and proof the rich aren’t necessary.

So no, they won’t leave. They’ll whine and cry and then fund police and paramilitaries and lobbiest to try and force their view. They’ll spend millions propping up friendly candidates like Coumo and running smear campaigns.

In other words, they’ll do what they’ve historically always done when threatened.

I agree with the analysis of the east coast, and will add that the South (“Silicon Bayou” is such a sad joke) is in basically the same place.

But I don’t think the West coast actually has all those advantages either, not anymore. What passes for “innovation” is all some variation on crypto, ai, or “being the Uber of $NICHE.” Throw in some buzzwords like IoT, quantum, blockchain, or “smart” and you’re all set to race with the other founders to get a piece of that sweet sweet VC dollar.

The financiers have taken over everything and are going to drive the economy off a cliff so they can scavenge and sell the parts. They’ve taken over film, gaming, tech, all traditional media, journalism, and they’re using the banner of “privatization” to finish off healthcare, education, postal services, and anything else they can convince idiots to sell them. The bankers are winning.

(As a lover of mixed-style and chaos in general, I picked what seemed like the “normiest” option for maximum impact, haha)

I’m kind of weirdly horny for Torvalds making unilateral decisions about long running controversies? Tell me what standards are best kernel daddy.

Maybe next he can ban tabs and ‘\t’ from Linux? Everyone indents with spaces now, debate over.

I don’t necessarily think the MM is intentionality going against AI, they’re just following what drives engagement and the mainstream tide is turning against AI (again, AI winter 3.0, here we go).

However, I did see that “AI causes delusions” article in the NYT together with the very hilarious conflict of interest notice: “The NYT is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement.”

So who knows? It is entirely in the MM’s interests to both write about AI (hot topic, much engagement) and also to make the AI companies look incompetent, reckless, and dangerous because that bolsters their cases against them.

For those who needed some news catching up also:

https://www.ign.com/articles/take-two-shutters-kerbal-space-program-2-studio-amid-layoffs

The publisher, Take Two, laid off the entire staff of KSP2. This pissed off many fans, who had paid full price for Early Access to an unfinishee game that now didn’t have a Dev team.

https://www.polygon.com/news/475635/private-division-sold/

Then T2 sold off the studio to this other company. And staffing up for Dev work when none if the original creators are around: 1. Sucks and is miserable work and 2. Almost never works out to produce a quality product.

So yeah, instead of that debacle, they opted for the Disco Elysium 2 debacle where the publishers steal the IP from the original creators and then fail to ever deliver anything with it. I love this debacle because you get a shitty publisher with a disappointing game AND embittered developers who will probably leave game making or go on to make less involved projects. It’s great they can both financially ruin an industry with bad practices while also tearing out the soul of the medium.

This is very exciting! But I’m relying on third-party addons for both Android (syncthing-fork from Fdroid, itself a fork of syncthing-android which wasn’t being maintained) and windows (syncthing tray). I think my Mac and Linux machines are using standard syncthing, but I’ll be waiting a little bit for the rest of the community/ecosystem to catch up!

Hmmm… I don’t see dbzer0 in the list, I wonder how we escaped? I think we’re like the 3rd or 4th biggest instance, and positive leaning on AI. Maybe @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com just has amazing sys admin skills?

This is great news! I love these 2 games, especially Hexen! Be a lot easier to play them on steamdeck now!

Looks like mods are just starting to go up. Hopefully Jimmy (or a fan I guess) uploads his Faithless trilogy for Heretic. It mixes some elements from Hexen in and is one of the better fantasy boomer shooters I’ve played. Highly recommended when it’s available.