I’m a huge fan of rogue-lites. I don’t think I’ve come across any meta-progression mechanic that has bothered me as much as you say.

Hades was probably the most jarring example for me. Mirror upgrades made the game significantly easier and there was little chance of a beginner rogue-lite player managing to complete a run without these. Then by the time the mirror upgrades were unlocked then it felt like I needed to rapidly turn up the “heat” to keep the game challenging at all. I can see why they’ve made such a drastic difficulty curve because they’re appealing to a wider audience than normal rogue-lite audiences (Binding of Isaac audiences would never tolerate such hand holding). I’m still fine with that.

I’ve got a bigger problem with abilities/items being locked behind impossible difficulty. Some items I will never unlock in Dead Cells, because I will never be able to do 5BC (got to 4BC max). Same with Enter the Gungeon and beating the final final boss and extra bosses. In those cases I wonder why the devs have made aspects of the game that the majority of the population will never get to engage with. I just download a 100% completed save file when I’ve made all the progress I could have. I think we should be given the option to access all unlocks after 100 or 150 hours of gameplay or some such option.

Overall, I’ve got no problem with the inclusion of meta-progression (or not). If they implement it well and make a fun game, that’s all that matters to me.

If anyone like getting their hands dirty with tinkering, then you can get inspiration from Zac’s YouTube video about modernising an iPod.

“That was a damn good wank… I must tell the others!!”

Its a community service really. Heroes doing good things for the sake of being good.

This is the origin of the phrase “where there’s a will, there’s a way”.

I’ve spent time with firefighters and paramedics. They can end up sitting around doing nothing for a significant portion of the day. This is the nature of emergency work. If you want someone to be instantly available the minute there’s an emergency, then you can’t really have them do anything else important. All they can do is work that can be dropped instantly (or do nothing). The same applies to any emergency service… emergency doctors, emergency plumbers, emergency locksmiths, emergency IT workers. Business managers hate this because no one likes the idea of paying someone who is not doing 100% work the whole time, but you just have to pay people to be available and do nothing else of major significance.

We will keep in touch grandma… When Facebook uses all your data and voice samples to sell me a subscription to put your deep faked voice into my bedside alarm clock.

This is not related to the solution posted, but may be useful to someone:

My NAS has been amazing for this. This obviously needs additional hardware, but can be done by connecting a USB stick to your existing router. Works great as the middle man to move files to any device (PC, Steam Deck, handheld emulation console, etc). Also works great to auto sync the files with syncthing.

Here’s my opinion on the matter.

Guys, what’s the best Linux distro to install on my PC?

The community:

My opinion on that for myself is that it is better to watch a video guide on a boss to be able to enjoy an amazing game rather than abandon it completely.

The other thing to say is (for roguelites generally) attack power = defense. It’s usually a damage check. If you can’t output enough damage then you can’t really go on dodging endlessly in a major boss fight. The best defense is to be able to put out enough damage to end it (relatively) quickly.

Comics are a completely different medium. This will not make up for poor translations. You’re comparing 2 different things and you need to decide what sort of content you want to publish, then you can plan how to best achieve what you want. In the time it is going to take you to become a good artist, you could use the time to learn English yourself. Decide what you want to achieve first. Translating with comic dialogue translation is going to still be just as much of a problem.

What if we used Grok to destroy Grok?

Why aren’t they called sugar mommys?

I haven’t bought a single one of these. I’ve played It Takes Two with my brother over Parsec though. Where can I collect my hipster certificate?

Cougars are a recession indicator?

Thats one of many benefits. The content itself is still useful. I’ve long since forgotten my highschool advanced maths content, but I know how to think about rate of change and probabilities and normal distributions, etc. My current job is also science based and I often need to explain things to lay service users. It’s remarkable sometimes how far back to basic concepts I need to go to help them understand. Even colleagues who didn’t learn certain aspects of match or physics up to high school struggle more than necessary.

I think even the forgotten material has been benefitting you all along.

I use this already. Works great. Thanks for your hard work on this.

You can rent anything if you have the money. Private plane, mansion, island, whole cruise ship, super cars, trip to space, trip in a submarine. I’m sure there must even be places that will let you use rent/use old military equipment like driving and possibly firing old tanks, etc.

Roguelites have all been great on the Deck. Brotato, Enter the Gungeon, Hades 2, etc etc.