Yeah, parrying needs serious work. I don’t think I’ve been able to make it happen even once.

Everwind is fantastic. Fixes just about every complaint I have about Minecraft, and I say that as someone who bought Minecraft back in alpha. There are things that could be improved, but even where I think there’s room for improvement the baseline always seems to be “It’s already better than Minecraft”. For example I really feel like the combat could do with a dodge mechanic and harsher stamina management, but that’s based on comparing it to stuff like Dark Souls. Even in its current state it absolutely clowns on Minecraft’s combat.

The artstyle is lovely, the building and crafting feels really good, the range of furniture and decorations you can build is massive, and you get to build and fly an airship. And that’s not an afterthought, it’s a core part of the game and feels really, really good.

The UK - along with several US states - is enforcing a bunch of age verification bullshit to “protect the children.” Not that the tech companies have pushed back on this in the slightest; they love that it let’s them collect more data on users. But they couldn’t get away with it if it wasn’t a legal requirement.

This is an obscure one, and not high on most people’s lists, but my personal favourite PS2 game is Steel Lancer International, a game where you build mechs and take them into arena battles in a post-apocalyptic future.

+1 for Burnout 3. That’s a series that desparately needs a new entry.

Zone of the Enders was phenomenal.

Ah yes, single player open world Helldivers.

Absolutely amazing game. Just Cause kind of captured some of the same energy, but never quite there. There’s nothing quite like being able to deploy cluster bomb strikes at will.

Alright, you just sold me on borg backup. Well done.

“I mean, they can’t get any worse, right?”

Spoiler alert: They can.

Don’t buy anything from EA, ever again.

This is, just to be clear, not remotely how copyright works.

By that logic, I could decide that movie studios have to opt out of me watching their movies for free, and if they don’t then it’s legal for me to pirate them. See how insane that sounds?

Copyright is automatic and presumptive, and takes effect without any action on the behalf of the holder (this is distinct from trademarks, which have to be actively defended). There is no such thing as “opt out” use of copyrighted works.

Embracer have never done anything ethical or sustainable in their entire existence. I really don’t think they’re going to start now.

Well now I kind of want to see that.

It’s a tabletop RPG, not a video game.

Dread is legitimately one of the best horror RPGs ever created.

For those who don’t know, it’s a game of “Final girl” / “Cabin in the woods” style horror where terrible things happen to a group of people. The only mechanic the game has is a Jenga tower. Every time you want to do a risky action, you pull a brick. If the tower falls, something really bad happens. No other game has ever quite created such a perfect feeling of steadily mounting tension and… well… dread.

But what constitutes “RPG elements?” Because most of the time that seems to mean “crunchy stats”, which has absolutely nothing to do with “Roleplaying.” I’ve seen Call of Duty described as having “RPG elements” because you unlock perks.

Your average visual novel is more of a roleplay experience than half the CRPGs I’ve played. If reviewers mean “There’s very little player choice or input and you don’t really get to feel like you’re embodying a character” then yeah, that’s a valid criticism. If their complaint is that they didn’t get to put enough dots next to things, I’m not really sure how that’s a problem.

From what little I know of the way Japanese humour works, there’s a decent chance this is all just a bit. There was a guy in Japan who married a different kind of virtual girlfriend not that long before LLMs hit the mainstream, and I heard from a few different Japanese people that he was almost certainly doing it as a joke. Apparently Japanese humour is very, very deadpan and they love seeing people really commit to the bit.

This is very obviously step one in a plan to kill apps like alternative YouTube clients that block ads, just like the Manifest V3 rollout was intended to kill ad blockers in Chrome. Once they have everyone using this verification system, then they can just arbitrarily deverify anything that contravenes whatever new acceptable usage policy they just made up.

The problem, as always, is that parents don’t want to put the work into educating their children, they want the government to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. And that’s what gets you half assed solutions like this.

I have to support a remote client that uses Starlink. It’s a nightmare. We can deal with slow connections, we can deal with bad ping, but with Starlink what we get is the entire connection dropping every minute or so, and coming back up a short while later. It’s unbelievably bad.

Basically everything can be set through server / game rules. How do zombies work (speed, strength, toughness, hearing, vision, nocturnal or not, memory, intelligence, etc), how does the virus work, loot availability, XP gain, how long its been since the outbreak, whether power and water should shut off at some point, and so many other things. And that’s all without even touching a single mod. It’s incredibly versatile.