Lurker > banananor

i just tuned in, what is going on with this hearing? something about trump wrestling for vehicle controls with his secret service team? what

First of all, you forgot freedom from religion!

ChichiriMuyo posted...

Without the right to free speech you have little to no way to protect your other rights.

I don't disagree, but free speech without the right to vote or protest is pretty rough. You can say whatever you want, but no one in power has any reason to care

All of these are important, but I think search & seizure might edge the others out to be most relevant for day to day life quality

Imagine the government being able to barge into your house and take whatever they want, whenever they want, for no reason. Or nab you walking on the street, etc

Others are more important in the long run, but if we're at the point where every right on this list minus one has been taken away, we're well beyond saving

there's absolutely a ton of elitism in SRPGs

nobody admits to losing or making a mistake. you think people are really gonna restart a 20+ hour run because they fudged one level up? Of course not. They're going to reset and either own it or pretend they didn't

Lightning Strikes posted...

-Make the Supreme Court now independently appointed by a non-political body made up of legal experts based on ability rather than politics.

-Sit back, relax, and enjoy a country that is actually democratic with significantly better welfare, lower inequality, an ability to actually change things, and no political appointees from earlier administrations acting as unchecked dictators.

Also, this is the part where you drift into idealistic fantasy.

Okay, we'll put an unelected, unaccountable, and by necessity incorruptible group of people in charge of our government. That's the opposite of democratic and not possible!

Fptp does need to go, though.

Another thing that gets me is the actual logistics of enforcing these laws

Are states going to form special Miscarriage Examination Units to look through a woman's discharge and determine if it had a soul? Whether it was an abortion instead of an accident? It's going to make the most depressing event of someone's life ten times worse

Are there going to be trials? Are men going to be on the juries, or just women? We're promised a jury of our peers, after all

I just get the impression nobody in power thought these trigger laws through. But the messed up part is that they actually did- they just don't care

My friend has been trying to get pregnant with her husband in one of these states. They've been having troubles due to the quirks of their own biology, and now have to seriously think about navigating the law if something goes wrong. For now they're putting everything in hold. It's just complete ass

Is this the part where we blame Democrats for being unable to get Republican heads out of their own asses, like with climate change and covid?

Is this game going to disappoint if I thought the puzzles in the witness were fair and legitimately fun?

2005 was Madagascar and 2006 was happy feet. Those studios always pull out their banked scripts to match their competitor's themes

But when did Japan's pop culture penguin thing start?

I know neon genesis evangelion was wildly popular in ~1995 and had a penguin with a backpack, but it must have started before that

masterplum posted...

Matches have been slow, so I'm 2-1 right now

Had a lightning draft which was synchronous which is wrapping up. Currently 4-1 in that one where I have 2 weaker opponents to face still. I made a few mistakes on this one because it was real time drafting but have done better than I thought I would! There is even a video replay of commentary on this one

Deck 1:
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/gpy-qa0YU06zEseztg-mKQ

Deck 2:
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/LqJFY2a7zUe9FxglCpfpBw

You might look at that decklist and wonder why I drafted tainted indulgence. That is because It was the 45th and final round and was completely blank on what else to draft

it's been a long time for me- i forgot those things can move slowly if you want!

-hotdogturtle-- posted...

Round robin is the only fair way.

absolutely! i always liked factorial numbers

Spider-Man

great contest! i appreciated the SFF battles, since they caused the tournament to take less than 3 years to finish

the "ideal" tournament might be some kind of double elim, but that would take absolutely forever

I once inherited a system where users had figured out how to get the and symbols into their usernames. The < and > symbols, too

You had users with the actual username <h1>joe's emporium & repairs<\h1> because they wanted their name to look bigger

It was wreaking havoc with logging in on different browsers, and was overall a good time. Apostrophes were the actual worst because every browser wanted to auto correct it to a different character

We eventually split out the login names from the display names and all was well for a time

all i know is that the only legit way to beat games is while blindfolded and wearing earplugs

Lopen posted...

Is it really elitism to say someone didn't really beat a game if they used Savestates

bluntly? yes

i think people get caught up with the negative connotations of certain words, and get surprised when those words apply to situations they don't find overly negative*

you can absolutely say it's different from beating the game without save states, or that the player didn't beat it the way the devs originally intended, but leaving out those qualifiers is for sure elitist

on a separate note, i kind of enjoy witnessing speedrunning communities decide which glitches are okay, which aren't, and which merit a separate category

*the big word this applies to is "ignorant". we normally associate "ignorant" with "willfully incurious or malicious", but its actual definition is closer to "hasn't learned everything yet". "selfish" is a little tougher, but sometimes it is 100% good and necessary for someone to be selfish, and take a day off of work when they aren't feeling well

masterplum posted...

Finished my first asynchronous Vintage rotisserie draft

My deck is sweet

how did it go?

Good final! Only issue is that I'd be happy with either winning

i've been looking for board game recommendations- hopefully we'll get to the games you whole-heartedly enjoy soon!

had my first board game "day" in a while with new people recently. I had a great time with Oceans as well as Western Legends in particular

bulbasaur

Heracross

END TITLE / THE BEST IS YET TO COME
Home Sweet Home
City of Tears

i should revise that to say i hope a season two comes out sooner rather than later! don't know if i can handle waiting 5 years, or however long it took to create s1

It's cool that everyone has different opinions on it

There were things about the final episode that felt scattered or unnecessary (I don't think it was important that the two leads become romantic, or that his wife be a secret plot element.) but I love the series as a whole. I'll give it a lot of benefit of the doubt and say the complex having little to no security is just symbolic of how much power workers actually have if they choose to take it.

I was very glad that the finale seemed to move the plot along in an irreversible way. Hopefully a season two comes out, given how many hooks they dumped on us. Season one apparently took forever to make

my brain always goes directly to an allosaurus

Not here to vote, just to admire box art

Bulbasaur
Cubone

Yeah, if we want to apply the slippery slope fallacy to crimes, we shouldn't convict anyone of anything, ever

It's why laws always have vague phrasing like "reasonable person" or "undue", and why we have juries at all

I picked that game up as part of a bundle recently- I'll be making a similar journey soon!

Sorozone posted...

Finished up majority of the Mako exploration bits. As an overall idea I enjoy this, but these planets are bare bones, empty, copy-pasta building layouts. The Mako itself is fine, but these terrains are terrible. It makes sense from an in-game perspective as they are uncharted planets, but man, this could be so much more.

Yep. Mass effect 1 was mostly responsible for killing my completionism urges across all games

The worlds were too empty and the collectibles not obvious enough

Mimikyu
Scyther

I actively avoid receiving gifts as an adult. When I host anything I explicitly say "no gifts"

But if I were in a situation where decorum demanded a thank you card, I'd suck it up and do it. Eight year old me absolutely loathed doing it, and they lived to tell the tale.

Who is sending you gifts so often that you have to train them to stop expecting thank yous?

If someone was going crazy like that I'd rather just make them stop sending gifts!

Duke Nukem Forever After

it's made by an extremely famous and previously revered company that has found ways to bother pretty much everybody in the gaming zone, so it's easy for everyone to gather together and connect over the tale of their fall from grace

there are plenty of shit games out there that i haven't thought about for more than 2 seconds, but diablo is kind of situated right at the metaphorical watering hole

XIII_rocks posted...

Maybe I'm just old but it doesn't seem like the gulf between ps3 and ps5 is that big

it's not just being old! it doesn't feel the same because the style of progression is different

we won't ever again have the same dramatic graphical progression we got from living through the SNES (mostly 2d) -> PS/N64 (chunky 3d) -> PS2/GC/Xbox (3d with spheres) eras

there have been a bunch of technological advancements since then, but they're more about load times/SSD, putting more "stuff" on the screen at once/parallelism, doing more physics, and so on. i think the next big one is supposed to be CPUs that interact more directly with GPUs, not exactly sure how that works or what it accomplishes

espeon

i played diablo 3 at launch (free game w/ wow subscription deal), so maybe some of this has changed

what made diablo 3 bad includes, but is not limited to:

• horrible, nonsensical story
• extremely poor level pacing*
• single player lag*
• they say war is "long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror". diablo 3 is loooooong periods of boredom punctuated by maybe one challenging enemy randomly popping up every once in a while*
• people i know tell me "no no, it gets good after you finish the game and you can start doing rifts". i posit that if a game isn't fun for the first 20 hours, that is the sign of a bad game*
• the inventory clutter/management is super boring and gets in the way of the actual gameplay*

basically, diablo 3 took out all the good stuff and replaced it with optimized skinner box elements

*look, i understand that those criticisms probably apply to the genre as a whole, but even if you think it's "better than the average diabloesque", that doesn't make it anything other than awful

i get it, it's hard to make a title feel immersive when it is an isometric loot game

i was a huge fan of the original diablo! it had a distinct beginning and end and the characters made sense. diablo 3 eschews that in favor of people who just want to grind loot and see numbers go up again and again, at which point i'd just recommend something like cookie clicker

if i'm wrong about any of these points, please let me know. but hopefully no one is confused anymore

also, i hit level 30 in d:i, and that's where the wall is. the story requires you to level up and it's just too slow and grindy. i'm not playing it anymore. the game was good until then

Waluigi1 posted...

Lol wut

it's almost like you didn't read my post

diablo 3 is a bad, boring game

Sounds like we're talking about traditional party based rpgs, not something actiony like elden ring

It's hard to complain about jrpg style bosses. But I can think of one thing

I guess I'd complain about what I'll call "guess and check" bosses.

That is, bosses that will instantly kill you if you don't do something specific in response to a vague prompt. Bonus points if the ability isn't seen until 75% of the way through a 20+ minute battle. Seeing a vague prompt like that just makes me want to pause the game, go to gamefaqs/youtube and look up what to do

I'd also complain about rng bosses, but I don't think I've ever actually faced a boss that was rng, just one that was rng for my low level or poor strategy

ah crap, i apologize. i must've gotten some alts/new account mixed up

redrocket posted...

Yeah I think people are judging this based on everyday experiences, rather than a, you wake up naked in the wilderness, scenario. Who knew?!

i didn't say anything about being naked in the wilderness

i'm talking about being outside of a climate-controlled room

this topic somehow inspired me to install the game on PC. it's free, i'm bored, and i'm curious to have my own opinion

tl;dr- diablo immortal is good for a mobile game and mediocre for a pc game. i *personally* hated diablo 3 and think this game is better than that. I suspect hardcore ARPG players will hate it and casual ARPG players will have a good time for the price point. It cleans up some stuff but overall has low highs and high lows.

pros

• story is clear and well structured
• rifts are integrated early, rather than saved for post-game
• levels/dungeons are the correct length (shorter) to be tuned to more entertaining difficulty
• doesn't try to bog you down in the inventory screen
• skill management is straightforward and easy to swap
• multiplayer co-op is smooth
• once an appearance is unlocked, you can put it on your character whenever

cons

• cash shop sells power upgrades
• ran into a bug in combat that wouldn't let me activate any abilities*
• mouse aiming feels a little less precise and detects enemies in a wider area, like it's designed for fat fingers on a tablet screen
• UI was clearly designed for mobile/tablet first
• camera zoom is too close

*could actually just be me being bad somehow. however, i think it has to do with moving my mouse to my second monitor while a channeled ability is running. but who knows

WRT the cash shop, which i assume is what most people are interested in: it tries to hide that it sells power. the power it sells:

• "crests" (rift runs with more crests = more treasure chests/gear at end)
• socketable gems
• item trait reforgers

the season pass also contains:

• item upgrade materials
• socketable gems
• one legendary ring that i don't understand the significance of

i don't know, it just feels like a normal, unremarkable ARPG with minor tweaks. i don't see any indication that either grinding or paying to beat the main story is necessary. the in-game chat says problems don't surface until you're at endgame trying to PvP, which I didn't even know was a thing in diablo games

seph i'm a little curious, do you do anything with your poll results?

i haven't played a donkey kong game in a while, has he become a "one punch man" type character?

i only know him from SNES/N64/smash games but it seems like an obvious red win

huh, apparently this kid was playing the secret alpha this whole time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIkdrpsER2g&feature=youtu.be

you fall asleep in 95 degree weather, you're sweaty and uncomfortable

you fall asleep in 25 degree weather, you die

seems like a pretty easy choice

...i guess you guys are taking furnaces and air conditioning into account

Yeah, the avengers were always supposed to be dumb in the comics

The series was a holding tank for characters that might deserve their own comic in the future

The mcu avengers have been fulfilling the role of the marvel comics fantastic four

I think it depends entirely on the type of mower I'm using

Gas mower? The job is easy, feels good to do, and I can sing as loud as I want and no one can hear me. Best chore

Crappy electric mower that runs out of power halfway through, and sputters if the grass is too thick or wet? Ugh

Actual push mower? Hell no

What I like so much about mowing is how concrete the criteria for completion is. You drive the mower over the entire lawn and you're done. It's not like scrubbing down a bathroom, where you might have to go over the same spot twice

Gaming is a broad swathe

If the worst thing in your game is that the choices don't matter as much as you'd like, you're playing a decent game

Speaking as someone who loved ps1 era final fantasy, I was recently introduced to truly generic anime style jrpgs and that is the worst thing

master sword, then hookshot, then ocarina, then boomerang, then metal boots, then deku nuts