4 is also being delisted later this year due to expiring licensing deals. It’s on discount until it’s gone IIRC, but if you don’t get it soon you’ll never be able to legally.
4 is also being delisted later this year due to expiring licensing deals. It’s on discount until it’s gone IIRC, but if you don’t get it soon you’ll never be able to legally.
I second this. Heat Signature is the perfect heist game, and there’s no feeling as good as when you get into the zone and take out or avoid everyone in a high-ranked mission and escape without being noticed. And when you’re not in the zone and screw up, it turns into pure chaos as you desperately try to salvage the situation. It’s great fun.
It’s by the same guy who’s making Tactical Breach Wizards, if that helps.
In a similar vein:
“A silvery thing in another cabinet, like a three-pointed star inside a circle, was made of no substance she knew; it was softer than metal, scratched and gouged, yet even older than any of the ancient bones. From ten paces she could sense pride and vanity.”
From the Wheel of Time.
Gacha games, but surprisingly not for the gacha elements. FOMO events, where you either play during a limited period or miss the event and its rewards forever, killed my interest in every one I played.
The worst are the ones that put critical parts of character stories in them, then never rerun the events. Genshin and other MiHoYo games were especially bad about this.
What? X is all about the passive income and telling NPCs what to do. You play long enough to afford a cheap cargo runner as a second ship, put an AI pilot in it, and tell them to run trade routes in the background while you do whatever you find fun. Your income snowballs from there as you buy more and bigger ships and unlock better trading automation, then becomes ridiculous once you start building stations and producing entire supply chains yourself.
I say this as someone who also bounced off X4, because even with all that and time compression it still takes ages to get to the fun endgame stuff I actually enjoy.
One does not simply wok into Mordor.
One-time pads require no machines and are unbreakable in theory, though in reality they’re a pain to set up and use so people reuse keys out of laziness, making it possible to analyze and decipher encrypted messages.
Security is only as good as its weakest link, and people are morons.
If they refuse to believe it’s a wrong number there would be a tiny voice in the back of my head telling me to make life as surreal as possible for the person they think I am. Make false but harmless promises, spread absurd rumors, that sort of thing.
Tak does not require we think of him, only that we think.
- Terry Pratchett, Thud!
Discworld in general has a ton of good quotes, but Thud! is especially full of relevant ones, being about religious extremists warring against inconvenient truths.
Day one patches exist because the devs continued to work on the game after the physical editions went gold, so the data on disc versions will be behind. They’ll stick around even if the industry goes entirely digital due to online stores offering encrypted preloads that won’t have the patches either.
Day one DLC usually (fuck Capcom) exists for the opposite reason - the art and asset pipelines finished their work months before launch, so rather than lay them off or have them paid to do nothing, they work on DLC for the last few months before release.
No arguments about P2W. That and the death of persistent lobbies in favor of matchmaking destroyed my enjoyment of multiplayer games.
I’ve never heard anyone else mention Dungeons of Dredmor! That’s the game that taught me how much I loathe total randomness in roguelikes. Without it I wouldn’t have discovered Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm, and a host of others where your skill actually matters, so even though I hated DoD I’m glad I picked it up after TB’s video.
(And the artist of Dredmor later ended up on the development team of my literal favorite game ever, Starsector. Weird how things turn out.)
I followed Shamus Young’s blog in 2007, and kept following him long after I dropped every other blogger. I didn’t always agree with him (*cough* Dark Souls *cough*), but his reviews were the best and most in-depth in the business (seriously, his Mass Effect retrospective covers the entire trilogy and is longer than most novels). He had a way with words where even when he was arguing for/against something you hate/love, you’d still be entertained by the read.
His death left a void in my consumption of media criticism. I don’t think anyone I follow is as articulate or entertaining as Shamus was. RIP Shamus.
The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION.
It also made every encounter consist of multiple waves, with enemy reinforcements popping into existence inside your party and rendering positioning nearly useless. It’s like they were going down a checklist of ways to make combat less tactical.
I hope they bring back spells like Virulent Walking Bomb from the first games. That one would poison an enemy and make them explode when they died, and if any enemy nearby died to the explosion or within the next few seconds they’d explode too, and so on.
It wasn’t the best spell, but it fit the “mages are one misstep away from becoming eldritch abominations” narrative and damn did it make you feel powerful when the secondaries went off and it turned an entire room full of enemies into mist.
The power grid does have a major point of failure, in that vital components are on backorder for years out so most places don’t have the spare parts to get back up and running if widespread attacks on the grid occur.
Prey drive is no joke. My sister has a heeler/corgi mix, and taking her for a walk is an exercise in not dislocating your arm whenever she spots a small animal. She’s adorabloodthirsty.
Oddly her other dog, a heeler/pit mix, is super chill with no apparent prey drive whatsoever. I’m pretty sure you could hold a baby bird in front of his face and he’d just sniff at it dumbly with his tail wagging.
Having owned a beagle, its brain looked more like the cat image but with “murder” replaced with more food “not food, but I’ll eat it anyway”.
Dogs think about food when they’re hungry, or when food is present. Cats will stand on you and complain for hours because their food bowl is only 90% full and they’d really prefer it to be 100% full at all times, please and thank you.
Burger King chicken nuggets from the 90s, before the recipe changed to crap. If I had to pick a flavor that I associate with my childhood, this would be it.
The Angus Mushroom & Swiss burger from McDonald’s. The Angus was the closest thing they ever had to a real burger, but they were too expensive for most people and were eventually discontinued. Fun fact: wages have stagnated yet their basic burgers now cost more than the Angus did.
Runza used to sell frozen dark chocolate-dipped cheesecake on a stick. They were delicious, and small enough that you wouldn’t feel guilty about ordering one.
I’ll grant you the Psycho Mantis fight, but the other two are Easter eggs and not the way the game expects normal players to handle things.