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.

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.

The battle pass from Genshin/Star Rail boggles the mind. You have to grind like crazy or play almost every day to complete it, and the majority of the rewards are character and weapon advancement materials. You know, something you’d usually have to grind for.

Escape the grind through more grinding.

Oh, and you only get 1/6 of the battle pass rewards as a F2P player. It’s ten bucks to unlock the majority of the rewards. And the headline feature, the weapon/star cone you unlock at tier 30 (only it you pay, naturally), is easily outclassed by stuff you’ll get as a F2P player.

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 (Albedo’s evil twin says hello).

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.

He’s “Sir Keir Starmer” or “Sir Keir”.

Oh, so when you say it it’s alright, but when we say it “it’s called football”. Double standards much?

He’s excellent, but I’ll stress the “not a review” part. He’s hilarious but you usually won’t get a good look at the games from watching his videos. He’ll often take a single mechanic and spend the entire video breaking the game in half using it, which means he won’t show 90% of the game’s content or how it normally plays.

What’s the translation of the previous “antelope/ant eloping” pun? I can’t imagine that works in other languages.

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.

They released an excellent announcement trailer parodying the concept of announcement trailers three years ago. I haven’t seen a single thing about it since.

If Republicans were Batman they’d ally with the people who killed his parents if it meant getting what they want.

Joe Chill came from humble origins and did more to eliminate the billionaire class than anyone before or since. He’s clearly a lefty! /s

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 a similar reason - the art and asset pipelines finished their work months before launch, so rather than lay them off or pay them to do nothing, the studios have them 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.

I actually find people that are usually considered a 10/10 to be less beautiful than a solid 7.

This is more common than you might think. There’s a reason “the girl next door” is one of the most popular archetypes.