Okay the image is messy but the snake coiling around the scales is actually a sick concept.

Very cool! I’m looking forward to it, but it also seems like the first expac that I might not want to enable for every playthrough, which is interesting—I wonder if we’ll see more of these themed packs going forward.

But they haven’t found the facial database and Invenda claims they don’t have one, right? Their story is that the machine takes an image, runs some local processing to determine demographic info about the user/customer/target/victim, and then stores that instead of storing the image or biometrics.

There’s a good chance they’re lying but claiming the database has been “revealed” when no one has found it yet seems like sensationalism.

Edit: “Secret demographic database derived from facial recognition” would be true but sounds less snappy, I guess?

This is the first I’ve heard of Jumplight Odyssey. It looks potentially cool, but $30 for an early access title is a big ask in a year completely saturated with banger games, and based on the reviews it seems to need a bit more time before it is really ready. I’m not surprised, then, that it didn’t do as well as they hoped: if they hadn’t just announced that they’re stopping development, I would have put it on my wishlist to come back to in a year or two when it’s feature-complete, and when hopefully I’m not in the middle of so many other games already. If that’s a typical response, they probably didn’t get many sales.

I always get this backwards ^^;;

I count 7 at least.

It’s worth noting, I think, that the definition of shovelware has slipped somewhat since it was coined like thirty years ago, and I think this is leading to you and niisyth talking past each other. Shovel Knight for Switch was maybe shovelware by the original definition, which was “shovel a bunch of old software onto a CD and resell it,” but by the Wii era people were using it to refer to software that is just bad, but exists to trick people into buying it by promising to be more full-featured than it actually is. The Wii had so many titles like this that it seemed like they were “shoveling” shit directly onto store shelves and calling it games. In this new definition, it refers to titles like My Horse and Me or Imagine Party Babyz. So if they are thinking of the newer usage, it sounds like you’re insulting Shovel Knight’s quality as a game.

The traditional answer to this is to just not let players cast spells that would be costly to implement, in the same way that we can’t currently cast Reincarnate or Magic Jar. There are still high level combat spells to look forward to, like Meteor Swarm.

I’m mostly just surprised that I’ve seen people say AC6 is more accessible than previous ACs when it’s probably the hardest AC game since Last Raven. The chapter 1 boss is as hard as the final boss of Verdict Day.

Of course, I said the same thing about Elden Ring; my friend was trying to convince our other friends that it was more approachable than Dark Souls, and I was like “The first story boss has higher moveset complexity than Nameless King phase 2!” I think in the end most people still found it more approachable, which I don’t really understand because I think it was way harder than the non-DLC parts of DS3, so maybe I’m just looking at these games wrong/weird.

Well, if I didn’t sign up when it was $1, I’m certainly not going to now…

You can revivify party members who fell into chasms by using the scroll/spell on their “soul orb,” which should appear somewhere in the area. Granted, it may be far enough away that you need to survive the fight first.

Whaaaaat? I’ve played For Answer and Verdict Day and I remember them being rad as hell; why were the review scores so low?

I’m excited, but I’m not done with BG3 yet, and I’m also supposed to be getting stuff in order so that I can move, so it’s going to have to wait until next month.

Well, I had already bought BG3 in Early Access before the OGL debacle, and before Hasbro (WotC’s parent company) sent the Pinkertons to intimidate some small time Youtuber into giving back some unreleased Magic: the Gathering cards that he had been erroneously sold early by a distributor. So I couldn’t very well boycott it when I had already purchased it and played like 30 hours of it.

I’m still not buying new D&D books or MtG cards.

Katamari Damacy, the game where you roll up terrified humans into your giant ball of trash and hand them over to your emotionally distant father so that he can turn them into stars, is a wholesome game? I’d dispute that!

I’m also not sold on the wholesomeness of Undertale, given what you have to do to hear the best song in the game.

I mean that’s the problem, isn’t it? What is it about these assholes like Tate that appeals to young men?

I actually love PoE’s inventory management, but I play the game “wrong.” I hardly ever trade, except to grab a cheap unique here or there that enables a build. I pick up and manually ID all the items that could be useful, even knowing that there’s only like a 1/10,000 chance that they actually are. I pick up all currency, even portal scrolls. I clear maps at a pace that might be described as “puttering.” And typically I RIP early in maps and start the league over, so most of my playtime is in the story, where successive characters can pick through my stash for junk my old character was hoarding for no reason, that might now have some use for levelling a different build.

It’s probably my favorite ARPG.

Oh thank you, I could not remember what exactly was in each game. The bosses I’m thinking of must have been in HR then.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided can be played as stealth games, and I really liked them. Note that they aren’t “pure” stealth games, there are some encounters where you cannot avoid fighting.

Also DE:MD kind of ends in the middle, so if you are a story player you will be frustrated to know that there seem to be no plans for the next sequel.

For the better part of the 21st century, the country has suffered from an ambient rage that remains partially inexplicable and knows no racial boundary.

Inexplicable? Inexplicable‽ Has this writer looked around in the 21st century?

I didn’t originally think that reddit shouldn’t charge at all for API access, but after spez’s recent interviews I wouldn’t go back to the site without a promise that API access will be free forever. Is that reasonable? No, but fuck spez.

I find it strange that The Verge didn’t push back on Rathschmidt’s statement about “incorrectly marking a community as NSFW.” r/mildlyinteresting polled a rule change that allowed NSFW content to be posted to the sub; following the change, it would be incorrect not to mark the sub as NSFW.

Do they have a schedule? If they want me to be out of bed and dressed when they come for me, they’re going to have to let me know in advance. If this is a Sunday thing I can probably squeeze them in between therapy and D&D, but they’ll have to make it quick.

reddit: “Please don’t post links on our link aggregator” :(