I went back and forth on it. The campaign is just the meta progression, the missions are the randomized element. Comparing to Darkest Dungeon for example, it’s really similar in structure.

Ok, sticking to roguelites, here’s some other options:

Deckbuilding Style: Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Griftlands, Balatro

Survivor/Bullet-Heaven Style: Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Deep Rock Galactic Survivor

Realtime Combat (I’d put Hades/Dead Cells here): Hand of Fate 1/2, Zero Sievert, Wall World, Rogue Legacy 1/2, Risk of Rain 1/2, Heroes of Hammerwatch

FPS: Gunfire Reborn, Roboquest

Turn-based/Pausable: FTL, The Last Spell, Loop Hero, Dungeons of Dredmor, Darkest Dungeon 1/2, Backpack Hero, Into the Breach, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2

Sure I missed some other good stuff.

Not a roguelite/roguelike but if you liked the combat style of Hades, check out Bastion.

For public ones, depending on what people started getting, it’d really strain the AIs. You could go in like 1 or two ways, probably different people getting both.

Something very uniform but still unique, like a QR code kind of deal, AIs would hallucinate the crap out of that. Or abstractions, like people do to change the way the shape of their face to combat facial recognition.

For private ones, just don’t ever get it photographed, any image showing that area without it would be probably fake.

I am waiting for people to start getting both public and hidden authentication tattoos, so they can prove generative images aren’t actually them.

I’m not sure why light would matter, obviously if you’re flying you’d use wind over solar, there’s so much wind flowing around the planes it’d be a much more available and reliable source of power.

/s

For something I’m paying for, I want no ads, recommended or otherwise.

For something I get for free, if it’s easily skippable/ignorable, I don’t really care, I’ll skip it or mute the tab or whatever. If I can’t, I’d rather have a like sniper level targeted ad (use all the data!), really try to show me something I’ll care about (there was some like 10 minutes ad about the science behing glass by one of the guys from MythBusters, I watched the whole ad, it was great). The demographic level targeted ads are my 2nd least favorite, mostly because it feels like I usually need to suffer through what is a targeted ad but if they bothered to exclude some of the audience based on some data points (looking at you luxury car ads, it’s just never going to happen), they’d know I’m a bad target, I’d rather some generic add over those. My least favorite ad though, when I get an ad in a language I don’t even understand, like at least match my primary language, wasting everyone’s time…

There are women who intentionally choose to be a single parent. Like they’re single, they get a sperm donor, have a kid. It’s not some insane thing. Kids should have a supportive and caring environment, whomever raises them. Not every kid with a single caregiver is neglected, nor is every kid with 2 or more caregivers properly cared for.

It’s more about the hardware/firmware/software uniformity and reliability for some people. My friend is in this camp, he doesn’t want to need to manage a PC, he just wants a box he can reliably turn on and use.

Gotta crank up that dystopia meter.

This is slowly moving toward having Content On Demand. Imagine being able to prompt your content app for a movie/series you want to watch, and it just makes it and streams it to you.

If by AI, you mean the things people are making today and calling AI, no, they’re all basically powerful regression algorithms. They can be strong tools for people to use to solve complex problems. Anything a program does will be based on what it was programmed to do, at best it will find novel things based on being programmed to look for novel things randomly and people will test and confirm those guesses. They already kind of do this for some medical purposes. Is trying an uncountably large number of randomized guesses and giving a probability for success based on historical data intelligent?

Could a true AI exist like we see in SciFi, maybe?

Other people had the capability to do what Copernicus did, but lacked desire/resources. A LLM will never have the capability for a novel idea.

I managed to get one of the “desktop replacement” laptops before they got sold to Dell, and that fucker was a solid brick shithouse, lasted like 7 years before functional issues. Heat was definitely a problem, couldn’t rest my left hand on the keyboard (above the GPU) after a couple hours and could probably sit outside in a blizzard without pants comfortably. Miss that bad boy… Shame Dell ruined them.

It’s not a coincidence, nobody wants to live near an airport let alone an international one, the noise level is insane. My grandparent’s house is less than a half mile from the edge of one, and even with soundproofing, the dishes still set to rattling far too often. The airport was basically forced to buy out like half the neighborhood because it was so bad.

While that’s part of it, it’s definitely not “just” that.

Sadly, part of it is that the game has released in a fairly stable/polished state, which is considered a positive in the world of broken releases. The multiplayer also just works with little issue as opposed to some problems of yesteryear.

There’s also a perhaps surprising pent up demand for good co-op PvE focused games. They blow-up hard but tend to fade out depending on gameplay quality. Part of this is the streamer effect, streamers like to play group games with other streamers because it helps cross-pollinate their audiences. Sales are also improved due to group/peer-pressure, if someone can pull in their friend group, that’s a lot of sale multiplication.

I also think that the developers tried to make a game that’s fun. A lot of decisions seem to have followed the rule of cool for this type of game e.g. pal mounts, firearms, catching people, automation of survival elements via slavery.

It also manages to have both a clear and guided progression system while maintaining the freedom for the player to just fuck off and do whatever they want while still at least partially progressing.

My only honest gripes with the game are how world saves are handled (they should use the Grounded system in addition to having dedicated servers) and that I for some reason can’t find the exit button on the title screen so to quit I need to alt-f4, for the rare times I need it.

Nah, this wasn’t an issue with the scanner, it’s an issue with the core design of the software. For whatever reason, it uses different value fields when determining the price to display for an item and the price used in the total, that means this problem can occur for any number of items and the only way to detect it is to manually total the receipt. It’s a fundamental problem with the software and their pricing change control process and a good PSA, the negative headline draws better attention than the positive, which is that anyone could be charged incorrectly. That the store was able to fix it is also good to include, but it is an expected responsibility of the store to do so, not some positive spin.

Back in my teens one summer, I was playing Resident Evil Code Veronica by day at my friend’s house and Doom 3 alone in my basement at night, got about halfway through both but quit because of the constant nightmares. Lost to the psychological damage I guess.

It’s there to get it away from the other categories. Every category isn’t just a game, there’s other stuff like events, just chatting etc to cover any content that isn’t specific to a single game (like a gaming related podcast for example), so playing a game isn’t required you can just talk at the audience. People who make the sexual content were using those more generic non-gaming categories (as well as popular gaming categories but having the game running in a tiny box in the corner) but advertisers took issue with advertising on the sexual streams, so Twitch made ways to segregate them from the content advertisers wanted to pay for.

Like in this story?

Each part of Prime just keeps getting shittier and shittier, this could definitely be a straw that broke the camel’s back situation. Shipping stopped being 2-days every time during the pandemic, returns used to allow for pick up at your house are now drop off at a store. Music catalog is being slowly locked behind Unlimited, and now it’s all station-ified so you can’t even listen to what you want.

To quote my best friend, “If I’m going to spend hours staring at an ass, it might as well be a girl’s ass.”