Don’t worry, I like a good double entendre, but when I get like this I have trouble seeing ones that are more like single entendres.
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Finished Assassin’s Creed Odyssey after 175 hours (it’s basically a single player MMO these days).
It was silly, it was repetitive but damn if it wasn’t a Skinner box designed specifically for me. Never found it boring, no matter how many ancient Greeks I stabbed in the back.
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Kassandra is the best. I’m so glad I chose her over Alexios. I enjoyed the hell out of Odyssey but it was entirely too long proving that yes, a game can actually have too much content.
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Has anyone tried End All Be All?
http://bundleofholding.com/presents/EABA
I stumbled across the Stuff! preview while looking for tech design tools a few years ago. I wasn’t impressed, it seemed more balance-oriented than data-oriented.
I can’t find any info on how well the system handles disabled characters.
I currently prefer Savage Worlds because it at least tries… And it plays quickly.
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I have not. From the description it sounds crunchy-rule-based. Over the years, I’ve come to prefer narrative-improv-based games. But I’d be curious to see how it is.
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Just finished Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice - just, wow. That game is incredible. I understand why it won all of the Baftas.
Played the whole thing with headphones as per recommendation, and I have to say, if they were releasing it in VR for the PS4, it’d really tempt me to pick up a PSVR…
And then at the end a VNV Nation song pops up and I find that half the music was composed by the singer of Combichrist 
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Makes me want to re-investigate that - I think it’s in my wishlist, but not actually bought and tried yet.
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Got part way through then hit a glitch where a gate just wouldn’t open.
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Just finished Shadow of the tomb raider. I liked the game for the most part, it was harder than the last two and it looks beautiful, lots if interesting side quests and I’ll still spend some time completing everything before I’m done with it.
The only problem I have with the game is that while they’ve done a great job trying to humanize, not only Lara, but all the other characters in the game, it feels odd being asked to play the part of an unremorseful killing machine.
For example:
There’s a side quest where you have a to rescue a little girl that’s about to be sacrificed by her father because reasons… You save the little girl and then proceed to kill the father and his accomplices only to later return to the girl and tell her her father’s gone away for a while, end of side quest.
I mean, it’s bad enough that we’re supposed to accept that everybody’s fine with human sacrifice because we’re in the middle of a primitive culture, and I know it’s just a silly game, but you can’t just end it like that, It feels icky playing someone that cold.
I just had to constantly remind myself that it’s just a game, I only wish the tone of the game could have been a little bit lighter.
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I’ve only played a little bit of the first in the trilogy, but my understanding from some of the coverage on this particular game is that they actually confront some of the white savior issues inherent in a game like this. Is that a fair characterization, and would you say they handled it reasonably well?
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*** POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD ***
That’s a tricky question to answer. In a word: Yes?
I never got the impression that Lara is a white savior, even if she does wind up saving the world it’s all because of her obsession with exploring and avenging her father, it’s actually hard to sympathize with her motivations because she is selfish and single minded. At one point in the game, even after she believes she got her travelling companion and, ostensibly, best friend Jonah killed, she puts him in danger again because she just has to pursue her obsession.
This does not have to be a problem, flawed characters can be very compelling, and here Lara herself is an interesting character, but even if she expresses remorse at her actions and how those actions hurt other people, the game doesn’t give you any other way to advance than killing mooks and rewards you with even more elaborate ways and tools for killing after having done so.
Because Lara can be so selfish, does not hesitate to kill and must kill without compunction, I as the player can sometimes be left feeling that the very fun game I’m playing would be better if we dropped the pretense that we’re supposed to care about the outcomes of our actions. I mean, it would be fine if you told me that “trinity” the main antagonist organization is evil and must be stopped at any cost, but it turns our they’ve infiltrated what looks to be an uncontacted civilization and is manipulating it’s inhabitants for it’s own nefarious purposes and these people, who are unaware that they are merely pawns in a game, must be killed too. It’s just a game, but I the player felt a little conflicted about this. Lara my avatar did not.
As a game, it’s fun, you just have to keep reminding yourself that it’s just a game when the “story” and the characters “motivations” get in the way of a good time. I really mean it, the game would be a lot better if it had only sketched the flimsiest of excuses for Lara to go out adventuring and killing bad guys, because then this last scene would not have provided context for Lara’s internal conflict and how she really feels about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S5aeerPPHY
Seriously, that’s the ending scene. Lara’s butler may serve her afternoon tea, but she’ll drink it while wearing a leather jacket.
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I don’t know anything more about it than what you can see here, but I am very much looking forward to this game:
I had the Paranoia pencil-and-paper RPG back in the day. It was very thematically on-brand for me and my friends at the time, but I still had a hard time getting people to play it. I don’t think we ever played more than a handful of times, but my recollection is that it was kind of a fun variation, mechanics-wise, from what we usually played, but it was also a bit of a one-trick-pony. We get it: the Computer is your friend.
But at the same time… Holy cow, what a trick!
The computer. Is your friend.
Why, yes. Yes it is. And with friends like these… 
As a faux-cynical, somewhat nerdy, computers-and-role-playing-games type kid, this sentiment really resonated with my funny bone at the time. I loved the premise of that game like I loved Verhoeven’s Robocop. There was something about it that was just so of it’s time (at least for my local zeitgeist).
So my first thought is that this new game is essentially a nostalgia play. And I’d be totally fine with that, as it happens. It was a fun RPG, after all.
But what if it’s not only nostalgia, but also allegory? There might be a very fine line between The Computer and, say, Apple, who really are totally concerned about privacy and protecting your data, or even Google, for whom it’s totally not creepy or ironic at all that their motto used to be “don’t be evil” (as if it were somehow virtuous to admit that they needed the reminder).
There could be a really interesting angle for a game named “Paranoia” to play in the context of today’s truthy, fact-free, conspiracy-theory-legitimizing world. What if the camp absurdity from thirty years ago turns out to be just the thin, but gaily painted, veneer over the sickening horror that is our daily lives? What if it’s funny because it’s true?
I kinda’ doubt they’ll go that route, but in any case, the Steam page says “single player” and “classic CRPG”, so I’m already on board for that much. Here’s hoping they don’t screw it up too badly between now and when they release it.
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Stay Alert
Trust No One
Keep Your Laser Handy
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Can I trust my laser?
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Typically, no. Especially if you are Infrared.
On a tagentally related note, this has been my lock screen for several months
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This could be dangerous. 
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I’ve mentioned Savage Worlds before, but this outlines why I like it and what reservations I have with it, as well as some other criticisms:
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Does anyone know if this is accessible? And whether it has a good story or a good expansion community like the old NWN?
https://www.gog.com/game/pathfinder_kingmaker_explorer_edition?
For me, NWN1 and NWN2 tend to be accessible, Shadowrun games give me a bit of trouble, the Baldurs’ Gate remakes are inaccessible due to flashing.
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I feel like Blizzard has intentionally fucked up their game. Every time they came out with a new expansion pack, they glommed content on at the end, and they raised the level cap.
Every addition of content was designed so that half of the content was completed when you were at max level, and you’d grind and grind some more, getting some kind of enhancement instead of experience points – be it gear enhancement, or reputation, or whatever. But with each new upgrade, they make that grinding content obsolete.
So for Warlords of Draenor, they introduced building your own base, and grinding away to enhance it, but the next expansion makes all of that obsolete and worthless, because the level cap that the content was designed for is just a mile marker towards the next level cap. It’s silly to waste any time building up your base on Draenor because once you level out of that area, you never go back to it. It’s on to the Legion content, which was designed exactly the same way.
In Legion, there are 5 different zones where you’re supposed to do all of this stuff and build up your artifact weapon. I just did two of those 5 zones, and hit the old level cap of 110, and got a quest to abandon all of that, and move on to the next expansion pack. And the artifact weapon that was so important for that expansion pack? They literally give you a new weapon that is more powerful than you could ever make it as soon as you do the first quest for the expansion.
Meanwhile, they’ve barely done any enhancement for the first 90 level grind that every player has to go through in years. There are zones that were once very important to the game that are completely empty now. There’s no competition for the grinding kills because you’re the only player in the zone.
I imagine Blizzard never imagined that they’d be adding content to this game when they came out with it in 2004, because It’s clear that they had no long term plan. And I imagine their goal was to keep their most dedicated subscribers – the ones who were constantly bumping up against the current level cap – satisfied, but they forgot about what it meant for the people who, like me, roll and reroll a new character and replay the level grind from zero to the top.
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I jumped off that treadmill years ago, because all my friends who I might have played with were eternally just a bit too high level for me, and because I hated just sitting around during “dungeons” while someone higher level breezed through them. I filled in the fun by getting the “achievements” for a while, but eventually that paled as well. Since I’m not much of a social person, the drama that always showed up in various guilds had no draw for me.
I had fun with both Warcraft and EQ for a good while, but eventually they both just became more work than was worth it for the things that I found fun.
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