Given how many systems NMS has and how disconnected they often feel from one another, taking a more focused approach might work out better for the game.

Dark Souls as well.

This reminds me of a post where someone hooked a dead spider up to a syringe and used it as a grabber. A spider’s musculature is hydraulic so the legs would curl and uncurl as the syringe was pressed.

Definitely one of the creepier things I’ve casually stumbled upon.

Edit: Behold, necromancy! (time-stamped video)

This kind of game becoming successful would have been impossible before Steam. In the old days the brick-and-mortar stores would refuse to stock any game that was even remotely controversial in content or age rating. Steam has been hands-off regarding what they allow outside of things that are illegal (or, recently, that their payment processors disapprove of - if you want to talk about influential monopolies that shouldn’t exist…).

San Andreas and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion were even pulled off of store shelves temporarily due to their age ratings being adjusted. Places like Walmart are a hundred times worse gatekeepers than Valve has proven to be.

Relevant XKCD.

“Pleased”

I hear homing pigeons are pretty good at location lookup. Maybe that old IP-over-pigeon RFC is worth a second look?

Isn’t Shelob a spawn of Ungoliant, the closest thing Tolkein’s legendarium had to a Lovecraftian Elder God?

Miyazaki’s foot fetish couldn’t be contained. He needed a sexy lady with eight legs to satisfy him.

And you have to smack his hand until he stops discharging, even.

His former long-time friends such as Michael Cohen say he doesn’t have a sense of humor. At all.

Which makes it all the more galling when every insane thing he says is laughed off as “just a joke” - he means every word.

The White House Correspondent’s Dinner used to serve this purpose, with a headline speaker gently roasting the President and staff (or not-so-gently, as was the case when they had Stephen Colbert host for George W. Bush and he spent half an hour viciously mocking Bush directly to his face).

The Correspondent’s Dinner was neutered when Trump came into office. Not only can Trump not stand being the butt of even the most mild joke, but Seth Meyers’ jokes about Trump at one of Obama’s dinners are the root cause of why he hates him so much, and his go-to response is to destroy anything even vaguely associated with whatever humiliates him.

Osloboros.

I get it. Anime noises killed my interest in the Final Fantasy 7 remakes.

Oh, definitely. Warframe’s movement mechanics are second to none and the combat is sublime, albeit unbalanced as hell (though in the player’s favor at least). It went from a good game to one of the all-time greats once they added the narrative alongside handcrafted missions.

I think another cause of early Warframe burnout is needing to unlock the starchart. Its mostly linear design forces you to play several of each mission type to progress, including ones the majority of the playerbase hates. And before we got open world hubs like Cetus and Orb Vallis with activities like spear fishing, hunting and racing, there wasn’t much you could do to unwind within the game when you got bored of missions.

I think the main reason The Second Dream hit so hard was because the game was so flat and plotless up until that point. Like, it’s a great story and all, but the “twist” would have been guessed within moments of starting it if players expected there to be any plot beyond the scraps of lore they’d been given thus far.

Though kudos to the devs for making that flatness part of the plot, as you’re basically just a machine going through the motions until you “awaken”. Still sucks from a gameplay perspective, of course.

That would be an interesting conversation.

On a completely unrelated note, they no longer have access to an army of mercenaries to send after anyone who’s wronged them, right?

Explanation: The Habsburgs were a powerful historical dynasty, though nowadays they mostly serve as a warning about the dangers of inbreeding. Their later members are known for their facial deformities, chiefly the Habsburg jaw.

Meanwhipe, pugs are a breed of dog that have been deliberately bred for severe facial deformities that are usually considered cute. They are an incredibly popular breed despite the many health complications caused by their shortened jaw and nonexistent muzzle, including difficulties with basic tasks such as eating and breathing.

(Attempting to channel the style of @PugJesus@piefed.social with this explanation, as is only proper for a post discussing both history and pugs!)

They also snatched up HiFi Rush after Microsoft’s idiocy. They’d better not screw up the sequel!

This reminds me of a story someone posted about learning Japanese while playing the Yakuza games, only to be told by a native speaker that while their pronunciation was great, they spoke like a thug/delinquent.

It makes me wonder if any foreign speakers learned English from Mafia movies and speak with a stereotypical mob accent as a result.