Jagged Alliance 2 (especially with the 1.13 mod) is the most ludicrously detailed tactical RPG you’ll ever find. It can be a nightmare to actually play until you spend many, many hours learning all its systems, but nothing else comes close immersion-wise. You can customize every mercenary’s loadout down to individual weapon attachments, capturing different parts of the map gives bonuses that actually make sense (like being able to ship in weapons once you’ve taken the airport), you can train militias to hold onto captured sectors for you, and you can even use the in-game internet to send flowers to the main villain.

It’s also already a ninth level spell, so saying he’ll cast it at level nine is meaningless and a failed attempt to establish nerd cred.

Steam is banned in Vietnam because it couldn’t/wouldn’t comply with their restrictive content laws.

The battle pass removed its daily check-in IIRC.

“Luckily” bottled water companies bought unlimited access to municipal water sources for pennies on the dollar, so fresh water is cheap enough (since they’re piggybacking off of the water company’s work filtering and purifying it) that they see no need to adulterate their product.

Sure sucks for the communities whose water is being siphoned away, but meh. It’s their fault for not being born rich.

China started drafting legislation cracking down on engagement bait daily tasks a few years ago and some games (like Genshin and other Hoyoverse titles) dropped daily check-in bonuses and made more things reset weekly in response. I think China later backtracked (IIRC the politician pushing the laws fell out of favor?), but not feeling forced to log in every day made those games so much less stressful.

I haven’t played anything in the genre in years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that crap crept back in again.

What other game lets you fight the demonic personification of Fox News and Bill O’Reilly?

I know a lot of people hyped up Outer Worlds as a spiritual successor to New Vegas and were disappointed when it didn’t reach the same heights of writing. Obsidian not being given any time to make New Vegas and then missing their contracted bonus payout by a single Metacritic point was brought up a lot before release, and gamers trumpeted this new game as what Obsidian could have made without Bethesda mismanagement. Then it came out and had the temerity to be average, leaving fans acting like they’d somehow been betrayed by Obsidian.

It wasn’t Obsidian’s or the game’s fault that people decided it had to be a 10/10 masterpiece, it just got caught up in a stupid fanbase war against Bethesda and its reputation suffered when it couldn’t meet people’s sky-high expectations.

Portal 2 has the best introduction to jumping controls of any tutorial in existence.

Metal Gear Solid had a weird halfway version of this: you would automatically eat a ration and heal when taking a fatal hit, but only if it was equipped in the active item slot. It was always fun to get an unexpected game over because you forgot to swap items back before a boss battle.

Same here. Though considering how the last attempt at a Dungeon Keeper revival turned out, it might be a good thing it’s not…

At least we have War For The Overworld.

Him being the reason Pence went against Trump on January 6 was a hell of a redemption arc, though.

Except those imports were used by a huge section of code you temporarily commented out, and now you’ll need to manually select a dozen imports to get it working again when you come back to it.

(Sure you could have just commented out the unused imports, but the linter auto-sorted them and you’re feeling too lazy to copy-paste a dozen scattered lines)

I could never get into Stellaris, or most other Paradox games for that matter. I have a thing where I want the complete experience on my first playthrough, and Paradox’s DLC practices are like anti-catnip for me. I can’t enjoy the base game because I keep thinking of what all I’m missing out on, but the game with all DLCs is overwhelming for a newbie.

Side note, I got excited seeing this post’s thumbnail because I thought you were playing Starsector. Great game if you haven’t picked it up yet, one of those indie games that does a half-dozen genres and does them well.

Bric hard indeed.

Aquamail (when it was good)

I’m still using AquaMail, is there some news or scandal I missed? It works well enough for me, but then again I barely use email for anything other than a place for notifications so if they fucked up some other feature I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

I know their attempts at monetization have been batshit insane, but I bought it ages ago for a couple of bucks and luckily missed out on all that. Is there any reason to move to another app if I’m grandfathered into lifetime premium?

Could you remind me what features people were upset about? I stayed away from most of the drama since CDPR has a long history of releasing a free major upgrade a year or two after release that fixes everything people complained about.

I remember the dev diaries being pretty open about dropping features during development, like the RC drone turning from a staple of your kit into something shown off once in a mission and immediately forgotten.

I’d really rather gamers focused their energy into showing support for the developer groups making cool projects, than specifically deriding any works made under publishers they dislike.

The thing about EA is they have a long history of acquiring the developer groups you’re talking about, then mismanaging them into the ground before dissolving them entirely. I know just as many if not more only exist because of EA and their funding, but it’s hard not to feel bitter when many of my favorite studios no longer exist due to their incompetence and greed.

Every major Unreal Engine upgrade sucks for the first few years. Eventually it’ll get optimized (the source is available and studios regularly contribute to it) or the documentation will start pointing out pitfalls and ways to increase performance. We’ll just have to suffer through a deluge of chip-melting games until then.

I wish there was more competition in the high-end game engine scene. Unreal tries to do all of the things all of the time and suffers for it, Unity requires tuning to look good and its management keeps shooting itself in the foot, Godot isn’t there yet and has a bare-bones approach that requires devs to implement nearly everything from scratch, and the dozens of in-house engines that have been open-sourced lack the community or documentation quality to foster significant uptake.

The Saints Row devs are cackling right now.