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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Day one patches exist because the devs continued to work on the game after the physical editions went gold, so the data on disc versions will be behind. They’ll stick around even if the industry goes entirely digital due to online stores offering encrypted preloads that won’t have the patches either.

    Day one DLC usually (fuck Capcom) exists for the opposite reason - the art and asset pipelines finished their work months before launch, so rather than lay them off or have them paid to do nothing, they work on DLC for the last few months before release.

    No arguments about P2W. That and the death of persistent lobbies in favor of matchmaking destroyed my enjoyment of multiplayer games.


  • I’ve never heard anyone else mention Dungeons of Dredmor! That’s the game that taught me how much I loathe total randomness in roguelikes. Without it I wouldn’t have discovered Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm, and a host of others where your skill actually matters, so even though I hated DoD I’m glad I picked it up after TB’s video.

    (And the artist of Dredmor later ended up on the development team of my literal favorite game ever, Starsector. Weird how things turn out.)


  • I followed Shamus Young’s blog in 2007, and kept following him long after I dropped every other blogger. I didn’t always agree with him (*cough* Dark Souls *cough*), but his reviews were the best and most in-depth in the business (seriously, his Mass Effect retrospective covers the entire trilogy and is longer than most novels). He had a way with words where even when he was arguing for/against something you hate/love, you’d still be entertained by the read.

    His death left a void in my consumption of media criticism. I don’t think anyone I follow is as articulate or entertaining as Shamus was. RIP Shamus.



  • Burger King chicken nuggets from the 90s, before the recipe changed to crap. If I had to pick a flavor that I associate with my childhood, this would be it.

    The Angus Mushroom & Swiss burger from McDonald’s. The Angus was the closest thing they ever had to a real burger, but they were too expensive for most people and were eventually discontinued. Fun fact: wages have stagnated yet their basic burgers now cost more than the Angus did.

    Runza used to sell frozen dark chocolate-dipped cheesecake on a stick. They were delicious, and small enough that you wouldn’t feel guilty about ordering one.





  • My brother-in-law once put a slice of bread on my sleeping sister’s stomach, and when their dog (a very gluttonous beagle) started chowing down, woke her up by shaking her while shouting “the dog is eating your flesh!”

    He’s great. There’s a reason he became my best friend after they married.






  • Spec Ops actually did have choices where you could be good (or at least less bad), but ironically people missed them because they didn’t think being good would work.

    For example, at one point you’re being harassed by an angry mob of locals. A lot of players simply shot them because a lifetime of experience with shooters told them that no other input would be recognized. But in actuality, if you fired warning shots at the ground or over their heads the civilians would flee without incident.




  • It should be noted the Irish team had the best catchers in the League, while the Bulgarian team was mediocre and carried by their seeker. And even then the Bulgarians only lost by a tiny bit.

    If Rowling’s goal was to show that other positions mattered, she chose a terrible way to do it. You’d have to be more than fifteen goals ahead in a game that often ends before a team scores fifteen goals, period.


  • I was still running a Q6600 (a 2.4 gHz quad core from 2007) until a few years ago. It ran most things acceptably for its entire life - it wasn’t until around the time of PS4 Pro/Xbox Whatever ports that it could no longer keep up, and even that was largely due to the other components I was restricted to on such an old motherboard.

    That thing was also a tank. The CPU cooler was stock and the thermal paste had degraded and separated to the point it idled at 65c, but I never had a single hardware fault in nearly fifteen years of running it. I kind of miss it.