This article is about the big gap in similar games that occurred after the release of Icewind Dale 2 in 2002. And as the article says, it has nothing to do with their popularity among gamers, it was due to retailers throwing their weight around. There weren’t as many good options for direct-to-consumer sales at that time, so you had to sell the game to retailers before you could sell it to customers.

The machine seems to be called “Cashnado Alert” so I think you’re onto something about the touch screen mechanics.

I’m still on Pandora and honestly have no idea how they stack up. I just use it as a radio station on long drives.

It’s a very faithful remake of MGS3. You can play with classic controls or modern controls.

If you play with the classic controls, it’s basically the same game, plus a few new collectibles. The new controls come with a modern camera system and some balance changes to accommodate the increased player freedom (the tranq gun has bullet drop in this mode, for example). You can change between control modes during the game, but doing so will reload your last checkpoint.

So it’s good, because MGS3 was good, but it’s not $80 good. And like the article says, at $80 for what is mostly a graphical upgrade you would expect to get all the bells and whistles… but some of them are conspicuously missing.

I learned up through 12 x 12 in 2nd grade. Some of them were easier than others. I remember drilling with my grandfather for hours to memorize the ones I was having trouble with. The incentive was that if I learned them, he’d buy me a GameBoy game I wanted. I did in fact get the game when I managed to master multiplication—it was Mole Mania, a sokoban-style puzzle game with the gimmick that there is an underground layer you can move through that also has its own obstacles.

He absolutely would have sold your data if there were any buyers for it. Microsoft was still a terrible company in the Clippy era, there just were fewer opportunities to be terrible in this particular way at the time.

You can only invite the vampire in if you’re inside the house. If the judge signed the warrant while inside the house for some reason, the vampire could enter. But in the usual case where they were anywhere else, it wouldn’t count.

I suspect that for people who spend a large amount of time in the house, the quality of “inside-ness” rubs off on them: you can probably text your vampire friend the location of your spare key and ask them to check on your cat, even if you’re not there. But someone who has never been inside can’t reasonably offer an “invitation.”

These lists of red flags make me feel like I must be a replicant. I wrote a comment just like that one, em dash and all, on a different site just the other day, with my own organic brain!

My first instinct was to use an em dash instead of that last comma, but it seemed too on the nose.

Tried to go to an event at my favorite bar last week and it was sold out, so I can’t confirm the issue.

I know the official term is “legacy Umamusume” but everyone I’ve seen talk about them who played the Japanese release calls them “parents.”

I love learning new rules. It’s honestly almost as much fun to me as actually playing the game.

Nah man, the older I get the less I trust adults. They let me be one and I’m the biggest fuckup I’ve ever met!

OP already accounted for social situations where you would expect to meet people, though, and his parents seem to think that he should be approaching people in other situations—like in a store, or on the street. I’d be very cautious about that.

I guess the video games probably aren’t canon, but I think it was The Force Unleashed that “revealed” that Vader intentionally planted the seeds of the Rebellion to create an opportunity to overthrow Palpatine, which makes all the times he or his troopers “fail” to stop the heroes make more sense.

Inspire allies to perform better or push their limits, bolster them against mental damage and heal mental damage they’ve sustained, raise the morale of a group (especially if that group shares my religion). Bonuses to public speaking, negotiation, religious knowledge, etc.

If I belong to a more fire-and-brimstone type religion, perhaps I can intimidate sinners, make my allies more effective against heretics, etc.

I feel like this list has some games that are too new to put on a “most influential” list. Let’s give it at least a few years to see how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 influence the industry.

On the other end, how is Rogue not on the list? The number of games calling themselves “roguelikes” or “roguelites” has been ballooning every year for the better part of a decade now, and some of its ideas have found their way into other genres, especially the use of procedurally generated level layouts.

Edit: Ohhhhh the poll methodology was to ask people to pick one game, and then they sorted them by popularity. So even though I think Rogue is definitely a top-20-most-influential game, it’s harder to argue for it being top 1. But… that makes it even crazier that KCD2 is on the list. A significant number of people voted for KCD2 as “THE most influential game of all time”? It just came out!

So did they not commit suicide, or was Jobst just wrong about the exact circumstances leading up to it?

Ahhh that’s the part I forgot or didn’t catch, thanks!

So this isn’t the main point of the article, but near the end they mention the fan game Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. I don’t know if I’m forgetting the plot of Gaiden or what, but they say it mixes the original game with the plot of Space Jam which… is not how I’d describe it? My recollection is that it takes place in the post-apocalypse and centers around the power of Barkley’s devastating Chaos Dunk, a dunk so sick that it can nuke an entire city.

What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?