Oof. Wasn’t this the one that was going to have in-depth object customization? I was looking forward to it from a dollhouse-building perspective. Even if it wasn’t great, having some competition might convince EA to allocate more dev resources to the Sims, which has ruthlessly embraced the “minimum viable product” philosophy for a long time.

As a Blood Mage sympathizer, I say we let Solas cook!

Iger was CEO when the project was announced, left for a while in the middle, missing the opening, and was back again in time to close it down. He stepped down in February 2020 and was reinstated in November 2022.

1. Jenny is very popular but hasn’t uploaded to Youtube in a year, so this a big comeback.

2. Star Wars is a popular franchise but has had mixed success recently, and Disney’s perceived mismanagement of it is a popular topic.

3. It’s organized as an Internet-friendly numbered list!

4. I, and apparently a lot of other people, could listen to Jenny talk about theme parks all day.

This is Sakurai’s explanation, and it seems reasonable to me:

“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” he explained. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose."

A while ago I spent 20 minutes doing captchas to try to reset the password to my Steam account. I finally Googled to see if it usually took so many, and it turned out to just be bugged, lmao. Had to reset it through the mobile app instead, IIRC.

Wait this is a real product‽ I thought it was a meme!

Mine is like 50% vids from people I mildly dislike and 50% Vtubers. I think there is really just not very much good short content.

Edit: To clarify, I’m not anti-Vtuber, I’m just not convinced that a 30 second clip from a livestream counts as good short content. The only high quality shorts channels I’m aware of are Tom Bates (who produces Nigel and Marmalade, a series about a tiny wizard and his dog-horse best friend) and Natural Habitat Shorts (funny animations about anthro animals, based on real animal facts).

I mean that sounds nice, but honestly I don’t “progress” nearly as much as I “faff about” so stuff like XP lets me have the illusion of progress while I spend 30 hours roaming around the starting area looking for collectibles. I’m not sure what a real-time effect on that would look like.

But… I like it when number go up!

It’s only in SMM2, which doesn’t allow you to edit other people’s levels. And actually there is now a 3rd party tool to view SMM2 levels so those levels are now exposed as well.

Sorry, yeah, it is intended that all levels are beatable. To upload a level you must prove that it is beatable by clearing it from the beginning without dying, and then clearing it again from each checkpoint (if there are any) to prove that it can also be cleared from any checkpoints.

Hacked levels have existed that cannot be cleared, but they can be reported and Nintendo takes them down. They should all be taken down by now, but in any case if it’s obviously impossible (the goal is completely blocked by impenetrable walls) Team 0% marks them as hacked on their spreadsheet in addition to reporting them, so they wouldn’t count.

In this game you can download levels and see the full level in the editor, so it isn’t possible to make a level that is “practically” unclearable using hidden information. Any things like hidden keys, “passcode” sections (where you need to hit blocks a certain number of times in order to manipulate things hidden off screen), etc. are trivially defeated by viewing the level in the editor.

The red balls are lit Bob-ombs. While lit, they can be carried, thrown, bounced on (with spin jumps), and kicked (when touched any other way), and obviously after a short time they explode. Thrown, dropped, kicked, or bounced Bob-ombs kill enemies and collect coins.

Yes, in Super Mario World the spin jump allowed you to bounce on dangerous enemies including Piranha Plants, and actually the Super Mario Maker version is nerfed in some ways: in the oringal SMW you could also spin jump on certain things like fireballs and saws that you can’t in SMM.

As someone who played 1 and then 5, I was really annoyed by how nice most of the demons in 5 are.

Also that one character whose arc is about coming to terms with the fact that her family is actually broke, when she had built her identity around being rich… but MFer you’re a demon overlord! Your overlord power is mind control! Just take other people’s money!

I don’t think DD1 and BG3 have very much in common, honestly. DD1 was not a game where you engaged in immersive dialogue or developed interesting relationships (well, there was a relationship mechanic, but if you didn’t know how it worked, it didn’t feel like you had a lot of input.)

It was more a game about walking around surprisingly atmospheric environments and then fighting for your life against surprisingly difficult encounters. (It also had the reverse-difficulty-curve problem, where the beginning of the game was very hard and the enemies felt very tanky because of how damage was calculated, and then once you had some reasonable gear and stats the game got much easier.)

I would definitely watch someone else play an hour or two of DD2 when it comes out before you decide to buy it, especially if the action combat was what you didn’t like about Dark Souls.

It’s quite good. If you’re looking specifically for aliens, you’ll enjoy the second trilogy (Brightness Reef, Heaven’s Reach, Infinity’s Shore) which is set on a planet where members of various species are attempting to live together outside the structure of galactic society.

I like Sundiver even though it isn’t very much like the rest of the series. I’d say check it out, and if it doesn’t grab you just move on to Startide Rising. Skipping straight to Brightness Reef will also work.

Very cool! I’m looking forward to it, but it also seems like the first expac that I might not want to enable for every playthrough, which is interesting—I wonder if we’ll see more of these themed packs going forward.

I have seen the music video ad for this product and now I’m inflicting it on the rest of you.

Edit: Ah someone else already got it, I didn’t see their comment at first.

But they haven’t found the facial database and Invenda claims they don’t have one, right? Their story is that the machine takes an image, runs some local processing to determine demographic info about the user/customer/target/victim, and then stores that instead of storing the image or biometrics.

There’s a good chance they’re lying but claiming the database has been “revealed” when no one has found it yet seems like sensationalism.

Edit: “Secret demographic database derived from facial recognition” would be true but sounds less snappy, I guess?

Thank you! And no, genetic heterochromia in dogs is harmless. :)