It says “reviewed in the United Kingdom”.

I have legitimately never used the orbital laser thing. Every time I get one I hold onto it for ‘when the situation is really dire’ but never end up using it.

Against the Storm.

Its a ‘roguelike’ colony builder where you’re basically starting a colony as quick as you can, then once it starts to get established and run well, you leave and move onto the next one.

I was thinking it was something closer to a city builder where you’re managing something from start to finish and didn’t expect to like the roguelike aspect but I think it works well.

Its just got a neat little art style, a bunch of fantasy races with particular quirks, strange biomes with pros/cons, and has a bunch of lore tidbits sprinkled throughout.

I tend to play on easy mode now.

If I am being honest, I ‘think’ there’s a part of Rimworld’s gameplay that I like and another section I don’t like as much, so now I find myself setting up mods and special difficulty modifiers to work towards whatever this other gameplay style is.

Also it doesn’t help that many mods (though quite cool) are semi-unbalanced and raids are based on your colony’s financial status - Which leads to the default difficulty settings being way overdone.

I think for 95% of Nintendo first party games, they’ll be a kid’s (or someone trying out new genres) first introduction to the genre or play style with added depth/challenge for people that are older/more experienced.

When you consider Luigi’s Mansion as someone’s first horror game, Mario Kart as someone’s first racing game, BoTW as someone’s first open world survival game, or Pokemon as someone’s first RPG - Looking at this ‘aimed at a new player’ angle, then their design and accessibility decisions make a lot more sense, and that generally makes the game popular because its so easy to play.

And of course a popular game is influential.

That also being said, post-BoTW, the glider has become pretty much a staple for the genre. I don’t think it was the first game to do it but you can definitely tell that many games copied BoTW’s implementation.

In my own experience, if you pick up another language but don’t use it on an at least a semi-regular basis, your skills in it get real rusty real fast.

In this particular screenshot, it looks like its an unfortunate case of lighting.

Sort of - I made a janky multiplayer game where a few players were shapeshifters and could turn into objects they found in the level, and the remaining players had to try and hunt down all the shapeshifters with firearms. The shapeshifters could only melee so the goal was to blend in as something and wait for the hunter players to walk by before you bop them. It was popular with my friends during testing but I didn’t realize it was potentially an actually good idea and thought they were just being nice.

I don’t think it was a totally original idea within the game space (I think CS 1.6 had something similar?), but at the time , it was one I personally had never seen before.

It was a few years later when Garry’s Mod had a ‘prop hunt’ mode that exploded and then I realized I kind of missed a big opportunity. That being said the game I had (poorly) constructed had similar base ideas but was very ultimately very different so even if it managed to hit it big, it wouldn’t have been the same thing really.

I like these vibes.

Yeah I think that being such a high number too got some looks.

The same thing happened with small time YouTubers, Pinterest, etc. As soon as there is a ‘potential’ to make millions, people started shifting gears and progressing towards what appeared to be a money making formula, which fundamentally changed the vibe and attitude of the community.

This is a weird one, but there’s been a definite shift in indie game development.

Before Steam Greenlight/Direct and Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace and whatever, there wasn’t a huge emphasis on trying to get money out of a game project. I’d speculate most indie (and modders) dev’s goals at the time were to make stuff and hope it was cool enough to show to a studio as a portfolio piece and get hired, as self-publishing was rather difficult at the time.

A lot of conversation and discussion about game dev at the time was just trying out new things or learning how stuff worked and so it was a generally chill environment.

But after the success of things like Braid on the Xbox or Minecraft (when it first released) on the PC, there was a huge direction change into avoiding working for a big studio altogether and getting into self-publishing to make the big bucks. Now its generally considered strange to make something just to make something and not have a community or dev logs or self-promotion.

Its somewhat made me avoid some development communities and I find that kind of frustrating.

If you glance over at Mastodon, there are absolutely content creators and people trying to self-promote. I suppose they do here too on Lemmy/PieFed, but its just not as well seen.

I don’t necessarily see it as a problem though if its relevant to the community and its something you can choose to disengage with… And also if the person posting it isn’t aggressively spamming every relevant community.

Do the prosthetics make it much more difficult to act in, or does it actually help you get into the role?

Dogs generally have a good sense if something is wrong or if someone is being aggressive towards you.
You don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) make a dog “mean”, he’s perfectly capable of it if he feels something is up.

I was specifically thinking of books with sexual violence, suicide, or promoting toxic behavior, and even then it does go down to the book’s context.

It sounds kind of ridiculous but this is actually pretty smart. I’d prefer to know what my kids are diving into and maybe set up guardrails or at least warnings if something they were interested in was funky.

My phone.

I broke the screen and had to deal without it for a week. I didn’t realize how often I’d flip it out and start scrolling every moment of downtime I had until I couldn’t do that anymore.

After a few days of that I started to wonder what was so important to catch up on every 15 minutes.

I’d probably argue games that ‘can’ do this well is JRPGs because they tend to be a slow burn and have a lot of small side conversations that are not directly plot related, which allows the characters and relationships to get fleshed out.

The ones that immediately come to mind are FF 8/9/10 but I’m certain there are others.

In games where the romance is like a mechanic and not a part of the story? Hmm that’s a tougher question because I think mechanics/gameification tend to ruin the human part of relationship building.

Alright so at an old job it was pretty windy and I was pulling into the parking lot when a tree branch snapped off and hit a power line, leaving the line on the ground right in the middle of the lot.

I sort of angled my car (a decent ways away from the downed line) to block anyone from driving into/over it and asked to see if the building maintenance guy could put out some cones or barriers or something until the electric company could look at it.

The maintenance guy walks out, sees the downed line, and picks it up. Then proudly proclaims it must not be connected to the grid, otherwise he’d be dead.

I have traditionally, with the player’s permission (important and key step!), tie their backstory into the plot by really just asking a bunch of questions.

Ok so you were at magic school but got expelled, why is that? Did you have friends or rivals at this magic school? Etc.

This works for them because they tend to flesh out their character more as they describe what they’ve been through. It works for me because it gives me people/places/things I can tie into my own half-written campaign. They may not have the details nailed out and this is good because you can fill in the blanks with pieces from the campaign that you have.

I usually do this as a little one-on-one while they’re doing character creation.

Now if you have a good player dynamic and you want to get fancy with it, you can tie their backstories together by incorporating details from other players backstories. Not something adversarial like one player having murdered another’s parents, but something that builds player context and allows them to flesh out their own characters naturally during the story.