Well, now I can only think of being Sherlock Holmes battling bioweapons, and I fear you’ve set me up for disappointment!

Dis u?

I’m not comfortable with companies using any kind of marketing tactics.

Now, I felt like I was fairly gentle in pointing out the absurd nature of that statement. I even readily acknowledged what I assumed to be your intent, i.e. there are absolutely marketing tactics which go beyond the pale. But, as I, and others, have pointed out, you’re the one operating on your own personal definition of marketing here, which is in contradiction to what that concept actually is. Any intro to business class will tell you that marketing is, essentially, ANYTHING an entity does to inform people of its services. It’s an enormous umbrella, which includes tactics both odious and innocuous. It is as readily applicable to the gal who posts on Facebook that she’ll do your hair for $20 as it is Facebook selling that information to a third party so she can be served targeted salon equipment advertisements.

All I’m saying is, if you say “all marketing is bad”, you need to be prepared for people to call you out on the hyperbole of that statement. Therefore, you might consider arguing the point you actually intend to make (which is good and I agree with you about!), instead of leading with a statement which you don’t actually believe.

Calling you Chicken Little was facetious, but meant to be a gentle dig at the hyperbole. Still, I shouldn’t have said it, and I apologize.

Take it easy there, Chicken Little. “I’m uncomfortable with any kind of marketing” is so hyperbolic, it’s almost parody. Putting the name of your business above the door? Thats marketing. Creating a website where customers can find and engage your services? That’s marketing. A minority-owned business proudly owning that status? That’s marketing. A friend telling you about the great meal they had the other day from a local restaurant? Believe it or not, that’s marketing.

Marketing is not evil in and of itself. Unless humanity returns to a tribal social structure where you can count the number of non-related acquaintances you know on your fingers, it is a necessary component of operating a business. Of course, you’re 100% right that there have been dubious applications of the principle, but again, you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water, and it hampers the salient point that you’re trying to make.

And it’s pretty good! I had fun with the time I put into it, though it did feel a little bloated in the same way their Pathfinder RPG did. I think it’s a consequence of their Kickstarter success for these games, which just kept talking on more stretch goals.

The good news is there is a LOT of game present for those that enjoy it.

Idk about that, I heard a fair number of folks who were less enthused with Eternal vs 2016. The general sentiment among those folks was that Eternal skewed too far into “combat puzzle” territory, where encounters felt like they had prescribed “solutions” that you needed to perform to succeed reliably. This iteration being less about resource management and high speed encounter flow seems to be a reaction to those critiques.

Okay? Again, who are you serving by choosing this specific forum to shout that messaging? I know you aren’t OP, so consider that the royal “you”.

It’s just tiresome is all, and I’m on the “boo, capitalism” side of things. It’s like the folks who turn every thread tangentially related to Microsoft into a Linux advertisement. Or the involuntary ejaculation of a vegetarian when the subject of diet comes up. Like, yes, these folks are probably correct about the things they are saying; you’re never going to be wrong to consider the angle being worked by a corp. However, it’s infantilizing to suggest that people are unaware that a corporation wants their money. That’s a given, and without additional commentary, it’s a positively useless statement that only serves to make people tune out the messaging, even in contexts where it IS desirable to bring it up (such as when a company is doing shady shit in pursuit of your money). Releasing a mediocre graphical remaster of a title that people have nostalgia for hardly qualifies as “shady shit” in my book. Lazy, sure, but not shady.

Undoubtedly, yes, the fixed camera perspective of the original RE games owes a huge debt of gratitude to Alone in the Dark. However, Sweet Home predates the original AitD by 3 years, and has a direct lineage to RE through Tokuro Fujiwara, who directed Sweet Home and produced the original RE game. In fact, RE began its life as a SNES remake of Sweet Home in 1993, and it wasn’t until production had already begun that Mikami discovered AitD and reconfigured their plans. I’m not super familiar with AitD, so perhaps he lifted more features from that game than the perspective (that weren’t already present in some form in Sweet Home, at any rate), but I didnt see that mentioned in the interview.

It all depends on how you’re defining “influence”. As an example, let’s look at the first Resident Evil game and it’s predecessor, Sweet Home. More people have played or heard of Resident Evil than a movie tie-in game that was never officially released outside Japan. However, a huge amount of RE’s DNA (indeed, things that fans will say are necessary to capturing the feel of early RE games) stem from Sweet Home. Hell, RE was initially conceived of as a remake of Sweet Home, until they realized they didn’t have the rights. Below is an incomplete list of features from Sweet Home that were incorporated into the first RE.

• inventory management puzzles
• exploring an intricate, cohesive location inhabited by monsters.
• narrative communicated through found notes and cutscenes
• deliberately clunky combat to emphasize player vulnerability
• protagonist characters each have a thing they can do that others can’t (presaging Jill’s lockpick and Chris’s lighter)
• door loading transitions

So, which is the more influential game? The one that popularized all of these concepts, or the one that originated the concepts? I think a case can be made for both, but I lean towards the originator.

Higher fidelity for sure, as one would expect when comparing games released 10 years apart, but idk if it’s “better” per se. Of course this is totally subjective, but I feel like there’s no style to inZoi, unless we define “generic AI output” as a style.

This video series sounds like it might be up your alley. Guy documents his attempts to simulate a goblin society and ecosystem.

He sucks, but it was such a good set-up for a shitty Dice Man style joke, I couldn’t resist.

An emotional box? Enough about my wife!

OH!

Just came from another thread detailing them walking back the skin=class change. Glad to that’s being fixed, as that’s definitely the most egregious issue, but I’m very disappointed to hear the gunplay is less impactful. That was KF2’s biggest strength imo, esp as a Commando main when I played it frequently. Popping domes in slo Mo was art.

Titus Andronicus?

cart retrievers are paid to do a job. I allow them to do it.

You intentionally make that job more difficult under some presumption that you’re ACTUALLY doing them a favor?

Cool.

4 was something of a departure from the formula, wasn’t it?

HoMM2 was my game from the series. For whatever reason, I never really progressed past that one, even though I had heard 3 was the consensus favorite.

I’m speculating, and certainly not a business expert, so heaping handfuls of salt comes with this statement: I think part of the problem that led to this is that each game was published by a different entity. Square published 2016, then put the devs up for sale the following year, citing underperformance. IO buys itself out and becomes independent, but needs capital to get Hitman 2 across the finish line. Enter a publishing deal with Warner Bros. That game proves successful enough that Hitman 3 is able to be self-published.

Considering IO’s concept of this World of Assassination trilogy was always that it would have certain online-only or live servicey features, and I assume that publishers often provide the necessary infrastructure for these things, I wonder if the rotating chair of publishers is to blame for making this process so much more obtuse than it needs to be.

Cause it doesn’t matter if they are still profitable. If you aren’t MORE profitable than your last outing, then you aren’t growing, and if your business isn’t growing, it’s dying.

However, I wonder if the premise is flawed here. In 1999, you could probably get a somewhat accurate idea of a game’s profitablity by comparing dev cost vs units sold. However, with live service being the AAA fascination du jour, and Call of Duty in particular having a whole game mode siloed off into the free to play space, I question if “units sold” is indicative of financial success anymore.

Offline play? It’s SOLITAIRE. Offline play should be the ONLY play, by default.

Feeling like I took crazy pills this morning…

I’m asking this from a place of genuine ignorance: how does the evenness of the heat distribution matter when microwaving a pure liquid? I’m familiar with the microwave’s uneven heating qualities. I’m sure we’ve all bit into food that is scalding hot on the surface and still lukewarm at best in its interior. However, I’ve always presumed that is a product of microwaving a heterogenous, predominantly solid substance.

So, sure, the microwave applies heat unevenly to the water. But wouldn’t the tiny little bits of water which get “over” heated simply diffuse their excess thermal energy into the rest of the homogenous volume in very short order? Furthermore,wouldn’t an uneven heat distribution in a mug of water simply lead to convection currents flowing from hot to cold, therefore promoting a relatively even distribution?