Even rabbits got their hipsters…

I think Married With Children has managed to come through unscathed because of Ed O’Neil and who he is as a person. He’s so much the opposite of Al Bundy and has always been very open about that. The show as a result falls into that same category as South Park or All in the Family; We understand that the jokes are meant to be satire via absurdity; It’s so over the top and the actor is so different in real life that we just get it.

Compare that to something like Home Improvement, where we know that the humour isn’t meant to be absurdist, and we know that Tim Allen really is a douche.

I never saw those moments as Kif being homophobic. I read it as a subordinate being repulsed by the idea of seeing his commanding officer naked.

I hadn’t noticed. but I have no real comparison since I was on Linux long before starting either title, so I’ve never played either on Windows.

They seem to run well enough, so even if its faster on windows and that’s the tradeoff for having no Windows in my house, I’m cool with it.

I’d say yes; with the mods available 2 is still WELL worth it. i n fact I’m doing yet another play through at this moment.

1 is also excellent, especially with the Long War overhaul installed.

Most of mine have already been mentioned; KSP, Rimworld, Stellaris.

So I’ll add one of my all time favourite games and say XCom and XCOM 2. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into xcom 2 with various mods.

Close second is Crusader Kings 2, and close third after that is Empire Total War.

And of course CIV. It’s not a proper list without CIV.

Nothing is unknowable. It’s just unknowable for now.

Technomancer next please.

Spider is, despite the janky play, really really good at making original narratives.

Say what you want about the movement and combat smoothness, but I’ve never seen a Mars set game quite like Technomancer. And I’ve never seen a high fantasy RPG that leans quite as bluntly into saying something important about the role of colinizers in our own 18th century.

Big ideas and good games with juuuuust barely too little budget to be amazing.

Short answer. Yes.

Long answer: I’m 48. And while some of what we are feeling is certainly a sense of “back in my day” nostalgia, its certainly not the only cause.

We are from a strange generation who were old enough to remember a world before all of this, and young enough to adapt to all of it with relative ease. ( “this” being a transition to an online existence)

Even one generation before us just simply struggles with it. And just one generation after us, while still “born” before this all became a thing, were to young to truly experience it.

So we have a very unique and valuable perspective to offer; one that says "yes, things seemed better back then, and that is likely most certainly true for many things. But some things were likely just as fucked up back then and we simply didn’t have the internet screaming it at us 24-7. And perhaps right and left were not quite as polarized as they are today because of it.

Just my Gen-x take on it.

Valley Lodge

They play the opening theme for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

How to Waste Your Potential by Taking the Easy Path at Every Key Moment

That is very true. Good point.

“They’re onto me…”

          Vincent Adultman, 2024

Yes.

Anyone who says differently is confusing “necessity” with “efficiency”.

When I first started in Linux I rarely used the command line at all. But as time went on and I became more familiar, I found that there were some things that were simply faster to do in the command line.

I can’t think of a single “everyday regular user task” than needs the command line, tbh.

I don’t think that’s an “if” at all. I firmly believe that that’s exactly it.

The same behaviours that we needed to evolve are harmful now that we’ve reached a potential “post-scarcity” stage.

To put it more bluntly, the drive to compete for resources in order to survive is what made us the dominant species. Now that post-scarcity is essentially upon us, our nature is to create artificial scarcity in order to satiate that drive for competition. And it will be the ultimate end of us.

One of my favourite games for the Genesis. It was my introduction to Shadowrun and to this day, I can’t begin to describe how it moulded my conception of cyberpunk and my own writing as a result. It’s one of three games that, in history, has legitimately changed my view of video games (Shadowrun for Genesis, Fallout 3, and XCom Enemy Unknown/Within)

Now, for your questions:

• You’re not imagining the difficulty. I too recently tried playing it on an emulator and found it more difficult than I remember. I think it’s because the slight lag on emulators between firing your pistol and it actually firing it is enough on the emulator that you simply can’t win a fight. This (I’m guessing) is because of modern displays rather than old CRTs that it was designed for, kind of like jumping with Mario feels just a little bit different.
• It’s pretty grindy in some respect. But that’s kind of the reason that it felt so different to me back then. You’re a Shadowrunner. You’re doing jobs. Yes there’s a quest, but it’s one of the first games I remember where you could just ignore it for a while and punch a clock to go hack some corporation if you wanted to.
• Killing innocents is entirely up to you, Chummer.
• Samurai class is the all around’er. But I think Decker is the “canonical” way to play because decking is a fundamental part of the gameplay aesthetic.

I don’t know enough to know if my ideas are achievable, or if I’d just be bashing my head against the wall.

Achievable is subjective, and even if you progress a ways and learn something that makes you realize that that particular project can’t be achieved how you envisioned it, you still have the knowledge to either a) figure out new ways to achieve the same effect, or b) take to a new project.

Knowledge builds on knowledge builds on knowledge. If factor in not starting a project is not knowing enough to know if it’s achievable or not, you’ll never actually get the necessary knowledge to figure that out. You can’t know how to do something until you try to do it…fundamentally.

I’m 48. Last year, during a period of unemployment, I decided that to kill time I wanted to create a 3D aircraft model for my flight simulator (X-Plane). I had dabbled in Blender in the past, but nothing too in depth. So I sat down and just did it.

Some of the features I wanted to implement required plugins that had to made with Lua (a programming language) so again…I just did it.

Age and learning have nothing to do with each other. Regardless of the topic. I feel like maybe the only valid reason that such ideas took hold is because the older we get, the less time we have to focus on learning new things, and so it can seem as though we can’t learn, when in reality we just don’t have the time to. That’s certainly what I found to be the case personally. It wasn’t until I had literally nothing else to do that I could focus on really learning 3D Modelling and basic programming.

The solution to that, that I found, was to be project based. I wouldn’t have made as much progress if I didn’t specifically have some thing I wanted to make, whether that’s an app, a 3D model, or whatever.

I was actually kind of blown away by the scale and verticality of the open world in Elex. It has some jank (as most AA games do), But surprisingly in the end, it actually honestly soured my feelings towards Bethesda games somewhat because in Elex, your choices matter far more.

It always annoyed me in Bethesda games that if you do one factions quest line, you can still go and do the other factions quest lines and no one ever mentions it. It doesn’t change the game whatsoever except the ultimate ending. In Starfield, for example, you can do the entire United Colonies Quest line, and then go join the freestar collective and literally nobody mentions it, or trys to stop you, or treats you literally any differently because you joined their erstwhile enemy. Each quest line is a separate game in itself. For example (spoilers for Starfield…) When you’re trying to get the Freestar Collective’s cooperation to get access to some data, if you’ve previously become a Freestar Ranger, that should have mattered to the story in some way. But nothing you do in a Bethesda game has any bearing on anything else that you do except in the most cursory of ways.

Elex doesn’t play by those rules. Once you join a faction, that’s it… And the other factions treat you very differently as a result, with different dialog and different options. None of this “essential character” garbage either. If you kill them, you’ll get a notice on screen that says ("x"s death will change the story moving forward…) and stuff like that. Sometime that change is immediate, and sometime it comes back to haunt you hours and hours later in a completely different quest line.

It’s also HARD because it doesn’t lock off areas until you’ve reached a certain level. You can go anywhere and do anything right from the beginning, but if you stumble upon an enemy that is twenty levels above you, tough luck. Often, getting to a quest requires going through those areas, which means early on, you’re not necessarily fighting all the time. You pick your battles and you pick when to sneak by at night and when to just run like hell.

It was honestly a very refreshing open world experience. And the world was extremely “vertical”. And by that I mean you could jump off a mountain and fall into a valley that’s about as deep down as some other game maps are wide, with absolutely no loading screen. Really impressive for a AA game. Can’t speak highly enough about it.

A couple of other one’s that I enjoy but not on the level of Elex is the Spider Software games, The Technomancer and Greedfall. Fun enough for what they are, but not nearly the same scope as Elex.

Mad Max get’s not nearly enough love either.

Doesn’t finish reading the headline before clicking…

“My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.”