Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[Friday]

Yeah if you continue through the main story, you'll see that the gang (and especially Arthur) are very anti-slavery. They are also very inclusive of minorities. Lenny and Charles are close to the top of my favorite characters. In Dutch's case, his acceptance of non-whites is a little more complex. He's ultimately self-serving, but his constant preaching of his ideals seems to have rubbed off on most of the gang anyway.

Most of them. Micah is still a racist piece of shit.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, I mean the various anti-slavery bits have shone through often enough (I'm at over 250 hours played now... finally went to Chapter 3 lol), but that was almost 4th-wall breaking. Not that I'm complaining! I was just more used to the usual Arthur chiding a field of reb corpses with "Y'all just... so angry!" (lolol), this was almost like an easter egg.

Dutch seems to be a believer in the "Noble Savage" trope, with all its baggage, especially when he gripes about settled folk as European peasants. But Dutch has always been a huffing-his-own-farts kinda guy. Which, mentioning Lenny, also reminds me that watching Lenny school Dutch on the shitty poseur authors he reads is one of the better interactions you can come across.

Also, speaking of random mobs, goddamn I've only had a handful of run-ins with them, but the Nite Folk are no fucking joke. Those fuckers are NASTY even when you know they're coming.

[Thad]

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is out, and I'm just going to gush one more time that Digital Eclipse's interactive documentaries are one of the most exciting developments in video game history in years.

Minter's something of a blind spot for me. I've heard of Tempest 2000, of course, but had never actually played it until a few weeks ago (it's as good as people say; I don't think "timeless classic" is an exaggeration). Beyond that I wasn't really aware of him or his work before now.

I heard one of the DE guys, maybe Kohler, on Retronauts not too long ago, talking about how there's this kind of conventional wisdom about game history, and it's really America-centric and really console-centric and it's not the only story; the evolution of gaming was a whole lot different on American PCs, let alone in Europe and Japan. Minter comes from a world of British microcomputers that I'm only vaguely aware of, and I'm extremely excited to learn about all this stuff that I missed growing up.

I'm only about 20 minutes in but I've gotten as far as his ZX81 version of Centipede, a game which he had never played and had only seen in still photos. It's delightful -- extremely primitive, slightly off and maybe a little more Space Invaders-y (you can only move left-to-right and, after the first couple of levels, the centipede starts shooting at you), but very playable. I love that artifacts like this have survived and we can play them.

[Thad]

I wonder if they tweaked the difficulty on CT or I'm just overleveled, because I've breezed through a couple of early bosses I remember being pretty tough (the Guardian and Masa/Mune).

[Niku]

Balatro really is as stupidly good and addictive as people have made it out to be. "Poker Roguelike" is brilliant just because most people have a concept of how to play poker, so if you know what poker hands do, then you're already onboarded to the way you interact with the game. That frees up your mental space to understanding how the bigger layer of the game works, how you need to earn chips via your poker hands to continue progressing, and how the Jokers in the game will then begin to warp your play style. Because the Jokers are the roguelike gimmick here: random cards that will change your deck and scoring in different ways. Multiply your score by 15 any time you play a Full House. Give an extra 30 chips for playing any Face card, etc. And as you play more, you unlock more Jokers that do more esoteric things, and find new ways to combine those Jokers in interesting ways, and suddenly you're doing the Poker equivalent of firing a howitzer at a squirrel when you set off a chain of x18 multipliers to score over a million chips against a blind that only required you to hit ten thousand chips.

Good game. Great way to disappear an evening.

[nosimpleway]

Palworld is
a) still in Early Access and may get better as new versions come out
but
b) does not appear to have a single creative or innovative idea to explore

April Fool's Day make your heart go doki-doki

[Friday]

Hey guys, did you know that in terms of male human and female Pal breeding,

[nosimpleway]

Yeah the fandom is going "you made Chillet the extremely shy boy who secretly loves to be cuddled you definitely know your audience also please release this game for realsies"

[Friday]

If they can fuck, they must be made to fuck.