Maybe the real Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 was the friends we bit along the way.

How do you remaster something that was intentionally broken/buggy?

I promise you, Everquest was plenty popular at the time, and it didn’t invent those things either.

maybe a sauce with red chilis?

gonna be real, WC1 was not a huge title at the time. I think a lot of people look back, rightly, at WC3 being one of the greatest RTS of all time and then think the whole series was lauded at release, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was just okay.

I think it had like a year long beta where people were playing before full release. I know I was personally playing in 2013.

Kinda wild to see nobody mention System Shock, the game that invented audio logs. It may seem quaint in retrospect, but at the time all shooters were in the vein of Doom, and story in a shooter was considered “like story in porn.” System Shock was not only the first to communicate the plot and next steps to the player through found audio logs, but it also filled the player in on side stories and provided characterization to the survivors on Citadel station.

The game recently got a remaster, and despite very few gameplay changes, still holds up really well in 2024. You can really see the bones of later games in it, such as story focused shooters like Bioshock or F.E.A.R. and I’d really recommend it to anyone interested in playing a great retro game.

I think the fault lies with Ubisoft and Assassin’s Creed. They really championed the idea of a bloated open world stuffed with systems that don’t really interact with each other, and now AAA gaming just keeps trying to stuff more mechanics in the pile.

Dark Souls is literally just Legend of Zelda for adults, which had a stamina system at about the same time Kings Field did. It’s honestly hilarious to me that it became known as the father of the genre, but the immediate copycats were also aiming for a similar tone to FromSoftware so I guess it’s fair.

Not even just survival horror, RE4 was a landmark title just as a third-person action shooter. It had a huge influence on the generation of third person shooters that came after it.

because it’s flat out wrong. WoW aped most of its systems from Everquest, which most of WoW’s development team was actively playing. They made some improvements on the genre, but the bones existed as early as 1997 with Ultima Online.

Even the pro-Putin Russians are being treated well and “deprogrammed.” I heard that a major struggle Ukraine is currently having is a lack of therapists, as captured Russians are struggling to come to terms with the cognitive dissonance between what they’ve been told about Ukrainians, and how well Ukrainians have treated them.

I know the term is involuntary celibate, but the “movement” has kinda moved onto any men who believe that a woman is obligated to fuck them. That crowd has picked up on a heavy pro-natal message, and Vance’s disparaging comments about women who don’t have kids plays well there. He might have had sex, but he’s trying to offer those losers a world where they’re on top of the power structure.

I think the only anti-Israel person Trump would be able to get would be a literal Nazi, so I don’t know if that would have changed anything.

I do think that there’s a lot of apathy among the incel crowd though. Yeah they might support Trump as a strong man, but that doesn’t mean they’re willing to expend the energy to go outside and vote for him. I think the idea is that Vance is uh, energizing? that movement with all of his incredibly pro-natal talk. Vance feels pretty close to saying he wants women to just be breeding stock, and that’s something incels would vote for.

I can’t really play devil’s advocate beyond that, it feels too yucky trying to rationalize it. For all we know he was just the name Trump thought of on the day.

He didn’t sell out for power.

He sold out because Teamsters leadership is racist as fuck.

To play devil’s advocate in defense of the Vance pick, I don’t think Trump needs any assistance in courting boomers. He’s managed to appeal to the generation’s racist tendencies and “I got mine” attitudes to great success. Vance is to try and attract the young dudebro vote with a discount Andrew Tate. So far he seems like the incel messiah, so maybe it’s even working, but obv in all normal circles being such a giant incel is weird af.

Hoping so, so, so hard that this can ascend from being eurojank and have a smooth release with very little bugs and crashes. It seems like this team has a lot more resources now.

I was just thinking about how much I’d like to play the full release of this last week! good to hear I won’t have much longer to wait.

There’s actually a lot of great politicians that most people haven’t heard of because they’re too boring for our 24/7 news cycle to care about. Walz has just been quietly being an excellent governor to Minnesota, like how Pritzker is doing a pretty good job as governor of Illinois or how Whitmer is doing a pretty good job as governor of Michigan. There’s not much of a reason to learn about politicians that don’t represent you though, so these kinds of working politicians don’t get much attention.

I have to interact with a lot of them for my job, almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

People basically act like children until they’re in their 20s, and kids born in '07 are currently still in high school.