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Cake day: March 18th, 2024

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  • I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.


  • You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.

    But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.


  • In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There’s a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.










  • 1998 comes up a lot in response to this question, for good reason. Pokemon Red/Blue, Baldur’s Gate, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Half-Life, Fallout 2, StarCraft, and on and on. Games were made much more quickly back then, and the technological advancements allowed for a lot of these games to do new things that no one had done before, that were quite predictably going to be well-received.

    If I’m putting together a pantheon of great years in gaming, it looks like 1998, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2023. If I’ve got to pick one, it might be 2004. Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (an odd choice for many, but it’s maybe my favorite in the series), Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, Halo 2, Burnout 3: Takedown, Star Wars: Battlefront, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Unreal Tournament 2004, The Sims 2, Doom 3, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Viewtiful Joe 2, Ninja Gaiden, Counter-Strike: Source, etc., etc. This was a magical time in online multiplayer, where it was pretty new for most, and you could do things like proximity chat in a shooter and expect people to actually use it for the video game at hand instead of spewing slurs into the mic. Local multiplayer was abundant. Obtuse game design made to sell strategy guides was just about obsolete, and DLC had yet to be invented (outside of beefier expansions). Midnight launches were exciting, and I have fond memories of, for reasons I can’t explain, playing Halo 2 on launch day in a 12-player LAN using bean bags, projectors, and 3 Xboxes set up in a local college’s racket ball court.





  • It can be a slow transition, but I did the same. I had equal space for Windows and Linux in 2017, predating the Proton years. When I built a machine in 2021, I saw how much I was using each OS, and it ended up being 1.5TB Linux and 500GB Windows. Whenever I build my next PC, I’m quite confident I won’t have any reason to use Windows at all, seeing as I haven’t even booted that partition in about a year. If there is some odd use case, like a firmware update utility for a peripheral that requires Windows or something, I’ll just install Windows briefly on a cheap mini PC I’ve got and then set it back to Bazzite when I’m done.