dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

All of the updates and content expansions and so on and so forth have really made Isaac unmanageable in that regard. Throw in the fact that there are quite a few item drops that are objectively detrimental in basically every situation so that a not insignificant fraction of the item pool is just trash drops that nobody in their right mind would ever pick up, and it gets ridiculous quickly. Once you have enough unlocked that you’re regularly getting runs down into the lower sub-basements of hell, unless you’re an absolute guru the meta is literally just to meta. Know a couple of the game-breaking combinations off the top of your head and cross your fingers that you’ll run across all of the components. Ignore all other risks.

This is in stark contrast to e.g. Dead Cells, which is why I’ve got such an immense respect for the latter. If you’re willing to adjust your play style slightly, every single drop in Dead Cells is a viable weapon that can be deadly in the right hands. You could be wielding a legendary golden abyssal trident, sure, but you can also just as well beat the shit out of all the boss monsters with a pair of frying pans tied together with some rope. It must have taken an immense amount of work to get all of that even vaguely balanced and ensure that there were no duds, wheras Isaac’s strategy seems to be more just throwing shit at the wall (probably literally…) to see what sticks, with a garnishing of deliberately adding things to troll the player for the lulz.

Binding of Isaac items are explicitly in that vein, in fact, given that its version of potions (pills) are indeed randomized on every run. I haven’t checked out the new update yet but insofar as I’m aware those still are.

I believe initially this was supposed to be part of the appeal. Any item may or may not screw you over if you don’t know what it does which is in keeping with Isaac’s theme of being beat down by your circumstances. Part of gutting gud was intended to be memorizing what the often idiosyncratic items actually did. Except now with years of updates and content expansions there are so many items it’s unrealistic to keep track of it all anymore. In the early days I might have disagreed with this but now it makes sense.

At least according to the patch notes you still have to collect an item the first time to get its full description, and the new descriptions don’t show at all until you beat Mom for the first time (i.e. you clear at least one basic run), so new players still get to experience the Fun and excitement of potentially getting hosed by an unfamiliar pickup.

No crimes should be thought crimes. All crimes should be action crimes. There can be no middle ground as long as freedom of expression exists.

Doing Nazi shit should get you locked up (or beaten up, or whatever). Talking about it should just get you ridiculed by everybody.

Ah, yes. Thoughtcrime and suppression of freedom of speech are totally okay as long as it’s our side doing it. No, no, no, see, when we do it it’s totally different from when other people do it!

Hey, hey, hey. Watch the penguin-bashing, bud.

That talk about substitutes happened when it was initially handed over to said data miner, and anybody concerned should have switched back then. I did, moving to Lawnchair, and never looked back. Oodles of other options are doubtlessly available.

I’ll take an 8k computer monitor though. In fact, send two. Kthnx.

Re: Lemmings.

How about Magpies?

But there will be an actual NES version. Hot damn.

But it’s still fun to shake the jar and watch 'em fight!

It’s a cost thing. It’s cheaper to get a shitty commodity touch screen from Alibaba and slap it in a cheap bezel, hook it up to a potato, and then just outsource the design and functionality to the code team in India. It’s more expensive to actually do the industrial design to fit physical buttons and dials and source all the components required for the same. Engineers are obsessed with screens because their bosses are obsessed with cost.

It’s the consumers, not the engineers, who go all starry-eyed and get so easily wowed over a crappy $12 touch panel with shit for pixel density and fuck-all for viewing angles, because they’re the ones who have been bamboozled into believing this is all “futuristic.” Most people aren’t tech savvy enough to realize they’re being sold cheap bullshit at a premium.

Did you include the fuel port in the glovebox in case you need to install any Liquid Schwartz?

They have brought a few expeditions back for replay a couple of times. However, another user here alerted me a while back to the presence of this:

https://cwmonkey.github.io/nms-expeditions/

On select platforms (PC and strangely also the Switch) you can replay the expeditions and get their rewards payouts any time you like.

Me too, pretty much, but I’m fine with that. Every couple of months we get a new content drop (for free!) and I go experience the new stuff, max out everything new there is to be maxed out, and then I can put it down and play something else. I appreciate that NMS doesn’t try to make itself my full time job or require such an asinine time investment that it forces you not to play anything else.

I think the only FOMO aspect built in to NMS at all is the expeditions, and even then you can replay them any time you want with a third party tool (on PC, anyway).

But you just don’t understand. Sean Murray personally lied to me nine years ago!!! Boycotted forevar!!!

(Edit: I thought the sarcasm in this was clear enough but maybe it’s tough to get through to some people.)

It really says something that like the first mod that was ever published after release was the one that eliminates the damn hold-to-confirm mechanic that is on every. Single. Stupid. Interaction. (At least this became an official feature and you can natively disable it on most interaction prompts now.)

The fact that basically none of the inventory and crafting screens are consistent with each other is one of the main things that still bugs the hell out of me with NMS. Especially when you’re using refiners and so forth, because the dumb popup they give you that only shows you like four options at a time doesn’t even arrange the items within it in the same order as they are in your main inventory. They should have just stolen the paradigm from Minecraft and used it for everything.

This would become quite a thorny constitutional issue very quickly. The 14th amendment explicitly specifies that one state can’t try to prosecute someone for something done in another state that was legal there but is illegal here. This has further been interpreted to mean that interstate travel as a whole is a protected right, and any form of checkpoint or other hassle-station on a border between states would surely also be a 4th amendment violation.

That’s not to say some idiot won’t try it eventually, especially given the current political climate, but up until now it’s not done as a matter of course.

A state neighboring mine got in big time hot water a decade or so ago for stationing their own cops in our state and tailing people out of liquor store parking lots with the aim of harassing them over the minutiae of the differences in liquor laws between the two. Obviously that didn’t fly, because that state does not have jurisdiction here which means they have no grounds for a stop or search. Likewise, entering another state is not legal grounds for a stop and search unless that state’s law enforcement already has some manner of articulable probable cause.

Major roads have a “welcome to wherever” sign but minor ones won’t. They’re always a clear delineation in the pavement, though, because neither state is going to pave one single molecule of distance further than they have to. And they never seem to be able to arrange it so that there isn’t a noticeable bump at the junction.

One of my neighboring states also has some kind of pathological aversion to putting complete and legible signs for the names of roads at intersections, too. So the disappearance of all useful street signs is therefore usually also a clue.

Microsoft have been calling discrete computer programs “applications” since at least the Windows 95 era, when Program Manager was replaced with the start menu. They’ve been inconsistently kinda-sorta doing so since even Windows 3.x, maybe even more, but nobody was closely paying attention back then.

It didn’t become the current situation of monkey-see-monkey-do until Apple started using the terminology heavily with the iPhone, as you have observed. But they actually cribbed it from good old M$, much as they’ve cribbed basically everything else they’ve done in the modern era from someone else and simply painted it glossy white.