well it’s only bitter until it’s gone through frost, apparently, so…

i too subscribe to Practical Engineering

headcanon updated, susie is neurospicy.

most places don’t. it’s a very british empire thing.

the UK power grid is weird. mostly due to echoes of the war. used to be that, to save copper, the entire house and sometimes multiple houses on a street would be wired as one big loop of wire, no fuse box or anything. that’s where the individually fused and switched sockets come from. then, since it turned out to be quite a good idea for safety, they kept doing it.

• his cat

…that’s probably it

swedish meatballs are overrated.

don’t sleep on a really good Janssons Frestelse though. that and small-batch pickled herring with weird herbs in it.

isterband is also good but that’s probably a more pan-european thing.

also, i will always use moments like this to bring up the culinary sleep paralysis demon that is the calskrove.

it’s a fingerprint reader. biometrics are mandatory for windows hello certification, and this ships with windows.

go to a post -> context menu (three dots top right) -> share as image… -> toggle “watermark”

thief sticks out to me in that list. all the others are run-based with metaprogression (except the original rogue of course) which means there is never a time where you get stuck. you die, you restart, you get an entirely new experience. thief is not only linear and slow, it is almost entirely devoid of combat and encourages savescumming because that was the style at the time. by thief 3 that was mitigated.

souls games, in contrast, are not run-based, heavy on combat, and not liberal with the opportunity to save. in addition there’s the retrieval mechanic which means that when you fail, your only option is to redo the run that you just failed but with higher difficulty.

and with “plays like a video game”, my main gripe is the dissonance between the world and what you do. the story is interesting, but it’s like the game itself doesn’t care about it. the developers do, and the player is supposed to, but the game doesn’t.

it’s hard to get better at a story.

i don’t know if it’s your intention but i take umbrage with the choice of the word “grasp”. it implies that the issue is one of skill rather than interest. i do agree that it is not for me, but the reason for that is not the game itself. as i said, explicit settings for difficulty would not hurt the experience of playing the game for anyone, but people are reacting as though it would.

some of the highest-rated games of all time have no trial and error. Disco Elysium springs to mind because i’m currently playing through it.

with king’s quest progression i meant that the game is designed around players getting stuck, possibly without them knowing.

RPGs center around the story and the role you play, and the mechanics are built to aid that. you play for the story. in most RPGs, failure still progresses the story because failure is interesting. getting stuck is not interesting. having the mechanics without a story to reinforce would just be going through the motions.

someone else said that the fromsoft games are made to feel like videogames, and that resonated with me. that explained the disconnect i see in the mechanics and the world.

i just want to be held during

true, but you need to account for it during production which takes effort and money.

ah, so it’s king’s quest style progression. i played enough of that in the 90s.

that’s… the most concise way to explain it i’ve ever seen, and something that has never clicked for me until now. it’s always looked to me like this lore-heavy dark RPG and i’ve never been able to square the gameplay with the feeling. hearing that it was never supposed to gel at all and it’s all just background noise makes a lot of sense, and made all the remaining curiosity i had for the series disappear.

now if only other games could stop getting infected by the fromsoft bug…

but that’s not interesting to me. i want immersion. that’s also why their multiplayer aspect seems like such a weird idea.

CE certification is a process that takes time and money to perform

sure but you won’t know that as a new player unless you go outside the actual game for info.