It took a lot of inspiration from Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, but the two games had basically the same creative team anyway.

Wordle 1,102 3/6*

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I think those screenshots look like something closer to Ogre Battle or the recently released Unicorn Overlord rather than any RTS.

Wordle 1,099 4/6*

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The answer was fairly obvious after my third guess.

Wordle 1,098 2/6*

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I got lucky for the second day in a row.

Wordle 1,097 2/6*

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Got lucky today.

EDIT: I’m bad at formatting

The story seems generic at first, but it goes places later.

One feature I really liked about this game was that you can adjust the encounter rate, even down to 0%. No in-game consumables or equipment needed, just an option in the menu. If you want to gain a few levels, you can crank it up. If you just want to revisit an old location because you missed an item, you can turn it off.

The hardest part of the Water Temple is that one of the keys is hidden way better than the others, and if you start opening doors in the wrong direction you will run out of keys without it. Combine that with the clunkiness of swapping to/from the Iron Boots and raising/lowering the water level, and the place quickly grew tedious and frustrating.

The 3DS remake added an extra camera sweep and some decor highlighting the hidden passage where that key is found.

I’ve never experienced that, and I’ve definitely told Google Assistant to fornicate with itself on multiple occasions.

Octopath Traveller is a game I should have theoretically liked because I have so much nostalgia for SNES RPGs. Unfortunately, it felt more like a proof-of-concept demo stretched to a full-length game than a complete experience in its own right.

I’ve heard that the sequel is better, but I haven’t tried it.

I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading Engadget’s review of the thing, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to use.

Maybe I’m too old-school and impatient, but I’ve never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It’s a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using it in the future. Even the thing I’ve used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.

The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I’ve never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond the most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.

I only ever got one ad in RIF, repeated in every spot. I think it was an app for organizing decks in TGCs, but as I don’t play any TGCs, I never bothered to investigate. As with every other ad on the internet, I only interacted with it by accident.

It’s the most accessible Paradox grand strategy game I’ve played.

That still means it’s as dense as pea soup, but its nested tooltip system makes learning the game’s key terms much easier.

Well, there’s the fact that outrage seems to drive more activity than other types of content. YouTube sees it as a more profitable option to advertise a Very Angry Gamer™ to you, even if you aren’t interested. I guess they assume that you’ll find something to watch anyhow, but if they will profit even more of they can hook you into the outrage machine.

Then there’s my personal hypothesis that in order to enable this, YouTube’s algorithm weights your demographics, subscriptions, and viewing history much more heavily than your manual inputs.

My wife and I had this conversation the other day. Our kid is only two right now, but as we’ve learned, these milestones sneak up on you.

I used my own life as a guide to my opinion, and so landed on age eight or so. That’s around the age I remember being able to go to the park or to a friend’s house within the neighbourhood on my own.

Other questions about how much functionality the phone would have and how much access they would have to it at home are still to be determined.

At least last time I donated blood in my country (Canada), you could discretely indicate “do not use” by applying a different sticker to the bag. This was done in case someone got peer pressured into donating but didn’t want to reveal something private that would have disqualified them otherwise.

You have yet to satisfactorily establish that. The most you’ve mustered is claiming that Jehovah would have known his victims were guilty and so was was justified in killing them. This excuse only works if one starts from a position of, “Jehovah is good”, and then finds justification for his actions afterwards. In every other instance we would judge people by their actions, yet you want to make a special exception for your god where we reverse the calculus and judge his actions by his person instead.

I reject this backwards logic, and still conclude that the god of the Old Testament is a vindictive, bloodthirsty character, much more in line with his Iron Age contemporaries than with any modern conception of a god. This is one of the fundamental flaws of Christianity: that its god cannot be separated from its narrow, barbaric past, and thus cannot be easily squared with what is expected of a universal deity.

I do not care how local you think the myth of Noah’s Flood was supposed to be, as that fact is immaterial to the point you continue to miss. That flood still would have killed innocent people, and the story frames this as a morally just action. No amount of quibbling over linguistics will change that.

The amount of excuses needed to ignore the plain implications of a passage is really telling. One could take the Old Testament as it appears: a series of books written and edited (and redacted, and co-opted, and edited again) as the religious and cultural canon in the Iron Age for an otherwise obscure Levantine tribe, with morals from a different time and place unsuited to our modern sensibilities. There are many such books and traditions from all over the world that contain tales just as horrifying as any in the Old Testament, so it would not be without company.

But the apologist wants us to believe that their ancient stories are actually true, and so they have to invent all these insane reasons why clearly immoral actions by their book’s main character are totally justified. This is the sort of position that can only come about when someone decides what they believe first and then looks for rationale afterwards.

You can’t even keep your own stories straight. The Great Flood myth in the Bible is very explicit that all life on earth will be destroyed, except that aboard Noah’s Ark. Genesis 7:23 (NIV):

“Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.”