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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2024

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  • Strong disagree with Gungeon. It’s hard skill capped, pickups mostly offer very limited benefits, and there’s very little in the way of permanent upgrades. Normally, in a roguelike, subsequent runs get easier because of your unlocks, and getting a good drop really helps. I didn’t really feel that in Gungeon. No matter what, it’s still extremely difficult. There’s very little progression other than “git gud”, and at this point it’s just a shooter.

    I bashed my head on the first biome until I managed to unlock starting from the second biome, until I realized doing that would just leave you too weak to deal with the second biome, as if you didn’t find anything useful at all in the first section.

    It might be a good top-down shooter, but as someone who loves roguelikes but isn’t the biggest fan of shooters, I really wouldn’t say it’s doing a great job as a roguelike.



  • Expectations.

    People don’t expect a country that’s supposed to be a close ally to do actual pure evil.

    Russia has always been in a different category. It’s oscillated between being an outright enemy and being a distant, somewhat-ally the West is suspicious of. Either way, Putin was never someone you trust.

    When someone betrays your expectations, you have a stronger emotional response.

    When you feel like your country is actually helping with evil acts, that’s another layer of emotional response.

    But if someone you feel like you can’t do anything about and has always been bad anyway is being evil, again… Well it’s a bit of a “no shit, Sherlock” moment. Doesn’t spark anger in quite the same way.






  • The Switch is fantastic for what it is. Sure, it’s anemic and old, but it’s a creative design that more or less created a whole product category and allows for very creative gameplay.

    They did push their luck a bit with BOTW and especially TOTK, regarding performance, sure. But most of the time, you really don’t need incredible processing power to play a Nintendo game. They’re overdue for a Switch 2 (I suspect they planned to release that much earlier but a combination of the pandemic and higher sustained sales than anticipated changed their plans), but I really don’t think most of their consoles can be considered mistakes.

    IMO Nintendo brings something different and it’s very much okay that it exists.

    What I’m actually doubtful about is Xbox and Sony. Those are just PC-controller combos, made cheap through standardisation, high volumes and loss-leader tactics, essentially. Microsoft and, to a lesser but similar degree, Sony, are the ones I’m not convinced provide the world with much value by making consoles.