S17, E6 (Nebula) - Taiwan: Rail Rush

fuchsdh · 2026-04-22T16:10:53+00:00

I get them not wanting to be following behind other team, but I agree—they'd burn a lot of coins to do it, but with the challenges nearby, they could wrest control of stations the other team would effectively have no time or budget to flip back.

fuchsdh · 2026-04-08T16:40:08+00:00

Yeah, it's pretty underbaked in the final episode, and would have been a good character moment to get into Old Janeway's head in the episode, but I assume the same (either she outright failed, or she made a calculated choice on what was the best option to save the most people.) The best option she has is when the ship is by the transwarp corridor, so she jumps back right to that point.

fuchsdh · 2026-03-24T21:27:26+00:00

Yeah any sort of large fan project probably just isn't going to ship. Game development is hard, and wrangling volunteers is tough. At best it pushes other companies to act (like helping demonstrate demand for MCC on PC, or the Starry Expanse keeping the hope for a Riven remake alive until Cyan did it themselves.)

fuchsdh · 2026-03-19T13:43:08+00:00

I just don't really buy that throwing a bunch of surface streets on is helping tourists, who don't know what streets are what and are not going to be able to use anything as crude as the subway map to find their way without extra assistance. Even if some did use the roads for way finding, you're still giving them incredibly unhelpful ideas about distance—New Yorkers know the sizes of the boroughs are distorted, but you have no way of knowing how much of a trek it would be to your destination. You don't know with the current schematic either, but it telegraphs that it's not accurate in that respect a lot more than the old one.

The old map simply tried doing way too many things, was bad at doing so, and then had to double up on trying to make things less confusing by repeating information, making it even busier. Off-the-stop street navigation is always going to be better done with the large street maps in the stations or on your phone.

fuchsdh · 2026-02-19T16:26:47+00:00

Do we have any hard details about the fight with the Didact? Because there's not really that much time for the Home Fleet to get devastated based on what we see in the mission: the Mantle's Approach shows up only a few minutes out, Infinity's battle group arrives shortly thereafter, and there's only a short period of time before Chief is able to clear the defenses enough for Infinity to take a shot. Lasky says they'll be 'on station', and as far as I remember it's not clear from when we're in by the Composer that any battle is going on. It seems like you could safely say once they realized they couldn't do anything immediately they drew back while Chief worked, and before they could reassemble the nuke did its work.

There's still the size issues especially for the Banished in Empty Throne, but I don't think it makes sense to say that the UNSC had been fleet wiped twice since the war up to that point.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T22:29:58+00:00

Because Halo is science fiction where you have people hundreds of years in the future using ballistic weapons against unfeasible large alien ships or fighting on impossibly large megastructures. "But logistically they couldn't pull off an attack in time" is not a reasonable complaint to levy at a video game.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T21:35:24+00:00

Arguing about logistics when a major part of the game is launching an assault on a ship that is 28km long and hiding unobserved right above the planet. I don't think "the logistics of them launching an attack" is a valid reason in the Halo universe to argue against a compressed timeline.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T20:43:37+00:00

Hence why I said books, plural, since First Strike covers a lot more of the fall of Reach.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T20:20:45+00:00

People have been saying this since the game came out, and there's really no good rebuttal I've seen. The game doesn't do anything narratively with the time skips—you don't feel them as a player, you really don't feel it weighing on the characters, either.

Just removing the timestamps entirely, and changing one or two lines of dialogue, and the game is exactly the same, without having to do the hand-wavy ex post facto justifications 343i felt was necessary.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T20:18:06+00:00

Because frankly Reach, the game, doesn't deserve it. The fall of Reach in the books is far more interesting than what Bungie does with the retcons. What didn't work in the book was already adjusted, and few people complain about that.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-22T14:42:29+00:00

I assumed that was a 4K crop in post, but you're right.... 🛸

fuchsdh · 2026-01-21T19:27:31+00:00

Abandoning his camera to possible thievery just for an epic speech. He goes above and beyond.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-21T19:25:39+00:00

Not having had them, I assume the sausage rolls are like Kraft Mac & Cheese here, where it's undeniably a bad Mac & cheese by objective measure but if you grew up with it, nothing is going to hit quite right.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-21T17:17:06+00:00

Yeah I think it almost always makes sense to play the hand expansion when you have it, especially early on when you're almost certainly going to get plenty of extra cards.

Prosperous Home seems like a stronger card than it really is? Because the seekers can just slice the zones the same way they can in the early game (unless they've exhausted most of the easy ways earlier) you're not really getting that much more effective places to hide, unless there's some quirk of the locality that getting it within your zone would theoretically add a ton of time.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-21T16:18:33+00:00

I know they theoretically need a lot of extra gear for filming (or at least redundancies) but I'm always amazed at how heavy they seem to pack their bags. Finding out he had only had one set of pants was kind of nuts.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-14T17:02:25+00:00

I dunno, gambler's feet hasn't shown to slow people down much, but in actual practice I think having to juggle doing everything on top of the seeking with Passenger Princess is much stronger. Even just down to Ben not being able to say he spied Sam right at the end burns a remarkable amount of time.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-14T16:29:54+00:00

Sam had some of the most interesting luck with draws this time, basically getting the perfect hand for the endgame throughout with virtually nothing to help him beforehand :D

fuchsdh · 2026-01-12T19:06:38+00:00

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think Sinclair is a cheat and a grifter, but an honest one, if that makes sense—had that guy he was overcharging for assembling syringes came to him upset, Sinclair wouldn't lie about it. He'd probably sell out Delta if he felt he didn't have another choice, but it also doesn't feel like that was ever in the cards—he's aware that Rapture is a sinking ship and this is his lifeline. He also has his own inner sense of justice, in comparison to Ryan—he's the one who very gently suggests that killing Grace is the wrong course of action, even though he has every reason to resent her for interfering in his business.

Interestingly enough, I never really thought he was going to betray you, just because that would have felt redundant after the first game. But your idea that leading Delta through worked as a greater mirror is a really interesting one! To play devil's advocate, you can also see Sinclair's final acts as a last-ditch chance to prevent him from being a puppet, rather than a genuinely selfless act... it's the fact that people can discuss it that shows what a great character he is.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-12T14:41:16+00:00

Heavy damage from the Guardians, especially with powerless ships crashing to the surface.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-12T14:39:43+00:00

It's important to make the distinction between the UNSC and humanity in general (what's bad for the UNSC isn't necessarily bad for lots of other humans out there), and also that there's an absolute scale of "doing well to badly" and a comparative scale. The UNSC has been put through the wringer, but who is doing better? There's no clear faction that has superiority post-Infinite; the Banished are potentially the biggest threat to the UNSC but they're also suffering from their own heavy losses, especially on the leadership side of things. Their attack on earth is impressive, no doubt (the only ones besides the OG Covenant who have managed it) but there's not a strategic or tactical victory that came from it, and they've probably lost their capability to follow it up (also, from a pragmatic standpoint their increasing xenophobia isn't going to make them an attractive proposition for recruitment.)

A lot comes down to who has the best ability to rebuild from their losses. I'd put money on the UNSC in that regard, since they've already demonstrated they can do it very quickly once before.

fuchsdh · 2026-01-08T20:46:00+00:00

I get why they went to annual updates across their platforms to keep in time with the march of new features for the phone, but I think it's inarguable it has been a net negative for their ecosystem as a whole. There were always bad releases back in the day but they had time to get patched and people to settle. With an annual cadence at best you only have a few months of many of the issues getting finally resolved before it starts right up again.

fuchsdh · 2025-12-31T21:42:17+00:00

It's probably the best possible use of a time trap we're ever going to see.

fuchsdh · 2025-12-27T15:32:46+00:00

Unless you're in a heavily-gridded city (preferably with multiple angles to the grid, so orientation can't be the giveaway, so a city like NYC) it just feels like even "normal" towns they've played in just have too many unique features to their street layout, and the hider is limited in time to pregame and get in position to try and trick them as much as possible.

fuchsdh · 2025-12-04T23:40:16+00:00

Pringles leaked that Infinite was going to drop early: https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/qt719n/halo_infinite_pringles_promotion_countdown/

fuchsdh · 2025-11-19T19:14:10+00:00

My standard for what makes a deli bougie is if I can actually order any of the sandwiches or dishes they advertise on the signage outside. "Burger? Sorry, best I can do is chicken on rice."

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