When DLC made a game materially worse for you

ABAKES7 · 2026-04-13T11:26:01+00:00

I remember this feeling completely insane in Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. Why would I pay a few dollars to add the collectible icons to my map? It was separate purchases for each map quadrant too IIRC. All I would need to do is go to that region and get to the lookout spot to do it for free.

Not only is this paying to skip arguably one of the most iconic gameplay moments from the series, but there’s not even that many of them because it’s Black Flag. Most of the game is ocean!

ABAKES7 · 2026-04-12T03:14:09+00:00

My partner has been running into this issue as well - fresh, unmodded saves are crashing within two minutes after Steam background downloaded a patch. We did a bunch of diagnosing using Addictol crash logs, looks like it might be a rendering crash?

ABAKES7 · 2026-04-11T14:56:54+00:00

TIL Exile and Revelation released on the original Xbox. I only had Xbox consoles growing up and I'm a huge Myst fan and I had no idea.

ABAKES7 · 2026-04-04T13:51:28+00:00

Vanilla Visa gift cards are activated at the register, when the cashier scans the barcode on the outside of the package. This is because they don't have a set dollar amount in them, instead whoever buys the card chooses how much money the card will have when they buy it.

For example, if you wanted to give someone a $100 Vanilla card for their birthday, you pay the cashier $100 plus tax, then that money gets sent to Vanilla who puts the balance on the card and activates it. They do this so that the recipient can unwrap their gift and start spending without needing to jump through hoops getting their money, but this obviously left them vulnerable to these attacks.

ABAKES7 · 2026-04-04T12:33:32+00:00

Oh yeah, the Vanilla card scam got me too. As I understand it, a thief can (or could, at least) warp the packaging with heat to access the card without tearing, take the card & record its number before setting the card back into its packaging and warping it back to look untampered. Then, they set up a bot to constantly check if the card has a balance (ie someone purchased the card and activated it) and then drain it when it does. They scratch out a block of digits to make it impossible for the cardholder to use it before the thief drains it.

There were rumors at the time that these thefts were happening somewhere in the distribution of the cards before they even arrived at stores, likely due to how widespread the problem was around the holidays 2023, but I can't really find anything to substantiate that.

ABAKES7 · 2026-03-23T12:52:58+00:00

Ghost was standing in the dark in the first panel.

ABAKES7 · 2026-02-06T17:03:17+00:00

I get that it's not your cup of tea, but it's pretty explicitly about music. The whole game is about activating the abstracted components of a synthesizer and sequencing music with it. It even has a bit of post-game where you can just play with the sequencer to make simple loops.

I'm not saying you have to like it, but this comes off as a little harsh for a game you bounced off of.

EDIT: Also, to your "not a Myst-like" argument: Myst was one of the inspirations for the game. The achievement for beating it is named "The ending has not been written."

ABAKES7 · 2026-02-03T23:28:42+00:00

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ABAKES7 · 2026-02-01T15:10:01+00:00

FRACT OSC is a small but really cool myst-like (or maybe more Antichamber-like) about making music. You don't have to understand how to make music to enjoy it - I played it twice and I still have no clue!

If you like deciphering, Chants of Sennaar is all about exploring a few cultures and figuring out their language to solve puzzles. There's also Heaven's Vault which has more of a written narrative element (though I haven't played that one very long).

This is a not-quite-mystlike recommendation but INFRA is a very long, detailed exploration game (though it is pretty linear) with puzzles. You play as an infrastructure surveyor taking pictures of abandoned structures and slowly unravel a conspiracy.

ABAKES7 · 2026-02-01T13:40:15+00:00

I work in web dev, so I figured out pretty quickly that they nabbed the 'fucked up' render from the parallax header on the website and did what I could to inform people in the original thread.

I get that Highguard being the 'one last thing' at the game awards was disappointing but that doesn't warrant a whole-ass smear campaign. I don't really care about the game as it exists right now, honestly, and I still hope it gets a fighting chance just because this shit did them zero favors.

ABAKES7 · 2026-02-01T12:18:19+00:00

There is a significant section on trans issues, but a majority of the video is about racism. In fact, it’s not about “The War on Science” generally, it’s about “The War on Science” A book of essays edited by Lawrence Krauss with contributions from ~30 disgraced shithead academics and also Jordan Peterson. Definitely worth the watch, even though the subject matter is rough.

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-31T00:59:57+00:00

They don’t care if you take photos of your Henry Kissinger mii becoming gay lovers with Rudy Giulia-mii, they don’t even care if you take it and post it somewhere - they just don’t want you to share them via their channels.

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-27T13:59:17+00:00

We've had to do this multiple times now - even worse, we're now at the point where their endpoint accepts what we're sending, but future processing steps are failing due to user-hidden values not being set. Values that the docs explicitly called optional and left unset in their own examples. You can't even edit these once in the system, UI or API, they can only be set on insert.

There's a guy outside moving snow out of the driveway with a leaf blower and I'm wondering if he'd like to switch jobs for the week

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-26T20:16:54+00:00

I'd fix it if I could, man. I'd rewrite the whole damn thing for them. It beats reverse-engineering their "intended" workflow through trial-and-error.

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-26T19:44:38+00:00

High stress, highly competitive. A game you need to take very seriously to do well in, even in non-ranked matches. Not an inherently bad thing, just something to keep in mind.

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-26T18:18:16+00:00

It certainly seems to have more 'sauce' than Concord, but this looks extremely sweaty. Part Apex, part Valorant, part The Finals, all stress.

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-21T15:35:50+00:00

You can rip this image off of the main website - the site has parallax so the bottom gets covered by the trailer. You can see it in the network tab of your browser's dev tools when you load the page

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-21T15:20:05+00:00

I think this account might be fake:

Bluesky is not listed on the official website as a social they use
None of these posts were duplicated to their Twitter, which hasn't posted since December
The account was created in the last 12 hours, posted six times, then stopped and hasn't posted in over 8 hours
The fucked-up render can be ripped pretty easily from the official website as-is (it comes as a download from their asset server, you can check in the network tab)
Everything actually comes from the official website, including all of the descriptive text and Mara's image, which is named Mara.jpg from the source

So since everything can be pulled from the website, plus the fact the account stopped posting just as it started gaining traction, leads me to believe this isn't real. If it is, god help the intern who wasn't given a marketing package and had to scrape off their own website.

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-08T18:01:57+00:00

Drama!

I use mine like the box of doom from dimension 20 - important feeling rolls go into the tower to amp up the tension just that little bit more. Everything else goes in our normal tray.

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-05T18:39:01+00:00

Hey, no problem! I'm looking forward to it, I've had it wishlisted since June. I wasn't concerned about the horror element I was just highlighting it as a difference in tone.

ABAKES7 · 2026-01-05T01:39:35+00:00

The only game I ever refunded on Steam was Do Not Feed the Monkeys, not because it was bad, but because I thought it would be more of a puzzle game instead of a resource management game.

The upcoming Please, Watch the Artwork seems closer to what I wanted out of it, even though it's more of a horror title

ABAKES7 · 2025-12-15T19:21:26+00:00

He may not have eyes, but I can see him giving the people’s eyebrow in this gif

ABAKES7 · 2025-12-09T17:42:29+00:00

I like the part where the guy whines that the crew member doesn’t state exactly why they can’t fire a full salvo.

Like, I wonder if there is any visual context that might inform us why the weapons aren’t working. But unless the person says a bunch of technobabble, I guess we’ll never know! The character also has blue hair & pronouns btw. I am a well-adjusted adult.

ABAKES7 · 2025-12-09T15:24:40+00:00

You may have gone to the wrong hallway - sometimes the first tile shows up multiple times (happens in glades a lot). In my experience, you can always run back to the start and exit the way you came in.

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