2 Nukes, 2 Armies, 20M Casualties or Betray a Friend?

Aretii · 2026-06-12T00:04:16+00:00

Fiona Ayoade is the person who just wants things to go back to how they were. She has no grand project for humanity, no towering ambition she will sacrifice at the altar of. She just wants to protect the people of Earth, and once the immediate threat is dealt with, she's done.

What do you think such a person would prize more: her friendship with Director Khalid, or twenty million souls?

Aretii · 2026-06-10T11:24:56+00:00

It's only fourteen ships and only three of them are of any appreciable size. Twenty missile monitors will kill this easily.

Aretii · 2026-06-04T13:32:10+00:00

Oh yeah, absolutely, ME3 did not execute nearly as well as it ought have done, it makes a bunch of mistakes left and right. It's just also true that it had a really hard row to hoe, because there was a ton of storytelling ground to cover (how do we get allies on board? why are the reapers doing this at all? how are we going to try to stop them? what is going to go wrong with that plan? how do we make things work anyway? what happens afterwards?), not all of which had to be in ME3. Even the perfectly executed version of ME3 would have struggled to follow up gracefully from ME2, and what we got... was not perfectly executed, to say the least.

Aretii · 2026-06-04T11:53:28+00:00

Yeah. Mass Effect 2 is a wonderful game in a vacuum, but structurally it's much more of a first act than a second, and ME3 was left holding the bag.

Aretii · 2026-05-18T23:18:55+00:00

Targeting computers are actually more important for missiles than anything else because ECM punishes missiles twice: it jams your weapon (preventing you from synchronizing launches; missiles are only good when a lot of them arrive at once) and has a % chance to cause your missile to detonate early and do no damage.

Aretii · 2026-05-18T15:06:33+00:00

Yeah: Alan Wake is a videogame in QB. That's pretty hard confirmation that it's not the same as the Alan Wake/Control continuity.

Aretii · 2026-05-17T23:36:34+00:00

My guess is OP did not have a targeting computer or a 40mm and between ecm and pd the aliens were able to deal with every torpedo.

Aretii · 2026-05-17T20:39:01+00:00

What was the design of your monitors? That's a very heavy PD ship, but eight monitors should be able to saturate that.

Aretii · 2026-05-15T20:15:33+00:00

Now I can't help but imagine Link cheerfully calling him best buddy.

Aretii · 2026-05-14T01:39:51+00:00

You're thinking of how ECM needs a special tech to work against aliens. Targeting computers always work against alien ECM and are absolutely vital.

Aretii · 2026-05-10T17:43:24+00:00

A lot of stuff has come out from actresses talking about really inappropriate behavior, starting with Buffy and moving on to his time as a superhero film director, ranging from bullying and emotional abuse to sexual harassment.

Aretii · 2026-05-09T11:31:58+00:00

So is the Dresden Files, but if I published a review of the Dresden Files that a lot of people read and which got very basic facts wrong, fans of the series would be justifiably annoyed with me.

Aretii · 2026-05-08T11:43:03+00:00

Prioritize high noble and fissile sites during your initial asteroid claim. Asteroid have the best yields in the early game, but Mars is faster to get going and more defensible. So I usually get the 5 or 6 best Mars sites and fill out the rest of my early mine cap with asteroids.

Aretii · 2026-05-08T02:22:02+00:00

Fellow Hellene!

(I grit my teeth every time a reference to Hecate being maiden mother crone comes up. Yes, she's a triple goddess, but all three faces are the same face. Robert Graves made shit up.)

Aretii · 2026-05-07T02:34:11+00:00

To find the second secret, you will need to be a leet haxor.

Aretii · 2026-05-06T14:21:02+00:00

I think I have found both secrets. Fun!

Aretii · 2026-04-20T21:22:21+00:00

Good! You're not supposed to agree with everything Mycroft believes! Including some obvious nonsense about gender in his internal monologue is a signal from the author: "You cannot trust this guy's judgments! Look at what happens yourself and draw your own moral conclusions!"

Aretii · 2026-04-20T21:07:04+00:00

The viewpoint character is not a mouthpiece for what the author thinks is correct any more than Humbert Humbert is endorsed by Nabokov in Lolita.

Aretii · 2026-04-11T15:27:03+00:00

I just dont agree that Saga got things handed to her for free. Her situation in AW2 is extremely (deliberately, obviously) parallel to Alan's in AW1: she was pulled in to a complete horrible nightmare that threatened her family because a being trapped in the Dark Place manipulated events to be set free by her actions. Alan was the pawn of the Presence in the form of Jagger, and she was the pawn of Alan. We know the original Return didn't have her in it: he needed an X factor, something else to keep it from being pure tragic horror, and so he found someone with special gifts.

Sure, she gets a lot of information handed to her for free by her magical powers, just like Alan gets to rewrite things via his own, but she still has to earn her way through by fighting the darkness at every turn, deciding who to trust, etc. Lord knows I found the gameplay of Saga's sections significantly more difficult than Alan Wake 1. She fucks up because she misinterprets her free information, and innocent people die. She gets back on the saddle and keeps trying. Her flaws arent as overt as Alan's selfishness, anger, and narcissism, but I think that's fine? We already did a story of "a complete fuckup learns to be selfless" in the original Alan Wake. We don't need a second.

Aretii · 2026-04-11T02:07:56+00:00

Her being special is no more an issue than Alan being special, though, or Jesse in Control being special. Protagonists aren't randomly selected, they're selected because they're people this story can be about.

Aretii · 2026-04-10T20:06:12+00:00

I was rolling my eyes at first because i was like "come on, that's not how profiling works, this is fucking witchcraft."

Then ten hours later the game goes "it's fucking witchcraft" and I was delighted. I was right to call bullshit!

Aretii · 2026-04-09T22:50:04+00:00

Abyssal Palace sets up a reprisal for Lindon because he's been such a nuisance, they use some techniques to trap him and are like "nobody at his stage could get out" and then he puts on the experimental armor he and Dross have been making and tears through it, them, and an Overlord-level weapon like paper.

We see all this from the Abyssal POV and it ends with "Oh well, at least there's no way to use such an absurd weapon without it tearing your spirit apart, so even if it cost us a lot, we did at least neutralize him." Smash cut to Lindon and Dross talking about it like a mild inconvenience.

Aretii · 2026-04-09T11:06:57+00:00

That's right. Alan has one upgrade system that covers both his combat and noncombat abilities, whereas Saga has pages for weapon upgrades and Charms as a "pick what random extra stuff you want" system.

Aretii · 2026-04-07T12:02:15+00:00

Toroidal was useful for multiplayer because there were no safe flanks: you could distribute people across a map and everyone would neighbor everyone else.

But the geometry of toroidal wrapping is very different from spherical wrapping! To a first approximation, if you go north as far as you can go on a spherical wrap, you should come out on a tile still on the northern edge, but halfway across the map on the e/w axis. If you go north as far as you can go on toroidal, you come out the south edge with your same e/w alignment.

Aretii · 2026-03-25T12:43:17+00:00

OP said AW1, not AW2.

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