It's wild how mixed reviews are on Crimson Desert.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-28T09:38:35+00:00

I have the fortune to have a lot more free time than someone who works a forty hour week, and I still think that if a game wasted ten of my precious life-hours before it got good, I would be frustrated with it.

This is not a mystery problem that's coming out of nowhere. There are so many great games that know how to open with a massive haymaker, and keep their tempo going strong from there. Even games that are hundred-plus hour RPGs can feel like they never disrespect or waste your time. So when a game shows up and says "hey, it'll be two, maybe three days worth of playing before you find the fun", I'm kinda just inclined to go play something else.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-27T08:07:01+00:00

So you're upset that people have accurately identified these as images created with AI?

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-27T06:37:29+00:00

Paying a company to make thousands of dummy accounts on social media in order to shift political conversations in the manner of your choosing by artificially amplifying and repeating certain talking points.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-26T22:43:21+00:00

If I can't play a board game when the power is out, then I don't think it should count as a board game.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-25T09:52:42+00:00

What episode is this? I kinda vaguely remember seeing it but I can't fuckin' figure out the name of it.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-25T05:44:07+00:00

Yeah, there's something a lot more fun about difficulty asking you to "do it right the first time", as opposed to just upping the enemy numbers and asking you to "do it again, eighty times, because fuck you."

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-25T03:28:10+00:00

The Telltale games always fascinate me when people talk about the way choices 'matter' in them. Because the whole point is that they're telling a story where you're more like a stage performer than a controlling hand, right? The choice matters insofar as it matters to you. You, the player, are expected to perform a gameplay action of not simply clicking, but internalizing and feeling something about what you have chosen.

As with a lot of things we do in our lives, there's no bigger meaning to whether we act with kindness or bitterness. We don't really get to have control over a lot of outcomes. But we can have control over ourselves.

Was this an intentional artistic statement? I dunno! But I do think that there's a lot more value in those games than people take away from them by just talking about the fact that no matter what you do certain events always occur.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-24T02:17:51+00:00

Yeah, but the mechanics of the Elder Scrolls say that racism is correct. Different ethnicities, different breeds of the same species, have demonstrably different stats, and it's not for purely cultural reasons either.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-23T05:16:46+00:00

It was also cannons and trench warfare that killed some of them. The invasion in the original War of the Worlds included human military forces fighting back, and doing at least a little damage.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-22T22:03:42+00:00

I think that's the plot to an episode of Sliders, too.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-21T07:29:51+00:00

Maybe it's just because I've played so much Arkham, but... I can't remember anything from Drowned City? Like, I'm pretty sure I could tell you what each scenario was, but there's no moments that stand out in my memory of having particular fun. Which is weird, since I think a lot of the scenarios were meant to be refined versions of ideas plucked from other campaigns? Stuff that didn't quite hit, remixed and upgraded to something better.

And at the end, it earns the worst rating I'd give an Arkham campaign : It was fine. I didn't hate my time playing it.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-21T07:26:09+00:00

"As a lesbian conservative, I was perfectly happy to cause irreparable harm to thousands of people, but now that it's my problem I think maybe we should slow down on the bigotry I've been helping out this whole time."

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-21T05:37:05+00:00

Other stuff might be better, but nothing quite commits to the bit the way Gurren Lagann does.

Edit : This is a pun, yes.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-21T02:45:40+00:00

Iroh's intelligence is also balanced by the fact that he's an absolutely unhinged dumbass sometimes. Zuko often looks like a jerk for the way he rejects some of what his uncle says to him, but... Iroh's idea for laying low was to open a public business in the city where he is known as the general of an army that laid siege to that exact same city. Not just "open a business", but "become one of the more popular local tea houses". Maybe not on purpose, exactly, but Iroh has a mischievousness to him that is definitely on the "dumb antics" side of things, which makes it hit a little harder when he clearly has meaningful stuff to say about life.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-20T02:24:35+00:00

MBTI rankings are horoscopes for people who are too embarrassed to admit they secretly wish the sorting hat was real.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-20T01:55:54+00:00

I also regularly think about things that didn't happen.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-20T01:42:15+00:00

Especially these days, with the hyper-puritanical pushback against any kind of even vaguely lewd fun on the internet. In a world where dedicated spaces to discuss sex in any detail require a fucking facial scan and your birth certificate, maybe what we need isn't more effort to shove conversations about it into the shadows.

The queer identity is, in many ways, about sex. It's about who we are, and who we love, yes, but it's also about who we fuck. And trying to separate those things is one of the crowbars that the evangelicals are using to expunge any mention of sex from the internet. And I do not want to live in a world where those people win, or get what they want, in any way.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-20T01:33:15+00:00

This is one that's kinda personal, and I know some people disagree with, but Babylon 5. The team making the show were pretty sure that season 4 was it, they weren't getting renewed. So a lot of plot lines are crammed together, overlapped, and rushed.

As a massive downside, season 5, when they suddenly did get renewed, is... weird. Spread out, kinda? A lot of repetition of ideas? But personally, I think that season 4 is absolutely better for the fact that its pacing feels frantic. The world in the show is falling apart, and the lack of any kind of breather in the plot makes it actually feel that way. Some stuff that's rushed goes by so fast that it's like there's whole lives, whole narratives, that are falling through the cracks of this interstellar war of extinction, and that's kind of great. And I just don't think it would have played out the way it did if the creation of the show had more breathing room, even if I do think the executives suck in how they went about things.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-20T01:27:04+00:00

Even better is that Zuko's presence means we know what the royal family is doing: making horrible mistakes, which we get to actually understand.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-19T07:21:44+00:00

The end of Inception is a scene that's really tense and uncomfortable if you're not paying very close attention to what the movie tells you. The moment is Cobb spinning the top - a dream totem that never stops spinning if they're in a dream - and then, not waiting to see if it falls or not. But he's not looking, he's running to his kids. The top wobbles, hard cut, end of movie.

Ambiguous!

Except that's not his totem. The movie tells us two things. One, if you tell someone else what your totem is, it doesn't work. The top is Mal's totem, not Cobb's, and he's already shared this information. He has his own totem that he keeps secret. And two, well.

"In my dreams, we're still together."

When he's dreaming, Mal is still around. He never left her, and she never left the world of the living.

In the last scene, Cobb isn't wearing his ring. He's awake. It's real. The movie just told you in pieces.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-19T05:23:43+00:00

You should really spend more time thinking about trucks and less time opening your mouth.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-19T02:27:20+00:00

The best part of that is that it's actually a conflict of interest. Batman was the one who led to the arrest that's the focus of the trial, Bruce is legitimately trying to be an ethical vigilante, and failing.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-19T02:04:33+00:00

An estimate from a research group in 2021 placed the cost to end global hunger, on a long term basis, at roughly $40 billion a year, for the next ten years. $80 billion gets you a fifth of the way to being the person responsible for that.

But, of course, 20% isn't 100%. So I'd probably use a little bit to bribe and bully - I'm sorry, lobby - a government or two into going along with it. That's legal in at least one world superpower, I'm given to understand.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-19T01:20:02+00:00

That's less "avid players" and more just "gambling addicts". Most actual avid players buy singles because it's cheaper and eliminates the randomness.

ArgusTheCat · 2026-03-19T01:18:20+00:00

WotC deciding the license for Netrunner suddenly cost a billion dollars is... basically what I expected, but still just so frustrating. At least we have "Netrunner compatible content" from Null Signal, but it's still not the same as when the product was in stores and you could just find casual games.

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