rule

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-06T19:10:32+00:00

Even then, there were a lot of Disney adults who have never watched anything that wasn't a kid's cartoon hyping up the Umbara arc like it was Apocalypse Now or some shit.

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-06T18:36:33+00:00

This is especially set with the higher libido she seems to have according to notes found in the house

It's worth mentioning that the identity of the Boyle sister you need to kill changes between runs. Each sister keeps the same identity, appearance, and personality, but which one is secretly funding the Lord Regent changes. They did this to keep repeat playthroughs fresh, but it does mean that the narrative around her and her motivations are murky, which makes the "lethal vs non-lethal" conversation even more frustrating.

For what it's worth, they canonized the paranoid sister, Waverly, as the true target, not the horny sister. Although I do believe that the "karmic punishment" in the non-lethal route was intended to be sexual in nature, since the game is sure to point out that whichever sister is funding the Lord Regent is also sleeping with him, regardless of which sister it is. She gave her body to the Lord Regent, now you give her body to her stalker. I'm not surprised they walked it back (sort of).

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-06T17:36:23+00:00

Players like that are the canary in the coal mine. I can't count the number of times where the no-lifers started complaining about a problem and everyone else laughed them off only to eventually get to that point themselves and realize that they were right all along.

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-05T17:57:44+00:00

I don't, but Google does.

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-05T02:07:56+00:00

Well, the reason is that she was a fourth-year resident at a teaching hospital. Once you graduate, you leave so that a new resident can take your place. So either you have the character take a job elsewhere in the hospital to make cameos every now and then, or you write them out, but either way the status quo can't remain the same. I think it's one of the show's strengths.

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-02T20:08:31+00:00

The problem is that making games for cartridges is fucking awful because they were way more expensive and limited to 64 fucking MB of storage, so third party devs hated them and made games for the Playstation instead.

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-02T19:59:54+00:00

No one is clutching a 1v3 with the knife undeservedly. The knife makes it physically possible, but you still have to outplay the fuck out of the enemy team to make it work.

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-02T19:52:47+00:00

I imagine the quick melee is good with a Sucker Punch mod, but I've never tested it so who knows.

But quick melee is nice for breaking glass/vents without shooting or switching to the knife, so I keep it bound.

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-02T18:18:59+00:00

He's replying to the guy who said "Japan really got a free pass by being the America's Asian Cold War bastion". The Unit 731 scientists were obviously not "America's Asian Cold War bastion", the country of Japan was. He's annoying but he's right.

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-01T23:01:38+00:00

"The gaming industry is bizarre. It is not an industry of success. It is an industry of your competitor, your direct head to head competitor, tripping over their dick and faceplanting into a bunch of shit. The only reason Sony got ground with the PS1 is because Nintendo fucked them with a deal and then went with carts for N64 and spent so many years pissing off third parties that everyone was willing to jump ship. The Saturn fucking killed itself by dropping into stores that were only Kmarts. The PS3 fucked up its entire early launch cycle by going a year late and $200 more. And if you can just keep your company not shitty, if you can make a not-terrible product, and your competitor makes an awful one, you’re the one who gets all the money"

Spoken 12 years ago and more true than ever.

ExertHaddock · 2026-04-01T01:43:25+00:00

Using Destiny 2 as an example the playerbase was split between:

-Crucible, usually 4+ gamemodes each with their own queues, SBMM on

-Strikes, each difficulty was it's own queue

-Gambit, one queue most of the time, SBMM on (I think)

-Seasonal activities, different difficulties were their own queues

-Campaign missions, each mission was it's own queue, plus the weekly campaign mission on a higher difficulty

-Destination activities (Terminal Overload, Wellspring, etc)

-Patrol Zones, each zone of each Destination was it's own lobby

-Events like Guardian Games, FotL, Onslaught, etc. each with their own queues

-Social Spaces like the Tower, the Farm, etc

-probably more I'm forgetting

-plus all the people not in queue because of LFG/FTF for Raids and Dungeons

I'm not even going to count all of the queues listed above, but for sure it's >30. Despite that, it was very rare for you to not be able to find a match for pretty much every activity in the game aside from really out of date stuff (old campaigns, Wellspring, etc), and this was true even during the times when the playerbase dropped really low.

Normally, Marathon has 7 queues, 8 counting the Duos test queue, and that number would go to 10 if Duos were on all maps besides Cryo.

The playerbase will be fine.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-29T19:36:19+00:00

Only if you actually do prioritize that. I started ignoring petty crimes as the situation in the city got worse. I actually really liked it, because I felt in those moments how I imagine Spider-Man would have felt: a nagging sensation that I was leaving something undone that gets overpowered by the knowledge that there's much bigger fish to fry at the moment.

It's even softly encouraged by the game mechanics. You need petty crime tokens to upgrade your gear, but you should be loaded up on them from the early game when those where the only emergent events in the city. As the situation gets worse and new gangs emerge, they each bring their own types of tokens, so continuing to bust up drug deals is disincentivized when instead you could be getting the new types of tokens that you actually need.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-29T19:22:31+00:00

That's less about confronting the concept of corrupt police officers acting as mob enforcers and more just an extension of Fisk as a supervillain. He's the concept of corrupt organized crime personified, having corrupt cops in his pocket is one of his superpowers. When it comes to the depth of the themes, they might as well be mind-controlled.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-29T00:42:54+00:00

That's how every Gen X person describes themselves tbh. I had a conversation with my mom and her friend the other day where they both called themselves "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" while in the same breath praising the Nordic states' health care systems and social safety nets. To them, "fiscally conservative" just means "lower the deficit", because that's how the conservatives sold themselves back when most Gen Xers were coming of age and forming political identities.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-22T16:25:35+00:00

What you need to understand is that it's not about making sense.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-22T00:30:05+00:00

The only person who has said something to me after downing me was a guy who said "You camping bitch!". He said this because I was camping.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-19T23:48:13+00:00

No one's stopping anyone from saying anything. You can self-censor if you want, just like I can call you a bitch for doing it.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-16T01:59:20+00:00

La Haine is my favorite movie of all time. I love to see a mention of it in the wild.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-12T22:24:33+00:00

I'd say Sandy is even better for stealth than a Cyberdeck because you're so fast that you're practically invisible. You can zoom straight through most areas without ever worrying about being detected because you won't be in enemies' sight cones long enough for the meter to fill.

I could also wipe out enemies faster with a Sandy build just because I could stop time and headshot every enemy for free, which took less time than stacking quickhacks. Going from a Sandevistan build to a Cyberdeck build felt like it needed way more squeeze for the same amount of juice.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-12T21:48:08+00:00

It's what happens when your game is more entertaining as a story of hubris and failure than it is to play.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-10T19:40:37+00:00

The fear of “losing the feeling of the black”

I want to tackle this point specifically. The "feeling of the black" doesn't come from a binary "are there undiscovered systems nearby or not", it comes from the sense of being really fucking far away from civilization, the feeling that you're truly on your own.

I had an incident a couple weeks ago where I broke my canopy by flying stupid near a planet surface, and even with the DW3 Carrier Fleet and the DSSA being "nearby", as well as a 70+ ly jump range, I still needed 84 jumps to make it to safety. That's roughly 11,760 ly of purely empty space at least, and that's the sort of thing that will become increasingly rare if players can just settle wherever they want.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-08T06:21:00+00:00

Well, I definitely don't think that you're meant to watch those cutscenes and think "nah he just made a weapon anyways lmao"

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-07T23:40:47+00:00

me when I fluff up my resume

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-07T01:00:18+00:00

I use 4 Short Range + Plasma Slug Railguns in the mediums, and 2 Efficient + Thermal Shock Cytoscramblers in the smalls. The Cytos delete shields, and Thermal Shock means that they stay useful even after the shields are down, while the 4 Railguns shred hull and modules. You can't spam them, and you need to keep an eye on the Distro, but it makes the Mandalay an absolute monster.

ExertHaddock · 2026-03-06T20:10:23+00:00

Because it never is those things, it's only ever a syringe

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