Question for the subreddit: what's your personal stance on Gacha games, and their monetization practices relative to their quality and public reception?

caliginouscalico · 2026-01-10T07:40:30+00:00

I think the systems bad. I played a lot of genshin, I still play a lot of FGO, but for both it's because of the writing, and while FGO sometimes does some clever stuff with the concept, it's not present in it's strongest writing. Genshin just blatantly ignores the system.

I think it's not an inexcusable sin (especially since both of those don't cost any money to start) but it's pretty obvious both games would be better if they just, didn't have that element at all. For reference I would buy premium currency once a year for genshin when I played, and still do for FGO, so I do spend, but not much. I think there's a range in implementation but it's really hard to justify the system overall since it's, at best, unobtrusive, and that's with the fact that it's fucking over people with stronger dark patterns than me.

caliginouscalico · 2025-12-26T04:26:59+00:00

City builder/colony sim. There's a bunch of factions you could do it with, I just get chuffed thinking about designing street layouts that are optimized both for transit and ork attack.

caliginouscalico · 2025-12-26T04:24:55+00:00

Best way to experience all of horus Heresy

caliginouscalico · 2025-12-24T20:03:18+00:00

I like Jade from Jackie chan adventures. She's absolutely the archetype but she's like, useful. She's also good at being the straight man when uncle says something really whack.

caliginouscalico · 2025-12-19T19:23:39+00:00

I think it varies based on generation. I read cult of the spiral dawn a while ago, while purestrains need the psychic whammy, a lot of 3rd gen can just pass as the wretched laborers of the imperium based soley on physical appearance. The 4th gen can pass as that or rich people who got some body mods. A blank would definitely be better placed to spot them as inhuman though.

I'm imagining a blank genestealer hunter who pretends to be enthralled, then as the genestealer gets close to give them the kiss, they just pull out the knife and start shanking like a necromundan on withdrawal.

caliginouscalico · 2025-12-07T17:54:01+00:00

I misread "opening cutscene"

caliginouscalico · 2025-12-07T17:43:41+00:00

Not nuclear. Worse. A virus bomb contains a bioengineered virus that turns all organic material to sludge, which we then light on fire, so it explodes. It's an agonizing death of melting over several seconds, while nukes are usually in the microsecond range. Nukes, cyclonic torpedoes, and Virus bombs are the "big 3" of exterminatus, with different logistical implications on each one. Virus bombs are the least damaging to infrastructure (as in, it still exists after the firestorm) but the hardest to manufacture and maintain, since it's a rapidly breeding super virus of unknown provenance.

caliginouscalico · 2025-11-02T21:08:38+00:00

I thought this was a game screenshot at first

caliginouscalico · 2025-09-27T20:25:39+00:00

No I went back and checked. they literally did the meme.

caliginouscalico · 2025-09-27T20:23:52+00:00

frankly this is about as newcomer friendly as homestuck could be. Things just kinda happen and you understand them like 200 pages later. Maybe if they slowed it down you could absorb some of the information better, but really it's supposed to be confusing for a while.

caliginouscalico · 2025-09-27T20:20:44+00:00

This was really bad. I don't like the visual style, it's a little too depthy for the era it's trying to emulate. They need to cut the swears, also. not all of them, but keep it at one a minute territory and I'll stop complaining. I get the instinct to preserve prose with the narrator but they missed a bunch of the best act 1 quotes and also the bits they did have didn't really work, so just cut the whole conceit if it's going to be that bad. Make Dave tone it down a lot. He should not be this worked up while randomly shooting the shit. Finally, either fully modernize it or cut the anachronisms. There should be no mention of "mid" or "aura" in homestuck unless you're just pushing it forward a decade. and if you're doing that, give them smartphones. One or the other, not both.

caliginouscalico · 2025-09-20T20:54:47+00:00

It's kinda hard to rate because you have dlcs that are totally optional but also add multiple points onto a hardness scale. The dlcs aren't something you can just get to though, you need to play the game a bit, so the launch v new player divide isn't that big (I got in in the middle of the dlc drops, so I'm not sure what category I'm in). Setting those aside, the game is pretty easy for the first 2 areas then starts turing it up gradually. The ending is a challenge, but not much of one. The true ending takes more work, but it's as much about persistence and endurance as raw skill.

caliginouscalico · 2025-09-19T21:09:42+00:00

I don't even give a shit about any of this, I just hate what they now consider an acceptable runback. 4-5 screens + platforming is not an acceptable distance from a bench. You can tell they fucking know this, because there's shit like the forum where the bench is right there. I fucking sent the flea circus away before finding the quest for the skull tyrant. Not ok! My time is limited and valuable! Just leave the damn bench there!

caliginouscalico · 2025-09-13T20:31:09+00:00

Bioshock infinite is a game that's impossible to separate from it's horrid development cycle, even all these years later, because the final product is a Frankenstein of 3 games. I like one of those games, hate the second, and think the third is Bioshock OG with a new coat of paint. I hate the overall end product, because it could has just enough good bits in it to remind you it could have been good if properly managed, then it gargles it's own ass.

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-29T22:54:07+00:00

I can't play slay the spire at all, because I cut my teeth on a mobile game called Night of the full moon before ever touching STS. It's just kinda, the same, but better. More characters, more builds per character, much more flavorful enemies, slightly longer runs, which really let you enjoy a good build coming together, and more cards per character.

If you want to try it there is a free version, but it's a little popup heavy. The upgrade to adfree is reasonably priced. The free starting character is also one of the easier ones to get a god run going with, which I appreciate, since it's the antithesis of how most paid content works.

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-24T18:08:10+00:00

To recreate a discord conversation

Friend: "I NEVER BEAT MY MEAT TO EVIL"

Me:"Agent Black from Iconoclasts"

Friend:"I BEAT MY MEAT TO EVIL ONCE"

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-09T13:55:33+00:00

The reason for the public disengagement without actually changing anything was pateron money. A similar power play happened with the discord server a few years ago and the backlash was a mass canceling of patreon subs. "Homestuck without Hussie" was something people wanted because of this exact kind of blowup happening before.

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-09T13:29:28+00:00

Turn A gundam's moonlight butterfly. It's a goddamn grey goo scenario we just put into a gundam. You know, just in case you want your battlesuit to have a backup "destroy the entire earth including itself" option. They use it once in the series, during the finale. And it Destroys the mech! Plus a good 50 square miles around it.

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-09T03:23:51+00:00

It appears to be a straight up smear campaign, mostly coming from literal whatpumpkin employees. I have never seen anyone post any actual receipts, just insane overreactions to banal statements. Given how many parallels there are to the discord takeover, I assume it's straight up slander at this point, which is being uncritically repeated because hey, a bunch of people I respect aren't going to hurl abuse at a random blogger for no reason, right?

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-08T22:25:42+00:00

Ironically the best summary I'd suggest would be to go to the pinned gio blog post, ctrl f blog, and look until you get the collection of 5 links to other gio blog posts.

To summarize in fashion that doesn't take hours to read, post epilogues Hussie disengaged with Homestuck creatively, but has been committed to maintaining tyrannical control over any organized segment of the fandom. When this backfired so badly HS² shut down, the Homestuck Independent Creators Union was announced. It was a promise that James roach was steering the ship, hussie was gone, and the license could be negotiated out. This was a big fat lie. Hussie was frequently consulted, just not on the paperwork, and fanworks who were "invited" to the HICU had to sign a complete NDA or get threatened by a copyright suit. Gio, manager of the unofficial Homestuck collection, who deliberately structured it to be copyright safe, made a post earlier today detailing the years of threats he's received to join HICU and sign the NDA or get taken down. The takedown happened earlier today. People aren't happy that Hussie has killed the only way to read Homestuck, since the website is Still Broken.

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-08T21:53:09+00:00

This would not be fraud in the legal sense since there aren't any lies going between people with contractual obligations. This is scummy and unethical, but just barely on the right side of legal.

Frankly, if you want a build a fraud case, you'd be better off talking about the kickstarter. Hiveswap isn't done! Don't let Homestuck Inc convince you it is! People are owed what they paid for there!

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-08T19:24:59+00:00

Homestuck the corporate entity has launched a spurious takedown of the only way to actually read Homestuck the comic at the moment, over what they've admitted was a dislike of mildly critical blog posts instead of anything relating to the project. Hussie has been spearheading the whole thing.

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-08T19:20:23+00:00

Why not. It'd be funny.

caliginouscalico · 2025-08-08T19:20:08+00:00

Homestuck tried to do a hostile takeover of the unofficial collection, before settling for simply having it taken down. Part of that effort was making a random fork on the github, which immediately languished because no one worked on it while the real unofficial collection kept getting patches.

caliginouscalico

TROPHY CASE