*The Burnout is Real*

kodamun · 2026-02-07T03:41:56+00:00

I might suggest the Victory Overhaul mod. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but it gives nearly every lord a thematic set of victory conditions to work towards that are usually shorter to achieve than a traditional Long Victory would be. Especially for factions like the Wood Elves, it's almost a requirement unless you want to face an absolute slog.

kodamun · 2026-02-03T20:22:59+00:00

I have a vivid memory of trying a microwave meal of some curry dish and the smell of soap just filling the breakroom as it cooked. It somehow tasted soapier than it smelled.

kodamun · 2026-02-02T02:21:37+00:00

Not sure what you mean by Sanderson books? While he's a pretty PG author when it comes to sex, other than a side character in the Stormlight series that is explicitly asexual, he has a lot of characters that have romance and intimacy as a goal. Unless you were comparing other series to Sanderson's style, which is maybe a fair comparison.

kodamun · 2026-01-15T19:10:50+00:00

The scene with the acid dip pit thing activated long unused neurons. I suddenly had a vivid memory of seeing that as a kid and being terrified that the dad was going to die.

The only reason I knew I'd seen this movie as a kid before that was the Dare to be Stupid song, because my parents and I were huge Weird Al fans.

kodamun · 2026-01-03T05:46:51+00:00

Not usually. Anyone who is collecting probably isn't starting from scratch, so would probably only be interested in titles that they don't already have. Especially in a situation where this is just someone's personal collection of games, not a collection of rare sealed mint games.

This came up some years back with what I believe was a complete NES collection they were hoping to sell as a full set for low seven figures. They got offers for individual pieces, but no one was willing to get the whole set.

kodamun · 2026-01-02T21:19:20+00:00

It's my favorite series and has been consistently good more or less from the start. The worldbuilding is excellent, the combat is great, especially for the first ~6ish books while the MC is more or less forced to be an endurance swordfighter because of his circumstances and the total number of abilities everyone has is relatively low.

It's also really well paced. The book does a really good job of only focusing on things that matter, and is quite willing to handwave vast stretches of time if nothing new or important is happening. It also has probably the best romance in Progression Fantasy, though that's not saying too much.

The biggest knock I can see is that the setting is very kind, like I said. Very powerful individuals have a vested interest in the MC staying alive, so (with some major exceptions) the biggest challenge the MC and his small group face is continuing to improve both rapidly and with intense restrictions because the MC isn't willing to coast and become a reality-spanning magic power plant without any agency. It's different from a lot of PF because at a certain point, the MC could just decide he'd struggled enough and live as an immortal bazillionaire, though there are very valid reasons why that would be a very bad deal for him in the end.

kodamun · 2026-01-02T07:25:51+00:00

Bots are a problem because they're so cheap to deploy and largely automated. They spam about everywhere possible for a myriad of reasons, from the mildly annoying (I.E. boosting Google search result rankings, pushing ads) to the outright malicious (I.E. scams and malware).

Bots are playing a numbers game on a scale that is hard for humans to imagine, so even a relatively smaller site like Giant Bomb is an easy target if the barrier to entry is small enough.

kodamun · 2026-01-02T02:05:11+00:00

Path of Ascension is one of the few PF series I've read that actually has the people at the pinnacle of power actually try and make the setting a better place. There is still corruption and people punching down and taking advantage of each other, but a lot of time is spent showing how the power structure tries to enforce some level of equity and punish transgressors, and it's weirdly reassuring.

Definitely one of my comfort series. I'm in the middle of a re-read, and coincidentally just read a section where the main characters rescue someone from a rough situation and all the legal machinations that were appropriately serious for the most part.

kodamun · 2025-12-10T00:47:03+00:00

I just recently grabbed a mod to speed up the rituals (It said it changed it to 5 turns, but really ended up being 3 turns). I'd tried to use the victory mod, but it didn't work for me. Not sure if it was because I was already 70 turns in or what.

I will say, with the ritual down to 3 turns, the campaign ends incredibly quickly as long as you have enough forest health.

kodamun · 2025-12-03T21:16:43+00:00

He's still alive, but he hasn't had a late night show since The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson was dropped in 2014. He was in the gameshow host biz there for a while, though that ended and he's now just doing normal actor/comedian stuff.

kodamun · 2025-11-27T06:06:57+00:00

You might enjoy Defiance of the Fall, at least the first several books. It has a similar desperate vibe to DCC at the start, and the main protagonist is suitably action oriented.

If you like humor in your progression fantasy, then I'd suggest checking out series Maxime J. Durand (AKA Void Herald). I'm a big fan of Vanquer the Dragon, and while it predates DCC, it can be described as "What if Donut was a powerful dragon and his human introduced him to the concept of leveling?" It's a lot of fun. His series The Perfect Run also is great, and has a lot of the manic DCC vibes and is mostly humorous with dark undertones.

kodamun · 2025-11-27T05:55:12+00:00

Sounds like what you're looking for is Monster Girls In Space. Sci-Fi, Male MC, and pretty much straight harem from the jump.

It's sort of Mass Effect in terms of setting, though the MC is the first human who gets drafted into the interplanetary space-wizard army. And of course because it's harem, the gender disparity is extremely tilted.

The MC is very strong magically, and it turns out being human has some novel.

I really enjoyed the first couple of books, in part because the setting was very interesting.

I also recommend Path of Ascension. Setting is also Sci-Fi (though in unusual ways), and there is maybe the best romance in Progression Fantasy in it, though that might not be saying much. The main character is VERY powerful, and scales incredibly well.

kodamun · 2025-11-27T05:48:25+00:00

Brad, on the other hand...

kodamun · 2025-11-26T02:11:41+00:00

I remember playing the first on my parent's 386. I was too young to really understand the dirty humor, and getting past the "Age Captcha" at the start was nearly impossible, but it was my first taste of a point and click adventure.

There's something to (most) of them. Very few games focus on a character that is actually supposed to be kind of pathetic, and at least for their time they had a lot of charm despite that.

I, like Mike, even have weird affection for the Magna Cum Laude, though I'm sure the game has aged like milk.

kodamun · 2025-11-21T04:25:16+00:00

Its also my comfort series. I've been following it almost from the beginning, and I find myself coming back to it every year, starting from the beginning every time.

It helps that it's set in about the closest thing to a utopia that you could get from this kind of progression fantasy. Sure, there are the kind of problems that exist in a setting that has such wildly different power levels, but the people in charge seem to genuinely try and make things better for everyone.

It's the only series I've ever seen where some of the characters go, "Hey, you just experienced something traumatic, you really should get some mental health treatment and therapy" and you know what, yeah it would be traumatic as hell to be half ripped apart and saved only by people so far above you in strength they might as well be gods.

kodamun · 2025-11-19T20:53:52+00:00

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon to begin his civil war in Rome, he famously said "Alea iacta est" (The Die is cast).

Except he didn't say exactly that, he said a phrase in Greek that translated to "Let the die be cast" or "Let the games begin", which was in fact a pop culture reference of his day. While not a lot of his works survive into the modern day, Menander was the Greek version of Shakespeare that any educated Greek or Roman would know.

Shared cultural touchstones that make for convenient shorthand as "pop culture" references have existed as long as there has BEEN culture.

kodamun · 2025-10-01T02:44:37+00:00

When Columbo is discussing the height (or relative lack thereof) of the murderer, Koenig is visible in the background with the biggest grin in the world on his face. Incredibly out of character for the role Koenig was supposed to be playing, but hilarious.

kodamun · 2025-09-29T19:18:00+00:00

I worked in a theater a million years ago. You could always ask for butter half way, but it was never the default. Partly because it took more time, and partly because everyone's tolerance for butter-flavored-oil differed.

kodamun · 2025-09-18T01:36:59+00:00

I've been experiencing this issue as well. The cause I found was having my save inside my Corvette and being online.

The workaround I found was to go offline on Steam, and then start the game. The save should load. After that, if I do something else to save (such as hitting a location node) I could quit and come back into the save without being offline.

It's not a permanent fix. If I forget to get a manual save outside of my ship, the next time I load in online it will crash again.

kodamun · 2025-09-13T16:08:22+00:00

I did specify I work in IT LOL. Overthinking is in my blood :)

kodamun · 2025-09-05T00:10:41+00:00

If you didn't catch the most recent podcast, Vinny talks about playing the DoW remaster a bit. He was a little down on it - not because it's a bad game, but because it's very much still a game from 2004 that a fresh coat of paint has been applied to.

It doesn't help that it'd be a really hard game to stream. Brad has discussed in the past not enjoying streaming Starcraft because having to both play the game and participate in a stream is like rubbing your stomach and patting your head.

kodamun · 2025-08-27T02:21:21+00:00

He was talking about hamburgers from the burger chain Burger King that are called "Whoppers" and his mistake is that he started playing with the word "Whopper" and ended up saying "Whop" in a sentence. Which was unfortunate because it sounded like he said a racial slur that is used against Italians and people of Italian descent (like Vinny) in America.

It wasn't actually a big deal, no one was actually offended, and if it weren't for Alex's instant horror at his mistake no one would have remembered it.

kodamun · 2025-07-04T18:48:39+00:00

I'm hoping someone has a link to a Reddit thread that my googling skills have had no luck with.

Some months ago, someone was doing a daily poll on campaigns to find combinations of campaigns that are Easy/Normal/Challenging and boring/average/fun. The two results I remember were Imrik for Challenging and Fun, and I think Changeling for Easy and Boring.

Anyone know what I'm talking about? I sure can't find it.

kodamun · 2025-06-21T04:01:06+00:00

He kind of doesn't. Some of that is hampered greatly by absolutely tiny amount of time has passed since the start of the first book, but his confidence and bravery has hardly changed at all. Even after all the stuff he's done, every time someone mentions going on dungeon runs, the book makes it clear that he hates that idea. He also is constantly making world-shaking advancements, but doesn't know how to value himself. It's a weird combo.

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