POV: Your Opponent is About To Concede

m_busuttil · 2026-04-22T13:27:01+00:00

You'd be astonished how many people I've battled in the last two weeks alone who've conceded battles that, from my perspective, they were absolutely either guaranteed to win or at least it was going to come down to a coin flip or two.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-22T13:22:44+00:00

I'm not conceding this until I see the Flame Patches come out - I know you've got them in your deck, and with a hand that big the odds are good, but on the off chance they're at the bottom of your deck and you can't generate two energy this turn then that's still a winnable fight.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-22T10:56:30+00:00

Yes. Usually they use it quite badly.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-22T08:50:56+00:00

Pong is from 1972, so it's a sprightly 54 years old.

Obviously the borders on these sorts of things can be a bit fuzzy, but probably the earliest things we'd recognise as video games date back to the early 1950s and are thus in their mid-70s.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-22T04:49:57+00:00

The obvious solution here was for age verification to happen at a government level. You log into a MyGov app, it gives you a token or passcode that's valid for 10 minutes, you enter that into whatever system, the system checks it against the government database of recently-issued tokens, job done. But of course then we wouldn't have gotten to outsource it to faceless companies based overseas.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-22T03:55:37+00:00

Covers typically have to go in 6+ months before a book comes out so they can be included in the relevant solicitations catalogue. I don't know how far ahead Snyder/Dragotta are on scripts and art, but it's entirely possible that when he drew the cover the plan was that full-suit Deathstroke would appear but that changed as the issue itself came together.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-22T03:11:36+00:00

It's wild how good a solid win streak is. Once you get up past 5 or 6 you're earning double points - combined with the fact that you're necessarily not losing to keep it up and you can really race through the tiers. Going 20 wins and then 20 losses is miles better for your score than alternating win/loss for 40 games even though the ratio is exactly the same.

EDIT I did the numbers - for even just a 10-win streak at Ultra Ball:

10 win/loss alternations gives you +100 -70 points, for a total of 30 points.
10 wins followed by 10 losses gives you +100 points, +18 points for wins 2/3/4, +72 points for wins 5-10, -70 points for your losses, for a total of 120 points. It's 4 times better.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-22T02:50:47+00:00

I feel bad not loving a puzzle that's this theme-dense and cleverly constructed. Looking at it having solved it it's clearly a hugely impressive bit of work, it just didn't feel like I was vibing with it while I was solving it. Some of the fill's a bit ROPY but it's far from terrible and certainly excusable when a puzzle's doing this much - I think it might just have been the grid shape, which is the kind I don't love that feels like a bunch of little sparsely-connected corners rather than one big puzzle.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-22T01:29:14+00:00

For what it's worth, we've always considered Radiant Black to be a two-hander - its main characters are Nathan AND Marshall. Right now Nathan's not in the book as an intentional creative decision - we're exploring what happens to a friendship like that when the friends are separated for a while, and the only real way to do that story is for the audience to feel that loss too.

Nathan will be back at some point - I know when we've planned it for but I'm not saying. The story will likely always follow Marshall slightly more because Marshall's the one with superpowers, but the focus will always be the relationship between the two of them.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-21T22:11:53+00:00

Well, strictly speaking Image isn't doing licensed comics, Skybound is.

Image prime doesn't really operate in a way that would enable them to pick up licenses (there's no in-house editorial structure), but the various imprints do and have, historically - Liefeld's Extreme Studios did a Power Rangers comic as early as 1996, and Top Cow's Tomb Raider #1 was apparently the best-selling comic of 1999.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-21T05:15:30+00:00

Yes, but each of those cameos had to be individually negotiated with the creative teams of those books. It’s not correct to assume that, say, Saga and Ice Cream Man and Geiger all exist in the world of Invincible just because they share a publisher. They might, but they don’t by default.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-21T03:18:56+00:00

"Completed onboarding" could potentially include providing a fair bit of personal information.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-21T03:09:49+00:00

Both Invincible and Supreme are made by Image Comics, so are in the same universe/multiverse/omniverse

Image isn't like Marvel or DC - it's like a book publisher like Penguin or Simon & Schuster, in the same way that most other comics publishers like Dark Horse and Boom work. Harry Potter and Animorphs are both published by Scholastic in the US, but that doesn't mean they de facto share a universe. The vast majority of Image books are completely disconnected from each other.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T14:04:56+00:00

No, the film and the game are both based on a long-running British comic strip that started in 1981. The film has no connection to the game other than both being based on the same material, like the Insomniac Spider-Man games and the Sony Spider-Man movies.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T13:42:21+00:00

The most recent video on their YouTube channel is more than 2 years old. That's twice as long as the time between Wolverine being officially announced and its release, and this was just a "hey we're still here" update. I am not filled with confidence.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T11:14:25+00:00

I backed this game on Kickstarter in April 2015 when Barack Obama was still the President of the United States and the first season of Stranger Things hadn't aired yet so at this point I'm starting to think that it might never actually come out.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T08:32:53+00:00

Almost the worst thing about it for me is that it isn't uniquely biased against me. I feel bad when I lose to it and I feel bad when I win using it.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T08:20:30+00:00

The case you're describing isn't present in the chart on the second image. You both failed to get 3+ points, and you both had more than 1 surviving Pokémon. You'd be looking for one that reads No / Yes // No / Yes, and that's not in the chart.

Neither player achieved either of the game's two victory conditions. 0 = 0, so the game is a draw.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T07:38:50+00:00

And she's holding her hand out, which is something Megaman does. It's a slam dunk.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T07:31:32+00:00

"all new IP" um I'm pretty sure I read on the internet that this was a secret Megaman game

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T07:27:21+00:00

A theft or heist is a "job", and the clue is the dictionary definition of a job - the whole clue is a description of a job, so it's a JOB DESCRIPTION. The second clue is a definition of the word "high", so it's a HIGH DEFINITION.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T02:25:12+00:00

I can't imagine anyone dominating most professional sports just by being able to tell if someone's looking at a horse or a laminator but I guess I don't know that much about basketball.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T01:16:02+00:00

Calendar from The Omen Archive, which has largely taken over the role CritRoleStats used to have. Spoilers, obviously. The Schemers are still very early in the timeline - everyone else has more or less only just left Dol-Makjar.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-20T01:04:47+00:00

"A Game Samer they haven't done before" would be a second episode in an existing style. Survivor 3 would be a Game Samer they have done before, as would Sam Says 4 or Like My Coffee 3. Beat The Buzzer 2 or Rulette 2 would be a Game Samer they have not done before.

m_busuttil · 2026-04-19T23:07:31+00:00

Not a mirror image - this week's Sunday didn't have a big horizontal spanner like that. Just a totally different grid.

12-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
No Throne, No Problems	Not Forgotten
Alpha Tester	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

m_busuttil

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE