My reading list right now is:

• Sweet Bean Paste, by Durian Sukegawa
• Legends and Lattes, by Travis Baldree
• Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu

Making very slow progress through each of them, but I’m still just trying to get into the reading habit again.

Okay, would people recommend playing 1, 2, then 3, to get the experience as it was first given? Or going 3, 1, 2?

I wonder if people realize that cyberpunk is meant to be a dystopian satire, and not just a cool aesthetic. It should feel like a condemnation of a number of modern practices (including our over-commercialization and hypercapitalism). I guess the issue with Deus Ex is that reality has jumped the shark so hard that it doesn’t even look like much of an exaggeration in some spaces, and more like the logical outcome of another decade or two.

I’m sure there are some weird tech bros out there that see it as a utopia, and that’s where I stop being able to see eye to eye with them. Who would want to live in a world where the cycle of poverty is more vicious than ever, where literal under-cities of people have to subsist on artificial light and synthesized foods that keep them alive, but only barely?

Oops. I did all of mine like 8 hours ago.

Some people sell their code packs online, though I guess it could be risky.

I’m basically in TCG Live to practice the game and to figure out how a deck is working before sleeving up in paper.

TCG Pocket is just a fun diversion. 2 free packs a day is like little dopamine hits, for better or worse. I can let my nieces and nephews “rip” a pack open as a reward without thinking “that’s $4 gone.”

TCG Live is for people who actually care about Pokemon TCG and the complexities and depth it offers. It’s not that confusing; there are maybe 3 currencies, and one of its features, like it or not, is that you can’t just swipe a credit card and get everything you want. The only money-to-game translation is buying IRL boosters and scanning in the codes. Yes, the app can be fairly buggy, but it’s what we’ve got for now, ever since they closed Pokemon TCG Online. It doesn’t have trading, which is to prevent people from just having a dozen accounts and amassing all the value into one.

The currencies aren’t too bad: Coins are for cosmetics. Crystals are the “premium” currency for unlocking the battle pass or buying the equivalent of IRL sealed products (boosters, display packs, bundles, etc). Credits are like dust from other TCGs. Duplicate cards beyond 4 are “dusted” and you can convert them into the singles you want for deck building.

TCG Pocket is to slowly attract people into collecting actual cards again. After you get into the cadence of opening your 2 free packs a day, people might start to be interested in collecting physical cards, which pulls them into paying for boosters (rather than just buying singles) and trying the actual card game. It’s just a small bonus that TCGPocket might also earn them a bit of money, largely off of old art and minimal playtest work.

Aggression should be part of a game, but shouldn’t be the only way to play it. Obviously, when a game is optimized, it may be the best way to play (Monster Hunter and HAME speedruns come to mind), but a lot of great games try to design so that different archetypes can coexist and play off one another.

Street Fighter 6 encourages aggression. The Drive Meter system makes it so that turtling and blocking forever will end with you in blowout, taking chip damage and having worse frame disadvantage, as well as removing your ability to use Drive moves and opening you up for stuns. However, also hidden within the Drive System are some of the tools to deter mindless aggression. Drive Impacts are big moves with armor that lead into a full combo, so if you can read a braindead attack sequence, you can Drive Impact to absorb a hit, smack them, and then combo them for 35% of their life total. There are also parries, which can refill your drive meter.

Magic: The Gathering has tried to balance the various archetypes (Aggro, Midrange, Control, and Combo) so that every format should have at least 1 competitively viable deck in each meta archetype. Typically, Aggro will be too fast for a Control deck to stabilize and kill them before they can get their engine set up. But Midrange will trade just efficiently enough (with good 2-for-1 removal or creatures) to stop the aggression, and then start plopping out creatures that Aggro will have difficulty overcoming. And Combo often has nothing to fear from Aggro, since Aggro oftentimes can’t interact with the game-winning combo pieces. And because of this system, Aggro decks have to have sideboard plans ready for whatever meta they expect at an event or tournament. Removal or protection to get over or under Midrange, and faster speed or other types of interaction to take down or disrupt Combo. Magic’s systems (Mana/lands, instant speed removal, and even the variance that comes from being a card game) don’t punish aggro directly, but they make sure that there are usually answers out there.

You’re right, I guess I wasn’t thinking it all the way through. Guess it’s up to SE to decide if they want to hire more artists and spend their time polishing bits of older content.

Usually when a dev studio says “budget”, it’s primarily a time budget, not just money. Yes, money can be used to hire more staff, but everything we know about software development says that output doesn’t scale linearly with man-hours.

Fixing hats in the way they would like (which isn’t just the modded method of having ears or parts of heads clip through whatever hats/helms exist) would require them to go through every headpiece created so far and rework them for the races’ head shape. Is it possible? Yes. Is it the best use of their time and effort? Probably not. It’s a live game; they’re always pushing on for the next bit of content.

SPOILERS FOR BOOK 3 HERE:

Yeah… I’m stuck on the idea of continuing, but the end of book 3 basically feels like instead of the world being a place that is mutable and changeable, it’s instead a deconstruction of the concept of heroism and would rather say that people are themselves, that they can’t be changed, and that the wizard has everyone dancing in his palm.

I can build a new PC or whatnot, but one thing that has helped the Deck along is that it’s established a clear standardized set of specs that some developers have chosen to build for. Obviously there have been plenty of games that won’t run on the deck, but sites like ProtonDB basically create a sticker for “this runs well on the Deck.”

Logen is in all 3 books of the trilogy, and plays prominent roles in all of them. It’s just a matter of the constantly shifting perspectives.

I’m with you, the ending of the 3rd book deflated me and actually lowered my opinions on the first 2 books. I’m curious whether the follow-up books do anything to fix it, but I can’t find the motivation to read them now.

This week has been a bit of UFO 50 and Terra Memoria.

UFO 50 hasn’t hooked me with a single specific game yet, but the entire package together is incredibly compelling and fun. It’s just neat to hop in, play half an hour of a game that makes me think back to playing on my dad’s NES, and then put it down for something else, much like how I played when I was 5 or 6.

I’m still very early on in Terra Memoria, but I think it’s pretty neat! I like the combat system as they’ve introduced it so far, and it looks like there will be a lot of depth and choices to make in combat or team-building (maybe). Something about turn-based RPGs feel perfectly suited for the Deck.

PLEASE revive Inbox!

I’ve subscribed to Shortwave to help bundle and manage my emails, but it’s not quite as clean as Inbox was.

I haven’t delved into this game much, and I’m not well-versed in 40K lore, but do you only get to play as the Ultramarines, or do they have other legions/chapters to customize as?

I went to my public library for the first time since I was in high school. Applied for a new card, since they didn’t have any of my old records, and checked out 4 books. I only brought one with me for a trip this week, Sweet Bean Paste, by Durian Sukegawa, since it was together with the other “book club” books.

I’m realizing that I’ve really let reading as a hobby get away from me; I have no clue how to look for recommendations, or even what I’m really looking for in a story. I feel like a lot of the SciFi or Fantasy I’ve read since high school probably still fall under YA fiction, and I don’t know if that’s what I should still be looking at or not.

I dislike the Epic Launcher and almost every move they’ve made as a company, but I’m glad that competition exists. People should have choices of where to get games, in ways that make sense for them. Unfortunately, I don’t really see a reason to choose EGS other than exclusives and freebies, but hopefully they actually develop it into a valid candidate.

In general, having more publishers and storefronts and developers in a place of stability is good for the industry. It sucks when studios have to get shut down because the funding isn’t there.

Any big finds in this list?

I’ve personally really enjoyed Sea of Stars. I don’t know if it’s too short or too long, because it did drop out of my attention for a bit, but the good moments are great. One of 2 games where I actually teared up/cried last year.

I like Into the Breach a lot! I’m not much for roguelike/roguelite games because I feel like I’m not improving/learning at the rate that the game expects, but Into the Breach is just so cool and fun, and it’s the tactics-based game that has made me think the most on every individual move. Each team plays so differently, and they do make use of the run-based system in interesting ways.

The study isn’t from Oxford. It’s from a team of Chinese scientists (likely in China) who used a large dataset collected in the UK.

The study is published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, which the Oxford Academic collects and reproduces for their academic press.