Slay the Spire is fun (but has aged). Luck be a Landlord is great fun too. And of course the Meteorfall series. All have a slightly different gameplay, but they’re all worth their money.
That said, I (just a casual gamer) learned about Balatro yesterday so am just a couple of hours in to it and must agree it is a blast, too!
Luck be a Landlord was my favorite out if all, Balatro might beat that but I need more hours and exploration.
My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It’s taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.
The keywords here are “copycat,” “clones,” and “shovelware.”
Just like how there’s a million versions of the same shit phone games that are just trash clones of something from the app stores or even old flash games like we’re on pre-sellout Kongregate and Armor Games.
Because they’re popular, and they’re super easy to slap together (graphically at least. In theory, you could make a completely text based deck builder and it would function identically to one with fancy graphics).
This is the equivilant of zombie games in the shooter genre. Why program complex ai when you could make braindead (pun intended) bots walk in a straight line at the player and deal damage when they touch them.
It’s even easier than that. Both of these genres have design features that require minimal balancing, making for an even faster dev cycle.
Roguelikes side-step the need for traditional game balance by providing meta progression and building inevitable-death-by-impossible-odds into the core game. For Roguelikes that actually have an ending, all the developer needs to do is provide enough meta progression perks to overcome the game’s peak difficulty, for even the worst of players. Everyone else gets bragging rights for beating the game faster than that. Either way, the lack of balance and “fairness” in the core design are features, not flaws.
Deck builders follow in Magic The Gathering’s footsteps: you never need to fully balance it. Ever. The random draw mechanisms, combined with a deep inventory of resource and item/creature/action cards, make it unlikely that a player gets an overpowered hand all the time. Pepper a few ridiculously overpowered cards in there, and it just feels more fun. Plus, if you keep the gravy train going with regular add-ons, the lack of balance is even further masked by all the possible choices. And yes, some player will min/max a deck at great personal expense and wipe the floor with their opponents because it was never fair in the first place, and doing so is a feature.
Sounds like you’re fed up with Elon and his BS, but I’d like you to take a moment and look around.
This article does not mention Elon. No one in this thread has mentioned Elon, except you. You have linked Elon to this solely because it deals with space, but you are the one propagating that link. You are the one keeping him in the conversation. Maybe, I don’t know, stop fucking talking about him?
Titan is a place where methane and ethane rain from the sky and have a hydrologic cycle like the kind we’ve only ever seen before with water on Earth. These organics form rivers and flow into seas, carrying sediment with them. This mission will be going to the equatorial desert to understand that sediment.
Titan, like Europa, is an icy ocean moon. Titan is even larger, though. While Europa’s ocean is measured to have about twice the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined, Titan’s ocean (which possibly has significant quantities of ammonia and organics and alcohols mixed in) has five times the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined.
Sitting atop this ocean is a thick icy crust, upon which is a surface that looks more earth-like than any other planetoid surface in our solar system. Although it looks earth-like, the chemistry is in fact fundamentally different. It is based around organic solvents instead of water as the dominant driver of weather and erosion. The water on titan is stored in the bedrock!
And the sediment on top? Well, titan’s atmosphere is 5% methane. That methane gets hit by UV light and turns into more complex organics. Titan’s atmosphere is also rich in nitrogen and carbon monoxide, which add Nitrogen and Oxygen to these complex organics. These organics sediment out and coat the surface. Around the equator, they blow into large dunes in a desert biome. Precipitation falls and erodes the tar-covered landscape. These complex organics get mixed together as sediment in the rivers and dumped into the beds of the polar lakes and seas.
Dragonfly isn’t going to the seas. Too dangerous for the first mission here. We don’t know what we’ll find, and it’s hard to communicate with earth, and there is complex weather and clouds called the “polar hood” that might interfere. Dragonfly is going to the desert, to observe the complex organics falling from the sky and gathering on the ground to be blown into dunes. These are the ingredients that will get mixed together in the seas. There is also a cool crater there that calculations suggest melted the H2O bedrock and created a water-filled pool for the organics that has long-since frozen over. However, calculations suggest that this liquid water pool full of organics may have stayed partially liquid for hundreds of thousands of years in the subsurface. This is a location where we can study: “what happens if you take a bunch of complex organics and add water?” How far along the path to life could they get before the snapshot was frozen?
Sure, I am not opposed to science. Just can’t help pointing out the lack of Healthcare for all whenever I see these budgets for other programs. Kinda absurd for granny to be rationing her insulin when we have this kind of money available
Negative 290f. Little past jacket weather. Will they have to stick a radioactive isotope in the thing to keep the batteries warm, I guess? Seems like a good and hard mission, right there. I want a picture of weatherproof methane aliens, damn it.
Odds are they’re using an RTG to power it anyways. Titan actually has a much thicker atmosphere than even earth and it’s much farther away from the sun as well so solar isn’t going to be a good option to power anything they send down.
RTG would need batteries to be getting charged to meet power demands of flight, but I guess that should take care of the batteries being kept warm enough.
Seriously. The United States just sent nearly $60B to Ukraine. Nearly 18 times more than this. If humans weren’t so intent on fighting with each other and instead spent that time, energy, and resources on advancing as a connected society, we could do amazing things. Instead, we’re barreling into the future as predicted by RoboCop.
You can’t just cut keeping tyrants at bay though. I totally agree starting a war is stupid, but defending against invasion definitely isn’t. And it prevents future wars from starting or spreading. So as cool as it would be to invest trillions into space exploration, we can’t just leave Ukraine out to dry.
I totally agree with you, I’m all for funding Ukraine’s defense. It’s just my idealist fantasy that everyone one day wakes up and realizes we’re being collectively quite stupid for the benefit of a very small segment of the population and we could do so much more if we cut them out.
The same reason a movie theater owner can’t show Pee Wee’s Big Adventure every weekend. Value is derived from exclusivity. Exercising your “rights” to a work means preventing anyone from having access to the work unless you are paid when and how you want.
This is what I keep telling people, we already live in a post-scarcity world… We just can’t reap the benefits because Capitalism forces us to pretend we don’t.
“Yes, we already have more empty houses than homeless people, but I’m sure building more houses is the solution to homelessness. We can’t disrupt the economy, after all.”
We need to instill voters with the courage to vote for actual left wing parties so we can get some politicians in Parliament who’ll just do what needs to be done, and seize the empty houses from the investors and landlords.
Trying to never disrupt the Economy when the Economy is based on materially impossibly extracting ever growing profits out of a finite world is itself a futile self-destructive endeavor.
It all comes down to “well, sure we might have plenty, but if not for capitalism how could we decide how to divide it?”
But any solution has to promote self-interest as a virtue and can’t take things away from people who currently own them, and also must conform to a bunch of myths we have about “how the world works”
I would be all in favor of “Use it or lose it” rights to Digital Distribution… Don’t offer a reasonable way to access a product? Can’t bitch when Abandonware sites give it away for nothing.
Copyright is not "use it or lose it", but as it is, it is unworkable for digital media. Computer hardware doesn't last a century and with no other measures being taken to preserve that content, it's effectively doomed by the law. It also doesn't reflect a world where average people make edits of copyrighted content as a means of expression without seeing any problem with that.
Because if good games from a decade ago are freely available, they can’t shove a new overexploiting live service game down our throats when it pales in comparison to the entertainment that’s available for free.
They can only sell less for more, by taking the previous option off the table.
There’s going to be a free online arcade whether game companies allow an online library or not. Companies can spend billions of dollars taking down emulators and unauthorized game distributors and ways to make playing games in unauthorized ways harder, but it will always be a game of whack a mole. Game companies should focus their time and resources on making legacy titles accessible, whether that means creating a deal with online libraries or selling the files directly to the consumer for a reduced cost. At the end of the day, game companies spend more money trying to prevent people from playing legacy titles than they make on the legacy titles, so there is no benefit to the consumer or the company.
I think there’s a fear by companies that a rerelease or remaster won’t make money if the original is available for free, but the reality is that people will happily buy a remaster or remake if it’s good despite already having the original game.
arstechnica.com
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