Reminds me of when Betelgeuse, the orange upper star of Orion, went dim in 2020. Lots of amateur reports on its brightness, 3x per night, for a few months waiting for it to go nova. It settled down a bit before disappearing behind the sun for the season and came back just fine. It was kinda fun to monitor, but soooo many false alarms from people trying to call it first
1R2 gang. Non-pro for me. The battery isn’t great but the convenience is exactly what I want in a Keychain flashlight. Dim is all I need for a whole room when dark adapted, bright is all I need elsewhere. It’s so nice to have a focused beam compared to the flood on my phone. And no touchscreen whackness or concern about dirty hands, just twist and light.
For me, it depends how much of the game is story-driven, how long a campaign takes, and how dynamic the gameplay is. I’ve never replayed an assassin’s creed game (from 3 thru Odyssey), but rank them highly. I consider racing/sim games “replayable” in the sense that I never finish the absurd number of championships but will binge them for a while as I buy more dream cars. Similar story for battle Royale/arena/non-story games like rocket league or fortnite. My most-replayed game series is Ace Combat (4-7), but that’s because the campaign is only about 5 hours typically and offers more variation in gameplay along with attainable medals. Puzzle games like Portal 1/2 or The Turing Test offer replayability to me because I never really remember all the tricks to the puzzles, but that’s like 5 years between replays to not spoil the entire story.
This is also driven by having less time available to game. I wish I could learn 2 games every week but a good gaming week has 10 hours of gameplay for me. It’s usually less than 5. So there’s a little more motivation to play something familiar so I can start having fun faster. Ironically, Elite: Dangerous is a comfort game despite the common complaint of its complexity. Some PS2 era games come to mind
I played amnesia exactly once and still haven’t brought myself to replay it. I tried a year ago (originally played in 2012) and, while I admit I didn’t give it much effort to relearn the mazes, I didn’t feel too motivated still remembering most of the plot and of course the finale.
I think I have 15 of those flashlights now. Several reds for astronomy, several whites stashed around in cars and backpacks, a few uv, and a blue and green because why not. My EDC is an olight i1r on my keychain since it’s smaller, rechargeable, and only needed randomly, but those compact AA lights are so convenient either when packing for an exact activity or using in an emergency. I store them with rechargeable batteries but like that I can use a standard battery on the fly too, if needed.
For everyone else, they’re generic flashlights I find on ebay. The head is focusable (o-ring slider) from a 60+° circle with smooth output down to some very tight beam that projects the grid lines of the LED chip - and a hair above that focus you can project just the lead wire. Half-pressing the tail button switches between bright/medium/dim/strobe.
Since time and speed are relative, to have 1 Earth day on the star and see 72 years on Earth, it’d simply be a speed multiplier of 72*365.24= 26,296.28 times faster. Our solar system orbits the galactic center at 250km/s or 0.0008c, so ~26k times that puts it at nearly 22c relative to us. So no.
But quite frankly, there must be a way to be a slower observer. Earth’s orbital speed is about 30km/s (0.0001c) so that drops the product way down to 2.6c. And while the Parker Solar Probe holds the record for the fastest man made object at 0.0006c at its closest solar approach, it actually took a lot of energy to slow it down to get it to the sun and stall it’s orbit. Otherwise, it’d just orbit it the same as the Earth. It slides out to a Venusian distance from the sun at apogee and drops to 12km/s, halving the differential requirement to +1.2c. But if everything is relative, how do we even determine where 1c is and know it’s so definitively impossible to reach? I don’t know, I’m starting to have an existential crisis. Maybe time just keeps dilating and simple addition/subtraction doesn’t apply for appreciable values of c so you have to start multiplying in decimals.
I played AC:Oddyseey in 2021 and am currently playing through AC4:BF now for the first time. I’ve been wondering if the Ody ship mechanic was as great as I remember of if it was just a nostalgic feeling having it for the first time in the tail of Origins and throughout Odyssey. Sounds like it was actually great. Not-true-to-AC argument aside, Ody was an excellent game as someone who started on Unity.
I do recommend AC4: Black Flag as a pirate game. It does take a fair amount of somewhat normal AC gameplay (and Ubisoft side quest trinket distractions) to get enough upgrades to the ship to feel like a real pirate of the Caribbean and not just a poop deck swabber, but my ship is nearly maxed at ~75% story completion. I make sure my wanted level stays maxed so the pirate hunters chase me in level 60 men’o’war every time it loads me at sea. Two types of side cannons, forward chain cannons, rear fire barrel mines, long range mortars, front ram, and the option to board disabled ships for swashbuckler combat to gain different rewards. Plus a little tabletop smuggling across the Atlantic with turn-based sprite battles for a laughably insignificant amount of money compared to the work it takes to capture proficient ships.
Wrong country and wrong outcome, I really nailed it. Given how hardy they are, I can’t say I’m convinced they’re all dead. Not that they’d actually be active without air and water
It proved it’s ass off because it thought maybe, just maybe, if It analyzed one more good rock, we’d let it come home since it’s original mission was only supposed to be 30 days.
FPS isn’t big for me so I just bop around looking for bio signatures. I feel the FPS portion parallels the flight portion the same way. It is flat, it is vast, it is a grind. That’s part of why I don’t do any FPS combat. I do wish it had better immersion, more features to FPS at least on some core planets and of course giving depth to the stations (since it’s copy and past) but I do also wonder if that’d really be worth it. The game takes long enough to travel as it is, so do I really want to also have reason to walk through a place for hours? My headcanon for not having any depth on planets is because the depth would all be located on terraformed planets. We’re barred from that so it works well enough for me (with suspension of belief). But they have such smooth transitions between instances that it doesn’t seem like an integration problem, just an effort problem for a waning game.
It’s amazing that 10 years after launch, Elite Dangerous is still running (online only, but has solo mode) and still has an active community. We can argue about how shallow the gameplay is, but for some of us, it ticks the right boxes. It’s just like the point made in the article - sometimes you have to use your imagination. It’s not a story game, it’s just open and you do your own things, same as it always was. And the sound design, that’s the real treat.