Excellent by American standards for most of Boston and Greater Boston, which is to say mediocre by European standards. It’s entirely possible to be independently mobile and car free there. Most places are walkable and there are pleasant old buildings and green spaces or plazas or spots overlooking water to stumble upon. It’s a lovely city.

She got an honorable mention from me in my post. She was a lot of fun to play as and the game would not have been the same with any other MC.

Probably April Ryan from the Longest Journey. She was clever, empathetic, funny, and grounded. She certainly had more than enough opportunity to get annoying over the many, many hours it takes to play that game but I found myself reading the journal that served as a story tracker just to see what she had to say about events. I genuinely missed her during Dreamfall. Though I had a few other favorite games with female protagonists that I loved (like Rynn from Drakan, Cate Archer in No One Lives Forever), it says something that decades later I still remember April’s name, and her major character traits.

My kid just had a screaming fit with big fat tears rolling down his face because he reached the bottom of the stairs. The other day, he was howling crying because I had a different colored bowl than he did. I have indeed had to carry my kid out of a public space to go calm down. I do my best to be calm and empathetic to him but emotional regulation is something they grow into.

That would be quite optimistic, but this is something I’ve noticed at multiple restaurants myself. I saw the tip “suggestions” were not accurate so I checked to see what numbers they might have been using and tried the after tax amount etc, but nope the numbers are just inflated artificially. It’s happened with or without alcohol on the tab, with and without sale items, and I don’t ever really get anything “comped” unless it’s a sauce on the side or something. I wouldn’t say it’s a scam, but I did roll my eyes the first time I noticed it.

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I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of Guild Wars 2. It was not a true sequel to Guild Wars 1 but it’s a decent game in its own right. I can see that if you’re playing a great city builder game and they announced a sequel, you would be thrown if that sequel was a 4x instead. But in this analogy, it’s a damn good 4x and maybe even the best amongst its contemporaries. Plus the original game is still there in all of its charm and originality, they’ve kept the servers running this long and seem to plan on keeping on doing so until no one is playing.

Setting it to private would limit its discoverability for people who are welcome to contribute, which as you say, is about half of all people. Some people like to lurk and read without posting which is perfectly fine and even welcomed. It’s not a private forum, it’s a forum that just asks men not to post.

It literally requires every single person currently on the fediverse to actively block it. And it requires every single new person that arrives in the fediverse to learn about this group, learn about their rule, learn how to block a group, and then go ahead and block it. Everyone who comes here has to do that, for every single new user that joins the fediverse. Forever.

The community only excludes men from participating

Keeping it open means people can find it, and it only excludes men from participating. WomensStuff accepts NBs and transwomen and basically anyone who doesn’t identify as a man. Just because it’s not for men doesn’t mean it’s private.

Yep absolutely seconding this one. Everything is very much a play-as-you-want playground, with many ways to level and a low stress, community based world. Pretty much everything that causes friction against other players in other MMOs (kill stealing, limited resource mining, open world pvp etc) just isn’t in the game or in its own place you don’t have to go.

I will say that it has a lot of complexity and systems on systems that have built up over time that can be opaque and overwhelming. But again, you have the choice not to engage, and can do perfectly well running your character around maps exploring and picking cabbages and pumpkins and doing whatever you think looks interesting. Just remember to change out your armor and weapons every few levels on your way to 80.

Kolanaki linked it above. It’s a disgusting crusty gamer den implying the game is so addictive you’ll live in filth. I remember that image being on the first couple of pages of a PC Gamer issue from the late 90s or early 00’s.

I remember seeing these ads as an impressionable young gamer and getting the idea that Playstations had games that were scary and weird, and Nintendo games and handhelds were for boys. Generally the ads told me “this is not for you”. Because I only ever saw ads for specific PC games and never for PCs themselves, (they were aimed at adults, not in the kind of magazines and comics young me was perusing) even though I was still not the target market it clicked more with me. I think that might be a part of why I’ve only ever really gotten into PC games over the years. I knew there were games I’d like and games I wouldn’t, and never got the same platform level messaging.

I remember seeing an ad for Thief and thought it looked cool, and I remember being super grossed out by that Quake 3 ad, but I never felt unwelcome or out of place playing PC games. In contrast, the focus on marketing to young males is really obvious in those console ads.

Examples of some PC game ads I remember working for me and led to me getting them:

https://cdn.mobygames.com/promos/18308445-thief-the-dark-project-magazine-advertisement-pc-gamer-usa-issue.jpg

https://www.retromags.com/rmg_fs/gallery_imgs/monthly_2022_06/large.1061174590_LordsofMagic02(December1997).jpg.82c9c4e56622e154a87711d93647ccc3.jpg

https://cdn.mobygames.com/promos/6568546-the-elder-scrolls-iii-morrowind-magazine-advertisement-pc-gamer-.jpg

Banished, you can’t get more Indie than just one guy’s passion project.

I don’t know what it is about that game but it really struck a chord with me and I’ve come back to it over and over. It’s my favorite game to play when I’m sick and can’t do anything. It’s relaxing and peaceful and cozy while also being complex and ruthlessly challenging at the same time, so it’s like spinning plates. Seems easy when you get the hang of it but it can all come crashing down if you make a bad enough mistake. It’s spawned some copy cats, and I’ve tried them, but the original just gets me somehow.

It’s definitely not Guild Wars 1, but it does still have a “low level cap” in the way that it’s extremely easy to get to max level doing a variety of content, then the vast majority of content is done at that level. You probably reach level 80 within completing not even 5%-10% of the total available content, so it’s just a number. The way you “advance” your character is through gear and cosmetics, and there’s an account leveling system called masteries you unlock at 80.

As a long time fan and proud GWAMM, honestly it doesn’t need the “classic” treatment. It’s still online, and the last major content patches didn’t change anything significant enough to alter the gameplay in a way that would make people “miss the old days”. They added some end game content and some quality of life improvements and some tools that allowed players to more easily solo content, then left well enough alone. It still has a small core of regular players, and has the event schedule going on auto. I suppose they could do some graphical improvements but it’s still a very good game as it is

Considering how famously hard to kill werewolves are, it would probably have to be a chocolate wrapped in silver and then eaten with the foil on to do any real harm.

For a while, I played the MMO Guild Wars 2 as a music simulator. It has playable in game musical instruments that you can equip, and play with the number keys. A-G are represented with the numbers 1-8 with 9 and 0 swapping an octave lower or higher. Killing monsters? Doing dungeons? Raids and world bosses? Nah I’m just chilling on a beautiful forested cliffside near a waterfall figuring out an arrangement for the Lord of the Rings theme.

Cute idea, but disappointed that it’s just a reskinned car racing game. I read the title and I imagine a “cat scale” racer, running around indoors having to jump sofa arms and climb cat towers or doing an obstacle course in someone’s yard, going under bushes and through kids forts etc. Just realizing now a cat parkour game in the style of Mirror’s Edge would be good silly fun.

By Droknar’s hammer, what a savings!