Rose

Wizards of the Coast spent lots of time in meetings with Bioware to make sure every damn detail of D&D 3e was implemented according to the book. And even longer time micromanaging the campaign design. A lot of the scenarios are essentially repeats of the others - “do these four smaller thingies and then go kick the main baddie” - because getting that approved by WotC was easier.

Why are there so few D&D games these days? Why do video game dev houses want to make their own RPG systems instead? Well, they don’t want the headache of dealing with WotC.

Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.

Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.

I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.

This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.

(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)

Every Halloween, I play this Xbox 360 (I think it’s also on PC now) game called Bullet Witch.

Basically a third-person shooter with postapocalyptic supernatural horror theme. You play as a witch who shoots zombies and weird creatures with a magic machine gun broom thing. Also you get spells. Some are bloody awesome.

This game is peak Xbox 360 to the core. The distinct memorable thing about it is that I can actually list good and bad things about it. Level design varies between meh and decent. Some of the particular setpieces are pretty awesome though. (You get to fight at an airport, and you get to do a boss fight at the top of the plane mid-flight!) Spells are fun. The mega-spells are hella fun. (Just call up lightning and watch stuff explode.) Shooting is kinda jank but it works. Jank is explained by lore. (Why is friendly fire not a thing? Well, you see, this is a magic machine gun broom thing, so bullets dodge the civilians and allies by ~*~magic~*~.) Enemy designs are nothing to write home about at first glance, but are actually kinda memorable. (You first meet up the zombies and hey, they’re talking zombies. With military helmets and guns. Like, what? You don’t see this every day.) There are some things that seem just not very well designed, like there’s these gigantic enemies that serve as minibosses and they’re a lot less scary when you note the AI is probably bugged and they often just decide to stand at place for a while and eat a lot of bullets.

I got this thing in the bargain bin. It’s a zombie shooty game that’s perfect for Halloween so that’s what I use it for. That’s all it does. That’s all I could ask it for. And it’s fine at it.

The first Call of Duty game I played was Ghosts, and it may have coloured my perception of what the series is about. Bombastic popcorn munching action that goes in one ear and straight out of the other. I was like “eeeeh it’s okay”. After playing some older ones I was like “well I’m sure it was groundbreaking at the time”. (Hm. Did I ever finish MW2? And I think I put Black Ops 2 on hold after the first mission. Loved Advanced Warfare tho!)

And this is different from the usual YouTube jank how, exactly? I can’t block ads on the YouTube TV app and it’s a buggy mess and I have no idea why one of the major tech companies in the world allowed that to happen.

“systemd is the worst implementation of init, except all those other inits that have been tried from time to time” -Churchill, if he had been a nerd

I use plenty of Linux on server side, just that I use Windows as my daily desktop OS for some godforsaken reason.

I actually got back to watching Star Trek recently!

There definitely have been a case where the police, observing things with thermal cameras from a helicopter (for it is in the US where this tale happened), observed some house with a highly suspicious heat signature. …Some dude’s crypto mining operation.

Well, that was definitely indirectly drug related.

The AI industry doesn’t want to abolish or reform copyright law, they just want an exception so that they can keep appropriating shit. On the contrary, they’re pretty mad that AI stuff isn’t covered by more copyright.

AI bros are not on the side of open culture.

I’ve seen Breaking Bad. This is just what the memes look like in Mexico.

“Proceedings from the Dog Turd”, Elsevier, annual subscription cost: several arms and legs

Site that lets you build a contact info page, such as a list of links to various social media pages (some even not operated by Meta). As I recall it was originally made because Instagram only lets you have one link on your profile. Incidentally, Instagram doesn’t like them very much and has banned it before.

I’ve found them useful for very broad level stuff (e.g. asking “I’m trying to do X in programming language Y, are there any libraries for that and can you give me an example”). Copilot has been good at giving me broad guesses at why my stuff isn’t working.

But you have to be very careful with any code they spit out. And they sometimes suggest some really stupid stuff. (Don’t know how to set up a C/C++ build environment for some library on Windows? Don’t worry, the AI is even more confused than you are.)

I agree. It’s quite unlikely the setup will finish in 33 minutes. Not really, anyway.

I wanted one!

…In Forza Horizon.

Real life, not so much. There’s a bus stop right by the street

Could have been back when the button was part of the address bar. But that was forever ago.

It’s literally in the same place as all other UI customising, though. I consider that as convenient as it gets.

At this point point, people who speak English as second language usually go “awww, how cute, the native speakers really think this is the biggest controversy of English orthography.”

(Instead of, you know, everything.)

Yeah, Randy, I find a way to make it happen, it’s called Xbox sale. That’s how I bought Borderlands 3. Which I haven’t played yet. And don’t get me wrong, Randy, Borderlands 2 is one of the most fun games I’ve played, I’m definitely a real fan! I’m definitely a video game enthusiast, I have a ginormous backlog on both Xbox and Steam.

Long ago I was exploring some MUD, and it was the usual fantasy game experience. But one area was basically a weird dimension representing the server itself. Instead of monsters it had zombie processes you could kill. And child processes looking at you sadly. Trying to kill them was one of those “top 10 video game moments that made you feel like a total monster” things.