Oh for the names?
Ogre Tactics is the first one, a series of earlier tactical games (started on the snes maybe?)
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is the other. It’s actually more like the Commandos games, a kind of overhead team stealth sim.
And I was just joking but if you’re on a tictac roll please, by all means, help yourself!
Lol, I love this gimmick! Next up, enormous Ogre Tictacs? Perhaps Shadow Tictacs: Mints of the Shogun?
It was full of fresh ideas when it first came out, like a minty cool breeze
Absolutely. Pandemic “inflation” threw all kinds of prices too high and nothing is coming back down because most industries are so small that they’re all essentially oligarchies now.
I am dead certain that the pandemic has actually put the US into a hard recession which the Fed has been covering up with various tricks. I’m pretty sure that after the presidential election, whichever way it goes, the economy is going to tank.
I can pretty rarely get under $30 for just myself ($50 for two i consider quite the deal now) and we live in a city with many options, and most places i would order from are about a 10 minute drive. I’m not saying it’s right or good, just that the prices you see are in line with what I’ve been seeing. Food is quite a bit more expensive right now.
Lol, this is how I’ll eventually open source my game: completely new repo with one fresh checkin. No one will ever see how many curse words and diary-entry commit messages litter my fossil repo.
But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.
And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.
But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.
He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.
The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.
This. I mean the smoke-life tattoos, the joke that she’s “smoking hot”, the very idea of a 4-5 pack a day fitness instructor being absurd. As a person, she sounds unbearable but 10/10 as a comedy bit.
I’m thinking “Smoke Yoga” for a follow-up skit, legs behind her head with a cig held in her toes (get that feet weirdos demographic too).
When I read the 4 Hour Work Week years ago it was exactly the same thing. Turns out the “secret” to getting rich has always been “get someone else to do your work for you for a pittance of the money you can make off that work.”
Tembra, his music downloaded. Darmok and Jalad with the AUX cable.
Software devs for a long time would discuss “green field” development, which is a metaphor from constructing a building in an empty field: you start from nothing, and build all new. Most software devs prefer to write new code rather than try to learn the quirks and nuances of a large, already-existing pile of code, so “green field” is considered both desirable and often practically unattainable.
“Blue sky” is a similar concept but loftier. It isn’t just that you have an empty field waiting for you, you’ve got the infitie expanse of the clear blue sky: endless possibilities, unlimited creativity, etc. “Blue sky development” as a metaphor I think comes from designers, product managers, and other software-dev adjacent fields. It means thinking of ideas that are out of the box and unconstrained by historical limits.
That’s why everything is named that: execs and marketers love that kind of hollow promise. That anything is possible even though actually they’re almost always just clones of existing things whose greatest innovation is to loudly proclaim how new and innovative you are.
POS I find very funny as I’m often working on Point-of-Sale equipment, and most of it is running Poorly Optimized Software, making the whole thing a Piece of Shit for the users.
Jraphical interchange format
I’ve seen that damn cart ride in Skyrim so many times that Ralof and Hadvar are basically family. I consider the alternative start mod an absolute requirement now.
I love Thief and Thief 2 but there are a few levels in there (Thieve’s Guild, Trace the Courier) that are pretty dull and uninteresting to replay. They’re the songs you’re still tempted to skip on otherwise perfect albums.
A new NCG video! 😁
And it’s about Quake!! 🤯
And it’s Christmas!!! 🎅
What a delightful present for all of us!
Yeah, I said it and then got to thinking about it and I’m not sure it’d be that difficult. For PC games anyway, consoles (especially Nintendo) would probably require self reporting.
But Discord seems to be aware of what I’m playing (steam integration?) so theoretically a “game scrobbler” could work through that too? I think if such a service was created, it could also be neat to add community-driven achievements and stats tracking.
Ah, maybe a fun side project to dig into sometime…
I tend to prefer the Steam version if I have both, mainly as you say for acbievments and keeping my playtime all in one place. But also the community forums and guides are nice sometimes, and easily accessible with the steam ui.
GoG I’ll pick (and mainly purchase towards) older games and nostalgic favorites where lack of drm feels more important to me. Those often don’t have achievements and such anyway.
Funny enough, I get pretty annoyed about that playtime tracking thing. I wish there was like a last.fm scrobbler but for games. Before my SteamDeck, I rebought several games on Switch because I liked the portability. So now my playtime on those is split across multiple devices. Ah well, truly first world problems.
We have altered the Clock app. Pray we do not alter it further.
Also, I learned to give up on games from the infamous Atari ET game, which was one of the like 3 games at grandma’s house. Even understanding what’s happening on screen is difficult, let alone figuring out what you’re supposed to do.
Oh yeah, my b, thanks for the correction