Hell, a suicide squad game that actually properly utilized the suicide squad could have been great.
Hell, a suicide squad game that actually properly utilized the suicide squad could have been great.
The movies that need remakes are the ones that had potential but just sucked (or at least, failed to deliver a fraction of what they could have been). Unfortunately, those are rarely huge hits that people will still recognize decades later. It’s the popular and successful movies that they want to remake.
If they lie and tell people that their votes were counted when they weren’t in order to disenfranchise them by robbing them of their opportunity to correct the ballot, I believe they could face fraud charges. That’s in addition to any potential legal consequences for violating this court order.
I have to ask, have you read Orconomics? It’s a parody of fantasy, gaming, and economics. I recommend it to anyone who likes Pratchett, and especially if you’re into the extremely specific niche of financial fantasy satire.
Isn’t this the same attorney general that refused to release prisoners that had been exonerated?
For physical tasks that require little higher brain function but just need me to not zone out or chase a distraction, I listen to audiobooks and podcasts. It’s about the only way I can get stuff done around the house.
For tasks that require real brain power, I stick to original scores from movies and games. No lyrics, easy to find something with the right level of intensity for your mood, and generally designed to compliment an existing experience rather than be your sole focus.
Extended loops of Brothers in Arms from Mad Max Fury Road and Mountains from Interstellar have saved my ass in many a crisis. And the hour long Skyrim morning exploration mix and Witcher relaxation mix combined have probably doubled my creative output.
The problem is we don’t have a federal agency for handling trash removal.
Let’s also not forget that this is the guy who argued that “some folks need killing” and seemed to be saying that this was a reasonable (perhaps even necessary) response to people getting “cancelled” and social media banning people for the things they say.
Or did the right thing.
Not this time, obviously, but sometimes.
I expect it to be a buggy mess that has lots of potential and doesn’t deliver on half of what it seems like it should do. Then after a year or two it will finally be patched into being mostly stable and mods will have reached a point where it can mostly be turned into the game I actually want. However there will be a few creative decisions that I absolutely hate but which are so unnecessarily locked in that even mods can’t fix them, so I’ll have to just accept them as an irritant that I will do my best to ignore.
Being recognized as the only sane choice by people across the political spectrum and by nonpartisan organizations that rarely if ever endorse presidential candidates is generally going to be helpful for a campaign.
While there are plenty of people on Lemmy acting like this is a deal breaker, I highly doubt any of those people were ever going to vote for Harris.
And even if there is a nonzero number of votes lost to third parties or staying home because of this endorsement, those lost votes are almost certainly less likely to be in battleground states, and are only worth half as much as any independent or republican leaning votes that would otherwise have gone to Trump.
Who would have guessed that they were all communist, fascist, Marxist RINOs?
Obviously these former elected officials, military leaders, national security experts, etc from every administration in the last 40 years are all just trying to destroy America.
A lot of talk about how the law prevents the president from stopping funding for policies they might oppose. Which should last for all of 5 minutes if Trump gets back into office.
Great, this will probably dominate the news for a while and give Trump a breather after he spent the last week alienating voters. That said, while he might be able to milk this for a brief bump in the polls, I doubt it would last. He doesn’t have the ability to not loudly proclaim insane bigoted nonsense.
Hopefully this will cause him to either get overly cautious (unlikely) or become even more nuts and repulsive to anyone that isn’t a die hard loyalist already.
At this point, I’m not sure if he’d lose even 1% in the polls if a recording came out showing him with Epstein, explicitly stating he’ll take the 12 year old girl, then dropping his pants. Most of his supporters would claim it was fake, some would claim it was out of context because they didn’t release any footage of actual sex, and at least a few would argue that there’s nothing wrong with sex with 12 year olds.
Hawaii
I think you can very easily see the progression of KOTOR -> Jade Empire -> Mass Effect - > Dragon Age Origins. It’s not all straight lines, but you can see the things they keep, the things they tweak, the things they cut, and the things they bring back.
I love Jade Empire. There are a lot of things I think could have been better, but I do really love it.
The combat was cool, and I liked the different styles, and the fact that you were not going to learn them all in a single playthrough. It also incentivized switching between hand to hand, weapons, magic, support and transformation in ways that still allowed each type to feel like it was useful and filling a niche rather than being the kind of samey rock paper scissors bullshit that many games use. That said, the balance was not great, and some options were significantly better than others, to the point of making some things seem almost useless. Most of them are usable, but if you try them all out you’ll find that there are some you will probably never use again. That said, on replays I would always pick white demon for my martial style even though objectively it’s the worst choice because I found it more fun and challenging than the other two.
Story-wise, the companions were fairly standard for Bioware games. I don’t hate any of them, but I also can’t say I have as much of a connection to them as I have to HK-47, Jolee and Canderous, or Garrus, Wrex and Tali, or Alistair, Oghren, and Morrigan. It’s not that there’s something wrong with the characters, as much as there’s just less opportunity due to the way Jade Empire handles them in gameplay. Unlike those other games, you only get 1 companion in your party at a time, so there’s no banter between them while you walk, and just less interaction with them overall.
This is made worse by the way the game handles combat for them. Followers can be set to fight or support, where they meditate to give you a bonus but leaving you to fight the enemies alone. A neat idea in theory, but the problem is that fighting really just translates to them distracting one or two minions until they get knocked unconscious. They can’t stand up to anything tough, and they will not be dispatching enemies, just acting as a momentary distraction before they fall (even the two that are combat only and are supposed to be incredibly strong). In support they will each give you a different bonus. One scatters bottles around that temporarily let you use drunken master style… which is not better than what you already have so it’s just a novelty. Two others slightly increase your damage with either weapons or martial attacks. And the remaining three each refill one of your resources (health, focus and chi). Since Chi is able to heal you and increase your martial damage, and powers your magic and transformations, that chi restoring character is by far the most useful, with the focus restoring guy being a distant second since it allows you to slow time and is needed for using weapons.
If I had one suggestion I could send back in time it would have been to allow 2 or 3 followers at a time, with a dedicated combat slot and a dedicated support slot so that you can have a larger party and less incentive to just pick one character to the exclusion of everyone else.
The morality system was a great idea, but like Mass Effect, there is a clear disconnect between what they describe it as and what it actually is in practice. The way of the open palm is supposed to be altruistic, while the closed fist is supposed to be about strength and growing through conflict and adversity. They aren’t intended to simply be good and evil. The problem is, you get lots of pointlessly evil options that don’t correspond with that philosophy they describe, and yet they still give you closed fist points. In fact, I struggle to think of a single time in the game where you couldn’t just replace the open palm and closed fist points with light side and dark side points and get the exact same result. It’s a shame, because it would have been great if they had more of a focus on the competing philosophies, with times when open palm might seem less than ideal, and times when closed fist comes across as respectable in its own way. In fact, I would have loved it if they’d had open palm, closed fist, and a third hidden stat for just being a dick, and had people react to all three.
One other big difference is the pacing of the game. The others all start in tutorial town, then move on to a second area which launches you on your quest, then opens up the map and lets you pick which order to do things in, before taking you to the endgame. Jade empire technically follows that description, but the part where it opens up is basically just letting you choose between 2 options, so it’s not nearly as dynamic. And based on the number of places which are frequently mentioned but never seen, I suspect there were multiple areas which were cut from the game.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there’s nothing wrong with the pacing, it’s just notable once you’re familiar with that classic Bioware formula.
Overall, I highly recommend Jade Empire. It’s fun, it has an engaging story, an interesting world, and a lot of that old pre-EA Bioware charm.
Also, I think Trump benefits from the assumptions that low information voters have about Republicans, and their tendency to blame the incumbent party for anything bad that happens, particularly in the economy. Harris laying out specific policies to help families, small businesses etc. is just in one ear and out the other, but Trump being vaguely pro-business in any way reinforces their biases.
And to make matters worse, most people aren’t all that rational. They aren’t paying close attention to what’s being said and analyzing it coldly and logically. Hell, they may not even be paying attention, and just check in every once in a while. This also benefits Trump because his strategy is to spew lies, false promises and emotionally charged rhetoric which is most effective on the uninformed and unthinking members of the audience.
That said, there’s just always going to be 20% of the people who would say Trump was better in every way no matter what happened. Some of that is because they are treating every question as a proxy for Trump vs Harris/Democrats/Commies/Whatever, and part of this is because they are so far gone that they can only interpret the debate through a right wing lens that will uncritically accept whatever Trump says, and which rejects any good point Harris makes.
And for something similar in its insanity, there’s also Santa Claus, a product of Mexico that I can only assume was fueled by product from Columbia.
If I ever become the ruler of the world, I’m making a law that every month gets one major holiday, and that holiday shall be confined to that month.
That’s 13 major holidays, plus New Years (and Leap Day) since I’d also be forcing everyone to use a better calendar.