2077 basically breaks from its source material over this. There’s a series of side quests where you are asked to non-lethally subdue people suffering from “cyberpsychosis” in order to facilitate independent research on rehabilitation, and it turns out that basically all of them are either a) suffering from medical side effects that (according to some other in-game documents) are known to cyberware manufacturers, but being swept under the rug to keep sales and profits flowing, and/or b) suffering from untreated psychological trauma, and it just turns out lashing out is a lot more destructive when you happen to have a ton of built in weapon systems that are always with you and ready to engage at a moment’s notice. The “humanness” angle is sometimes seen being pushed by the media, but it’s basically an excuse the corps use to shift blame away from their faulty products.

Pokémon Infinite Fusion is really good. It’s Kanto but you can splice Pokémon together for fun and/or advantage, combining their types and movesets, and a ton of the possible combos have custom sprites. (The ones that don’t have custom sprites use old auto-generated sprites, which are at least usually funny.)

There are about 500 canonical 'mons, which means over 200,000 fusions!

Don’t trust Google, people are making fake download sites. Get the game from the Discord.

(Yes, Discord is a terrible place to keep the canonical download links. No, I don’t know why it’s like that. Yes, this whole thing was made in RPG Maker, somehow!)

Thanks, I didn’t flatline! One of my players couldn’t make this week so I improvised a variant on the classic Food Fight intro scenario so that we could familiarize ourselves with the combat without going off on a run sans street samurai. In retrospect I’m not sure I handled recoil penalties correctly, and we slogged through the rulebook looking for some things like “Why does spell Force matter again?” but in the end only one of the players got mildly shot, and the mage manabolted a guy so hard that he totally fried from the inside out, so I’m calling it a success!

Thanks chummer, I’ll need it!

Shadowrun on SNES. And I’m running Shadowrun tonight for the first time in literal decades (I last GMed it when I was in middle school!), for people who haven’t played before; I’m so nervous and unprepared! I hope that even if I mangle the rules I can get across the vibes.

Sonic Roboblast 2 Kart and its successor Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers are open source, and pretty fun! The exact degree to which they’re free-as-in-libre depends somewhat on Sega’s policy of turning a blind eye to fan games, so although GPL-2.0 permits commercial use I wouldn’t recommend testing it.

There is a lively modding scene (or there was for SRB2K last time I was playing it; I haven’t played RR yet). Ring Racers has single-player content if that’s what you’re looking for, I hear it’s quite challenging.

“I had a [noun] [verb]” is a perfectly fine colloquialism for “a [noun] [verbed] (in a way that affected me).” It’s very common in the parts of the US I’ve lived in, at least.

One of the conditions for being a tax exempt religious organization is staying out of politics. If they denounce a particular politician or party they could lose their status.

My car has been on standard time for years now, so it’s currently correct.

The last time I was handing out candy at my old neighborhood, kids would ring the doorbell but then they’d just stand there and stare at me until I handed them candy. You’re supposed to say “trick or treat”!

Now I live in an apartment, so I don’t get trick-or-treaters. (I have candy just in case, but nobody ever knocks.) My roommate went to hang out with his sister and hand out candy at her place, and apparently their neighborhood has decreed that trick-or-treating ends at 7 sharp now so that nobody is out after dark? I don’t get it. I thought staying out late (and, for teens, potentially unsupervised) was part of the fun!

Apparently the Narcan is “in case fentanyl is deployed as a chemical weapon.” How often does this happen? I can find one instance of Russia using aerosolized fentanyl against Chechen separatists during a hostage situation in 2002.

This doesn’t strike me as an especially efficient way to increase security.

Wow knowing the asset reuse was by design makes me feel way less charitable towards DA2. (I don’t know if I’d go as far as the other commenter and say it’s “a bad game,” but I didn’t like it.)

Initial reviews seem remarkably positive given what we saw in the first gameplay reveal a few months ago. My impression at the time was that about half the voice actors sounded like they hadn’t been given enough context about the scenario and some of the cutscenes had questionable direction, which were bad signs for a curated ten minute slice. I still think it’s ultimately not for me—I don’t really want action combat in my Dragon Age—but I’m glad people are enjoying it.

My college workflow was to copy the prompt and then “paste without formatting” in Word and leave that copy of the prompt at the top while I worked, I would absolutely have fallen for this. :P

So fuck Alex Jones, but I really don’t think it’s a good idea to force people to sell their accounts so that other people can impersonate them. It’s just inviting social engineering attacks.

• Do what thou wilt
• This shall be the whole of the Law
• This space intentionally left blank

https://youtu.be/4nyHPIcbn88 (nsfw lyrics)

Was that this studio, or their other studio that’s been running since 2017? This one, “Team Blue,” was supposed to be working on some unannounced AAA game.

I think you’re right, it must have been the sequel!

Is this the one where I kept trying to go visit my mom (as part of my belligerent insistence on looking for stuff to do in the open world after every mission), but the game wouldn’t let me go into any building that wasn’t the next story mission, and then later the main character got chewed out by his mom for never visiting her? I did find that annoying.