sdp's recent activity

  1. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sdp
    Link Parent
    Very cool! Thanks for sharing. 🙏

    Very cool! Thanks for sharing. 🙏

    3 votes

  2. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sdp
    Link Parent
    You picked up a copy of Netrunner? Last I heard the game was in legal limbo since Fantasy Flight and WotC didn’t agree to continue licensing. I might be out of the loop. I did a quick search...

    You picked up a copy of Netrunner? Last I heard the game was in legal limbo since Fantasy Flight and WotC didn’t agree to continue licensing. I might be out of the loop. I did a quick search before replying and found that a company called Null Signal is printing Netrunner-compatible stuff.

  3. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sdp
    Link Parent
    Oh! Very good to know. I’ll be prepared. :)

    Oh! Very good to know. I’ll be prepared. :)

  4. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sdp
    Link Parent
    Oh, that’s rad! I’ll have to play through again with the commentary. Thanks for mentioning it. :)

    Oh, that’s rad! I’ll have to play through again with the commentary. Thanks for mentioning it. :)

    1 vote

  5. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sdp
    Link
    Last night I picked up Tactical Breach Wizards (TBW) and I’m very impressed. My first exposure to tactical games like TBW was Final Fantasy Tactics and Front Mission on the PS. Of course I’ve also...

    Last night I picked up Tactical Breach Wizards (TBW) and I’m very impressed.

    My first exposure to tactical games like TBW was Final Fantasy Tactics and Front Mission on the PS. Of course I’ve also dipped my toes into XCOM and most recently I’ve been playing Valkyria Chronicles. But for some reason on which I could never quite put my finger, I kept bouncing off those games.

    But last night with TBW, everything clicked. Tactics was just a puzzle to solve and I delighted in taking my time to solve it. The game has a lot of mechanics that make the tactical puzzle solving easier. It lets you rewind back to the start of your turn, undoing every move you’ve made until you commit to a sequence and pass the turn to the opponents. It also lets you magically “foresee” and respond to enemy actions on your turn, and since it’s still your turn you can rewind and try something else until you’re satisfied. Finally, there’s no chance of missing. Whatever the action says it does, it will do. If it says 2 damage, it will always do 2 damage. This is what makes the game a kind of puzzle solving that really satisfies me.

    Looking back, it’s easy to see that randomness was a big part of why I bounced off other tactics games. On Saturday I was playing Valkyria Chronicles and I spent 2 hours on one mission only to lose in the end because I missed the last shot I could make on a turn. On the enemy’s turn, they rolled over my camp with one hit of health left and I lost. If I wanted to make progress, I’d have to replay the last 2 hours, just to hope that I get lucky and make that shot this time.

    In my last review, I talked about bouncing off Elden Ring and enjoying Nier Automata because it’s much less punishing. Games that punish me and set back my progress don’t make me want to keep at it and get better. But games like TBW that reward experimentation make me fully lose track of time as I try to nail every last goal and get a perfect turn.

    And I haven’t even mentioned how TBW lets you get creative with combining effects from different abilities. The simplest example is an ability that lets one wizard lay a trap and shoot an enemy as soon as they step on a square, which combines nicely with an ability that knocks an enemy to a different square. The combination of ability effects and rewind mechanics makes each turn of TBW feel like a sandbox of toys to play with and craft something perfect.

    It doesn’t hurt that TBW also builds an interesting world through characters that are absolutely charming.

    7 votes

  6. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sdp
    Link Parent
    I don’t know when I started, but I have a tradition of sitting through the credits and spending some time reflecting on the game. To have the game then invite me to play again felt great, as it...

    I don’t know when I started, but I have a tradition of sitting through the credits and spending some time reflecting on the game. To have the game then invite me to play again felt great, as it was fresh in my mind how much I enjoyed the experience the first time, despite hitting that road bump.

  7. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sdp
    Link Parent
    Gotcha! I’m working on B now as 9S.

    Gotcha! I’m working on B now as 9S.

    1 vote

  8. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sdp
    Link Parent
    Looking at my save, I have achieved endings AT. But the first play through was as 2B.

    Looking at my save, I have achieved endings AT. But the first play through was as 2B.

  9. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    sdp
    Link
    Last night I beat Nier: Automata for the first time. I have some thoughts. This is my third attempt to really understand this game. My friends rave about it. Most recently, about a year or two...

    Last night I beat Nier: Automata for the first time. I have some thoughts.

    This is my third attempt to really understand this game. My friends rave about it. Most recently, about a year or two ago, I got stuck on a quest that was just a bit harder than I was really ready for. I play the game on easy, but I’m just not very good at action video games. On my break, I got into Elden Ring until I got stuck there. Coming back to N:A felt totally different. I’d gotten so used to how unforgiving Elden Ring is, it was wonderful to play a game that felt like the devs really wanted me to beat it.

    It’s unlike any other game I’ve played in that I immediately started playing again. I have heard that it takes 3 play throughs to see the whole game, and it was very obvious while I was starting the game anew that there was more going on than was apparent after one ending. I thought I would get bored playing through things a second time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It feels like a fresh perspective.

    6 votes

  10. Comment on Apple TV+ coming to Amazon Prime Video as an add-on subscription in ~tv

    sdp
    Link
    Amazon Prime is becoming the new cable network.

    Amazon Prime is becoming the new cable network.

    14 votes

  11. Comment on The unlikelihood of being complimented as a man in ~life.men

    sdp
    Link
    Someone told me “I like your sweater” in passing. I barely held back tears because I wasn’t expecting to hear something like that ever, let alone from some stranger in the grocery store.

    Someone told me “I like your sweater” in passing. I barely held back tears because I wasn’t expecting to hear something like that ever, let alone from some stranger in the grocery store.

    11 votes

  12. Comment on Israeli military announces ground invasion of Southern Lebanon in ~society

  13. Comment on Canada cannot afford another lost economic decade in ~society

    sdp
    Link
    The article lays out its case about Canada's "lost decade" based on a part of charts: GDP per capita and R&D spending as a percentage of GDP. Wealthsimple's tl;dr just this morning published an...

    The article lays out its case about Canada's "lost decade" based on a part of charts: GDP per capita and R&D spending as a percentage of GDP.

    Wealthsimple's tl;dr just this morning published an article asking if Canada's economy is broken, in which they discuss GDP per capita and R&D spending. This makes me think that their article is a rebuttal, though they don't link to the hub, they do link to an op-ed by Andrew Coyne in the Globe and Mail that makes a similar point, though notably without mentioning R&D.

    Wealthsimple's argument about Canada's GDP per capita seems to be well-reasoned. The chart in the original Hub article plots Canada's GDP per capita and nothing else to give context. Wealthsimple starts by plotting the GDP per capita of both the US and Canada, which certainly seems to support the hub article's point as it shows the US far surpassing Canada. That is until they plot the same again but with more countries for context; namely Australia, Germany, the UK, France, the EU, and Japan. In context, we see that every country follows roughly the same curve except for the US, which is the clear outlier pulling ahead of the rest.

    However, Wealthsimple's argument about Canada's R&D is much less convincing. They admit that Canada's R&D spending per capita is falling short of other countries, as the Hub article's bar charts show, but argues that Canada has more R&D researchers per capita. And that a third of the US' R&D spending is the result of a handful of tech giants. This just convinces me that Canada needs to spend more on R&D and foster an environment that encourages companies to make risky R&D investments.

    5 votes

  14. Comment on The spectacular failure of the Star Wars hotel in ~movies

    sdp
    Link Parent
    I’m a native English speaker and a published author, and it tripped me up. I had to read the whole comment to pick up from context what they meant.

    I’m a native English speaker and a published author, and it tripped me up. I had to read the whole comment to pick up from context what they meant.

    7 votes

  15. Comment on What is a value or belief you have that is extremely outside the norm? in ~talk