Agreed. It's why I have all of Kobold Press's supplemental monster books. Variety is the spice of life, and I'm constantly trying to find ways to make combat more engaging than just slugging it out with my players. Quirky stat blocks help me come up with scenarios.

Yes, however, to appease the pedants out there, saying Gygax and Arneson and the rest of the Geneva Lake crew "grew up on" DnD is a bit of a misnomer. They didn't grow up on it, they invented it, and they were well into adulthood at the time.

Man, the before and after shading is such a stark difference! This looks great!

Interesting! Based on the headline I thought this was maybe like a 2d version of The Guild games, but this appears to learn closer to something like Recettear, maybe?

Boy, I knew Alan Moore has some strong opinions, but this seems beyond the pale.

There's less of a difference than you believe there to be. In principle, you've said the biker that rides without a helmet has proven themselves too dumb to live. You state that you believe we should allow more stupid people die, because our society has A) limited resources and B) removed or lessened the natural filter (risk of death) that accompanies stupid activity. You state that this has led to a situation where stupid people are procreating and the stupid offspring of stupid people are showing up in ERs, demonstrating new and heretofore unseen misunderstandings of physics. If we let more stupid people die, hopefully some of them will not have bred yet, and we, as society, can course correct back to nature, where stupid critters tend to die more frequently than intelligent critters (which is a huge assumption in and of itself).

To be clear, despite my facetious comment earlier, I don't actually think you're a Nazi, or a racist, or any of the other things that proponents of this pseudoscience were back in the day. The tricky thing about eugenics is that, devoid of context, it sounds pretty fucking good. And, despite no one using the term anymore (thanks, Hitler), there are absolutely eugenics advocates out there today, and many of them aren't even necessarily bad people! A few years back, FDA approved gene therapy treatments for folks afflicted by sickle cell anemia. This is, essentially, eugenics in action, and, other than the most die-hard slippery slopers, you've not got folks distributing torches and pitchforks because of some light genetic editing, especially when the tech has allowed eugenicists to bypass the most ornery methods of gene manipulation that previous advocates used: namely sterilization of certain populations.

So, I get it. You're not advocating preemptive death camps for idiots, or a sterilization device on motorcycle fuel tanks if you start moving without a helmet on. Therefore, you don't feel like your argument is based on eugenics. However, it is, and you can either become comfortable with that notion, or you can reexamine your line of thought and come up with a different hypothesis. Neither option is any better or worse than the other.

As an aside, to continue using your asshole biker example, there are tertiary benefits to attempting to save their life to best of our society's ability, if you're looking for silver linings. Skills practice in a "live-fire" environment for the folks trying to save him, for one. Sure, maybe, in your estimation, this biker didn't deserve all the effort to save him, but maybe the sweet old lady with a TBI the week following does deserve to live, and the surgical team noted some process improvements during their work on the asshole earlier.

Congratulations, you've just talked yourself into being a proponent of eugenics. Speak with Goebbels for your welcome packet and fashionable armband.

I mean, we can only go off of what is presented in the story, while acknowledging it's 4chan and therefore both fake and gay. Within that frame, the new guy has been tagged with a nickname, he has mentioned to his colleagues that he'd prefer they not call him the nickname, and they are continuing to call him the name he's expressly said he'd prefer they didn't use. That's a textbook hostile work environment, at a minimum.

He's upset enough that he voiced his preference. Choosing to ignore that stated preference might be fine in this context, or it might not be. But, assuming that someone is not actually upset about a behavior that they've requsted change seems like an unnecessary leap of faith.

You come for Bruce Campbell doing a geriatric Elvis impersonation, you leave with a newfound respect for the importance of dignified elderly care. In the middle, some souls get sucked out of butts. This movie rules.

Undoubtedly, yes, the fixed camera perspective of the original RE games owes a huge debt of gratitude to Alone in the Dark. However, Sweet Home predates the original AitD by 3 years, and has a direct lineage to RE through Tokuro Fujiwara, who directed Sweet Home and produced the original RE game. In fact, RE began its life as a SNES remake of Sweet Home in 1993, and it wasn't until production had already begun that Mikami discovered AitD and reconfigured their plans. I'm not super familiar with AitD, so perhaps he lifted more features from that game than the perspective (that weren't already present in some form in Sweet Home, at any rate), but I didnt see that mentioned in the interview.

Legit had half the onion wedged between my jaws before I remembered to check the community.

That's a real neat image, does anyone know the source?

I really wish there was a companion piece to this article in which all of the alluded to "higher-ups", who are pushing the technology, were afforded the same anonymity and freedom to speak candidly as these employees. The most insightful passage of this article, to me, was the individual who theorized that proponents of AI view game development as a problem to be solved, rather than a valuable process of iteration. Given the opportunity to speak freely, I'm curious if the pro-AI devs/execs would agree with that characterization.

It all depends on how you're defining "influence". As an example, let's look at the first Resident Evil game and it's predecessor, Sweet Home. More people have played or heard of Resident Evil than a movie tie-in game that was never officially released outside Japan. However, a huge amount of RE's DNA (indeed, things that fans will say are necessary to capturing the feel of early RE games) stem from Sweet Home. Hell, RE was initially conceived of as a remake of Sweet Home, until they realized they didn't have the rights. Below is an incomplete list of features from Sweet Home that were incorporated into the first RE.

• inventory management puzzles
• exploring an intricate, cohesive location inhabited by monsters.
• narrative communicated through found notes and cutscenes
• deliberately clunky combat to emphasize player vulnerability
• protagonist characters each have a thing they can do that others can't (presaging Jill's lockpick and Chris's lighter)
• door loading transitions

So, which is the more influential game? The one that popularized all of these concepts, or the one that originated the concepts? I think a case can be made for both, but I lean towards the originator.

Higher fidelity for sure, as one would expect when comparing games released 10 years apart, but idk if it's "better" per se. Of course this is totally subjective, but I feel like there's no style to inZoi, unless we define "generic AI output" as a style.

Given your parenthetical, I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm gonna dispute that the series of novels about the fractured and imperfect nations of "the West" uniting against an alliance of barbaric monsters and uncivilized men in "the East" is apolitical at all.

Not to mention it's a text which presupposes the divine mandate of kings, which is an explicitly political stance.

Which is not to say any of this is bad, necessarily, though I do think it would be a fun exercise in fan fiction to rewrite Aragorn's arc. Instead of it culminating with him accepting his "birthright" and becoming king, he winds up fucking off back to the woods with his hot elf-wife and telling Gondor to sort their own shit out.

Buy the Divinity games instead. Rewards Larian, doesn't give WOTC/Hasbro shit, and enables the studio to continue to work of stuff they find exciting, rather than becoming chief foremen of the IP mines, along with all of Activision's support studios who do naught but crank out CoD skins nowadays (RIP Raven).

If I remember right, Larian has pretty definitively said they want nothing to do with DnD or BG3 moving forward, to the point that they cancelled DLC plans.

This seems like the thread to ask this question in: are there any Persona fans around here who can help me break through my mental block with P4G?

I don't typically replay narrative games which I've completed. Therefore, in games which offer a NG+ experience (usually under the guise of "you got an ending, now play the game again for the TRUE ending!"), I am inexorably drawn to guides which are designed to allow the player to experience the maximum amount of content on a first playthrough. On the bright side, such guides are in abundance for this game. On the less bright side, playing Persona gives me anxiety now.

Even when I'm intentionally avoiding the guide to lessen that sensation, the knowledge that an optimal path exists, and I'm not following it, is discomfiting. I know this is dumb. We work on it therapy.

Is Persona just not the series for me? How do others deal with some of its quirks?