I've been thinking about how card games and card-game-adjacent roguelikes tend to have two kinds of counterintuitively opposing systems - "diversifying systems" that force the player to diversity their moves, and "specialising systems" that force the player to restrict them.

I think it's funny that when a citizen is forced to do something by the government, it's called an order, but when a constitutional monarch is forced to do something by the government, it's called "advice".

New Deltarune characters are certainly not going to be coming back in later chapters, so while I'm happy they had their time in the sun, I'm sad that an incredible Aqua-Lancer pesterlog will never happen.

Thinking about what makes me like 868-HACK and 868-BACK so much, and while the core mechanics of alerts and encounters are really fresh and satisfying to grasp, the one huge reason is simply the cyberpunk setting. That by itself holds everything together and gives it beauty.

*finds out there's an Isle of Life painting that's the opposite of Isle of the Dead* Folks, Böcklin has jumped the shark

I love games that make you wanna become the wiki for them

Yeah, you BET I'm hurriedly replaying Deltarune. My new favourite underappreciated character is the secret shopping UI white tiger face.

Reading the ImageMagick command line manual

Alright, the game's been out long enough, time to post insular nonsense and relatable made-uppery #868-BACK

fairysvoice.net/blog/How_to_... - Hey! If you're playing 868-BACK and are still coming to grips with the game, here's a new blog post with some tips for beginner play. I'm hoping there's something here that might get you up and running on both feet.

A big design thought I've been having about 868-BACK is how it takes a game with stage-spanning power progression (on each 8-floor stage, you start with few progs and slowly gain more as you fight through) and adds a second, run-spanning power progression system (devices) to it.

Hey! For the past quite-awhile I've been playtesting 868-BACK store.steampowered.com/app/3304110/86 8BACK/ It's the sequel to 868-HACK, one of my lifetime favourite minimalist traditional roguelikes, and let me personally guarantee you, this one's absolutely even better. It has the stuff in spades.

Save 10% on 868-BACK on Steam

868-BACK is a computer-hacking strategy roguelike game where your mission is to dismantle capitalism one server at a time! Use hacking powers to fight enemies, steal the servers' data, and face increa...

store.steampowered.com

Mario Maker 2 out of context

"How can you people live with yourselves" ​- Me remembering that North Americans call the room with the toilet the bathroom

Seems everyone's talking about Titanium Court now that it's released. …And, as it turns out, I /also/ have a release review of the game at the ready. Here's my *gameplay-only* review, its two "tides", and whether the most effective strategy is fun or not. fairysvoice.net/blog/A_gamep...

@foddy.net

If the web platform is standardised then explain THIS

I was just browsing Twitter, and right while I was reading, it started auto-translating Japanese tweets without my asking and I had to click the "Show original" button to turn it off.

Thinking about software names with common one-letter prefixes… Apple's "i" is trying too hard to be cool. G from GNU should be cool like "g-force" but gets attached to and silenced by "n" way too often. q from Qt has a whiff of wrongness to it. X from X11 is downright ugly.

I've often said browser-side web programming is about trying to communicate between three languages at once (HTML, CSS, JS). Well, if you add JSON, two XML sublangs (SVG and MathML), two shader languages (WebGL and WebGPU), and WASM, it's actually much, much worse than that.

Welcome to… THE GAME DESIGN MINUTE Kiddy Kong's skipping-stone water-bounce should have exponentially increased in height on each bounce until you could fly over half the level like the springboards in SMB Lost Levels …Thus concludes THE GAME DESIGN MINUTE

Was reading a really old forum post about the Wayback Machine, and one of the pages linked from it was this worryingly contemporary-feeling "you can just make a website" page from 1997 http://web.archive.org/web/19970110164754/http://www.links.net/webpub/

Thinking about how fortunate it is that when Phil Katz invented the most ubiquitous compression format in history, he called it "Deflate". Easy to remember and apt. Meanwhile, every compression format created after it is some substring of LZWSSMA78265.

@heckmaybe.bsky.social Quick question, is it possible for the Lifeline vods to be uploaded to the Youtube site? The game came up in conversation and I wanted to link them, but it seems they're gone (forever?)

So you've run into that age-old problem: every time you mispronounce semicolon as "se-mico-lon" over and over, people quickly make you stop. But did you know that if you sneak into the wilderness during new moon, you can say that word incredibly wrong as many times as you want?

These oven gloves I've got are shedding a lot of their internal lining, thus upgrading them to "exciting gloves that make removing things from the oven an exciting experience".

You know hard drive prices are actually, seriously in trouble when a tweet about WizTree, the disk usage graphing freeware, gets 11K retweets

Alexander the Great trying increasingly harebrained schemes to trick his weary troops into letting him invade India, including Opposite Day, ventriloquism during a vote call, and publicly raising a signpost reading "←Macedon" then spinning it around in the dead of night