Like an alpha particle: very low penetrative power.

TORVALDS is a powerful Great Prince of Hell who has 618 legions of demons under his command. He gives true answers of all things past, present, and yet to come; he reveals the secrets and source of the kernel if asked; and he grants to the conjurer power and authority over devices and binds them to the conjurer’s will.

His name was Ozymandias, King of Kings.

When the COVID recession started, dairy farmers were seen dumping surplus milk rather than sell it at a lower price. I foresee a version of this where companies start destroying silicon to keep the supply low rather than let the prices drop to sane levels.

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The player is shown a lot of disturbing imagery, but there is zero tension and no threat. It’s similar to early Chinese Room titles: a pretentious and superficial experience comparable to A Machine For Pigs, without the pigs. Evaluated as a horror game, its horror is ruined by the game. 4/10, the experience isn’t worth the time. Just watch someone else play it.

Forget that, I was mixing up which game I remembered. I thought LOF2 was the one with the insane painter. I know I’ve played both, though (plus Observer), but can’t recall a single damn detail about the second game. I guess the experience was too bland to even retain.

Depends on where the curator draws the line, and you can’t apply sane criteria to what they consider “too woke”. Sometimes a game is put on a woke list because it has a female lead, or a physically strong female character, or non-heteronormative character dynamics, or people of color are present in it… I’ve seen one that was marked as woke because it referenced climate change and climate action. I think it was some popular shooter or something.

That is literally how I discovered Signalis. It was included in one of those anti-woke curators’ “not recommended” list, then I saw that it was an indie title, and overwhelmingly positive… I was sold immediately.

As someone who was bullied and assaulted several times in school, I have to chime in: don’t do that. A huge, arcing punch like that is flashy and spectacular, but it is easy to dodge or deflect (massive moment arm), and you’ll be thrown off-balance. Instead, if you can get in close, aim for the gut, just below the sternum. Keep the fist low and close to your body, and twist your torso as you punch. Hitting the soft tissue below the ribcage and above the stomach is fucking painful and will leave the rubber sole sommelier struggling to breathe.

FFXIV. I was playing it for the story… then Dawntrail happened.

Considering how many websites were temporarily obliterated by the left-pad fiasco, being an npmjs maintainer might be an even higher power-to-effort ratio (by virtue of a near-zero denominator) than being a billionaire CEO.

Marketing is extremely important for a game’s launch because it’s the only opportunity for a game to make a first impression and set expectations, and to gain player goodwill. When an announcement trailer is presented as the final spot on TGA, the audience expects a game worthy of that spot. Geoff did the game no favour by doing that, or by doubling down on twitter. They’ve cocked up the marketing and ruined player goodwill that may have caused some people to overlook the product’s multiple issues on release.

Coming back from that takes a lot of fucking effort (see: No Man’s Sky), which they’re obviously unwilling to give, so why would players waste their time for the promise of a better game? Highguard is a failure of design, a failure of management, and a failure of marketing; and I’m not at all sad that it’s getting flushed down the drain.

It sucks that the first to feel the effects of this entirely predictable failure are the workers.

That would be true in a vacuum, but there have been plenty of examples of “good” games completely fizzling out simply because they were unremarkable in a saturated market. Lawbreakers was a fairly well-received objective-based team shooter with interesting movement mechanics. It was killed off because it couldn’t compete with Overwatch for players’ time. Then there are the countless battle royale games released during the reign of PUBG and Fortnite, and all the wannabe Halo-killers, CoD-killers, WoW-killers… history is littered with the corpses of “good” but otherwise unremarkable games that thought they were the shit.

Highguard isn’t just a failure of a game, it’s a failure on the studio’s part to learn the lesson: players’ time and attention are limited resources, and you need to be exceptional to compete in a saturated market.

They didn’t just make a bet. They made a bet on the horse with broken legs.

“We are absolutely cooked, chat.” - Alan Wake (writer)

Something needs to fill the gaping hole left behind after Concord’s death.

Better not look at the microcode running on your CPU at a higher privilege level than the kernel, then.

It gets fast-paced and exciting when the boss has An Idea on a Friday afternoon that must be completed before the end of the week.

I’d take a confessional booth over an open office floor.

“You are absolutely right, ma’am. I understand why my spilling your drink in your lap has caused you some distress, and I truly sympathize with your son’s concussion from the blunt impact caused by my reckless flailing to fix my previous mistake. Please listen to this advertisement while another attendant comes to assist you.”