I mod a worryingly growing list of communities. Ask away if you have any questions or issues with any of the communities.

I also run the hobby and nerd interest website scratch-that.org.

  • 26 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’m legitimately having difficulty following the flow of this question. The formatting vacillates between question and statement, and I am sincerely having trouble fully discerning the connection between points.

    I think this post comes from disappointment with Star Wars Outlaws, which by all reports largely follows the Ubisoft formula for open world games. For this, yes Ubisoft has struck upon a formula that is applied to seemingly all of their open world games, which is indeed overly predictable. For that, I do agree that the rote steps of a collectation heavy game where the player secures territory of the game in order to advance the story is overplayed.

    Otherwise, I am stuck trying to tease out the rest of the post’s intention.

    Recently the 2 “highly praised” Star Wars “open world” games

    I don’t know what the other Star Wars game referred to is supposed to be. Is this referring to Jedi Survivor? That game did have a number of technical problems, but it wasn’t ever intended or marketed as an open world game. Putting even that aside, why are two Star Wars games used as the pillars of western AAA games? What is the point or critique here?






  • My apparently encyclopedic knowledge of early internet culture and deep cut 80s-90s media. I knew I was well versed, but thought that what I knew was near baseline. Just recently I had to explain the connection between Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid and the movie Escape From New York to someone astonished I was pulling out all kinds of details from an “obscure” old movie.












  • For people who want FPS single player, squad control games. The choices are really original Ghost Recon, GRAW, Brothers In Arms, and kinda-sorta Full Spectrum Warrior.

    Arma is more open ended. There is a niche for a game that is out of the box squad control with missions designed around it.

    Sure you can tell people to keep replaying those old games over and over, but new entries into the genre would be nice. The graphics of this new game are a mix of indie game devs knowing their limitations and appealing to original GR era nostalgia.


  • There’s no good 1-for-1 way to represent it on a screen.

    In real life, the entire image in one eye would be the scope, and the other would be everything else. On a monitor with a little scope pop up you have a small image-in-an-image that you’re looking at with both eyes and bouncing back and forth with to the surroundings. Your brain isn’t processing it the same way.

    This is a case where i don’t think it is possible to replicate the real experience, but that doing image-in-image is a more annoying choice than others. I’d veto it on being annoying to play with grounds, and do hope what we see in the trailer either doesn’t represent how it works or is an option.





  • I really love when RPGs give unique dialog options based on non-dialog skills.

    For example, if you are spec’d into a certain class of weapon you unlock dialog with a relevant vendor. Or if you have a high gambling skill, your character can talk about the finer points of gambling.

    Taking this a step further, reactivity from having accomplished something requiring application of these skills allowing unique dialog.

    This can all either be unique flavor dialog, dialog that gets the conversation to where it would have gone anyway, or dialog that opens up new quests or quest resolutions.


  • Always keep an updated resume. If you are at a current job and accomplish something or get some kind of skill, put it on the resume or a word doc. Just keep everything up to date so that when you leave you have material to work with. Similarly, make sure to have contact info for people who will have your back. (Not like most places actually call, but it never hurts to be prepared).

    When actively tuning up a resume for a job search, I’ve always been told to keep it just to one page. Having many pages of bloat has been told to me to be turn off. I usually have made variations of a resume during job searches to cater to different jobs by highlighting different relevant topics.

    Know what kind of work and environment you are most comfortable with when looking for a job. Know what kind of downsides you are willing to accept. Some jobs with unique downsides like weird schedules, travel, or some sort of physical demand can have upsides in terms of valuing people who don’t run off. Of course, sometimes those jobs have downsides and don’t value employees, so I suppose you have to feel that out. If it is a job requiring special skills plus having the downsides it is more likely to value you.

    Naturally, don’t trust interviews where the place is trying to oversell you on the job. Don’t trust places where they highlight things like a nice break room over actual benefits.

    If you are going through a job agency, you often get temp-to-permanent offers. These are often sketchy, where they string along the temp contract workers with the promise of a permanent position but never serve it up. In my experience, both cubicle grunt work and entry level manufacturing do this a lot to people. On the other hand, some temp-to-hire positions are legit, and the temp time is basically a probation period that the company wants to be done with if the person is a good fit. In my experience with this, look around the workplace to see if they have any other temp people getting strung along, look to see how specific your value is, and look at the overall size of the company.

    FWIW, my current job was a temp-to-hire situation. I was initially skeptical, but the interview sold me. Much of it was the boss who did not sugarcoat the downsides to the job, to be very clear with what I was getting into and what was expected, and make sure I was okay with it. There was a short kind of demonstration walkthrough of what I could expect. All this gave me the signal he was looking for a good fit and not just a warm body. My temp period was “up to” six months, but got cut off at about 3 when it was clear I was ready to stay.