Mage Knight. This game threw me in to an unbridaled rage with how much I loathed it. I couldn't understand why it was rated so highly. So, I went to BGG to see just how so many people could like this awful game.

Turns out everyone plays it cooperatively. Not a soul plays nor recommends the competitive mode; the mode I was playing in.

I wasn't much in to it. It plays very much like a co-op procedural. Each player just kinda does their own thing and occassionally shouts at the other players while the app applies constant pressure.

The meat of the game is just in doing your part within the imposed stressors of the game. For that sort of experience, I think Space Alert is vastly better (and not obsolete!)

To be clear, Visual Studio Code is the Electron app. Visual Studio is not.

I couldn't get in to this game, myself. Granted, due to that, I've only played about an hour of it but this game felt much more like a Visual Novel than an RPG, to me. Stats seemed to have no bearing on anything other than what the narrative decided they have a bearing on. It was therefore, very difficult to figure out who my character was. Otherwise, you're just clicking on things and reading reams of text.

I get that they were trying to go for a more tabletop version of an RPG but without a DM, I find that near impossible to translate 1:1. I would have preferred a more Baldur's Gate approach to the game.

Digimon, Monster Rancher, and other games also didn't have creatures that are very clearly direct knock-offs of the Pokemon creature IP, either.

Not everything can be easily compressed to significantly smaller sizes. In fact, for any random arrangement of bytes, finding one that is compressable by any significant amount is rare.

I don't think I have the gene which lets me blindly trust someone with a transaction, heh. I research every game I buy. My money is guaranteed to be worth something. I want to know my game will be worth something in exchange.

That said, Volko Ruhnke, Eric M. Lang, Corey Konieczka, Rob Daviau, and Vital Lacerda are some of my favorites who are still active.

The worst part of getting old is listening to younger folk tell you how the world couldn't have possibly worked the way it actually did work in the past.

VS is great. Even the Community edition is a fully-fledged IDE. It has robust debugging and profiling tools. Intellisense is wonderful.

It does have some minor annoyances if you ever find yourself having to manually modify project files but otherwise, it's by far and away my favorite IDE (followed closely behind by IntelliJ)

Rad! I'm a big fan of Space Hulk.

Maori: Warriors of the Long White Cloud by Compass Games.

I think there are enough tabletop games in the hobbiest game space for everyone. That means there's a very wide range of games from the simplistic to the complicated. I think if expectations are not kept in check, it can be easy to bite off more than one can chew.

Moreover, everyone's going to find different things complicated. I've been in this hobby for decades. I don't find Gloomhaven particularly complicated. I very much enjoy hex and chit war games. But god damn, I cannot wrap my head around Oath. There's just something about it in which the rules don't click for me.

One of the first things I do when considering a new purchase is head over to BGG and read some reviews. If it looks up my alley, then I'll give the game a go.

Got in a great 7P game of Ares' The Thing. I was the starting alien. I infected someone and they, in turn, interacted with someone else.

Just as the rescue helicopter was to arrive, I decided to out myself as an alien. That instantly cast doubt on those two other players, one of which was actually human. The humans left him behind and we won. So fun.

You don't have to plug the remote in to your PC. You can use the mobile application.

Regardless, how would you have designed it differently? The DB of devices has to be updated all of the time. Not all of those devices are IR controlled. Some are BT. Some are 802.11. There has to be some means of pulling down data, common configurations, and providing a mechanism to change those configurations within the context of a single UI. The Sofabaton remotes are implemented in a very similar way.

Ninety god damned dollars.

The Pixel 7 is the first to drop 32-bit support. For what it's worth, Apple dropped 32-bit support about five years ago.

I'm opposed to this acquisition but let's be clear: Activision doesn't have a "minor duty to shareholders". They have a fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Starcraft, Doom, Exceed, Sniper Elite, and Space Empires are all brilliant. Personally, I think Street Fighter: The Miniatures Game is pretty good as well (although perhaps not for the price)

1994's X-Com.

If you have Game Pass, it's available there.