This reads like an ad written by an LLM, wtf is it doing here?

Was not prepared for the Diablo II reference lmao

San Francisco had an emperor.

(He even “decreed” the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)

Sigma Star Saga for the GBA. Really creative mashup of an RPG and a side-scrolling shooter, with a cool weapon-configuration system thrown in. Definitely suffered a bit from platform limitations, but there’s absolutely more that could have been done with the core concept.

Shockingly good writing, too.

Good lord yes. Overwatch is just a corporatized TF2 ripoff, but Battleborn was a creative, unique game with a soul.

Anyone who hasn’t seen it should watch the game’s intro cinematic, which gives a great sense of just how much character the game had.

FYI, “anthropomorphizing” doesn’t strictly mean “viewing as human”. I never meant to imply that people see a spoon as a human being.

Anthropomorphization is the act of associating human qualities with non-human entities.

My point is that humans are remarkably good at doing this, even as far as, e.g., ascribing “unhappiness” to a spoon simply for being unused.

This kind of behavior is why we must be extremely wary of the Turing test and other measures of machine “intelligence” - humans may see intelligence even where none exists simply because it’s our nature.

Yep, this is the major flaw that’s becoming clear about the Turing test, and why people are so hyped over LLMs: computers don’t have to be good at imitating people, because people are so good at anthropomorphizing computers (along with everything else).

The “solution” is to curate things, invest massive human resources in it

Hilariously, Google actually used to do this: they had a database called the “knowledge graph” that slowly accumulated verified information and relationships between commonly-queried entities, producing an excellent corpus of reliable, easy-to-find information about a large number of common topics.

Then they decided having people curate things was too expensive and gave up on it.

It’s also just an incredible deconstruction of the “modern warfare” shooter genre. It screams at the player, “hey, hold up a sec, think about those people you’re shooting”.

I think it’s part of why the only other shooters I like are TF2 and the Borderlands series, both of which frame the violence with a distinctly fantastical, escapist setting, intentionally distancing the game from reality.

I tried Disco Elysium, and I really appreciate everything it did/was trying to do, but I simply could not get over the pacing, long-winded conversations, and lack of guidance.

Don’t get me wrong, I love narrative-based games and open-ended exploration, but what amounts to turn-based game mechanics are too slow, and a complete absence of any obvious paths to take makes the game unapproachable.

Funny story about that one: my first time playing it, I actually found it a bit too… visceral, and had to stop after getting a couple hours in - I only came back to play it all the way through several years later.

In the intervening time, I learned that one of the developers, when asked whether the game had a “good ending”, said something along the lines of “that’s when the player stops playing in disgust”.

Guess I got the good ending.

Hey, in my defense, the explanation there was only added in 2022, and I’d already given up looking by then!

Roughly in order, I think:

• StarCraft: Brood War
• Subnautica
• FTL: Faster than Light
• Spec Ops: The Line
• Risk of Rain Returns
• Portal
• Dead Cells
• Hades
• Team Fortress 2
• Borderlands 2
• Satisfactory

Honorable mention:

• Unreal Tournament 2004
• The first two Golden Sun games
• SOMA
• Diablo II
• Diablo III
• TLoZ: Link’s Awakening

Looking over this, it seems like I’m drawn to games that have either unusually good writing, very long skill curves, or (e.g., #1) both.

UT2004 sneaks in for being the absolute best LAN-party game ever (fight me). I think Link’s Awakening is mostly just nostalgia though. 😋

Edit: bumped UT2004 down to “honorable mention” because I somehow forgot the billion hours I’ve sunk into Satisfactory. Still very curious to see where that game goes story-wise after the 1.0 launch, though.

Thank you! You would not believe how long I’ve been trying to figure out where the term came from.

The best explanation I’d heard prior to now was that the practice of composing functions was akin to mixing ingredients for curry, (the food) but I’d never really bought that line of reasoning.

Or, if you like it more pithy: “The difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than it is in theory.”

Alien might be the scariest movie of all time, IMO, so this makes perfect sense to me.