I’m still on Pandora and honestly have no idea how they stack up. I just use it as a radio station on long drives.

It’s a very faithful remake of MGS3. You can play with classic controls or modern controls.

If you play with the classic controls, it’s basically the same game, plus a few new collectibles. The new controls come with a modern camera system and some balance changes to accommodate the increased player freedom (the tranq gun has bullet drop in this mode, for example). You can change between control modes during the game, but doing so will reload your last checkpoint.

So it’s good, because MGS3 was good, but it’s not $80 good. And like the article says, at $80 for what is mostly a graphical upgrade you would expect to get all the bells and whistles… but some of them are conspicuously missing.

He absolutely would have sold your data if there were any buyers for it. Microsoft was still a terrible company in the Clippy era, there just were fewer opportunities to be terrible in this particular way at the time.

I know the official term is “legacy Umamusume” but everyone I’ve seen talk about them who played the Japanese release calls them “parents.”

What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?

It’s a US label and the percents are % of recommended daily intake. So that’s 3% of your daily recommended carbohydrate intake, 6% of your daily recommended intake of sugar, and 12% of your daily recommended intake of “added” sugar. The recommendation is something like, no more than half of your carbs should come from sugar, and no more than half of those should be added during manufacturing (i.e. most of your sugar intake should be from fresh fruit, etc.). So the numbers do line up.

Revanced still works. If yours stopped working, download the latest patches and make an updated .apk.

Oh phonics is the old one (although it’s making a comeback). The “new” one that they’ve been promoting for a couple decades (and have recently realized isn’t very good) is cueing, the one where you just show kids words and encourage them to use context clues to guess what they mean, and hope that they eventually learn to read by doing that. Phonics is the one where you start with letter (and letter group) sounds and learn to sound out words by reading out loud.

She hated the concept of… teaching what sounds letters make? Was she a big proponent of cuing, or something else?

Yes, I think so. I also did Hooked On Phonics with my grandfather before starting kindergarten which meant I could already read by the time we started school. This was in Texas in the early '90s.

If you search for “poker” on PEGI’s site, it seems that many games which are actually about simulated gambling are rated 12 or 16. They seem to think Balatro is more likely to expose children to realistic gambling than, say, Prominence Poker or Pure Hold’em World Poker Championship, which seems completely bizarre, given that those games are about playing poker and Balatro is a fancy kind of solitaire with no betting.

This is the part I can’t figure out. It’s not just indie games: ages ago, Pokémon dropped the casinos from their games specifically to avoid having their age rating bumped in NA and EU. So clearly they sometimes account for gambling in side content. But somehow other franchises have kept them in, and aren’t suffering.

Does it just depend on whether or not the particular person assigned to review your game is a hardass about particular things?

I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.

The patent isn’t about the balls, it’s about the summoning controls, and it seems broad enough to cover any controls that use a control stick together with buttons to aim a device for summoning a character. It is ridiculously over-broad, and part of a grand tradition of software patents being granted that are more akin to patenting “the idea of doors” than “a specific design for a doorknob.”

That’s why the new control is “press button to summon next to you,” it doesn’t use the stick and thereby avoids the patent. It’s also ass because it doesn’t let you aim the summon, but it is hard to envision a control system for aiming summons that doesn’t use a stick and buttons and also doesn’t suck.

This change is actually really annoying. Being able to summon Pals far from you was great in fights so that you wouldn’t both be in range of the same AoE, and some Pals like Croajiro have have skills that benefit from being able to decide where you place them (Croajiro can act as a launch pad to help you gain height in the early game before you have a flying Pal saddle).

I was cautiously optimistic for Pokémon Legends Z-A but I’m definitely skipping it now, fuck off Nintendo.

I think the patent is about controls more than about the balls, the mechanic would have to work very differently in order to not fall afoul of it. Like maybe if you had to go to the spot and place a mark there, or something, instead of aiming with the control stick, but that would be too clunky to use most of the time.

“Original” as in it has original ideas, or “original” as in it’s not part of an established franchise? If it’s the latter, I saw The Wild Robot in theaters. It was okay. A bit by-the-numbers, and I’m not sure everything made total sense, but it’s a kid’s movie so that was to be expected.

If the former, then, uh… Problemista? Also in theaters. I really liked that one.

In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, the world is ending, and the 13-day timer is very real. You basically get told “do as much as you can before the world ends” and let loose. So there’s urgency AND side questing.

And of course you have the opportunity to spend that time doing things that are completely irrelevant to making progress, like collecting silly outfits and forcing Lightning to wear them so that Hope can laugh at her.

If it’s to avoid clipping, then something is badly wrong in the older game, where the person walks inside a bunk bed, lies down, then sinks all the way through the bed before rising up to slightly levitate above it!

Although in that case the idea of a margin might make sense, since at the end they’re only barely above the bed. In the new game they’re in the right place at first, and then rise up like a foot and a half above the bed once the player approaches them…

Sonic Roboblast 2 Kart and its successor Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers are open source, and pretty fun! The exact degree to which they’re free-as-in-libre depends somewhat on Sega’s policy of turning a blind eye to fan games, so although GPL-2.0 permits commercial use I wouldn’t recommend testing it.

There is a lively modding scene (or there was for SRB2K last time I was playing it; I haven’t played RR yet). Ring Racers has single-player content if that’s what you’re looking for, I hear it’s quite challenging.