Ninety god damned dollars.

Rad! I’m a big fan of Space Hulk.

I laughed aloud when I heard, “Bahldoors…Gate III officially!”

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.

My apologies. You seem to be absolutely correct. It seemingly does not work outside of your LAN.

Just to be clear, it can stream your PS5 remotely. It doesn’t only work across your LAN.

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.

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I strongly disagree with this. As with all engineering tasks, it comes down to what you’re trying to solve.

If a framework can do some significant lift for you, then it’s a question of whether learning it is worth the time and effort saved in writing a bespoke solution that does what the framework offers. You also have to measure how “locked in” to the framework you’ll become and whether or not that will be a problem for you.

One example of a framework I wish I never touched is React Native. The way React Native handles everything from dependency management to coding practices to how to handle breaking changes is nightmarish. More than once on a React Native project did the entire project explode for reasons such as wildly major refactors (with only 6 to 12 months given for folks to switch over), “clever” code having wacky ambiguities and conseqent side effects, a convoluted toolchain breaking somewhere in the middle, and even the package manager itself being conceptually problematic (which I understand is not the fault of React Native but still) I am convinced the team lost more time in learning and coping with the idiosyncracies of the framework than if the project had just been written in Java and Obj C with some useful libraries.

One example of a framework (or game engine or whatever you’d want to call it) I adore is Monogame. Monogame is super straight forward. You’re given a game loop, I/O handling, and some additional niceties. Nothing is obfuscated from you. The tools you use, with the single exception of the MGCB, are whatever you want to use. There’s no magic. Everything is right there in plain ol’ C# for you to see and understand clearly.

As you rightly point out, some tasks are both critical and complex (e.g., cryptography) and shouldn’t be performed on one’s own. Choosing a framework or a library that will handle that for you is prudent. However, most of the features of a framework are not that. Most features are about solving boilerplate and general issues for you so you can get to the task of writing whatever it is you’re trying to write. That’s all well and good. However, choosing a framework can come with as many headaches as they relieve, if you’re not diligant.

Amen.

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.

As much as I want to like VR, it just makes me so nauseous. Even games attempting to mitigate motion sickness make me nauseous.

There’s a game on PSVR called RIGS. It’s a high speed sports game. That game made me nauseous in about thirty seconds and the nausea lasted for hours. Such a dreadful experience.

I love Monogame. Long live XNA.

tri-Ace has made some of my very favorite JRPGs on the face of the Earth. I am so stoked for this release.

ASL would like a word.

I just buy wider shelves for the wide-box games: https://imgur.com/a/otbkAdm

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.

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 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.

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.