nuclear_wizard

SWORN if you like Hades. It's pretty transparent that they just said "What if Hades, but rip out any depth to the story, make it up to 4 player multiplayer, and change up the pantheon of gods" then made that, but it's still fun to play.

Esoteric Ebb is a self-described Disco-like (referring to Disco Elysium) where you play as a cleric investigating a local tea shop that exploded. You have the typical RPG stats that you distribute points into at the beginning (so you can basically make whatever class you want despite your job being a cleric at the beginning), and as you go through the game, the stats are represented by different parts of your psyche that will comment on and influence your actions. The writing is genuinely hilarious and the sheer amount of content could keep you coming back for many playthroughs with very different experiences each time. I've never played a video game RPG that captures the experience of playing a TTRPG as well as this one does.

I hadn't seen Mina the Hollower mentioned in this thread, and I really enjoyed that earlier this year too. It's a more modern take on 2D Zelda game with more focus on skill difficulty (harder enemies and some brutal platforming) than puzzles. It has some great pixel art in the style of a Game Boy Color game and is packed full of secrets to discover. It's got a really great soundtrack too!

1000xRESIST and Pathogenic

1000xRESIST was on a lot of underrated games lists last year when it came out, and I kept putting it off because the plot points I had heard about seemed very heavy, but it is a beautiful piece of art. It's a very cinematic game with a lot to say about identity, family, and the pain we inflict upon ourselves. Saying anything about the story would probably ruin it, but it's a walking sim with some light puzzle elements.

Pathogenic is a rougelite twinstick shooter where you play as an infection fighting through the human body and upgrading along the way by adding internal upgrades that power up external upgrades like tentacles that allow you to move or appendages that shoot/attack. It's almost the complete opposite of 1000xRESIST. Basically no story and all gameplay.

Just to give you an idea of what she thinks "success" for Xbox looks like, she said around the time of the last major layoff and studio culling that she wants the Xbox platform to hit a daily player count of one billion users. So literally enough unique user accounts to cover one in every eight people on Earth will need to play within the Xbox ecosystem within the same day for her to be satisfied. If you count mobile, I can see hitting north of 200 million, but executive expectations are detached from reality.

Pop!_OS on my laptop and CachyOS on my desktop.

I've had good experiences with ABF Freight, but it might not work for everyone. They drop off the back of a trailer at your place, let you load up, then you call them to pick up the trailer and tell them where it's going. They charge by the square foot of the trailer that you use, so there's some more savings there. They provide bulkheads that you use to seal off "your section" of stuff in the trailer, and they'll fill the rest with other stuff going to the same place.

Biggest downsides are that you need to have the space to put a 30+ foot long trailer (usually street parking unless your driveway is long and straight) for at least 2 days, and I would recommend that you have storage on the other side for your stuff even if you don't yet have a place because the one time that I had to pay their trailer storage fee, it was quite pricey. Also you gotta be flexible on delivery (don't pack anything you can't survive a month without) because occasionally, their drivers get rerouted or delayed.

In my experience, it's easier to deal with local movers completely separately from the shipping service. The one time I was on a time crunch and hired an "all-in-one" service, all they did was get local guys giving them the cheapest quote anyways.

When the movers showed up, they claimed they hadn't been told about "all the extra stuff" and quoted me literally double the price to pack it up. My wife and I had padded every number we gave to the moving company (e.g., room was 12' x 15' and we'd just say 15' x 15' and full of stuff) beforehand to avoid this, but they still tried to gouge us. I was able to negotiate them down by about 30%, but I was going to be on a plane in less than 24 hours; so they had me over a barrel. They would have been perfectly fine leaving me high and dry if I didn't shell out the cash either. It's an industry with a lot of predatory practices.

Meanwhile, every time I've just hired local guys on both sides and dealt with shipping separately, it's been cheaper (still not cheap), and I sleep better at night knowing that way less money is going into the pockets of middlemen.

Fuck 'em. This far into Meta's descent into a capitalist surveillance platform, they should know what kind of company they work for. They only find it to be a problem if they aren't "finding meaning" in the "interesting technical challenges" of turning people into data points.

Or Mina the Hollower...

Literally read a Texas Monthly article asking What's Wrong with Downtown Dallas today: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/whats-wrong-with-downtown-dallas/

I grew up in one of the (many) suburbs of Dallas in the late 90's early 00's and the problem I had with it is it's the most extreme form of gentrification I've ever witnessed. You can probably estimate an individual's annual salary within about $20k based on their zip code. The city is so concerned with seeming like a good place to visit, they don't seem to care if it's a good place to live.

I do it once in a while for stuff I'm excited about. Not really to "get it first," but more to have an experience I can remember and hype myself up about it.

In high school, I worked at Walmart, and I got a pretty nice (I think 10%) employee discount on everything including electronics, so when I heard we were getting a shipment of Xbox 360's that night, I decided to wait for it. Some friends joined me while I waited and everyone else waiting was very friendly. We all talked about what we were excited to play and how cool the features were (at the time). They just told us to hang out around the electronics section, so as people showed up we all kind of knew who had been waiting. Around 11:30 they told us to form up a line and a guy who showed up about 15 minutes earlier tried to get in towards the front. I had never seen a group Walmart customers work together before, but everyone ran the guy off haha.

I did it for the original Switch because the day after I had a flight between the US and Korea, so I figured playing the new Zelda would be a good way to eat through the time. I had a preorder so that kind of killed the excitement around the uncertainty of getting it, but it was still a good time.

I most recently did it for the Switch 2. It was actually pretty difficult to find any local stores selling it without a preorder, and none were doing midnight releases. The only place I could find was Staples that was selling them at opening the day of release. I knew they wouldn't have very many in stock, but I figured I would wake up early, go to the store and if the line looked short enough, I'd camp out until opening. I got to the store at like 3:30 am and there was one guy there... Was cool to get to hang out, talk games, drink coffee, and watch the sun rise.