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Cake day: Jun 27, 2023

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the Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology and artificial intelligence products

Genuine question, but doesn’t this just mean that Israel paid for a Microsoft Azure subscription and used it to host web services? Like, anyone can do that. What am I missing here, exactly?

They say Microsoft have “deepened” their relationship, but how did they do that, exactly?


I think “common” here would refer to having to produce them, over the actual explicitness of the scene. Whether Mass Effect fades to black or not isn’t really the point when the voice actors still have to record the lines that play while the screen is dark.


Yeah, what they’re asking for is pretty standard stuff in other media. A friend of mine is an actor who played a scene where he had to shoot a masturbation scene. He was alone in a room with like 3-4 people: sound guy, camera guy, director, and I think the intimacy coach was there too.

Having a whole team watch you pretend to have sex is not okay, what the hell.


Same. Elden Ring’s biggest weakness is its open world, in my opinion. It makes the first playthrough great, but it makes subsequent playthroughs a chore. Especially when you’re aware that 90% of dungeons/side areas have completely worthless gear and runes. Your subsequent runs just end up being you riding Torrent for long stretches of time from point A to point B.


Probably wanted to bring it in line with the other perfumes. Rolling Sparks was completely busted lmao




I can finally share my side of the story now that Twitch employees have come forward. You see, all I did was indulge in a little bit of grooming. One might even say it was a minor case of grooming.

Anyways, I’m not a pedo.

Doc out!


Oh yeah, for sure. I like it too.

I always find it funny when people react to Myazaki saying the game is supposed to be around 30 hours by going “UUUUHHHH??? My playthrough was like a billion hours???”

Like, yeah, if you do everything it’ll take a while, but it’s clearly not made with that in mind. It’s really easy to just not do the whole thing and still have a decent length playthrough.


Same. I think the human act is just dealing with a Banshee and some harpies while the humans are just complete assholes towards you.

Meanwhile, the non-human act has you going on this cool magical adventure with your friends and a dragon lmao.


Witcher 2 has two mutually exclusive middle acts. That’s cool.

Well, one of them is.

The “Humans” middle act is so fucking boring!


My first playthrough (100%) was 120~ hours. Subsequent playthroughs (not 100%) were 30~ hours.

Once you realize that 95% of side dungeons are literally just the same filler content with useless summons and weapons, and that you really only need to do, like, 6 to get useful loot for your build, the game gets a lot shorter lol


Honestly, summoning is the accessibility to get through hard areas in FromSoft games (not saying it’s good accessibility, mind you). Summons that won’t die in one hit basically trivialize most single-enemy boss fight since their AI spazzes out because it’s not meant to fight 2 opponents at once.


Yeah, Timmy’s had a hate-boner for anything related to Valve and Linux for years. He’s been lying through his teeth non-stop whenever either topic comes up.


They’ve been slowly going in that direction with the writing since DA2, unfortunately. Inquisition definitely had more of it than the other 2, but this is almost fanfiction-levels, honestly.


DAO is my favorite game of all time. Seeing the series get progressively worse (I hated the switch to High Fantasy, and this looks even worse) is really disheartening.

I just don’t understand, why even make a fucking Dragon Age game if you’re going to completely change the tone? (It’s a rhetorical question, the answer is obviously that they’re trying to cash-in on the brand recognition).


Man, the contrast between this Guardians of the Galaxy-ass trailer and both the Warden’s Calling and Sacred Ashes trailers is night and fucking day.

God I miss when Dragon Age was a good dark fantasy game.


Imagine making a Borderlands trailer and not using Cage the Elephant. Like, come on guy. It’s right there!

As someone who doesn’t really like the writing in Borderlands all that much, this trailer looks worse than that. Like, were Brick and Mordecai replaced with Krieg and Tina because they wanted to get “the fan favorites” in the crew?


God I miss Monday Night Combat. It was one of my favorite indie games on the 360.


Imagine downvoting someone for saying they’re going to replay one of the best single player games of all time.


Was gonna say. How is the hero shooter market over-saturated? There’s like 3 games that people actually know about, and like 2 of those are good/decent.


It was dead last time I tried playing (because of the login thing). Unless someone made a community patch to bypass the login prompt, I guess.

You’re pretty much in the same situation I’m in. BFBC2 was the last Battlefield game I liked, and it was because Rush was so much fucking fun in that. I hate how much the newer ones kind of mostly focus on Conquest, personally.


EA did this thing a while back where they saw people were still playing Bad Company 2 on PC on community servers. They updated the game to require a login to EA’s server on boot, then took those servers down. Always online is cancer.


“The breast milk snatcher will be caught”, a Microsoft representative assured the New York Times before taking a deep, long slurp of their milkshake, their eyes closed in apparent bliss as shivers ran down their spine. “Your days are numbered!”


I think it’s interesting that he believes that, personally.

Dragon Age has 3 main things going for it:

  • The Darkspawn
  • Templars vs Mages
  • Whatever the fuck Solas is doing

While the Darkspawn could work for TV (it’d just require a bunch of makeup and we’ve seen shows like The Walking Dead pull-off the whole zombie thing), it’s pretty hard to do anything low-scale with them, since they’re either small bands attacking small villages or a large invasion force during a Blight. Game of Thrones and Lord of the Ring pulled-off large-scale battles, but they also had rather large budgets by that point.

The Solas arc doesn’t really work for TV because of the budget it would require for all the insanely high-level and trippy magic stuff that would be needed. And also because anyone who isn’t already of fan of Dragon Age would be confused as fuck about what Solas is doing.

I could see a series about a smaller part of the Templars vs Mages working, personally. Unlike Solas and the ancient Elves, most “regular” magic is pretty low-level and tame. Blood Magic shouldn’t be as expensive as some of the ancient Elves’ magic worlds and Demons would probably need to be adapted to look differently than they do in-game, but it’s got potential. Not sure if I trust most network to handle the writing of it, though.

Also, they made Dragon Age: Absolution, which was pretty damn bad and felt like someone tried to smash 3-4 seasons-worth of plot into 6 episodes. The characters were walking tropes, the villain went from one of the most brilliant minds of the Tevinter Imperium to an obsessive weirdo, and it had some of the most forced romance and comedy bits I’ve seen in a while. In my opinion, the show also does an awful job with their portrayal of Tevinter, essentially contradicting a lot of established lore from the game for no apparent reason.

Not sure how many people in the community actually remember, but back in the day they made Dragon Age: Warden’s Fall with Machinima to setup the events of Awakening (haven’t watched it in forever, but I remember liking it). It’s dark and gritty like Origins and Awakening were, and less “witty” like Inquisition’s writing.


Making the tags make their jokers free is such a welcome addition! The amount of times I skipped, won, and then had a joker be ridiculously expensive for the early game has made me ignore these tags unless I’m already rich (at which point I probably have all the jokers I need anyways).


Is it actually good? I was planning on getting it, but the reviews seemed a bit mixed on release. Everyone seemed upset about some kind of broken promise or something? It’s been a while, I’m not sure what it was anymore.



I get what you’re saying, but “the entire video game industry” didn’t make Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m not jaded enough to claim the entire industry is soulless (indies and AA still exist), but the AAA industry is pretty much there, with the rare exception.


Same. My entire friend group went “Eeeeeh, $50~ seems like a lot.”

I’d given-up on playing it with friends, and then a buddy from work just randomly called me up on Teams and was like “Hey, I see you’ve got it in your wishlist. Wanna play this Thursday?”

Kind of surprised to see it do so well, tbh.


how about the Rusty Lake games? They’re weird.

And they’re also linked. It’s a really cool rabbit hole to go down. Definitely recommend them to people who are into games with some meta elements to them!


Personally, I just really liked the platforming and movement. There aren’t many platformers that come close to Celeste’s polish, and I 100%-ed it (there’s some secret strawberries that are pretty damn hard to get), the golden strawberry challenges where you have to not die are super challenging, and I ended-up trying to speedrun it for fun. The modding community also has some excellent maps with practice areas that teach you advanced movement mechanics (I highly recommend the “Strawberry Jam” community map pack).


Dragon Age: Origin Ultimate Edition: My personal favorite game of all time. Got me into the dark fantasy genre and RPGs in general. A simple story that has so much replay value based on the various decisions you can make with an amazing cast of characters. The rest of the series has been steadily going downhill since, unfortunately (in my opinion, at least).

Celeste: Best platformer ever. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into it, and ever since I discovered there was an active modding community (seriously, the modding tools are so good now) I’ve been going through modded community expansions.

Slay The Spire: The most fun I’ve had playing a card game. It’s extremely challenging, but very well balanced, and there’s nothing else quite like it.


Pretty much, yeah. The genre was called “Rogue-like” because of Rogue, where your runs were all unique. “Rogue-lite” happened when devs wanted to add persistent progress to the game.


No no no, see that’s the opposite of what I want. I want more games where you can just straight-up be the villains. Not an anti-hero, not someone who’s trying to change the system from within, not a secret rebel who needs to go along with the bad stuff to keep their cover.

I want more games where you can just be a villain. I want more games where you can rob the banks, kill the NPCs that aren’t listening, have a big fortress of doom, and fight-off heroes who are trying to stop you.

Not because of some gray moral backstory that somehow justifies some of it (or that will have people jumping through hoops to justify it like with Mr. Freeze and his wife).

Just because you can.

Tyranny gives you a bunch of options to just be evil and not enough RPGs do that properly.


Tyranny was such a fun game (rushed act 3 aside). I really wish we’d get more games that explore being the bad guys without:

  • Immediately trying to overthrow them
  • Making it into a joke/comedy

That’s good to hear. I remember not really enjoying the end game much, because a lot of bosses were so fast that they kind of required you to trade hits because yours were so slow with Greatswords and Ultragreatswords. Malenia especially felt more annoying than challenging (especially coming off of DS3 where most of the fast-paced bosses could still be fought hitless with big weapons).


I’m kind of excited to go for a strength build again once the DLC releases. Greatswords and Ultragreatswords were kind of rough on release (they’ve been straight-up buffed like 4 times now, I think?) and I’m in the mood for some good ol’ fashioned bonking.


Had to drop it because it just creeped me the fuck out for some reason. It definitely nails the eldritch horror atmosphere lmao


A few weeks ago, I learned that we had an old server still running somewhere with Lotus Notes installed on it, and that we somehow need it for some critical system. ¯\(ツ)