One option:

• Every time an item is unloaded, save the in-game date and time as part of its data.
• Every time an item is loaded that has historical data, check that timestamp.
• Use the time difference between now and then to calculate whether fires have burned out, whether the temperature should have returned to the ambient temperature, etc. You could also assume some kinds of contaminants wear away after a certain time: water dries up, biological substances degrade, etc. If item degradation is ever implemented, potentially you could roll for damage to items that have been unloaded for very long periods of time, although you’d want to know if they were supposed to be exposed to weathering, etc. and you might not have good data on this. Or if food spoilage is ever changed so that items being carried or stored in barrels should still spoil, you can check for rot this way too.

This is how Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead checks if food has rotted or fires have burned out while you were away from an area. There’s a possible edge case here where an unloaded unit acquires an item that should still be dangerous, but then is saved by it taking long enough for them to return that the item becomes safe, but that’s probably okay—it’s hard to imagine how you’d set it up, and even if it happened the player probably wouldn’t notice.

And you’re a prescriptivist!

They aren’t suggesting he not die, they’re suggesting that the part of the game before he died should have been much longer.

I don’t understand how this scene, which is only sexual by implication, is not allowed, but Fear and Hunger, in which you can drag a little girl through a dungeon full of monsters that sexually assault you, through orgy scenes, etc., is fine. Like I’m not saying that F&H should be removed, but I am saying that based on what is currently on Steam, it does not seem like this would be over the line.

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

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.

“Real world politics”? Did I miss the news that Undead Demon Margaret Thatcher is running in the next UK election?

Is that bad? I love almond milk but I feel like it deserves its own word. :P

Very cool! I’m looking forward to it, but it also seems like the first expac that I might not want to enable for every playthrough, which is interesting—I wonder if we’ll see more of these themed packs going forward.

But they haven’t found the facial database and Invenda claims they don’t have one, right? Their story is that the machine takes an image, runs some local processing to determine demographic info about the user/customer/target/victim, and then stores that instead of storing the image or biometrics.

There’s a good chance they’re lying but claiming the database has been “revealed” when no one has found it yet seems like sensationalism.

Edit: “Secret demographic database derived from facial recognition” would be true but sounds less snappy, I guess?

This is the first I’ve heard of Jumplight Odyssey. It looks potentially cool, but $30 for an early access title is a big ask in a year completely saturated with banger games, and based on the reviews it seems to need a bit more time before it is really ready. I’m not surprised, then, that it didn’t do as well as they hoped: if they hadn’t just announced that they’re stopping development, I would have put it on my wishlist to come back to in a year or two when it’s feature-complete, and when hopefully I’m not in the middle of so many other games already. If that’s a typical response, they probably didn’t get many sales.

Diogenes bursts into Dracula’s throne room while holding a chicken.

It’s worth noting, I think, that the definition of shovelware has slipped somewhat since it was coined like thirty years ago, and I think this is leading to you and niisyth talking past each other. Shovel Knight for Switch was maybe shovelware by the original definition, which was “shovel a bunch of old software onto a CD and resell it,” but by the Wii era people were using it to refer to software that is just bad, but exists to trick people into buying it by promising to be more full-featured than it actually is. The Wii had so many titles like this that it seemed like they were “shoveling” shit directly onto store shelves and calling it games. In this new definition, it refers to titles like My Horse and Me or Imagine Party Babyz. So if they are thinking of the newer usage, it sounds like you’re insulting Shovel Knight’s quality as a game.

The traditional answer to this is to just not let players cast spells that would be costly to implement, in the same way that we can’t currently cast Reincarnate or Magic Jar. There are still high level combat spells to look forward to, like Meteor Swarm.

I’m mostly just surprised that I’ve seen people say AC6 is more accessible than previous ACs when it’s probably the hardest AC game since Last Raven. The chapter 1 boss is as hard as the final boss of Verdict Day.

Of course, I said the same thing about Elden Ring; my friend was trying to convince our other friends that it was more approachable than Dark Souls, and I was like “The first story boss has higher moveset complexity than Nameless King phase 2!” I think in the end most people still found it more approachable, which I don’t really understand because I think it was way harder than the non-DLC parts of DS3, so maybe I’m just looking at these games wrong/weird.

Well, if I didn’t sign up when it was $1, I’m certainly not going to now…

You can revivify party members who fell into chasms by using the scroll/spell on their “soul orb,” which should appear somewhere in the area. Granted, it may be far enough away that you need to survive the fight first.

Whaaaaat? I’ve played For Answer and Verdict Day and I remember them being rad as hell; why were the review scores so low?

I’m excited, but I’m not done with BG3 yet, and I’m also supposed to be getting stuff in order so that I can move, so it’s going to have to wait until next month.