That’s an insane claim to me. HL2 set the bar for worldbuilding. From the guy muttering “don’t drink the water” in the train station, to the people and vortigaunts building homes in the sewers, to the stick legged stalkers waddling around the citadel, HL2 took “show don’t tell” to heart. It was the most immersive experience anyone had played in a video game up to that point, or for years after.

I’ll grant you that other games have learned a lot from it, but I would say the vast majority haven’t. Games still come out today where everything needs to be spoonfed to the player literally for them to stop and process what they’re looking at, instead of just running and gunning mindlessly.

When you say HL2 can be boring and nonsensical if played today, the first thing that comes to mind are all the people who turn movie subtitles on, and then for 75% of the runtime their eyes are in the bottom 1/3 of the screen, not taking in any of the visual information the filmmaker is putting in front of them. Like, yeah, HL2 is quite boring when you’re not looking at it.

Eufy doesn’t have a good track record for keeping things local or secure, despite claiming they are, btw. Source

Some people will, but not enough for him to hold power. Trump wasn’t elected by MAGA, he was elected by the people who couldn’t afford to live, but were being told by the Democratic party that everything was fine. Including more gen z than we’d like to admit.

Now trump is trying the same strategy, and he knows that come midterms, all those same constituents are going to vote against him. That’s why he’s been pulling out all the stops to prop up the economy for another year. He doesn’t care if it means 15%+ inflation, as long as people don’t blame him for a tanked stock market.

I thought I liked Leder Games. Turns out I mainly just love Kyle’s art. Besides Root, I’ve never played any of the games Leder is holding on to.

Add it to the list.

I did run across Sorcerer yesterday during my searching. I think the only downside is that it doesn’t look very compact. But I am intrigued, thanks for mentioning it.

I saw Smash Up, haven’t tried it, but it looks promising.

From a cursory glance, Nexus looks perfect! I’ll definitely check that out.

Ah yes, Android: Netrunner is one I need to check out. I think that might be closest to what I’m looking for. Hah, it feels like every single one of these deck drafting games is set in the same quasi-sci-fi, play-as-an-AI-in-the-future type universe.

I feel Dominion-like deck builders are a dime-a-dozen these days. In video games too. But what distinguishes Compile for me is that editing your deck isn’t part of the main gameplay loop. Instead you and your opponent draft sub-decks at the start of the game, shuffle them together, and then play with that. That’s the mechanic I’m asking about that seems harder to find. At least while staying compact and relatively quick to learn and play.

This could be worth exploring, thanks for the idea. I’m not really interested in building a custom cube, I’d rather have a well playtested set of cards that are fun together. It looks like I could just pick a popular/smallish cube from this website to try it out.

I realized that today and ordered it!

I remember when this came out. Looked interesting, but I never did get a chance to play it. More heavyweight than what I’m looking for though, I think. Seems more like a meta TCG-simulator, and a “game” takes hours.

Hah, I’ve never heard of the cube format, but from what I’ve read in the last 5 minutes, the responsibility of constructing this 720+ card cube, much less transporting it, sound like deal breakers. I’m not against gameplay like MtG, but I like compile because I don’t need to think about the cards out there that I don’t have. It is also nice that teaching Compile is a 5-10m process, though. I can’t throw the cube in a bag on the way to a pub, and casually teach magic to someone over a beer.

Ooo, that looks really interesting. It looks like it also supports “constructed” play, where you build a deck tcg style. Wow, bgg has the complexity weight at 4.36, that’s pretty intense. Thanks, good recommendation.

Yeah, seems like there needs to be a distro made for retrofitting various phones or something with those features. Maybe even using the zune hw.

The rational would be, if two people are committing a crime, and one dies in the process, the other traditionally gets charged for their murder. The problem is, they were not committing a crime. Meanwhile, this ICE agent defied their own training to commit a murder.

To be fair, America now has the scale and bandwidth of misinformation that the Nazis never had.

Where are you getting the term “visual capitalist”? And why did you learn about this phenomenon today? Misinformation has been rampant for over a decade now.

Some people don’t have the luxury of being in the same place as the people they’re celebrating with. Jackbox games is a popular remote party game, but I am curious if there exists a similar, open, self hosted alternative.

Can you please save this somewhere you’ll find it in 10 years?