If possible, I recommend giving Alyx a go, even if you have to borrow a headset, visit a friend, arcade, ect.

Not an option for everyone of course, Alyx aside VR is fun and while the entry requirements are getting lower it’s still a leap.

Valve will probably summarise the main story change in HL3, which will be a very WTF moment that’s kinda on brand with the scenario.

As TachyonTele suggested, you may want to play or read into Half Life Alyx. Time travel got involved.

To add to the other responses, and I suspect the real reason, is that Coco is listening to Audible Audio books regularly and/or music. It’s mentioned and then dropped by the article fairly quickly.

Interesting how every comment on the article is doing the “you’re a terrible parent, how could you do that” routine when I’ll bet it’s there because Coco either took the first one in or asked for a second one. Kid wants, kid normally gets one way or another.

DM: Scribbles a note “Without the rust it seems like a serviceable crown, but not too fancy.”

Note to lost heir: “You see the crown and you think as it… looks at you. This should be your crown. You wants it. They shouldn’t keep it from you. Steals it, hides it, it came here for you”.

DM: “Probably worth some gold.”

Ouch, just when you thought it couldn’t get more anti-player it turns into trap roulette.

You’d be playing rock paper scissors constantly before touching anything.

Quite interesting how the tomb is built for very specific features in OD&D, just to screw with players in a rush.

I can think of a few barbarian characters I’ve seen at my table that would have charged every single door. They may even have learned not to after the fourth or fifth time.

As for the orange gas, in second edition that might have been peak comedy but it being yet another ‘fuck you’ for OD&D players just adds a bit more to the general player hostility. Having to force a player to edit a character sheet to a ‘less optimal’ feels quite brutal. Definitely good to see the end of that sort of “prank”.

Given how modern editions are much less crunchy and brutal, it’d be hard to recapture the sheer brutality of the tomb. You could make it harder of course, but capturing the sheer antiplayer hostility and competitive grading is a special kind of difficult.

Though, competitive tomb raiding feels better than generic PvP in any case.

I was once looking at a robot lawnmower to tend to my ageing parents lawn. I was looking at prices over a thousand bucks and thinking seriously.

My parents hired a local handyman to do it every few weeks for a small sum that across a year would still be less than the robo mower and do a better job at it and without the hurdles of maintaining that mower.

That realisation had me reevaluating automation as a whole.

Yep, was the case in all TES games before Oblivion as well, typically more strength in starting male characters but more intelligence in female characters varying depending on the character’s race. Only went away in Skyrim as they’d simplified the stats so much that starting stats were more uniform.

Possibly, Bungee is working with Sony right now. They went hard on this sort of thing, Concord and Helldivers 2 being other examples of the push, Concord famously failed, Helldivers worked. Methinks this may actually have been built from older LLM summaries of the deep lore in a few ways, there’s surface knowledge, but things that should have been obvious have been missed.

Sony fired a scattershot of games into the market into trendy genres, many will fail, but they may be expecting it.

I’ve seen a few of the famous quotes, but the Marathon itself is too spherical to be the old flying Space Spud. Bungie has often referred back to Old Marathon but this feels off. It’s like someone is doing this only reading Wikiquote and a few summaries. I did see hints of Tau Ceti’s spaceport being nuked, and the involvement of MIDA as a contractor, so there’s a few hints of the deep lore.

They’re cagey about the story as well, suggesting they don’t have a written one yet. I’ll bet they were starting towards a proper story and an author keen on the original Marathon left with the pieces sat idle in the meantime as the game grew.

It also feels incomplete, lots of pve features despite pvp extraction as the stated goal. I think this was intended to have multiple game modes, several factions trying to find something left behind, Tycho making a move on the ruins controlled by fragments of Leela. Throw in a bonus UESC force Sent by a hint from Durandal who is still off having his own brand of fun elsewhere. Perhaps Straus’s plans with the Colony long term come up.

A dream perhaps. On an Idea for a new Aleph One Scenario.

Too damn right. Community is what makes humans strong. Eventually from those communities we form institutions which build nations, which may even build empires and coalitions.

A human alone is just potential food for something else.

Even before subscriptions became normalised cars had a support cost, parts and servicing, especially for genuine or genuine reconditioned parts.

Strictly speaking, you can avoid the dealers and the part costs by working with mechanics, wreckers or aftermarket manufacturers but those have extra costs and voided warranties.

Parts sales are a major income stream for manufacturers, especially as they need to compete on car sales, but once you’re locked in on that car they mark up the prices on the parts long term.

Though admittedly enshittification means worse and more expensive parts and legal threats to aftermarket manufacturers.

The counter is that all of a sudden instead of windows 10 it was 10 from 2020, then 10 from 2022 and so on. Instead of only being the last version it became a succession of short lived versions that people still weren’t upgrading.

It does feel like a whole bunch of analogies coming true: giving a former alcoholic a hard drink, waking a sleeping dog, tugging Superman’s cape, poking a bear, hurting John Wick’s dog…

Europe has had a nice long run of peace, maybe we shouldn’t feel too bad about them slacking a little bit on the defensive front. They needed it, and have done a lot with it.

Usually it’s wise to placate the people you screw. One of my favourite sayings is, “Friends come and go, enemies accumulate.” You don’t want too many, especially those who have little to lose.

Building good will after the fact is very wise, even if it only buys a grudging acceptance. The prestige is also a major bonus in smoothing over business dealings.

Getting a bad rep leads to cautious or worse terms in deals, if not being outright bypassed in favour of a competitor.

As jia_tan said, in theory it should be fine if the hardware is up to scratch. I could see it becoming an issue for plane traffic, especially if passengers don’t turn on flight mode. Lots of very eager LTE phones switching between towers and sat com. Airplane gear has improved over the years so phone traffic doesn’t annoy it, but it’ll be something to watch for. Gotta test the theory in practice some time.

Thanks for surfacing this one, it’s always fun to get the older perspective and realising they’re very human.

There’s magic and then there’s complexity in tech (at least this is how I think about it).

Video calling, pure magic, simple to use with major benefits.

Complex business management software that requires a degree to use? Complexity almost for complexity’s sake to lock an organisation into a support contract.

Web stores? Usually magic, especially with refined payment processing and smooth ordering. Can verge into over complex coughAmazoncough.

Internal network administration (Active Directory) and cloud tech, often complexity for complexity’s sake again.

This comment sent me on a deep thought train. These places are populated by those that remained, while others left and became the sophisticated urbanites that broadened their horizons. My father was one of those people that left, he left the day after his mother died and joined the military, a common enough story. He was quite the teacher, and it made me the person I am today.

My father often also pointed out those who had also left, who had also done well. There’s a selection bias there but I feel like having a mix of both a rural and urban experience is extremely helpful in human development.

Those that stay… well my father was often disappointed to hear how poorly things went out there, but with no family remaining there he never returned. Abused, poorly supported (though sometimes it seemed not for a lack of trying), with an evaporative cooling effect removing the best and brightest as they went to urban areas seeking better lives, and perhaps resentful they didn’t get to leave. The crab bucket effect is in full play as well, dragging back down many who climb but don’t get out.

In the end the remainers feel not quite unlike a medieval peasant: A prize for nobility to fight over, an accessory to the land they work, and body that can be drafted when someone threatens to take that prize away.