I remember once (probably a decade or more on now) realizing that the deadliest force in Dwarf Fortress is not your adventurer, or any of the various randomly-generated Forgotten Beasts, demons, night horrors, or anything else: it's gravity. A fall of one or two Z-levels is generally survivable, but anything falling off a 10+ high cliff instantly* plummets to the bottom and generally does not survive the encounter with the ground. In fights, sometimes enemies will bull-rush your adventurer, and one of the options you can set for when that happens is "dodge", which causes the enemy to rush past you as you jump out of the way. Putting two and two together, I made a high-agility adventurer and went around picking fights in populated areas, then played high-stakes bull-fighting at the top of nearby cliffs as the entire population turned aggressive and came after me. I don't remember all the details, but I think I managed to rack up a body count of a few dozen entirely through successful dodging.

I'm excited about this news, is what I'm trying to say.

*Literally, in a single tick of combat.

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Huh, Iron Judgement is the fifth-most-used ability? Wouldn't have guessed that, what with how you have to go retrieve Teresa's bolt after firing it. I guess people like their long-range kills.

Definitely looking forward to checking these out when they release! If you like real-time tactics, this is an incredibly good game. I remember thinking that the only thing that could make it better would be having an inbuilt level editor. I'm looking forward to the new characters; one of things that makes this game so great, in my opinion, even compared to their previous games is the fantasy setting which allows them to really go all out designing fun magic powers. Teleportation, growing hiding bushes anywhere, launching people out of Gaëlle's cannon, so many fun things to play with.

I'm also hoping that with these additional missions they've rebalanced the mission distribution across the islands a bit – it felt weird to have some islands with 4 or 5 missions happening on them, then another with only 2, and one with just a single mission. Regardless, I'm sure whatever there is will be just as fun and engaging as the original game.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyKind of amusing that they made "pausing the game" and similar mechanics into in-game features bestowed on you by your ghostly cursed pirate skull artifact thingie.

Without spoilering too much, I found the overall story of the game enabled by that decision to be rather uplifting, with themes of how our mistakes – and not being able to instantly undo them – allow us to learn and grow and make us the people we ultimately become.

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Ah, I should pick up a new kickstand. Mine just randomly snapped one day (literally, it was sitting on my desk beside me and the part that connects to the socket broke suddenly, launching the springs out). I've been meaning to get a new one since it was pretty handy, and just never got around to it. Seems like a good time.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: BlackBloodRumThe Steam Deck has a microphone? Huh. I honestly did not know/notice that

It actually has two, for positional audio. They're behind two pinholes at the top of the screen.

Ohhh, I've noticed those pinholes and never realized what they were for. Thanks.

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Portal Stories: Mel also used 'mechanics "not seen in Portal 2"' and it really put me off it, since practically every puzzle required deliberately fizzling a cube at some point, which is highly unintuitive. We'll see how this effort turns out, hopefully they've got a more fun puzzle mechanic.

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Well, maybe it's a good thing I'm in the grip of a RimWorld obsession right now, it'll give some time for bugs to be fixed before trying Astral Planes (which does sound pretty interesting).

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Quote"Expect betrayal[…]"

Isn't that any game of mini-golf with collisions between balls allowed?

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The Venus Next expansion for the digital version of Terraforming Mars (probably my favorite board game) just dropped yesterday, and since I'll be away from home the next two weeks for a conference/visiting family it'll probably get a bunch of playtime on my Deck.

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Intelligence agencies the world over must be salivating at the prospect of being able to make their own poorly-balanced games to tease out more classified handbooks on military hardware. 🤣

(That's not a dig at War Thunder, which on re-reading I see it could come off as; I haven't played it and have no opinions on its balancing.)

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Quoting: HelmetDoes this mean I should use the Flatpak version rather than what's in my repositories?

"Should?" No. Or at least not necessarily. That's a choice you'll have to make for yourself. If you use Flatpak a lot you may like having Discord be part of it as well. If you don't use Flatpak on your machine and are happy with downloading the occasional update (or waiting for your repository to update), you may not want to introduce it. It's up to you and your particular system. The article is mainly saying that if you do want to use the Flatpak version, it's now being officially maintained by the developers.

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