I was on vacation in France in 2018, dropped an Ursaring on a gym at Chateau de Saint Fargeau, had him there for just under 30 days before someone knocked him out.  I was seriously starting to wonder if I was ever getting him back.

Yeah, it’s someone cheating most of the time. They aren’t cheating to dupe items though - if you’re spoofing your location, it isn’t tough to get lots of golden raspberries. The cheat is the spoofing, and it also alerts them when somebody starts fighting the gym near as I can tell.  They also often will have…

I definitely agree with you - the way the main story of ARR ends is really unfortunate, given how good the content becomes later. Especially in the Praetorium, it’s really easy for players who don’t know what they’re doing to get killed in some of the mad rushes to skip or shorten fights. It’s even worse if, like me,…

I have vivid memories of going on this ride with my father in ‘89 or ‘90, when I was a little tyke.  40000 Leagues Under the Sea was the first “real” book I read, I was always into Jules Verne, and I loved the Disney adaptation of it, so naturally this was my favorite ride in the whole park.  I didn’t get to go back…

I like the modern stuff, but even I wouldn’t say you need to play Origins AND Odyssey just for that.  Both of those games are totally worth playing on their own of course, but definitely not just to get the modern story which can be summed up in maybe a single paragraph.

I’ll second levarien’s recommendation: if you’re struggling with Hades, give the shield a try.  It’s even better if you can get a daedalus hammer that lets you turn the bull rush into a ranged attack, because you can just face Hades and bash him over and over, holding up the shield when he’s attacking.  Makes his big…

The Legend of Dragoon is one of my favorite RPGs of all time, and is second on my list of games that I really wish would get an FF7 Remake treatment (the first is Xenogears). It’s one of only a handful of RPGs I can think of where I actually enjoyed fighting battles - the rhythm combat was so fun, though I admit the…

Nah man, he’ll just tell you that colorless green ideas sleep furiously, and insist that knowing which shaker to use is an inherent trait of humankind.

I think this is a good shift. It’s also in keeping with something they’ve been leaning towards lately, which is that “humanoid” as a type carries with it the implication of complexity on a moral spectrum. It was pretty explicit in 5e with the player races, but non-PHB races like orcs or gnolls still had these…

My response might not have been clear here; when I said “I wouldn’t argue that sex is...an intensely emotional experience”, I meant that I think your guess as to the cause is correct - sex causes an enormous release of mind-altering hormones and chemicals, which creates an intense emotional response. Most people, if…

While I certainly would agree with you that, in American culture (and possibly Western/Christian culture as a whole), prostitution = bad is a firmly entrenched position, and I certainly wouldn’t argue that sex is, for many people, an intensely emotional experience, I think it’s very risky to make the leap from “it’s…

I realize you guys might not have control over the ad layout, but the page has an ad inserted between your first graphic and the paragraph, which makes it more difficult to follow the description in your article (which I thought was otherwise great).

Well it’s clearly inspired by late renaissance armor. The poofy shirt on the right arm is very common in armor from the era, as would be the quilted armor on the left leg. The gorget, gauntlets, greaves and pauldrons are, although highly ornamented, definitely intended to be some kind of plate armor. Obviously it…

I enjoyed every second I put into Doom Eternal, but I could only play one, maybe two levels at a time before I just felt burned out for the day, and once the FF7 remake came out I just...stopped playing it.  It’s fun, but to me it felt like I was always “on.”  In firefights you’re constantly moving, juggling resources…

I agree, the game is taxing.  I’ve been playing just one level per day - when I finish a level, I don’t feel driven to keep going, but rather I want to take a break.  It’s super fun, and really gets your adrenaline going, but that plus the constant need to keep track of armor/health/ammo/blood punches/grenades to make…

I think you’re probably right about the game working better early on at higher difficulties.  I started on UV, and while the first level was still pretty easy overall, I found myself struggling with a lack of ammo throughout Exultia.  Once they introduced the whiplash demons in the Cultist Base, I finally ran into a…

Oh man, do I have bad news for you about how “recent” this problem is...

Now THAT literally is how you get Skynet.

Right, that’s my point. If it stumbled upon a strategy like that which resulted in maximizing/minimizing its loss function, it could totally end up using it.  That’s why you’d have to define its win conditions better.  But even in those cases, the hyperbolic “that’s how you get skynet” isn’t possible.  The AI simply…

At the risk of running afoul of Poe’s law, AI doesn’t work like that.  If the only outputs it can produce are within the game, it will never be able to learn how to produce effects outside of it.  The worst you could get would be if the AI counted the players disconnecting as a win, it might learn a combination of…