Button mashing especially works when you take a character that your opponents never play. I was at an acquaintances house once, and they were playing a Tekken style game I'd never seen before on a console with unfamiliar controllers, and I picked one of the female characters and button mashed my way to annoying the…

Is this what it's like for the people of my Civ when, wracked by economic hardship and threatened by more powerful neighbours, I sink my remaining energy into a desperate bid for a space victory?

Yes, good article, I hope everyone reads it.

The big problem with unassigned seats is people traveling together. Specifically, families. Do you really want to sit next to a 5 year old for the entire flight because the family couldn't find seats together?

I'm going to stick with them being the result of sexual selection.

Jenny Flint is back? Then the series is a success!

I agree. Once a commenter has been around for a while they're no longer truly anonymous - it's more like they have a pseudonym. There should be a system for the admins to allow commenters to be trusted to post immediately, because if they did anything dodgy (such as post a gif like the ones that have caused the…

I'm not colour-blind, but I've had something similar in a game I played ages ago. It was an old, pixelated game where you had to jump over fences and choose different paths and all the rest of it. I spent several hours exploring for a particular path before reading deep into the documentation and finding out I was…

Personally, I'm glad that out of the billions on this planet only a few dozen are on this forum. They're complete arseholes and should probably be locked away for the safety of society, but from what is getting thrown around I was expecting these forums to have hundreds of thousands of participants.

The problem is that I don't think that particular example is valid - cars made these days know that their brakes are getting dodgy and would refuse to drive - or call a mechanic to come and fix them - or a host of other possible solutions. Mechanical failure shouldn't be a problem (except failure in the computer, but…

As a male, when I started playing LOTRO I of course chose a female avatar, and when I was later asked about it all I could come up with was "this is an MMORPG..ROLE PLAYING GAME..." But I realised female was my default choice in all games.

I never get upset about spoilers, because if the movie (or book) is done well enough knowing what happens doesn't hurt the enjoyment. In some cases it improves it. I recently managed to watch The Godfather, and was completely unsurprised by (is it obvious there's going to be a spoiler here? It should be) the horse's…

I don't comment on anything GoT related any more. Someone wrote a "think piece" about it, and I disagreed and responded why, using examples. I specifically removed an example from the latest book out of care for spoilers, but people started howling because I used an example from the penultimate book. I have no way to…

I can't imagine being a program is going to change anything. There'll still be data corruption, equating to disease or death, or sudden server failure leading to Armageddon. There can be back-ups, but that leads to other problems and quandaries.

Yeah, kids bring joy but lower happiness. It's something that if you think it's worthwhile doing you're willing to make sacrifices - like studying at university can lower happiness in the short term, compared to just partying, but people do get something out of it that counteracts the happiness.

Why would men even participate in a system that could leave them without options?

I used to make semi-jokey predictions for my job as a tech writer...they were either wildly off-base or, in some cases, were already being implemented by some companies and I hadn't heard of it. Still, here we go...

"Humanity's penchant for murder and mayhem towards "outsiders" is a relatively recent social acquisition."

I'm sure I'm not the only one that can imagine hobbits having sex...young 'uns meeting up behind the party tree, elders with a glass of wine in front of the hearth before snuggling. ..I hope it's not just me.