Those are coveralls. Or a jumpsuit, depending.

These are overalls:

openscad is kind of a bad choice for architectural drawings.

Is RNG always bullshit? No; only a sith speaks in absolutes. There are appropriate uses of randomness in video games. Is RNG very often a source of bullshit? Absolutely. Do I feel like that’s the case in Blue Prince? ABSOLUTELY

“I got the pump room but not the boiler room again so I still can’t try doing the thing I’ve been trying to do.” Said players of a game designed to disrespect their time.

If, at the start of each in-game day, you were given all of the rooms you’d unlocked so far, and were allowed to arrange them however you like right then and there, and were then free to move around in it however much you please, would the game be worsened? I’m convinced it would only be improved, because pretty much all you would do is remove “Welp, for the fifteenth time, I know what I want to try, but random chance prevented me from doing so.”

The presentation is charming and the puzzles are intriguing but I think the community is putting up with the deeply terrible mechanics out of sheer novelty, and another game made like it isn’t going to be well received.

Adding bullshit RNG to a puzzle game to make it take longer might make it more “challenging” but doesn’t make it better, is my point.

Putting a jigsaw puzzle together is a challenge. You could increase that challenge by requiring yourself to roll a die and getting 6 five times in a row before you’re allowed to try to fit a piece. Does that sound like good game design to you?

Could it present the player withbsmallband large puzzles/mysteries without egregiously misusing RNG?

I’m not interested in the RNG telling me I can’t work on the thing that’s on my mind.

From what I saw of Blue Prince, it would be like playing Return of the Obra Dinn, except after you get one of the death scenes and the soundtrack blarps at you for awhile, there’s the door unlock sound, and there’s a random chance it’s going to make you arbitrarily replay the game.

I’m just not on board with all the shit they piled in front of the mystery to solve.

I propose we call Microsoft’s portable Xbox a “Xune.”

That question is the thesis statement of a 2 hour long video essay if ever I heard one.

Most games involve random chance somehow to make the game feel more alive and less deterministic, like in an early Zelda game, should the Octorok run 3, 4, 5, or 6 tiles forward? Should it turn left or right? Should it drop a rupee or a heard when killed? These I’m fine with.

In an RPG, things like monster encounter rates might use the RNG to simulate the behavior of a dungeon master, both “roll for initiative” and “I’ll have them encounter 4 groups of low level monsters on their way through the creepy forest.” Using an RNG and lookup table for that is a reasonable low overhead way to add some unpredictability and adventure to the game. Note: I don’t really play RPGs that much.

The term roguelike has started to be overused to mean any game that features procedural generation and permadeath. By that definition I think Tetris qualifies as a roguelike. The original Rogue kind of worked like a virtual dungeonmaster, it would create an RPG campaign for you to play in, and then it played like any RPG where you have to explore a dungeon, learn the mechanics etc. with permadeath and the consequence of having to relearn everything you’ve learned thusfar generating stakes and pressuring the player to survive, no “whatever, I’ll just die and respawn.” So that’s an innovative use of a computer random number generator. Most things that call themselves “roguelikes” are more “We designed a cool primary gameplay loop but can’t really be bothered with level design so here’s some procedural generation to beat your head against over and over again, maybe hoping to find a scenario you can possibly win.” Quite often, it’s not that the game randomly re-engineers itself, it throws the same pre-scripted things at you in a somewhat different order, so they end up playing more like old arcade games than an actual adventure.

A “roguelike” I’ve spent the most time with is FTL: Faster Than Light, and its roguelike structure is by far my least favorite feature. I don’t really like beating my head against the RNG hoping a permutation of combats, 50/50 “do you help with the giant spiders” encounters goes my way so that I have enough scrap, and that it gives me a shop with a useful array of weapons so that I have a chance at the end encounter.

Blue Prince takes the randomization to a whole other level. It might be compelling if it procedurally randomized the house for each playthrough such that you do have to learn YOUR way through it, and you have limited stamina so that each day you can only explore so far, but you can get upgrades to your stamina so that you can stay in the house longer and explore deeper, but…I can’t see the way they implemented the game’s RNG as anything other than flagrant disrespect of the player’s time.

The “AHA!” moment in a puzzle game is what you’re after. That hapens in the player’s mind. If the player thinks up the solution, but the mechanics of the game make it take a long time to implement, all you’re doing is grinding the player’s teeth together. And Blue Prince seems designed to maximize teeth grinding, because the player may know the solution to a puzzle, but contriving the circumstance necessary to implement that solution requires several unlikely rolls back to back to back to back to back.

Sorry, I’m just convinced it’s bad game design pretending to be novel.

Increasingly, the software published on disc or cartridge is incomplete or unfinished, because there is pressure from management to ship retail products on time, but game development is hard, so the dev team will use the time during manufacturing and distribution of discs or cartridges to write patches, which will be automatically downloaded when the game runs. And it’s getting to the point that the cartridge or disc just functions as a license key. Maybe some of the game’s assets will be stored there but not the complete game, as they’ll still require large downloads to function.

I’ve been a Nintendo + PC gamer my entire life; basically anything I’ve ever wanted to play was available with that combo…and I’m ditching Nintendo.

Well, I’m kinda curious how much longer home consoles are going to hang on.

Nintendo is releasing their second generation handheld. The Steam Deck is quite popular, and the rest of the PC gaming industry has been scrabbling to match it. Meanwhile, the PS5…exists and what’s an Xbox even for anymore?

People like to say consoles will continue to exist because they’re so much simpler than PCs to “just play” on, but that’s not really true anymore. My parents’ Switch has a multi-page settings menu, an online account and subscription, even games that come on cartridge often require downloads and updates before you start playing. We’re in a different world than when I was a kid, when I could really get a game, plug it in the SNES, flip the switch and it runs.

I could see Microsoft and Sony having an Atari or Sega moment. Exiting the hardware market, shutting down their platform, becoming a relatively minor game studio occasionally remembering to make a game in a property they haven’t published in awhile, like Atari putting out an Alone In The Dark game every 1.5 decades or so.

My mother got into it. I’m not going to.

A puzzle game that puts RNG in between the player and the ability to attempt a solution is something I’m not willing to tolerate.

how is it different from playing Riven with one of your sticks of RAM poorly seated so the computer crashes on a semi-regular basis resetting your progress?

No. Not for me. I’d be more interested in wearing the corner fire hydrant in my ass than playing that.

Somehow, it’s a surprise to people that I’m a competent trumpet player. As if every high school in the state doesn’t have a band class. Fully half of my graduating class in high school were musicians of some kind between chorus, orchestra and band classes. But somehow nobody expects a random dude in his mid-30’s to pick up a trumpet and play a few bars of Ravel’s Bolero.

Learn how to echolocate!

When a cat loafs, the things that stick up on either side of her back? Those are her knees.

Controlled Flight Into Terrain, or CFIT, is the case of being extremely specific. It’s not a mid-air collision with another aircraft, in-flight breakup or fire, flight control failure, crew incapacitation or anything like that. CFIT means the crew was present and alert, the aircraft was functioning correctly and hadn’t departed controlled flight, they’re flying along and all of a sudden the ground happens.

It’s almost always a case of egregious amounts of pilot error. Failures in judgement such as deciding to fly down a canyon because it looked so cool when Luke Skywalker did it, and then being unable to climb out and slamming into a wall. Failure of navigation in the mountains. Failure to maintain minimum altitude on an instrument approach (Look up that Cross Air flight that killed the German pop band Passion Fruit) Failure to compute takeoff and climb performance and flying an airplane straight into the mountain off the end of the runway because you needed 900 feet per mile and at this density altitude you could only manage 750. Or, one of my favorites, the Korean Air Cargo 747 captain that chased a broken ADI straight into a forest outside London.

The guy who named it was running away from it in a panic at the time. “AH FUCK! GORILLA! GORILLA GORILLA GORILLA!”

On a similar vein, there’s indicated airspeed, calibrated airspeed, true airspeed, and ground speed. Aviation comes with a hard requirement of 5th grade math.

I got gas from Sheetz today and it put up a silent and stilla ad on the display while the pump was running.

you might be thinking of Rust.