I’ll grant you the Psycho Mantis fight, but the other two are Easter eggs and not the way the game expects normal players to handle things.

4 is also being delisted later this year due to expiring licensing deals. It’s on discount until it’s gone IIRC, but if you don’t get it soon you’ll never be able to legally.

I second this. Heat Signature is the perfect heist game, and there’s no feeling as good as when you get into the zone and take out or avoid everyone in a high-ranked mission and escape without being noticed. And when you’re not in the zone and screw up, it turns into pure chaos as you desperately try to salvage the situation. It’s great fun.

It’s by the same guy who’s making Tactical Breach Wizards, if that helps.

The battle pass from Genshin/Star Rail boggles the mind. You have to grind like crazy or play almost every day to complete it, and the majority of the rewards are character and weapon advancement materials. You know, something you’d usually have to grind for.

Escape the grind through more grinding.

Oh, and you only get 1/6 of the battle pass rewards as a F2P player. It’s ten bucks to unlock the majority of the rewards. And the headline feature, the weapon/star cone you unlock at tier 30 (only it you pay, naturally), is easily outclassed by stuff you’ll get as a F2P player.

In a similar vein:

“A silvery thing in another cabinet, like a three-pointed star inside a circle, was made of no substance she knew; it was softer than metal, scratched and gouged, yet even older than any of the ancient bones. From ten paces she could sense pride and vanity.”

From the Wheel of Time.

Gacha games, but surprisingly not for the gacha elements. FOMO events, where you either play during a limited period or miss the event and its rewards forever, killed my interest in every one I played.

The worst are the ones that put critical parts of character stories in them, then never rerun the events. Genshin and other MiHoYo games were especially bad about this (Albedo’s evil twin says hello).

What? X is all about the passive income and telling NPCs what to do. You play long enough to afford a cheap cargo runner as a second ship, put an AI pilot in it, and tell them to run trade routes in the background while you do whatever you find fun. Your income snowballs from there as you buy more and bigger ships and unlock better trading automation, then becomes ridiculous once you start building stations and producing entire supply chains yourself.

I say this as someone who also bounced off X4, because even with all that and time compression it still takes ages to get to the fun endgame stuff I actually enjoy.

One does not simply wok into Mordor.

If they refuse to believe it’s a wrong number there would be a tiny voice in the back of my head telling me to make life as surreal as possible for the person they think I am. Make false but harmless promises, spread absurd rumors, that sort of thing.

Tak does not require we think of him, only that we think.

• Terry Pratchett, Thud!

Discworld in general has a ton of good quotes, but Thud! is especially full of relevant ones, being about religious extremists warring against inconvenient truths.

They released an excellent announcement trailer parodying the concept of announcement trailers three years ago. I haven’t seen a single thing about it since.

The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION.

It also made every encounter consist of multiple waves, with enemy reinforcements popping into existence inside your party and rendering positioning nearly useless. It’s like they were going down a checklist of ways to make combat less tactical.

I hope they bring back spells like Virulent Walking Bomb from the first games. That one would poison an enemy and make them explode when they died, and if any enemy nearby died to the explosion or within the next few seconds they’d explode too, and so on.

It wasn’t the best spell, but it fit the “mages are one misstep away from becoming eldritch abominations” narrative and damn did it make you feel powerful when the secondaries went off and it turned an entire room full of enemies into mist.

Prey drive is no joke. My sister has a heeler/corgi mix, and taking her for a walk is an exercise in not dislocating your arm whenever she spots a small animal. She’s adorabloodthirsty.

Oddly her other dog, a heeler/pit mix, is super chill with no apparent prey drive whatsoever. I’m pretty sure you could hold a baby bird in front of his face and he’d just sniff at it dumbly with his tail wagging.

Having owned a beagle, its brain looked more like the cat image but with “murder” replaced with more food “not food, but I’ll eat it anyway”.

Dogs think about food when they’re hungry, or when food is present. Cats will stand on you and complain for hours because their food bowl is only 90% full and they’d really prefer it to be 100% full at all times, please and thank you.

There’s an entire song about this.

The thing is, Viconia and ::: spoiler Throne of Bhaal spoilers Sarevok ::: had similar arcs in the previous games but I never got annoyed enough to not want them in my party. A character can be disagreeable without being insufferable.

Ellison.

The suggestions for email addresses if yours was already taken used to include what you entered plus the last two digits of your birth year. I wonder how many people born in 1988 followed that advice and now deeply regret it.