It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.

Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!

A critical piece of context that a lot of modern gamers completely miss is that Douglas Adams' adventure games are works of parody not only in terms of their narratives, but also in the sense that they're rather vicious parodies of adventure games as a genre. Each of their absurdly obtuse puzzles is lampooning some puzzle design trope or set of tropes that was legitimately commonplace at the time they were made, and many of the really nasty bits are crafted specifically to piss off experienced adventure game fans who otherwise wouldn't get caught out by that sort of thing. They're outliers in the genre only in the sense that they're putting forth extra effort to be annoying about it – most games of the type pull the exact same shit entirely without remark!

(Honestly, the player-hostility of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to be tremendously overstated owing to a combination of effective marketing and the fact that it's the only adventure game from that era that any significant number of current-gen gamers have ever actually played. In terms of sheer fuckery it's considerably friendlier than stuff like, say, Codename: ICEMAN.)

It helps to understand that point and click adventure games are one of the first genres the Git Gud crowd really fixated on, and a lot of these early design trends revolved around catering to that crowd. It only got reframed as a genre for filthy casuals in the wake of a demographic shift in the mid 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing strongly female; it's practically the only example of a video game genre's reputation flipping directly from "hardcore" to "casual", and one of the most striking illustrations of the fact that which kinds of games are considered "real" games is more about identity politics than mechanics.

Once I drank a 5 hour energy right before work because I had gotten less than an hour of sleep, but then we got rained out after less than an hour in the field. I took 2 tylenol PM to try and counteract the caffeine to try and get some sleep, and ended up having auditory hallucinations of people breaking into my room while I lay dazed in bed. 2/10 would not recommend.

Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of someone else's actions that I am directly impacted and severely affected by

(chinese guy thinking in centuries) and then in the 21st let's have really weak consumer demand and high local debt

i feel like if you make a post this good you shouldn't be allowed to delete your blog

if a person refers to themself as a “silly little guy” they are usually filled with a deep evil

I hate drug tests soooo fucking much they are this totally normalized, uncontroversial thing when they are deeply invasive and irrelevant to your ability to do a job. they are completely pointless except as a way to keep poor people poor by not letting them into certain positions, and are a way of controlling existing employees outside of work. the threat of drug testing hangs over most people in the workforce I'd say

check this out i'm playing bad apple in your imagination

reblog to play bad apple on your mutuals

Just a casual reminder that posting on the internet about how you would want to do physical harm to members of the US government is something that they can (and will) detain you over, so just be careful what you say in public spaces like, uh, on Tumblr.

this is your semi-regular reminder that tumblr has cooperated with the fbi to hand over user information in a very public way at least once. and that's not the only way the feds can collect information on you either

Sex is cringe. "Hey do you wanna come over and play boners together?" What naked bullshit. They have played us for fools.

the smuckling smumbler