I still find Civil War Generals 2 to be a really fun and challenging game. The visuals are still perfectly readable and charming.

Isn’t is supposed to be is.

[US] Any suspect that says “Am I free to go?” during an interview where they haven’t been Mirandized, and then if they are free to go leaves immediately.

Or if they are not free to go and Mirandized “I demand a lawyer.” and “I am asserting my right to silence.” and nothing else. Playing cute games in an “interview” so you can get off some zingers at the cops is at best not going to make your situation worse. Very likely though, the longer you talk, the worse it will get. Therefore any technique that is giving up your right to silence and council is sub-optimal.

This footage doesn’t catch the public eye as often because it isn’t spicy. It’s just boring. You want to be boring because the cops who booked you are not the right people to be spinning your side of the story to.

Airsoft has grown massively. While it is more of a whole day event, it fills that same niche but better in many ways.

Most lazertag places I remember seeing were inside or connected to arcades, and those really aren’t a thing for kids these days either so it makes sense the lazertag places aren’t as widespread as they used to be. If you’re specifically going to travel to just do lazertag, you’ll probably just travel to do airsoft or paintball.

I love Battletech, but I understand why it isn’t for everyone. The crunch of of detailing armor hits and internal effects, and keeping track of heat sinks is all the kind of thing that appeals to a specific kind of numbers nerd.

Yes Alpha Strike exists, but it’s relatively new and I think it exists as this weird thing that by stripping out the details takes away the appeal for the loyal crunchy brained people.

Further, the miniatures are really neat, but 28mm (or 32mm, whatever is happening with 40k scale creep these days) scale really allows people to paint and customize characters which is appealing to more people than relatively less characterful mech sculpts.

For video games, Full Spectrum Warrior.

It’s got a unique third person-ish view where the player swaps between different fire teams or special units, and orders them. It looks like a third person shooter but is just a real time ground level tactical game. It’s demanding but fun. It’s the kind of game that Brothers In Arms, old school Ghost Recon, or Doorkickers players would love. I don’t know why nobody really remembers it or why somebody hasn’t made a spiritual successor.

The original version of Crysis is available right now on GOG and the EA store. PC isn’t a single vendor ecosystem where the only store also owns the hardware to play it.

We also don’t know who decided to pull it. I’d still wager it is unlikely Valve made a unilateral choice or pressured the game off the platform. Look at EA for answers.

It’s unlikely Valve forced the game off the page. Even so, the supposed issue has always been if Steam were to pull games from you that are already in your library (which AFAIK they haven’t) or a future hypothetical where Steam closes down and if people would be able to offline save their libraries.

My claim to a brush with celebrity is that I used to know Michael Rooker, who played the guy who got pretzeled.

I posit that ratings in a franchise like Star Wars are a downstream reflection of previous material. Part of Andor’s low ratings I think are a reflection on the other shows that came out and weren’t good. It creates an environment where so many viewers check out. I’d say that Disney reducing the amount of Star Wars shows it puts out and giving the shows to properly talented creators to make unique high quality projects should be the takeaway.

I really hope the executive takeaway is “let individual creators have unique takes and expand Star Wars” and not “All Star Wars should now be dark and depressing and grim.”

I don’t support using it as a basis to shove politics into everything, I was just following that this is a common trope of people who do, which leans on semantics while ignoring the spirit of people not wanting everything to be a political debate.

For such people, there’s no way to word a rule ironclad enough, and you simply have to make judgement calls at some point.

Since “everything is politics” it seems impossible to ever word a rule is a way that an obnoxious wannabe rules lawyer won’t argue, but the plain intent of the rule seems clear enough. Enforcement will normalize the tone, and if a post is removed and the poster reacts will outsized outrage, in my observation, it was probably because they were emotionally invested in the politics of the post.

Black borders on white text please. I beg you.

First, we have to agree on what a plot hole is.

My definition of a plot hole in a story is something that simply can not happen given the existing rules of the story, or something which could only happen in an unexplained and if not literally impossible than at least so unlikely it is practically impossible way that defies everything else we know about the story.

This would be an item inexplicably jumping locations, a character having knowledge they could not possibly have, or a character or item being in two places at once. Things like that which gnarl the story.

What it isn’t: A character making a bad decision, a character acting unusual (even to the point of acting out of character- that can be bad writing, but not a plot hole), a character forgetting something, a plot contrivance, an unlikely coincidence, something being unrealistic but consistent within the context of the story.

I commonly see poorly written scenes, or scenes where someone thinks a character was acting irrationally, or scientific or legal or other plot points that are intentionally written to serve the story described as plot holes.

With that description, I’d say quite a great number of works of fiction don’t have plot holes.

Here’s my pitch: The story and aesthetic of Fraiser, the gameplay of FEAR.

I’m not going to count shows aimed at adult audiences because that feels like cheating (that also includes not listing anime aimed at adults because that doesn’t seem like the spirit of the question). Of shows aimed at and easily accessible during their run to children I’m going to say Courage The Cowardly Dog and Invader Zim.

Courage had insane creepy visuals in almost every episode.

Zim wasn’t consistently freaky to the point of being notable in every episode, but the ones that were, they were really out there. The show was from the mind of the creator of the Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (which I read as a kid thanks to my interest in Invader Zim) and the show’s darker elements are obviously reigned in just enough to get on TV.

Nah, I just don’t feel like typing out a thesis to defend what started out as an offhand joke under a meme post.

But also Gollum.