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.

“Phone home” was actually him saying he needed to check in with his probation officer.

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.

At least they all appear to be cosmetics like furniture, outfits, and skins for pets. Judging by the DLC descriptions I don’t see any gameplay locked behind paywalls.

Agreed that those prices are absurd though.

I’ve had Sun Haven in my library for a while, but I’ve been holding off on playing it due to reviews calling out bugs at launch. Is it in good shape now that it’s had a few major updates? And how does it compare to the other juggernauts in the genre (old Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and Stardew Valley)?

Also, it looks like the game is being review-bombed on Steam right now. Is that just due to the deluge of DLC with the latest update, or is there something bigger wrong with the game?

My brother-in-law once put a slice of bread on my sleeping sister’s stomach, and when their dog (a very gluttonous beagle) started chowing down, woke her up by shaking her while shouting “the dog is eating your flesh!”

He’s great. There’s a reason he became my best friend after they married.

What are you talking about? Dragon Age already had two sequels.

They just called them Pillars of Eternity I and II for some reason…

There’s a Half-Life mod that brings it to PC, along with one that ports the Decay co-op expansion.

So BB-8 is the modern Oddjob?

Its return was clearly foreshadowed by the meme using Windows, where “no” means “pop up again later”.

“I slept with you because you reminded me of Ivanka, but you’re actually a Tiffany.”

Thanks for the detailed review!

I’m curious, have you played Starsector? It’s an RPG/space combat sim, not naval combat, but it feels broadly similar. From what you said you liked about this game it seems like you might enjoy it, and it’s ridiculously well polished for a game still in alpha - I’ve encountered virtually no jank or annoying bugs in my playthroughs.

(Trading kind of sucks* due to tariffs making margins low if there’s not a shortage in a good, though there are mods out there to make the economy act more like a more traditional trading sim)

(* Though it has the most fleshed out smuggling system I’ve ever encountered, with stealth mechanics and suspicion meters and economic effects to dumping things on the black market)