I’ve held multiple times before that it possibly would have been better off if it were a more focused, linear experience possibly akin to how the newer Deus Ex games worked. Within those you had the freedom to screw around in the area/mission you were in and given a wide latitude to complete things as you saw fit, but it definitely excised the wannabe GTA filler in the middle.

2077 had an excellent series of incredibly well-directed moments, both within the main story missions as well as several notable side missions, but the stuff in between made little sense especially given the story framework of V living on borrowed time with a ticking bomb in their head. But sure, let’s save up and buy nine apartments, collect all the gold class weapons, stock your garage with all the cars, traipse all over down finding all of Delamain’s rogue taxis, do a sidequest for this random chump, see a concert, check all these cyberpsychos off our list…

There is incredible detail in the world if – but only if – you stop to search for it. There are a lot of things most players will probably miss unless they’re specifically pointed out, and while that’s certainly neat it also means that the lack of discoverability means the time spent on many of those details ultimately turns out to be wasted. 2077 is thus a weird hybrid of a linear and open world game and as a result feels both too constrained and to unfocused at the same time. It’s all to easy to get derailed, and alas to some extent you have to let yourself get derailed to accrue enough XP and equipment so you don’t get your ass handed to you if you just try to stick to the main storyline, even though that storyline is written as if it’s supposed to be a single linear narrative.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the game. I just would have presented it much differently if I were in charge.

And they’re basically free. I think I paid $20 for my last one, new.

Inaccurate. You won’t find out about the $4000 hat charge until you randomly get a bill in the mail for it four months later. It’s also already been denied by your insurance. When questioned on this, because your declaration of coverage clearly states that it includes hats, your insurance will claim that the hospital charged it under the wrong code and somehow this is your responsibility.

A surprising amount of people labor under the assumption that they lock shut somehow and the door can’t be opened while the machine is running which is bad in case “something goes wrong.”

A) No they don’t, and you can easily open the door as you have observed, and

B) If the thing were having some manner of hypothetical catastrophic meltdown, why would you want to open the door as your first impulse anyway?

People also near universally have a serious misconception about how much water a modern dishwasher uses, or rather how much it doesn’t. Everyone unanimously insists to me that they can hand-wash the same amount of dishes using less water than a dishwasher. No, you can’t. They think it’s running water constantly while it’s in operation and don’t understand that it fills with 1.5-2 gallons of water and recirculates that through each phase of the wash, usually resulting in only two or three fills.

Specifically in your face because one of the nozzles on the middle spray arm is aimed outwards to hit the latch on the detergent dispenser door.

INB4 KDTM804ESS.

I have to conjecture this didn’t sell very well.

It probably would. I have no idea as to the alloy of the brass but it’s not coated with anything so it will undoubtedly patina over time regardless.

This is so. At the bottom of the article it says:

To help us give customers who use T-Life a smoother experience, we are rolling out a new tool in the app that will help us quickly troubleshoot reported or detected issues. This tool records activities within the app only and does not see or access any personal information. If a customer’s T-Life app currently supports the new functionality, it can be turned off in the settings under preferences.

So yes, it can only see itself, i.e. within the T-Mobile app. It’s still dumb.

I’m not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are several roadblocks in that path on the part of the OS for obvious reasons.

You don’t just hoola hoop it? That’s what I always did when I was a kid.

That’s just the thing: Either they did or they didn’t. I’m going to give them one star, or all five. The other three in the middle are really meaningless.

…Just don’t look at it too hard when you go to the Great Deku Tree in BotW.

If you’ve never actually used the Canon app on your phone: I assure you that it would be faster to ride the elevator down from your hotel room, walk to the nearest store, haggle with the store owner for 10 minutes over the price of the cable, get your money changed, buy it, and return to your hotel room than it would be to wait for the app to connect to your camera over wi-fi.

Ballista > Catapult.

(Orbital ion cannon > Ballista.)

I just don’t understand why I must type something into the text box below the positive/negative selector on eBay, even as a seller. If everything went down like it was supposed to, this is pointless. “Sale went through as expected; buyer did not attempt to rip me off with a fraudulent or frivolous complaint” should not require any further explanation.

Same thing with retailer reviews. This whole pick-the-number-of-stars thing gets to me. The fact that you delivered the product I paid for vaguely within the specified time frame is not special five-starsworthy treatment. It is the bare minimum level of obligation you as a retailer must provide to me. All of these should be a simple positive or negative, like eBay is. Let the site itself figure out what the average is and calculate the number of stars if it feels like it.

I thought at first you guys were thinking of this, and I was puzzled. Then I looked it up.

Crivens, it’s like a combination of Tempest and Flappy Bird, but since it’s a Terry Cavanagh game it’s also been whacked over the head soundly with VVVVVV.

I also maintain that Breath of the Wild was superior to Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently this opinion makes Zelda fans incredibly salty.

Journey is indeed absolutely fantastic. It finally got a PC port a while ago after languishing on the PS3 for quite some years, and its hardware requirements are probably low enough in the modern era that practically anybody should be able to experience it.

My only gripe is that online randos seem not to understand the meditation achievement, and get antsy when you try to entice them to sit there with you until the achievement pops. And since you can’t type at them you can’t communicate to them what’s going on.

I got the trophy on PS3 back in the day but I haven’t successfully wrangled anybody into helping me get the Steam achievement for that yet…

Historically a masterpiece has been a (or the) work that demonstrates an artist is capable of utilizing their medium to its fullest extent, i.e. it has been mastered. Per ye olde Wiki:

Historically, a “masterpiece” was a work of a very high standard produced by an apprentice to obtain full membership, as a “master”, of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.

In that light, I’d say the best qualified would be games that completely utilized the capabilities of the platform they were designed for or, perhaps of interest to more people, expanded what everyone thought could be done with those systems. Games which were furthermore well polished and complete, and did not have much room for improvement taking into account the constraints they had to work with at the time. (For instance: No duh we could make Mario 64 run at a higher framerate and have better textures to look nicer on hardware now. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t arguably a masterpiece of its time, on the system it was on.) This doesn’t just have to be technical stuff – It could be the way the game used storytelling, its gameplay mechanics, or anything else.

I use Root Explorer.

A shocking number of Android devices ship without a file browser installed from the vendor at all. If you want one you have to install it yourself. This is baffling to me.

It does not, but on all of the Android devices I’ve used there’s simply a “downloads” folder in the root location (or what is exposed to the user as root location, anyway) where downloads go by default. From web browsers, at least.

The problem is that where things are saved is more or less up to the developer of the app in question, and sometimes they make some very nonsensical choices. The app could create a folder for itself in root, or it could create a folder for itself in “documents,” or it could simply park things in one of the preexisting userspace folders. Or it could bury the file it just created in /Android/data/com.appname.fd6bca3/files/0/dl/, and it sure as shit won’t tell you nor give you the option to put it anywhere else.