Warning: all of those games contain stuff that can fuck you up if you’re not expecting them, so check trigger warnings as required. That said, I’d also add OMORI and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass to the list - IMO they are much better than OFF as both games and stories while playing with similar themes.
Well this article’s a pro-Putin load of shit. The reason cluster munitions are banned under so many treaties is that they tend to fail to detonate and then kill civilians after the war, requiring a long and horrible cleanup process. But Russia has already been using cluster munitions in huge quantities, so that cleanup process already needs to happen, and this article is handwringing over Ukraine being able to use them on Ukrainian territory in response. And if Ukraine loses this war, Russia has already made it perfectly clear through their actions in occupied territory that the result will be genocide - something the article curiously decides to omit, while quite happily pushing a false equivalence between Russia’s use (pre-emptive, offensive, and murdering civilians of the country they’re invading) and Ukraine’s use (in response, defensive, and accepting some deaths to stop Russia from killing more).
Counterpoint: All the origin characters have bespoke side stories and dialogue, and one of them is a chaotic neutral rogue who is also a bisexual vampire twink.
(Given Sven’s advice here I’m probably just going to go with a drow or tiefling warlock, but Astarion is absolutely on the table for the second playthrough.)
The problem here will be that Elon’s new X logo is really just an existing Unicode character: 𝕏. It’s appeared in maths papers for decades. This isn’t like the golden arches - there’s nothing novel there to trademark.
I’d say start with Wrath and don’t bother with Kingmaker. Wrath is just much more interesting both as a game and as a concept, and there’s no shortage of replayability there - the amount of variability between paths is crazy. That said, whichever game you start with, I’d strongly recommend you download a mod to trivialise the management minigame (kingdom management for Kingmaker, crusade management for Wrath). They’re a) not fun, b) difficult (and unlike the rest of the game have no difficulty settings), c) have nothing to do with the core RPG gameplay, and d) can brick your campaign if you screw them up.
Also, you know about Baldur’s Gate 3, right? It’s coming out in two weeks after a very long and successful early access period and it very much looks like all the crazy reactivity of Wrath on a full AA budget.
People like you are why AdNauseam exists, FYI. If you make the non-adblock experience intolerable and then ban adblockers, people have a nasty tendency to fight back rather than knuckling under. I say that as someone who’ll whitelist ads - or donate to - sites I use regularly that aren’t run by shitheads throwing video ads in my face and selling my data to the highest bidder.
A tip isn’t a story in itself, it’s a suggestion of where to start looking for one. “Hey, I’m off the record here, but some shady shit is going down at my job and you might want to fire off a Freedom of Information request for x, y and z or talk to a and b” is a pretty good tip.
Quite a boring answer from me:
There will be some slight gaps in backwards compatibility/emulator compatibility for some games, but I suspect the biggest remaining gap will be PC games not capable of running on the Steam deck.
I don’t think anything I said implied that Ukraine was morally unimpeachable on the military side. If we were talking about whether or not Ukraine should be able to torture Russian POWs or impersonate medics or firebomb Russian apartment complexes then this would be a very different conversation and I would be saying very different things. I also don’t think anyone is saying that use of cluster munitions is a good thing, only that it’s the lesser of all available evils.
I do think that under all circumstances it’s very unhelpful and even paternalistic for us to tell Ukraine what they can and can’t do for their own good. Ukraine is not fighting the Iraq war or Vietnam here. They’re not lunatics, they’re not children, and they’re not fighting because they’ve been lied or manipulated or bullied into it by their leadership. They’re fighting a defensive war of annihiliation in which they either win or die, much of the civilian population included. Given that, they are the only ones who should be allowed a say on what risks they are prepared to take and what costs they consider acceptable, and our role in this should be to shut up and help them unless they are genuinely violating international law. There might one day come a time where the Ukrainian people start disagreeing with the Ukrainian leadership on how far to go, and if that ever happens then I’m happy to weigh in on the side of the people, but we’re not there yet - last I heard Zelenskiy was still incredibly popular.
I also didn’t say there was “no downside” to using cluster munitions more. I would instead say that most of the downside is already there thanks to Russia’s extensive use of them. Obviously the more bombs are present the more likely it is that someone is killed, but AFAICT the deaths are not the worst part of unexploded munitions because they are typically rare. The problem is that the reason deaths are rare is that the instant the immediate threat is over, the government has to designate huge swathes of the country as de facto minefields, unsafe for everyone including the people who used to live there until they can be painstakingly cleared. Even afterwards, the risk is never entirely gone and the population has to live with that - people don’t feel safe walking in the countryside they grew up in for decades after the fact. That, to me, would be the worst part, and past a certain point increasing the number of munitions used in a given engagement makes very little difference to it.