I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.

How much of that sounds familiar…?

Ok this got a chuckle out of me. But yeah, I don’t see any problem with people expressing agreement verbally.

Imagine a real conversation where you’re only allowed to agree with someone with nods, never saying “yeah I agree completely” or any other verbal feedback.

Honestly I didn’t even read the article. Shared it purely based on the headline.

You say “handful”, but it still hand thousands of players, and the thing that makes me sad about this screw up is that of those who played it, it was probably someone’s favourite game…

…Is what I was going to say, until I looked at the Steam charts. It hit an all-time peak of 607 players, with estimates of total ownership ranging from 9.5k to 25.1k. It very well still may have been someone’s favourite game and I feel really sad for them that it’s gone, but wow the game still did so much worse than even my expectations based on the reporting.

See this, this I get. This is an actual reasonable problem. And we could be talking about it wrt Retold, since Freyr is a day one DLC.

Personally I’m not too concerned with it because even if you ignore Freyr, the cost of Premium is $25 AUD more than standard, and it includes two future DLCs (which they’ve already said will be $15 USD, probably $20 AUD each). So Premium is worth getting just for the two future pantheons. And since Premium includes Freyr in addition to the future pantheons, it ends up not looking like an added cost in the way it would otherwise.

But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that there’s actual playable content not included for free that’s available day one. And it would leave me very angry if the prices had ended up such that the best deal for everything except the day-one DLC actually cost less than the best deal for everything including Freyr. But all this discussion about cosmetics. Not even interesting cosmetics like unit skins, but something that’s basically just profile pictures. Is annoyingly distracting from that conversation.

You buy it for the expansions. The Chinese, one more as-yet-unannounced pantheon, and Freyr. The other stuff you get with Premium is basically irrelevant.

I’d much rather have a conversation about the day-one DLC of Freyr, and the fact that they’re charging for the future Chinese pantheon despite Chinese being available in 2014 Extended Edition and no previous Age of Empires Definitive Edition removing a civ that was previously available (indeed, aoe2 and aoe3’s DEs both added new civs in addition to all the existing ones). Granted, there are extenuating circumstances there, in that the EE Chinese DLC was so terrible it basically killed the game and they’ve promised the upcoming expansion to Retold will be “all new Chinese”. But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

This discussion about what is basically profile pictures is some irrelevant bullshit as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a shit about it, and I find the rhetoric from people claiming they do care (especially that one person claiming that this is a reason they’ll avoid Retold entirely because it’s “an advertisement, not a game”) extremely unconvincing. It’s eye-rollingly stupid to care about this when there are real things to get upset about both with this game and in the wider gaming industry.

where I’m actually playing a game and not an advertisement

That’s more than a little bit hyperbolic.

Mercifully, the base game’s faring far better.

On Steam it is. Though ironically, given the source of this article, PC Gamer has not given it such a stellar review. While heaps of other review sites are giving it 90/100 and its Metacritic score is 84, PC Gamer gives it just 75, which in the inflated world of online game reviews is basically a failing grade, and is a significant outlier compared to overall review sites and fan reception.

I’ve seen others allege that it’s part of a general trend at PC Gamer having a grudge against remasters and not scoring them entirely on their merits.

I’ll repeat my comment from !aom@lemm.ee:

Gonna be honest, I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I do agree that it’s kinda shitty to charge $6 ($8 here in Aus) for something that was basically the thing people already had in the original game.

On the one hand, the description of it as “22-year-old JPEGs” is wrong. They’re at the very least upscaled, but certainly in some form higher quality than the originals. There’s also the fact that they’re completely optional and unnecessary. They provide nothing but cosmetics, and not even cosmetics that you see in important places like character models. I also think it was primarily intended as a small added bonus for people with the Premium Edition, and to me the Premium Edition is a no-brainer for reasons completely unrelated to this. It costs like $20 extra, and includes the first two upcoming expansions free, each at $15 (or similar maths to that), as well as the Freyr god pack (like $10?). It’s able to be bought stand-alone, but I don’t think that’s really what’s intended.

Still, yeah I really think trying to upsell with this pack is kinda penny pinching in a way I wish they wouldn’t do things.

Oh interesting. I’ve never used the “thumbnail URL” field on a submission before. But yeah it looks like it messed up before and was treating it as the main URL instead…

It’s a shuttle run. You’re not running laps of a track, you’re running back and forth between two cones placed 20 metres apart.

Oh I used to love doing the beep test! I’ve only gotten to do it 3 or 4 times but it was a great fun challenge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epvLrK6Mhd4

Normal YouTube link

CCTV produced an article asking “six shocking questions” about “US doping scandals.”

Hilarious, considering they had a known doper on their swimming team at the Olympics who was banned in 2014 and then banned again after destroying testing samples in 2018. Not sus at all…

Based on this website at its ugliest the UK had –2.3 Helens

ESO is pretty similar in that regard

Isn’t ESO a classy system? I’ve not played the game since shortly after its release…probably put more time in during the betas than I did in the official game. But from my memory, I think that they talked about the idea that any class could be specced into any role, and that at least early on people were saying that they hadn’t done a great job of that, but that the best class for a role wasn’t intuitive. But still, definitely not classless.

Oh, nice catch! I’m not American, so don’t have an enormous amount of exposure to AAE. Thanks for the added detail!

And yes, you’re definitely right that “the” would be more appropriate for standard American (and British, and Australian, etc.) English.

I could be wrong, but I believe “a” is often used in African American English (which—and again, I could be wrong—I believe is the preferred term these days by linguists, rather than AAVE) even when the proceeding word begins with a vowel. Considering the guy in the picture is black and, based on the fact that he’s standing in front of NBA signs, presumably American, using “a” in this meme makes sense.

Her most memed moments came from her third contest, after she had failed to score a single point in her first 2.

So yeah, I think she might have been having some fun with it the third time around. She knew she wouldn’t progress out of the pool phase, so why not have fun with it?

On my desktop I’ve currently got 4 windows with 101, 103, 17, and 191 tabs. Think it’s about 60 on my phone, and currently only about 30 on my tablet.