So does that feel like a good game or am I just really a sucker for interesting art and atmosphere? Either way, wishlisted.

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@Kimyrielle: The law isn't so much weird as bought and paid for. It's the kind of thing that happens when your lawmaking process is dominated by the lobbyists of small elites. The DMCA happened at a time when you were seeing the rise of things like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a corporate-backed lobbying outfit that literally just writes legislation and gets US governments, typically starting at the state level, to pass their bills as is.

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Like a few other posters, I too remember when all the major payment platforms at once decided that giving your money to Wikileaks was verboten.

Ultimately, Paypal probably shouldn't exist. There should be a secure international payment system run by an international body like the UN or some consortium of governments, that lets you use your money on the internet straight from your bank account. People have become dependent on the internet as a way to buy things they need--my dad gets his groceries that way because he's old and mostly blind so it's very hard to go to the grocery store. It's not a frill, it's important, and I see no reason why some private gatekeeper should be skimming fees off every transaction.

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I can see some games being always online. Shooters of the sort where the point is you have a bunch of different people, like, shooting at each other, I can see being always online. But a skating game? How does that require other people? Even if there's leaderboards and stuff, that doesn't require being always online, and anyway if someone isn't interested in leaderboards why shouldn't they be able to just play the blasted game? Is this, like, a combat skating game where you ram your opponents and clobber them with your skateboard? What's the rationale here?

Doesn't matter to me, not interested in skating games except possibly someday that one with the birds.

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@tfk Not exactly, no. Sharks normally need to keep swimming because if they don't they gradually sink. Normal fish have this "swim bladder" thing that gives them neutral buoyancy, and sharks don't. But sharks around places like coral reefs and other shallow areas will apparently find caves and take a nap. So a shark could lie there getting dentisted and be fine.

On the other hand, the tooth thing . . . yeah, obviously the game is silly fun so it doesn't matter. But as people have said, no way would sharks need a dentist, they just lose teeth and get new ones. Heck, they're not even real teeth, they're made of fingernail stuff, and either they're modified scales or their scales are modified teeth, I'm not sure which way it goes.

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OK, it's the "Roguelite" part I'm wondering about. How many times are we expecting to die in the process of setting up a farm?

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We can say "It's time, Valve". But, is it Valve Time?

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Noticed a little late, but happy birthday anyway. If you see some rather solemn-looking birds on your doorstep, it's because I'm sending my Sincere Egrets.

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So in a while we'll be able to say goodbye to all of this, and hello to Oblivion.

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Down with Gacha games.

Meanwhile, there's one thing I have been failing to understand for a couple decades now. So, once upon a time, dates were usually written with the month as a word, or an abbreviation. Like, "Oct. 12, 1972" kind of thing. But back when things first started getting computery, there was a shift to doing dates in all numbers so computers would be able to understand them, because computers were stupid like that, and primitive, and stuff. And this influenced even non-computer stuff--even in an analog form you're writing on, there's typically an assumption that you'll do it that way. But this has serious drawbacks--people aren't consistent in how they order year/month/day, different countries have tried to standardize on different orders, and dates done with just the numbers are ambiguous, leading to errors and misunderstanding. At the time, the sacrifice was probably necessary.

But for a long time now it has been perfectly possible for computers to handle things like a date format with a word in it. Like, really no problem. And the result would be more human-readable and less ambiguous. So why do we stick to doing it the stupid way?!

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