Quetzalcutlass

A quick and dirty search shows about ten thousand words starting with un-, so gun puns are safe for the foreseeable future.

How long until all the good portmanteaus are taken, I wonder?

The fans have made a local server replacement to emulate unlocks and such. It even lets you run the old timed FOMO missions, so it’s technically superior to playing online.

They added the ability to neuter your pets. It won’t save an already cat-infested colony, but it will prevent the explosive breeding from happening in the first place.

It’s one of my favorite Dwarf Fortress stories! Though my actual favorite would probably be the tale of the catsplosion, which shows how interactions between complex systems can break things in unexpected ways.

Basically, dwarves in the game have infamously short tempers, and when their mood gets low enough they have a mental break and rage and break stuff, which tends to upset other dwarves, starting what is known as a tantrum spiral. These are often run-ending.

One thing that helps keep a dwarf calm is having a pet, of which there are many types to choose from. Cats in particular are popular since they clean up vermin, preventing the bad thoughts caused by their presence.

Cats also have one other unique mechanic, though. Instead of a dwarf adopting them like with normal pets, cats choose a dwarf at random and “adopt” them, becoming their pet.

Now here’s where things get messy. Animals can breed in Dwarf Fortress, and the normal way to keep their numbers down is to set excess unowned pets to be butchered. Except you can’t stop a cat from becoming a pet, and killing a pet causes a huge morale drop in its owner (often enough to cause a tantrum on its own).

So, onto the catsplosion: if you have at least two opposite sex cats, they’ll breed and grow in number exponentially with no way to get rid of them, filling your fortress until your CPU can’t handle the strain and your framerate slows to a crawl. This was the death of many a fortress back in the day until it got fixed.

Good for them. That said, it’s ridiculous that this child predation gets their attention after they’ve spent the last few years ignoring several elephants in the room.

ARK released an (incredibly buggy and half-baked) underwater-themed expansion for the original UE3 game some time after the UE5 remake was released. And several years after all the modders for the original game had moved on. It broke everything.

Conan Exiles just did the same thing recently, though at least theirs was a free upgrade to a new engine so they had an excuse.

Yeah, but it’s also Bethesda, so you could chalk compatibility breakages up to their usual incompetence.

Meanwhile, in Dwarf Fortress women used them as ablative armor.

(The priority of child care was set so high that dwarves would carry their babies into battle, with predictable results.)

That’s just RPS “humor” (or humour given they’re British). They started as a comedy review blog and have kept the decades of in-jokes and references despite all the actually funny writers being long gone.

Modern RPS is a hollow shell of what it used to be.

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They got rid of Medieval Tapestry Art Baby?

I hope Knytt Stories gets a similar treatment. There were so many excellent user-generated levels that shouldn’t be lost to time.

If you’ve never played it, try the level “Don’t Eat The Mushroom”, and go in blind.

Last I read the “deal” is saddling EA with $20 billion in debt, so here’s hoping.

But also, leveraged buyouts are fucking disgusting and should be illegal.

Crazy Taxi is also the reason there aren’t more games like this. Sega patented the gameplay and UI and later sued Fox and EA over The Simpsons: Road Rage’s similarities. Fear of Sega’s legal team killed the genre until the patent expired.

Delicious, nutritious snow.

Edwin?

*checks article*

Edwin.

I miss the old RPS.

“Shut it down now!”

“It’s not- it’s not shutting down!”

*cut to scientist mashing keys in vim insert mode as resonance cascade begins*

“Yes, we put out $85 in DLC on day one, but don’t worry. It’s all unnecessary crap!”

What excellent marketing.

Thanks! I’d like to pretend there’s a clever story behind it, but I came up with it by randomly adding and swapping syllables around Quetzalcoatl until I accidentally stumbled upon something decent.

“Minimalist” isn’t a word I’d normally associate with “immersive sim” (which are all about emergent complexity from the interactions between systems), but in this case it seems to be called minimalist because it’s basically a text game with a GUI bolted on top.

It looks great and it could be fun, but I don’t see how you could possibly do anything not explicitly programmed in by the devs in such a system. I personally wouldn’t describe it as an immersive sim to avoid getting players’ hopes up.

Don’t forget the Yuffie expansion for the first game that they made early adopters pay for (though it’s now bundled with the game).

I give it a week tops before a player drops an entire mountain on one.

Vordt, is that you?

Fuck the Daughters of the Confederacy too while we’re at it.

Considering what the J in JD Vance stands for, I’m fine with s moratorium on James for a while.

Court cases in a world with illusion magic must be wild.

You speak the truth. I gave a Deatchclaw 6 .38 rounds and it just seemed angrier.

I guess I needed a gift of higher caliber.

But it you didn’t go into that random building, you wouldn’t have found that chest with a single lockpick inside (that took three to open).

The evil twin was running a complicated scheme of identity theft and character assassination. You killing them before they could destroy the good twin’s reputation makes you even more of a hero!

Okay, Rimworlder.