pheonixdown
@pheonixdown@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Do you cheat in video games? 3 days ago:
The point of games is to have fun, “cheats” are essentially just difficulty options.
- Comment on Best vertical games on Android? 5 days ago:
Once Upon a Galaxy has been my default game since I first played it.
It’s an asynchronous alternating activation autobattler (like Arcane Rush, or Storybook Brawl/Hearthstone Battlegrounds but you play against ghosts). Games take about 10-15 minutes.
It’s largely public domain fantasy themed, but has been expanding into the “legally distinct” cultural references as they add content, basically every captain/unit/treasure is a reference.
The shop mechanic is simplified, there’s no currency, you just get a set of choices, and can pick 1. You get two shops per round by default, lots of ways to get extra.
Asynchronous play means that you face challenging opponents that naturally evolve with the meta game but you can also take time to make thoughtful decisions.
The draft pool for the shop has a large base pool that you add to by selecting a custom sebset from a second large pool as your captain’s deck. The progression is through unlocking cards for each captain’s secondary pool, and unlocking new captains. You can naturally earn all cards through play, most captains are free, new captains are paywalled for a limited time.
Monetization is through 3 paths: cosmetics, acceleration of card unlocks, access to paywalled captains. I haven’t found it to be particularly exploitative or negative feeling.
My only gripe is minor, that it doesn’t have mid-run save/resume, but that is on their road map.
There is essentially no story, if that matters to you.
If it’s not obvious, I’m really enthusiastic about this game. I’m not affiliated/sponsored in any way. Happy to answer any questions.
- Comment on Help me decide what I should name my game! Currently Country Architect, it turns out that "country" has a double meaning in English that I was not aware of 5 days ago:
It sounds very infrastructure/trade based than politics, so I’d stay away from nation/country terms. Regional Planning would be a generic term for the infrastructure piece, could use Commerce if trade is important. >
- Comment on For those of you who enjoy open-world games, how big of a world is too big? 4 weeks ago:
An Open World is only too big if it requires loading screens at transition points that aren’t natural. An Open World can have an insufficient density of relevant content, where exploring it has too little marginal utility to the player, and therefore it is ultimately not useful to exist.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Conservatives do not understand subtext, satire, or allegory. They don’t assign what they like or don’t based on any meaningful understanding of the message it conveys. They get told what to like and believe by authority and follow it, constantly dismissing or dissonancing any message from what they consume that doesn’t align with their instilled beliefs.
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 2 months ago:
I’ll be honest, I can’t remember all my particular criticisms, but here’s my impressions that I have left:
It’d be more accurately titled Star Trek: Burnham, because 95% of the time, every problem or mystery is somehow related to Burnham, everyone else is just supporting cast.
Like Picard, each season felt very disconnected from the others, there’s some continuity, but you could almost name the season based on the feel of an episode.
Plots more often than not felt underwhelming, as they were solved by essentially deus ex machina, mcguffins, surprise reveals or abrupt character changes.
It was largely visually ok, actors all did at least a decent job.
I have 0 desire to ever rewatch a single episode.
- Comment on Magic: The Gathering to Honor 60th Anniversary of Star Trek with Special Tribute Set 2 months ago:
They started a new strategy in the last few years, Universes Beyond, which is MTG sets based on other IPs. They’ve done it for dozens of properties, it is basically just printing money for them, people who don’t play at all try to get them because they’re collectables related to the IP, which causes scarcity, which allows them to justify higher prices while still selling out.
The player base has mixed responses on it, obviously higher prices is unwelcome, and some people don’t like the IP being diluted (“This is my SpongeBob/Spiderman/Space Marine deck”), but some people like those properties and enjoy overlapping their interests. It doesn’t help that a lot of the recent “original” set IPs have been kinda meh.
The funniest thing recently is that they made a whole Marvel set, but failed to get the digital rights (probably something to do with Marvel Snap). So they had to reskin and rename the set and cards to release it in their digital clients.
- Comment on Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters,’ but they say it’s worth it | TechCrunch 2 months ago:
I’d say the use cases of: mundane but time consuming, pointed inquiries or interactive rubber ducking, are all getting AI help. Offloading a design where you don’t have a clear understanding of how it should be done is vibing.
- Comment on Writing with LLM is not a shame. 3 months ago:
The way I see it is, the usefulness of straight LLM generated text is indirectly proportional to the importance of the work. If someone is asking for text for the sake of text and can’t be convinced otherwise, give 'em slop.
But I also feel that properly trained & prompted LLM generated text is a force multiplier when combined with revision and fact checking, also varying indirectly proportional with experience and familiarity with the topic.
- Comment on Looking for a game like "99 days in the forest" to play with my kid, but not on roblox 3 months ago:
Not as roguelike, but maybe Don’t Starve Together?
- Comment on What are some games with absolutely fantastic soundtracks? 3 months ago:
Kind of obvious, but Hades is largely just banger after banger, I especially love Good Riddance. No Escape is also a highlight, and the way it’s echoed and enhanced in God of the Dead is fantastic.
I do think the Wasteland 3 soundtrack doesn’t get enough love, I really enjoyed their takes on some classics.
- Comment on The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics 4 months ago:
I’ve got the Armor 21, giant speaker. Almost upgraded this year when the USB port died, but then I remembered the dock based charging that also exists for some unknown reason. Was looking at one of the Thermal options, just because they’re kind of neat, not that I really have a use case.
I just love that they take some random idea and make a crazy phone.
- Comment on The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics 4 months ago:
- Comment on The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. 5 months ago:
So, states already have their list of registered voters, this is about culling people from that list the state doesn’t think should really be there (but really specifically those supporting the opposition of the party in power, typically Republicans removing minority groups).
The reason removing people is a real thing that needs to happen is that people aren’t permanent citizens of a state, they’re just residents, and what state they are a resident of for voting purposes is extremely easy to change, and doesn’t really require notifying the state you’re leaving, just the one you now want to be a resident of.
The reason this specific thing is bullshit is that every time anyone does any kind of check for non-citizens voting, it’s basically non-existent. Instead, they’re going to use the pretense of checking citizenship to check other information, which they’ll selectively find other discrepancies in to remove people who are registered, but are likely to support their opposition. Likely with little time before an election, so hopefully they don’t find out until it’s too late or other frictions cause them to forgo voting voluntarily.
- Comment on The people who clean up your TikTok feed are starting to fight back 5 months ago:
Nah, you do all the setup so it looks like a decapitation video, but have the victim read out your advocacy speech instead of a ransom or whatever, then just end the video. Enough people will report it based on looks in the early segment that it’ll get flagged for review still, but it ultimately won’t be problematic.
- Comment on Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp 5 months ago:
Signal used to be the best answer to this conundrum, since it would use its own internal protocols if it could or fall back to SMS if it couldn’t, unfortunately they decided to drop SMS support a few years ago, citing users that sent sensitive information not realizing they were using SMS (that always felt kinda flimsy). I really disliked this change, because it raised the difficulty of adoption, from just getting people to replace their default app with Signal to making them manage multiple apps.
Now though, you basically need to advocate socially for the change you want to see in the world. Anecdotally, I started using Signal when they still supported SMS to talk with 1 friend group, and eventually convinced most of my closest family groups to also use it, many after SMS support was dropped. Apart from 1 tech illiterate elderly couple and 1 extended family member, I haven’t received any personal (non-company related) text messages in like 5 months.
- Comment on Study: US kids who said their social media, phone, or video game use was “addictive” were 2x-3x more likely to have thoughts of suicide or self-harm by age 14 5 months ago:
I’m a little disappointed that they looked at each of social media, phone use and video game use independently as part of the study and didn’t seem to consider any covariance. If you’re looking for which things are really associated, seems like it’d be helpful to see where they overlap.
- Comment on Blue Prince - Have you played it? How blown is your mind? 5 months ago:
If you only did a handful of runs, you likely didn’t experience many, if any, of the various ways that persistently impact your run. It is also a game that have layers to it, the draft some rooms first layer ends up giving way to the puzzle second layer as you progress. It does a great job of giving you different ways to look at something that’s old that suddenly makes it relevant again.
Honestly, the devoted community is pretty sure the whole game isn’t even solved yet.
