I love Elite and it’s definitely amazing in VR. For everything in a ship I agree with you, NMS is childish in comparison.

However, NMS is attempting a way more multi-cultural galaxy, and I often wish Elite had more diversity in aliens, and more interesting planets similar to NMS. Especially when Elite has so much grind to do rep etc. I wish just once I’d be doing a delivery quest to an acid jungle planet covered in hostile turtles, instead of yet another dead planetoid with a few outposts sticking out of it.

No Man’s Sky is an incredibly uneven experience. The one thing it does better than its peers is the variety of aliens and flora/fauna. There are easily 30 hours of fun in just exploring around and seeing some cool alien vistas and ecosystems, trying to survive on ice or acid planets etc. The game gives you good reason to visit them too.

However, it sort of falls apart after that. The space flight, mining, and combat aren’t nearly as good as (e.g.) Elite, the quests are pretty meh, the base building is okay but it falls down on automating production of anything you actually care about (I.e. it’s mostly aesthetic, but it can be cool to have a home base in a neat spot). Some of the recent updates added things like big carrier ships, and the game contrives to give you one to captain with a quest… But that sort of obliterates the ship progression.

You may have more fun with something like Elite or X4 depending on what you’re looking for, but if you just want to fuck around and see neat stuff on your own timeframe, NMS could definitely justify its price tag.

If you’ve read all the OG Dune content, I say go for it. They aren’t at the same level, but they’re… Fine. Get it from the library or wherever and try it. Go in with low expectations and possibly get pleasantly surprised, or never pick them up again.

I’m not quite sure what the advantage of doing it that way is

If I had to guess, it just kept the programmers from being super lazy about it. If the individual enemy AI doesn’t have exact coordinates of the player, it actually has to move around, search a space, potentially manipulate the environment, and possibly fail to find the player, versus doing what is effectively an idle animation while waiting for the player to step out of cover.

Never in a million years would I let my kid transition… to being a Floridian.

I bounced off Stalker 2 at launch because of bugs, but revisited earlier this year and had a ton of fun with the 90% of the game that is open world scavenging, stealth and combat. The only thing that sucks are some of the boss fights.

Nothing takes me out of being a sneaky, resourceful Stalker more than being forced to drop into an arena, or have a door magically lock behind me, and not being able to advance the story without either beating some bullet sponge or reloading a save from an hour before to change my load out/get more ammo etc and redo it.

I wish they would take more of a Deus Ex approach, where you can action hero your way through if you want, but with some clever/thorough playing you could significantly nerf the boss fights. The game even pretends to do this, but ultimately your choices have no bearing on the bosses.

Thanks for the rec!

Upvote for Jesse Welles. I appreciate his music can be topical, but also humorous and chill. Maybe not the sort of protest songs you play to fire people up, but definitely ones that will get their message stuck in your head.

My dad likes Dire Straits, Clapton, The Police, Tracy Chapman, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison. I know a few more from what he’s told me later in life, but those were the casettes/CDs he had around when I was a kid.

When I was a teen I tried to introduce him to the Pixies, but he looked like I was making his ears bleed.

It was my mom that introduced me to Pink Floyd though, which is really the only musical common ground I have with my parents (although I will definitely get whiskey drunk and belt out Dire Straits on occasion, or sing along to Orbison).

Imo’s in St. Louis is my favorite overall. Thin, crispy crust, square cut, Provel as the base cheese. It scratches an itch that all other pizzas don’t. I’d eat it 7 days a week if I could, hot or cold.

I’ve had pizzas with superior ingredients, made in fancy ovens, served with wine instead of cold beer, but if I could get any pizza right now, it’d be Imo’s black olive or veggie pizza.

Another person of refinement and good taste, I see. Both gone way too early. I have been rationing Discworld since Pratchett died.

So traditional it’s like a Norman Rockwell painting.

I put this on expecting a trainwreck and a cash grab too, but it still had me laughing my ass off. It really felt like they understood why the originals were so funny.

Yeah, my parents are still basically the same liberal Democrats they were when I was a kid. Meanwhile I’ve gone farther left and the rest of the family mutated into a virulent strain of fascist.

I used the communicator chime for a long time, but these days I’m basically permanently in do-not-disturb. My phone only makes sound when a close contact calls, or for a timer/alarm. Anything else can wait.

I love that song and yeah, nailed it.

I’ll bite. Austin, TX circa 2007. Sublet. Moved my (now) wife and one year old into a one bedroom, one bathroom house the size of a shoebox. Cooled by a single window unit, had to steal wifi, and roaches crawled in through the gaps under the doors.

Ironically, it’s now a fond memory. First place I lived with my new family, it was just for the summer, we had cool neighbors and were like 200 feet from a bunch of really cool local businesses.

By myself, probably Apollo 13 - I used to watch it like once a day over the summer. With my dad, we watched Predator every time my mom had to work late.

Probably due north.

Hey, that’s great. I’m not sure it’s a way to reach full communism, but good on them.