Ask Lemmy

I love Sentinels! A friend of mine and I actually found an apparent game-breaking combo a few years ago. We defeated one of the harder bosses in I think 2 or 3 turns? It really felt like we were doing something wrong but we couldn't find anything.

So here's a dumb Puzzle Fighter story. When I was 18, many years ago now, my girlfriend at the time, my best friend and his girlfriend at the time went camping near a little lakeside resort town.

It was the last day of our trip, we'd been extremely frugal and so we all still had some spending money left. The girls wanted to go clothes shopping, my buddy and I weren't as interested in that but we're trying to be cool so we tagged along. Except, on a covered section of boardwalk we passed a 2-player Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo machine. The girls just left us behind, laughing that the boardwalk was a straight line and we could catch up.

3 hours later, we were both broke and my buddy had to borrow gas money from his girlfriend to get us home. The girls had ducked into a little café and also lost track of time. That was a 50 cent machine and we must have put over 50 bucks a piece into it. We just stood there, getting better and better in perfect lockstep, trading wins and getting more competitive for an entire afternoon, oblivious to the whole world.

That was a great trip. God, nostalgia like that makes me feel old.

Anything named Turbo must be good

I don't think it really helps when everbody calls it FTL instead of Faster Than Light. How would anyone be able to learn about the game when nobody calls it by its name?

Yes, this so much!

The installation guide is not good, and it's annoying on Fedora since it's blocked by SELinux, but it's worth it for the amazing experience. Such a good expansion for an amazing game.

I want a game that has the primary gameplay loop of FTL, but with a choose your path role playing game like Fallout behind it instead of a roguelike.

As Yahtzee Croshaw says, it has the most Star Trek "Target their weapons systems! Damage control to the engine room! Transfer power to the shields!" effect, but I kinda wish you were more able to choose where you want to explore, have a little more agency in quests...

Most quests in FTL follow the format of:

A space thing is happening! Do you:

• Send in a crewmate to help (50/50 chance of succeeding and getting a reward, or failing and taking damage/losing a crewmate)
• With them luck and fly away (guaranteed nothing happens)
• (blue text) use special equipment (guaranteed chance of a nice reward, if you have the equipment/resource/type of crew aboard)

So you don't have a lot of agency in the kinds of quests you want to explore. A lot of beginner quests happen to you a lot (how many times have we all done the giant alien spiders one) and in a lot of cases you don't have the blue text options available, so you get to choose "do nothing" or flip a coin. And then you have to face the ship at the end, which a lot of the builds that are kicking ass up to that point just can't face the end boss.

I want a longer term roleplaying game under these primary mechanics.

There is outdoor laser tag now. I also haven't tried this, but apparently with a couple of Quest headsets you can play laser tag in VR in a large enough space.

I think it was the cost. We would go do it but it was a bit pricier than seeing a movie or bowling or hanging at an arcade. Was great though. Super fun and great exercise. Our photon had coin operated guns above the arena so you could not just try and sit and snipe. I remember this guy who was so rediculously good at the game he beat my friends and I and his team was a bunch of kids.

Airsoft has grown massively. While it is more of a whole day event, it fills that same niche but better in many ways.

Most lazertag places I remember seeing were inside or connected to arcades, and those really aren't a thing for kids these days either so it makes sense the lazertag places aren't as widespread as they used to be. If you're specifically going to travel to just do lazertag, you'll probably just travel to do airsoft or paintball.

It's still big for kids. At least one kid per class did a laser tag birthday every year throughout elementary school.

omg my dad used to take me to laser tag so much when I was a teenager lol. it was fun

Blazertag in Austin, Texas has been open for ever.

I played laser tag once and it was so incredibly underwhelming. I thought you'd see the laser in the air and I didn't see that. I much prefer airsoft. You'd probably have more fun playing airsoft with tracer rounds in the dark

Never heard of this and now I wanna give it a try!

I love Battletech, but I understand why it isn't for everyone. The crunch of of detailing armor hits and internal effects, and keeping track of heat sinks is all the kind of thing that appeals to a specific kind of numbers nerd.

Yes Alpha Strike exists, but it's relatively new and I think it exists as this weird thing that by stripping out the details takes away the appeal for the loyal crunchy brained people.

Further, the miniatures are really neat, but 28mm (or 32mm, whatever is happening with 40k scale creep these days) scale really allows people to paint and customize characters which is appealing to more people than relatively less characterful mech sculpts.

Like, from 20 years ago? I mean I loved that game too, and playing it in Iraq made it all kinda silly surreal in a fun sort of way. OK, yes, I second this!

Yeah but it doesn't have tech trees or fog of war