Okami
Where do I apply for my “I beat Radahn before he was nerfed” badge?
This game will always have a special place in my heart. It was my first Visual Novel. I didn’t see the appeal and picked it up to see what the memes were about.
Rin’s story broke me, and taught me to really appreciate art for the first time.
Wildermyth is an awesome indie RPG that I’ve had a lot of fun with as a two-player coop game. It’s a turn-based dungeon crawler with a strong focus on role play and party dynamics.
I hear great praise for Across the Obelisk as a coop game from my friends, although I personally bounced off of it. It’s a roguelite deck builder like Slay the Spire, but with multi-player, lots of meta progression, and a heftier time commitment for each run.
Gunfire Reborn is a roguelite looter shooter that’s a blast in coop. I think it’s still in Early Access, but what’s already there is enough for me to be happy with it as a full game. To me it’s a spiritual successor to Borderlands in combat and gamefeel, but without the grinding.
Lots of little things, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the constant pop-ups asking me to try out Copilot in Win10, harassing me daily on both on my personal PC and my work laptop.
Windows has been on thin ice since the trash fire that was Win8, and I’d only stuck with it for Nvidia driver support for gaming. I’ve been watching Proton development for years now, and putting it through its paces on my older PCs every few months, so I knew I was ready to make the switch for about a year before I finally pulled the trigger. I justified putting it off with the thought that “I can build my next PC around an AMD graphics card amd make the switch then.”
Then Win11 and all its garbage was announced, AI took off, and Microsoft started pushing their slop on my machine harder than ever. It was too much. I switched to Mint DE on my current machine and haven’t looked back.
Hades, yes. That’s a premier Roguelite with meaningful meta progression.
Slay the Spire is fuzzy on that point. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a Roguelite. It straddles the line in that it has very limited meta progression which is quickly exhausted and basically works as a tutorial. Once you’ve maxed out the card unlocks for each character it plays with the same feel as a Roguelike game. It’s still not a pure a Roguelike since the starting boon choice and the card swap event allow some minor meta-influence between runs, but there’s no more meta-progression.
It took me a long time to appreciate eggs growing up, too. Used to only be able to eat them scrambled. Fried eggs and boiled eggs would make me nauseous. I hated the taste and texture of a runny yolk.
It wasn’t until my mid 20s that someone finally made me eggs over easy and taught me that you’re not supposed to just eat the yolk straight, but treat it as a sauce to complement the flavor of the other food on your plate. It was a revelation.
I still don’t like sunny side up or boiled eggs, and I still don’t like the texture of runny yolk on its own, but I love me some over-easy or over-medium eggs on a burger or over bacon, sausage, hash browns, waffles, or pancakes. Let that shit spread everywhere to mask the texture and maximize the flavor.
Never would have thought of that on my own. I wouldn’t mix foods growing up, and I still don’t when left to my own devices.
I’m not a super picky eater, but there are some foods I won’t touch.
Pickles, kimchi, and beets taste awful. Cottage cheese is a sensory nightmare. I don’t think I’ll ever attempt oysters again.
I hate how prevalent pickles are in American restaurants. Seems like I have to ask for no pickles in every new place, and half the time they’ll have pickles anyway, or they’ll include pickles in dishes that have no business including pickles and I wouldn’t think to ask for them to be excluded. If I pick them off I can still taste the pickle juices, and it ruins the food. The sandwich and burger places think they’re so fancy for including a pickle spear in the plating, and it’s a crapshoot whether they keep it isolated off to the side or drape it across the food where it can contaminate everything. Miserable.
Pickled jalapeños, lettuce, and mustard are on thin ice.
I don’t like ranch dressing or ketchup, but I’ll only grumble a bit if I find them in my food.
I’ll try anything once, and I do go back to foods I hate every now and then to see if my tastes change. I used to have a hard aversion to seltzer water, sour cream, and hoppy beers like IPAs, but I’ve come around on them. I have a much better appreciation now for bitter and sour flavors than I did as a kid.
Still. Fuck pickles.
