Ace T'Ken

The Jaunt by Steven King

One of my favorites short sci-fi stories ever.

Man, I played this game a few years back and I had a pretty opposite reaction to most reviews I’ve seen.

PROS:

• The music and sound design were completely appropriate and fit the world.
• An initially interesting story setup.
• Some of the planets have a SUPER cool premise and are a joy to explore.
• The DLC adds some much-needed mild horror elements.

NEUTRALS:

• Achievements are implemented, but are mostly for irrelevant side activities. Do you like using a guide to figure out how to get all the achievements? Well, you will have to if that’s your thing.

CONS:

• This is not an adventure game, this is a puzzle game first and foremost. If you are not down with figuring out hundreds of vague Dark Souls-style lore blurbs scattered all over in order to work out how to solve environmental puzzles to progress, do not get this game.
• In the same vein, if you are not down with having a loop end before you’re done exploring an area only to have to trek all the way back there and go through everything all over again in case or because you missed something, do not get this game. This could be partially solved by having the logs you find on a planet permanently NOT GLOW any more after you had read their chain, or maybe a ship notice letting you know there were undecyphered texts on a planet still. I had to re-tread an astounding amount of ground just to make sure I wasn’t missing something.
• When your ship directs you to a planet that you need something from, the navigation on some of them is so obtuse that I found several places I could not find again even after dozens of visits to their planets. A map or better signposting would alleviate this.
• The characters were deeply forgettable, and you are constantly inundated with dozens of gibberish alien names so unless you follow a lore guide or take notes, you’re not going to figure out who did what. And speaking of…
• The story has a veneer of “pretty good sci-fi” but is told quite poorly. You will beat the game, get the incredibly lacklustre ending that doesn’t close out the story in any way, and watch one of many lore explanation videos that will make things click into place. The fact that the lore videos have SO MANY HITS is endemic of the fact that this is a narrative poorly delivered. You will find the lore in random order. If spread over multiple sessions like I played, this will mean you will not make some absolutely needed connections.
• Many things do not make sense within the context of the world and there is no reason for them to be happening at the time except for the hand-waving “It’s a video game” excuse, which breaks immersion. Why only now is sand being moved from one planet to another at the beginning of a cycle? Why only now is one planet being broken by lava? These (and other that I can not speak about due to spoilers) are not explained - the systems have existed for ages and would have (and should have given the environments they set up) occurred before this, but because it makes for a more interesting setup, it all happens now.
• The controls are… an acquired taste at best. Look at many of the negative reviews; many state the controls as an issue. There is a reason for this, even though I did become accustomed to them over time.
• Even this far after release, I had some severe bugs. Controls would get “stuck” and force a game restart, achievements didn’t unlock correctly, etc.
• I wound up quitting because I didn’t know what to do next and didn’t care to watch yet another video to figure it out. There were hundreds of text logs that may or may not have been useful, and no idea how to find what was missing to help me progress without consulting guides, and it became too much. I eventually realised that I was just throwing time into a hole with nothing to show for it. It genuinely felt like it wanted me to give up and I couldn’t help but oblige. I just… stopped. I hated it. I kept doing the same thing over and over and eventually realised that I wasn’t enjoying anything. I hate the very concept of repetition as a game mechanic unless executed well; this wasn’t executed well.
• Despite quitting, I have seen all the endings. The real ending is legitimately nonsense and is basically an appeal to emotion while leaving the reality of the universe behind. It abandons the premise with what can only be described as a narrative hug that does essentially nothing, but presents the veneer of “feel good.” It is nothing. It is empty. Everyone but me loves it for this, and I can’t figure out why.

CONCLUSION: Meh? I really don’t understand the adoration people have for this game. It’s a mediocre non-combat roguelike with about 3 hour of content they’ve spread over 15 hours. It feels very much like a case of style over substance. This game genuinely makes me sad. I really wanted to like it, but… ugh. It feels like work.

Nope. I’m in Canada and it happens here too.

Palaye Royale - No Love In LA Love these guys; they have some serious My Chemical Romance vibes and I used to live right near them.

Nope. Her party was elected when somebody else was at the helm, and then when Jason Kenney retired, she was just kind of put there.

Literally no one in the public voted for her.

I’m in Alberta but I vote NDP. Before he left, Kenney was actually saying that the crazies were trying to take over. Hell, we thought Kenney was crazy.

Literally nobody voted for her.

Huh. Reading the article now that I have time, they cite massive immigration as an issue, not to mention training people from other countries who then go home.

I know people in hospitals that retired when COVID hit, but not GPs. Not to say it isn’t the case, but I’d like to see a large study showing WTF is going on.

So like… Where are they all? Is there still a brain drain to the US?

Ah yes, nothing like a nice rum and water.

I truly don’t mean to be pedantic here, but aren’t these nearly word for word the same beliefs Left-leaning people here have about the Right in America?

Maybe if you’re being generous and want to write out the other side of these beliefs you could leave out the descriptors “lazy and weak” and replace them with “psychotic and brainwashed”, but other than that, is this meme not the same for Left and Right?

The most current version that was available to me at the time was 159. I have 160 now and it seems to be functioning correctly!

Clicking on many of the links from All presents this error after updating. Is there anything that I should be doing or is it specific to Connect?

As a Windows user who manually updates weekly and reads changelogs for what actually changes, neither do I.

But then again I don’t leave 400,000 items open on my desktop for no reason whatsoever and get mad when I have to close them.

That might be what you wish they are learning, but I assure you that’s not the case. There may be more of those Highway blocking protests that you’re thinking about, but you’re simply hearing about them spread across many, many locations. They are not occurring frequently enough in one location to warrant a change to the way people commute. I have never even heard of anybody linking those two points together before.

If they’re blocking a highway, it’s not like you can just see the protest up ahead and turn off instead instead of choosing to be stuck. Often they are held in the middle of long stretches where they will trap as man cars as they are able on both sides.

And the lesson most people learned from COVID was that there was absolutely no reason why we couldn’t work from home. Although I could potentially see a link between working from home and, when the time comes to replace the infrastructure, replacing it with something more environmentally sane… but they’d have to convince big business owners to not force people to come into work for no reason, and good luck with that.

It seems like there’s a lot of wishful thinking to get from “those protesters are blocking this street” to “man, we should completely redo the entire infrastructure of North America because of these protests.”

My favorite Star Trek game of all time was the video board game with the Klingon host. I had everything from the Nightmare games so this was the next logical step and we loved it to even though it was cheesy as all get out.

No matter the outcome of this, nobody is learning that lesson from this demonstration.

If you want to take a (more obvious) environmental bent, this is a terrible idea for them to do because all they’re doing is causing vehicles to have to run substantially longer.

Well that’s a terrifying prospect if you have any sort of opinion outside of the groupthink.

Funnily enough, “not so smart joke” is the same descriptor I have for no-discussion downvoters.

My liver may be flower-scented, but I tend to not paint situations in broad-stoke terms like “woke” that are used to dismiss valid arguments.

You can’t disprove a label (especially a vague one that someone else applies to you), however you can very much disprove points.

It really is that old joke about people not wanting to hear other people’s opinions and only wanting to hear their own opinion parroted back to them by someone passably eloquent.