Yeah, I agree the bots are genuinely "more fleshy"and with skin and such - just saying where my imagination was at - which thanks to the wonder of books can be quite different for different people.
I wish we knew what the motivation was for choosing the actor. The cynic in me thinks they opted obviously male lead to reduce friction and claims of “wokeness” but without some inside insight we can’t know.
In my imagination, Murderbot looked kinda like the player character from the game ‘Citizen Sleeper’, pictured below.
Which is to say, very androgynous and very obviously cybernetic.
There’s quite a bit of character similarity between them too, because the titular Sleeper is a human consciousness in a cybernetic body that has a lot of biological parts, and they are kept loyal to the company who owns them by a drug that will cause their body to break down if they stop taking it. Same intent as the governor module, but a different approach.
I found Murderbot’s physical appearance an important aspect of the books, not just for surface plot reasons (everyone knows they are a bot etc) but because it’s a large part of what people need to overcome from the perspective of seeing past their prejudices.
Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.
A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.
Reading your comment I got worried about disk writes, so I’m glad this info is on the website:
Replay data is stored in RAM by default but there is an option to store it on disk instead.
Sensible design decision, because writing video to your SSD 24/7 wouldn’t do anything good for the lifespan of the drive.
What was the bug and workaround? :)
Matrix org isn’t obligated to run a public instance at all - they could stick to developing the spec, and let other people run instances.
And honestly maybe they should, because then we wouldn’t have this huge consolidation problem on matrix.org in the first place.
To me, the unspoken premise of the game is that you’re a kid in 1986 with a parent or cool uncle who went on a business trip to Japan and brought you home a Famicom and a copy of the original Zelda - months before the console even launched outside Japan.
The whole game is about replicating that sense of childish fascination and wonder.
The ‘Alien Language’ game manual is supposed to mimic the feeling of trying to read the Japanese manual that came with the game, muddling through as best you can with the pictures, and a few random English words they included just because English is ‘cool’ in a gaming context.
It’s a very fun mechanic, and my favourite thing about the game.
Promoting that the nunber exists as a actual thing people should use is good, yeah. :)
The actual number isn’t so important, though. If ever needed to call the non-emergency number I’d search it up, which fortunately I can do given I’ve got loads of time because it’s not an emergency.
For sure.
If they’ve got a problem with non-emergency callers dialing 911, surely it would be best to try and reduce that problem through other means (such as fining persistent inappropriate use of 911)
I don’t want to talk to a robot when I’m on the floor dying.
I agree with you, it’s insidious.
Given you’ve got a Pixel phone, you can save at least yourself from this problem by running Graphene or Calyx on it.
The ship was one of the best parts for sure. Once you are competent it feels super liberating how nimbly you can zip around a planet.
The other good parts of that game were progression, and death.
I love that knowledge is the only thing retained between loops - the only currency of value. And I loved the feeling of making new discoveries.
And with death as an expected mechanic, the game doesn’t have to put up any guiderails to save you from it. There are no training wheels. You want to go outside without a spacesuit? Bad idea but we’ll let you. You want to literally lose your ship so you can never get it back? Sure, go for it. You want to fall into a space anomaly and see what happens? Be our guest.
Masterpiece game honestly.
The classic example we already have of this is when you are stopped at a side road about to enter the main road, and a car coming towards you on the main road signals to turn in.
Many people take the fact the other car has their turn signal on as a guarantee that it’s safe to emerge, but any good driving instructor will tell you to wait until the car actually begins to turn before you yourself emerge.
They had their signal on but that doesn’t mean they’re actually going to DO what the signal said they would.
Same with the front brake light. It would be like “Well their front brake light came on, so I assumed it was safe to step into the crosswalk” NO. They could have just tapped the brake a second, doesn’t mean they saw you, or they will actually stop.
I’m dumbfounded there are people out there who will tolerate spending upwards of $1,000 on a phone which then pushes ads at you on your lock screen.
I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.
Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.