Captain Aggravated

Star Trek needs to be taken away from Paramount while it still has a good name.

At this point my laptop is just my away mission machine and a backup. I do just about all my computing on a desktop PC these days.

My x86 tablet exists almost entirely so I can have a running copy of FreeCAD in my wood shop.

I always figured that the Master Sword should have been unbreakable, just a mediocre weapon against normal enemies but very powerful against Malice’d enemies. Like it should have been a 10 sword when not glowing, and 100 when glowing. Because the Master Sword is Sting now.

I don’t think that’s true. Take Little Rocket Man, that achievement is a special challenge run that encourages people to replay through the game, probably after they’ve beaten it naturally, and then they see that achievement in the list and they get some more fun playing through it doing this weird thing.

Subnautica’s achievements are pretty much all on the critical path, only two (launching a time capsule during the end game sequence and hatching a cuddlefish) are reasonable for a first timer to not do. These serve more as useful metadata for both players and the developer. For example, the achievement “Get your feet wet” stands at 88.7% of players have gotten that achievement. 11.3% of players have played Subnautica but haven’t gotten into the water? You can look at the achievements in the order a player would probably do them, and you can see where players tend to fall off, and in fact it makes 100% sense to me why it does where it does. If a lot of players start the game and get early achievements, but there’s a sharp drop in the mid-game where players fall off, maybe you need to look at the mid-game, especially if it’s an early access title like Subnautica was, or you can learn from how players interact with this game and apply that knowledge to your next one.

Breath of the Wild does it both wrong and right.

Weapons in BotW are almost like ammunition. A given sword or club or whatever does so much damage per swing, and will last a certain number of swings, so it represents an amount of damage you can do to an enemy. This system is at its best when you break a sword over an enemy’s head, pick up his weapon, and then keep beating him with that. Problem is, there’s only so cool weapons can get. Players that want to work hard to get a really cool weapon don’t really have a way to both play with it and keep it around. Hell, the Master Sword breaks and grows back.

BotW does it right with shields. Shields have a use case, and an abuse case. If you do a perfect parry, your shield takes no damage. Same thing happened in Skyward Sword, if you abused your shield too much, it broke. But if you used it correctly, it wouldn’t break. If you built use cases and abuse cases for weapons, for example, bashing a sword against an enemy’s shield would wear it out, but striking soft flesh wouldn’t, that would reward players for learning the combat system by giving them a way to keep their coolest swords around.

TotK…Youtuber Skittybitty did a 3-hour takedown of that game and I could add at least two hours of my own criticism.

Eh, these can be implemented well or badly.

Look at Subnautica’s achievements. There are seventeen total, seven of them are triggered by events required to beat the game, 5 are triggered by non-required but main path “players will do this” story beats, and 3 are “engage in a major advertised featuer that are technically possible to skip.” The last two are “play with this little bonus feature we included.”

I’m quite fond of a couple achievements for Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and 2, which are basically challenge runs. “The One Free Bullet” which challenges the player to beat the game having fired only one round from a gun (the crowbar, grenades, rocket launcher, crossbow I think, and gravity gun don’t count as “bullets”) and Little Rocket Man, an achievement for carrying a garden gnome from the beginning of the game all the way to the end and placing him in the rocket.

Possibly my favorite achievement in all of gaming history has to be in Portal 2. At the beginning of a chapter, PotatOS says “Well, this is the part where he kills us.” And you land on a platform surrounded by spikes and Wheatley says “Hello! This is the part where I kill you!” And then the chapter heading reading “Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You” flashes on screen. And then you get an achievement for “The Part Where He Kills You: This is that part.”

I’ve been looking into robotic lawnmowers, and they’re basically the same. The more primitive ones have a hall effect sensor under their snout feeling for a wire you bury around the edge of your yard, and do the “go until you hit something, turn a random amount, repeat until low battery, follow perimeter to dock” or they require phoning home in some way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, some guy’s got an open source system that runs on a Raspberry Pi on the mower itself.

I guess I’m willing to believe that some of the LIDAR or camera-only guided mowers need some serious processing power to create the maps they use for guidance around the yard, and that’s more practical to do on the company’s servers than on the device itself…except not really; we’ve got decently powerful ARM SoCs that don’t cost much, don’t take a lot of power to run, and can do that job. The reality is, you can’t get a pedometer app for a smart phone that doesn’t broadcast sensor telemetry to two continents these days.