Mira

"Spooky's House Of Jumpscares" is about as good you'd probably expect from a game with that title, but it does have some pretty cool sound design IMO

To be fair, viruses don't normally evolve to become more deadly, since that would only hinder their ability to spread to as many people as possible (and thus be an evolutionary disadvantage). So I wouldn't worry specifically about a new Covid variant posing any more of a threat to civilization than it's currently doing. However, given the fact that a virus that only kills between 1 and 2% of infectees is capable of paralyzing society to the extent we're seeing right now, and that we've proven to be woefully inadequate in preventing the global spread of new variants of the disease, I shudder to think what would happen if a completely unrelated virus like Ebola, which has a mortality rate of over 40%, were to evolve to become sufficiently transmissible so as to cause a pandemic.

I'm still really thankful for this video; this was one of the first games I remember playing and I've come back to it (as well as part 2) so many times since that it still shows up in my dreams now and then. I never heard anyone talk favourably about it (if at all) until this video spread the good word about it; being validated in not being the only person who loved this game was very heartwarming. About the backtracking: something I didn't know until many replays is that there's a small payoff to the 'subplot' of the old man in the travellers' camp ("may the road you follow be pleasant and your vengeance complete") whose daughter Sikra has been captured. It's not until hours later into the game that you actually find Sikra and can recruit her into your team, but if you then walk all the way back to the camp with her (which would take another hour and which you'd have no reason at all to do) he'll actually acknowledge it and thank you; discovering that made me feel like an adventurer. According to a Wiki page he was originally also supposed to give you a discount at the local store if you do this, but this code was left unused. To my knowledge this would be the only 'benefit' to walking back in the entire game (besides soaking in more of the environment of course).

There has to be a democratically established legal basis for the use of force. If political factions start using violence whenever they feel it's justified, it's only the most brutish who come out on top in the end. In other words: not the people that you (presumably) sympathize with.

I guess you could make any random collection of notes sound like something if you just change the instrument with chimey ambient noise Everyone thinks of this as a "silent" piece, but that's not how it was intended: Cage wanted people to appreciate the musical quality of the sounds we hear all around us in our daily lives all the time, so by having the pianist play no notes on his instrument, he intended for any noises in the room during the piece's duration to be the music itself. In other words: if you don't like it, the solution is simple! Just go to a performance of it, take a ghetto blaster along with you and play your favourite song real loud on it as soon as the piece starts, and then that will be the composition.

I find this whole idea very sympathetic but this specific problem could really break it, I fear. You probably wouldn't want to hand out voting rights to employees who are still in a "preliminary period" when it's unlikely if they'll stay with the company long enough to even see the effect of their votes, but then that might incentivize the higher-ups to fire employees before said preliminary time is over (in my own country, the law says that when companies hire people for a temporary year-long contract, it can only be extended for one other year beyond that before the company is obligated to hire them for an indefinite time; while sympathetic on paper, this has led to companies simply letting people go after two years and hiring new employees to start the process over again). Similarly, would "independent" contractors and freelancers hired by the company have a right to vote? If not, wouldn't that incentivize certain companies to do away with their officially registered employees as much as possible in order to re-hire them as or replace them with gig workers?

I ate a fried grasshopper once. It tasted like a French fry without potato filling.

If you still want to see it, Ross always records and uploads his streams to this YouTube channel.

The Map theme in this reminds me a lot of the intro of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"

I was "suggesting" those games in case he wanted to do more short warm-up reviews of obligatory throwaway Christmas games in the vein of Deer-Napped or Santa Clause In Trouble. suggesting in quotes because I was mostly just being silly :P

I don't think the "abridged playthrough" format for Game Dungeon is necessarily a problem; it works with games where the badness or weirdness is gradually built up and/or revealed the more you play of it, like in The Chosen, Hellgate London or Martian Gothic (incidentally those are some of my favourite episodes). It doesn't work as well in my opinion for more straight-forward games, or games with a more even level of noteworthiness (such as Demonica or Terror TRAX)

If there's another Christmas episode this year, I hope Ross won't waste his hard-earned Złotys on crap Christmas games before remembering that he already owns Naughty Elves, Season's Beatings and Christmas Cat's Revenge from buying that giant Itch.io bundle from last year [cannot personally confirm or deny whether these are sufficiently crap]

I for one thoroughly enjoyed the new episode and most that preceded it, and I always look forward to new content.

Maybe the developers liked Mac because it's the true Goth OS