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Notes -
I don't really mind if there is a right way to do things, irl or in games. It's just that figuring it out should feel like reasoning from first principles, not trying to get into the head of the writer to follow his weird moon logic.
It's like the old adventure game puzzles where to fix a broken pump you had to use a banana on a metronome to hypnotize a monkey. There's no way your intuition can lead you there, you just have to know what the designer wanted you to do.
Minecraft mod packs almost transcended this because the appeal is in exploiting unintended interactions between different designers' moon logic progressions. You're back to real reasoning again, but at the end it's still built on a pile of gibberish.
And yeah, I feel the same way about working with what you get. Starsector is at its most fun in the early game, when you're using ships and weapons because they're what you salvaged from an ancient debris field.
It's less fun later on when you're micro-optimizing fleet builds to farm the end game content for 1% AI core loot drops
You take that back about Monkey Island 2! The correct example is Gabriel Knight 3. In a world where masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair, you use it to make a fake mustache to disguise yourself as a man who doesn't have a mustache.
This is my favorite sentence of the week.
It is a summary of Old Man Murray's article, who absolutely deserves the credit here.
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