missingno

Crypt of the NecroDancer.

There are three big challenge characters in the base game:

• Aria can only use the starting dagger, no other weapons. She has only one hit point. And she dies if the player ever misses a beat.
• Monk dies if he picks up gold. All enemies drop gold, even ones that normally wouldn't, which turns the game into a routing puzzle where you must never step on squares that an enemy previously died on.
• Bolt plays the whole game at double tempo.

Once you have beaten these three challenge characters, plus the other six easier ones, your next task is All Chars Mode. Beat the game nine times in a row, once with each character. If you die, you must start the whole marathon over.

Beating that unlocks the tenth character, Coda. Coda combines the restrictions of Aria, Monk, and Bolt all at once.

And if you can do that, the final achievement is Lowest of the Low, which requires you to beat All Chars Mode without collecting any items.

The DLC adds a few more hard characters, and another achievement for an extended 13 Character Mode, but they aren't considered to be as hard as Coda or Lowest of the Low. A single digit number of players have stacked the challenges for Coda low% and 13chars low%.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - wheeeee

Skullgirls - hehe

Splatoon 3 - I may have hurt some people today

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - nice

Mega Knockdown - also nice

I'd been on the microblogging side of Fedi for a while and was aware there was a federated reddit-like, but my initial impression of it was that it's a long way from getting enough of a userbase to sustain the kind of niche hobby/fandom communities I used reddit for.

But once reddit's API scandal happened, I dropped it and decided to check out the alternative. Still feel like it isn't really there yet, but eh, I'm here anyway 'cause I'm not going back.

Aren't they needed to run all the 32-bit games that are on Steam?

If what's supposed to be the core gameplay feels like an unwanted interruption, I don't think the random enounters themselves are the problem. I think the reason random encounters get a bad rap is because some games don't make basic fights feel engaging enough. But when done right, they should be the fun part!

Unfortunately you're not going to find opponents very easily on Steam, as I mentioned. Japan is pretty much entirely on Switch, and the game failed to really take off in the west so you gotta play where the Japanese players are.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - wheeeee

Skullgirls - hehe

Splatoon 3 - I may have hurt some people today

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - Very close to hitting 7th Dan on RC, and at the same time I'm closer to dropping to Expert 2 on MJS than I am to earning my Master 1 back. Honestly I think this is just a consequence of RC's rating system being kinda jank.

Been working on a secret project, so I haven't had much time to play anything but my usual rotation.

I've only ever blocked one person, a former friend who hurt me very badly. I doubt they'd ever try to contact me again anyway, but I needed to make sure that bridge stays burned.

I do wonder how much of an uptick in sales the first two games will receive once the third is done.

Did you read the article?

This doesn't just cover microtransactions. In fact, the new law is harsher on fake gambling than it is on real gambling - loot boxes get classified as M, but a poker minigame is an automatic R18.

Patent infringement is a curious angle. Do we know what specific patent(s) they're claiming here?

Oh, did you think the headline meant they were shutting S3 down? Servers will remain up for the foreseeable future, and they'll even still run seasonal Splatfest and Big Run events. They're just done with content updates.