Boy, this question hurts.

For anyone above a certain age with kids below a certain age this isn’t a punishment or a challenge, this is A DREAM!! Heroes of might and magic 3, system shock 2, Anno (any version up to 1503), Morrowind, Civilization 3, Age of wonders shadow magic, Baldur’s gate 1 and 2…

Whenever my wife finds the time she goes to her room to play Morrowind. She just got a new laptop and the first thing I did was install OpenMW and copy her save file.

It goes without saying that you couldn’t finish any of those games in those 12 hours, except for System Shock 2.

At my first job I was working on an MMO and we had a DatabaseManager class with 10k+ lines of code. Less than the first 200 lines actually used any of the members of that class.

you’d never have player movement in the GameManager class

You want to bet? (Source: I teach game programming on a college level.)

But yeah, your comment about the gear icon is sadly more true than people may realize. Game developers do questionable things. => Engine developers cater to people. => Students argue that if something is supported it can’t be that bad. Sometimes it feels like fighting windmills.

The real naming fail is calling the class “GameManager”, still my number one pet peeve. With a class name as vague as that you would have to add tons of information into the variable name. (Also the class name begs for unorganized code. I mean name one function or variable that you could not justify putting into the “GameManager” class. After all if it’s managing the game it could justifiably perform any process in the game and access any state in it.)

Once you put the first bool into a class with a name like AccessibilitySettings, calling it something like HighContrast is completely sufficient.

You may enjoy having a look at F#. It says that it’s “functional first”, but I think a better description would be “an opinionated version of C#”.

For example it doesn’t have a “const”-keyword. Instead it has a “mutable”-keyword, because everything is const by default.

No, actually C#'s answer should be: “What Java said - hold on, what Python said sounds good too, and C++'s stuff is pretty cool too - let’s go with all of the above.”

C#, or as I like to call it “the Borg of programming languages”.

I am surprised no one mentioned my all time favorite: The Fly by David Cronenberg with Jeff Goldblum.

Most horror movies present you with an external threat. The good protagonist is threatened by external forces like zombies, murderers, psychopaths etc. The Fly is different in that there isn’t really a bad guy. You identify with the monster just as much as with their victim.

For me that makes a much more powerful horror experience, because in my day to day life I don’t have any meaningful external threats. Sure, there are thieves, murderers, angry mobs etc. in our world, but it’s not like I woke up hoping that today I wouldn’t meet one of them.

But this fear of losing control over yourself, lashing out at your children, saying something wrong at work or losing control in a very different way like finding out you have a tumor that has been growing inside of you for a long time - those threats are much more real to me.

When I start a free trial I immediately set a reminder in Google calendar. And when I am looking for a specific movie I buy it used online. That way I have all my favorite movies on my NAS and can cancel my subscriptions when there is nothing especially interesting.

Of course trickle down works. I just don’t get how people came to believe that the rich people (i.e. the place with all the money/water) is the top of the mountain and the poor people were the ocean.

There are so many reasons why money constantly trickles from the poor all the way down to the rich.

That’s the thing: progress quest isn’t an idle game. It’s a parody of modern games that was made long before idle games were a thing. It wasn’t fun just like a joke isn’t an interesting story.