douche

Sandboxy games definitely have more replayability. If I look at my steam stats, Medieval Total War 2 is in the lead, followed by Paradox grand strategy games, Mount & Blade, Skyrim, then things like Terraria, Rimworld, Stardew Valley, Prison Architect, Gamedev Tycoon, and so on. I have to go pretty far to hit something with a defined story.

Mass Effect 1, at least, was most fun when you said to hell with the official objectives and just started treating it as a sandbox. I had so much fun using the sniper rifle from as far away as possible, or taking the mako places it really shouldn't have been able to go

Quite possibly we would have been saved the pain of the start screen, "Metro" apps, and maybe Cortana.

Maybe this is changing, but in my generation, gamers are typically more proficient in a lot of the low-level nuts and bolts. Modding was such a big force in pc gaming, and typically the tools to do it were a little sketchy and rough.

I remember hacking around in data files for Civilization II, or poking at python scripts for Mount & Blade, way before I learned any proper programming.

Hmm, I submitted this yesterday, but it got lost in the scrum.

It's always interesting to hear real reports from the trenches that aren't essentially ads for technology XYZ. I'm afraid that all too often, we make things more complicated for bad reasons; whether ignorance, chasing the latest trend, or resume-driven-development...

Once in a great while, unicorns are found.I

I'm still using Linq-to-SQL in the .net world. For 99% of what I need it to do, it works golden. Once in a while I've got to go in and profile and rewrite a query when somebody that doesn't know what they are doing has introduced an n+1 query, or done something overly "clever" that's resulted in gnarly SQL being generated.

Quite likely, the people that are capable of doing that sort of hard technical work are not capable of doing the soft, identity-politics ridden outreach functions, and vice versa.

Bang-up programmers are typically not the ones you want pressing flesh and pushing buzzwords.

Maybe there's some magical place where you can actually learn how to program from someone else, but for the rest of us, there's no substitute for solitary hours grinding away actually doing the work.

In Bavaria, I've seen beer carts going along factory production lines at noon time, handing out a couple lagers with lunch. Didn't seem to affect quality, safety, or output.

I can't bring myself to watch espn any more. They've gutted so much of their actually insightful talent, while retaining the hot take artists and trolls. And I don't need to be constantly bombarded with left-wing propaganda and outrage with my sports scores.

In addition, their broadcasts are just not very good. Watching TNT and Espn during the NBA playoffs this year was like night and day.

That and their daily half-off sales have resulted in me spending far too much money on their books... At least they generally have good editing and a pretty high quality bar, better than I've seen with Packt or Apress.