I’d like to imagine their pineapple pizza was the absolute best there is on planet Earth, but in spite of (or maybe because of) that they just fucking hate making it.

Basically, the Ronnie O’Sullivan of pie shops.

Two necessary components for friendship are extended presence and shared struggle.

That is, you need to be around the same set of people for a non-trivial amount of time. Relationships need time to form.

But that is not enough. Just being around people doesn’t tell you much about them, or tells them much about you. There’s no basis to bond over. You need to experience the same hardship as someone else.

In 1v1 games, that’s surely harder but not impossible, if you’re e.g. struggling to improve yourself, or trying to succeed in spite of the game being a bit shitty. Try thinking of a shared objective. Only ever wanting to defeat others is ultimately alienating.

Close one of your eyes. What you see through that closed eye is “nothing” since it’s not just blackness, but something entirely nonexistent.

According to my mom, the calcium off her teeth.

“My dentition was so great, but then you came.”

I’d argue this counts as dog-sitting. The dog is around people in every panel, and actual sitting (i.e. doing nothing else) isn’t required.

This probably works okay… if oils are the only source of smudges on your lenses. Any cloth or tissue will rub solid dirt into the plastic, creating scratches by that sort of indirect action.

Ideally, you’d clean your glasses with soapy water, use laminar flow to rinse off any leftover droplets, and blow off any water that’s still left on the surface. And I suspect even that is just a 99% solution.

With Genshin being as popular as it is, expect the next Zelda to become a Gacha-fueled live service game, with drip-fed narrative and piecemeal dungeons.

As long as that doesn’t happen, I’d say we’re still okay.

If, from your perspective, a Zelda game distinguishes itself primarily by how good of a puzzle delivery platform it is, then sure, larger scale puzzles beyond the scope of a single shrine are sort of absent from the “of the Wild” era games. I suspect this was a conscious design decision, because once a player has to hold significant state in their head, any interruption (this is a mobile console after all) will lead to a number of players being stumped and not completing the game. The same idea applies to tasks with multiple solutions, funneling players by only allowing one solution, one path through the game will mostly just lead to gatekeeping and exclusion. You can see that kind of thinking exemplified in the design of the TotK dungeons, each of which are basically half a dozen independent puzzles leading up to some unrelated boss fight.

Personally, to me puzzles are a fun diversion and not very important at all. What the original Zelda was amazing for was its hardcore exploration. After being more and more limited and railroaded in LttP, then LA, OoT went too far for me. It never clicked for me, even after trying several times, and I left the franchise basically until BotW, with exploration once again being front and center of the Zelda experience.

I agree that everything after LA and before BotW could have been its own franchise. But BotW is more “Zelda” than basically every other Zelda before it, and I’m happy it has returned the franchise to its original, “proper” form.

“I’m allowed to do this… This place is literally named Chinatown”

Maybe check out Monster Train. That one also landed on Arcade pretty recently.

This is so, so phenomenally inappropriate, that it’s frankly impressive.