I recently watched Flow and with enough care and effort a movie doesn’t need dialog to be impactful and well done. There is often a large gulf between what is possible and what they’re going to do but I’ll be interested to see where this goes

Capitalism, HO!

Club House Games is an easy recommendation. 51 games that are classics around the world. You probably know how to play the majority of them already. Likewise a Nintendo switch online subscription is the price of a game for a year and comes with N64, GBA, GBC, SNES, NES, and Dreamcast games. Pokémon stadium 1/2, Ecco the dolphin, Kirby super-star saga, Kirby dream course are all good

I imagine Epic cares less about what the ESRB thinks and more about what the CCP thinks, seeing as Tencent has a major stake in Epic. China is generally anti-death in games

Epic’s official language for the game never features death. Characters are eliminated, you can meet the god of the underworld, but no character ever actually dies. Apparently the ESRB says it’s ok

Yes but a big difference is Call of Duty is an M rated video game whereas Fortnite is rated T. Fortnite doesn’t feature blood, death, or swearing. Does it matter that the same kids probably play both? That’s for the parents to decide

Conversely the worst is when that happens and a bad boss blind screws your run

It’s hard to offer strong heuristics for Balatro because you could theoretically build up to a point where you’ve got a crazy high multiplier but if your chips are low it doesn’t matter.

For example let’s say you’ve got a face card 4 of a kind build going with: Pareidolia, Zany, Smiley, Trio, and Family jokers. These give you (respectively) all cards are face cards, +12 mult for 3 of a kind, +20 mult for each hand (all cards are face cards), x3 mult, x4 mult for a total of 384 multiplier! On base 4 of a kind this is

60x([7+12+20]x3x4)=28,080

However if you were to drop smiley face (+5 mult per face) for scary face (+30 chips per face card) which by almost every heuristic is a bad decision your score becomes:

(60+120)x([7+12]x3x4)=41,040

Which is a way bigger score!

So while people can offer general advice like stack high chips on plasma, always go for total score multipliers, etc. sometimes you just have to evaluate your specific build and figure out the best play

Finally outside of decks like abandoned and checkered which are specifically made to get certain hands, there isn’t a “best” hand to go for. The highest possible scores I’ve seen all come from high card builds but most normal players won’t get those. I’ve won two of a kind runs, flush 5 runs, straight runs, flush runs. You just have to evaluate your deck and tarot cards to see your options

Generally some good advice is that Balatro is a math game first and foremost so you want to focus on things that raise your score the quickest. So adding chips is ok, adding multiplier is better, and multiplying your total is the best.

For example let’s say you are playing straights and you have a 10-6 with level 3 straights. So you’d have:

10+9+8+7+6=40

(40+90)x10=1300

So let’s compare how jokers impact that score:

Devious joker: +100 chips if you have a straight

(40+90+100)x10=2300

Crazy joker: +12 mult if you have a straight

(40+90)x(10+12)=2860

The order: x3 mult if you have a straight

(40+90)x(10x3)=3900

You can see those are very big differences! It’s also helpful to pay attention to the order of your cards. Generally Balatro cards are scored left to right. The most important thing is to take any card that multiplies any part of your score on the right so you can add as much to the score as possible, then you multiply that number

So in short: multiplier jokers are best, additive multiplier jokers are good, additive chip jokers are ok, and pay attention to the order of your jokers/played cards

For plasma specifically I’d focus on high additive chip jokers. While that’s normally bad advice, consider how crazy good a card with +50 mult on it would be. Now consider that a +100 chip joker is effectively a +50 chip/+50 mult (I know that’s not technically true but I’m illustrating a point). Also eventually you do hit a point of diminishing returns because plasma prevents you from having a super high multiplier or chips, so like every build, total score multipliers are the best

Have you played a GTA game on PC? They’re all so poorly optimized to the point some are unusable. Not to mention bizarre choices. GTA IV used games for windows live which became its own shit show when it went EoL. GTA V/Online took forever to get to PC and didn’t even have all the features when it did release. Also minor gripe but I think it shows how little they thought about PC: the default controls for flying a helicopter (required in several missions) use a numpad. Numpads aren’t even popular on keyboards anymore, let alone the fact that nobody will ever intuitively guess those controls. RStar doesn’t care about PC at all, and even further, Linux/steam deck support is a pipe dream

I prefer Sci-fi background noise so Surviving Mars is my favorite. Mass Effect is ok but I find it gets a little too cinematic and bombastic at times. FTL and Into The Breach, or really anything by Ben Prunty is good too

That… would also be part of the adaptive suite. So instead of your phone turning the screen off after being “inactive” it would stay on