MMO player grinds god-awful minigame tokens for 8 years, breaks in-game XP tracker by blowing it all in 49 seconds

I feel sorry for the developers who work on crafting systems in open world games. When they're not central like in Minecraft or most survival games, crafting systems feel tacked-on and easy to not bother with. I saw a forum thread asking what game mechanics people ignore, and crafting came up over and over again. (Parrying too, surprisingly. And card games.)

I did a bare minimum of crafting in The Witcher 3, and only a little in Fallout 4. One rare open world game where the crafting did hold my attention was Prey. Something about the way its nanotech recycling machines take all your junk and then spit out a set of colorful cubes and spheres of crafting material at the other end is inherently pleasing. Prey also has grenades called recycler charges that suck in everything around them like environmentally friendly black holes, transforming it all into crafting resources. Even alien mimics get turned into "exotic materials".

Turns out, that's how you turn a crafting system someone made to fill out a feature list something I'll engage with. Give me grenades that do half the work, and then I'll care. Otherwise, unless you're a game that's actually about crafting, probably best to leave it out.

An Old School RuneScape player with the handle NC State (presumably not an official representative of the Raleigh-based university) finally sought his reward for grinding an infamous minigame, the Brimhaven obstacle course, for eight years. NC State finally brought his journey home, turning in all of his banked rewards at once and gaining 178 million XP in RuneScape's suboptimal Agility skill in less than a minute. This was such a rapid influx that the game's built-in experience per hour tracker couldn't keep up: it tapped out at 2.147 billion even though NC State was progressing at a rate of 10.8 billion per hour.

Premier CPU manufacturer Intel had a bad 2022 that ended on one of its worst quarters since the apocalyptic days of dot-com collapse of 2000. Industry analysts already unhappy with Intel's financial performance are now saying that 2023 could be just as hard for the company. The company's bad end of 2022 and low projections on its 2023 earnings have knocked $8 billion off of the company's market value. To be pat: Intel is having one of those years where the red line on the money chart is going down very steeply.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine has a cult following, and those poor loyalists have been waiting a decade for a sequel to the hack-and-slashing third-person shooter. As the faithful no doubt knew all along, the time is finally upon us, and Space Marine 2 is set to deliver unto thee a scale never before seen in the series.

Nintendo classics have always been ripe pickings for indie reimaginings. Series like Mario and Zelda have directly inspired greats like Shovel Knight and Tunic, and you can't walk five feet without stepping into a new metroidvania. But I've often pondered, where were the Wario Land revivals? Its mix of high-speed platforming, exploration, and anarchic, slapstick energy made for some of the Game Boy's crown jewels. Well, looks like I wasn't the only one to have that thought.