Fredo Fabrucci: The Poster's Poster™

The Coca-Cola Company Relaunches Mr. Pibb The picture is for 2 new cans of Mr Pibb and Mr Pibb zero sugar. pibb is stylized as P!BB on the can, and there's a sort of zigzag pattern in the background (red on dark red for the regular and red on black for the zero sugar)

Absolutely massive, earth shattering news here

Magneto from one of the more recent movies played by Michael fassbender, Fassbender, in a dark red robe with armor accent, a sort is approximation of his comic costume

I am magneto, master of magnet

X-men, welcome to die

Hahaha

X-chicken

You areDEAD

Mufasa should have thought of this

And yeah I've found myself getting frustrated by this a fair bit. With so few skill points, you run into so many opportunities you can't take advantage of! I understand wanting players to specialize and have different experiences but I think they went a little too far

Yeah definitely Avowed feels different in some ways but it evoked the comparison for me because it feels similar in that "medium scope rpg" way.

Yeah same I thought it was cool

Interesting - in that case I can see why they seemed to be focusing so much on multiple playthroughs. Sounds a little bit like atomfall from earlier this year

I'm not the first one to point this out but it's definitely a peculiar feeling to see this kind of satiristic "as a dutiful employee you should blow yourself up for your employer who is not obligated to pay you btw" stuff from a game that was developed within a culture that's maybe 10% less extreme

I didn't even get into this in my rant but both games take place in this pretty interesting hypercapitalist hellworld future that feels increasingly plausible. It plays this up for laughs and I think it's pretty effective, but it is of course ironic given the culture at microsoft

it's woke 😒

Overall I am liking it - It's not quite one of those mindblowing games I'll remember for years (at least not so far) but it's fun and well designed, with an entertaining world and characters. It's not the mega huge RPG some people might have been hoping for but I think it's cool for what it is!

Unfortunately, the fact that you can burn your very limited perks on specific abilities means you're likely going to be tied to a small number of abilities to avoid "wasting" your perks. Again it makes me wish the game gave you just a little more of this stuff

The one I'm currently using a lot is a shield which gives you a temporary overshield to your health and allows you to run into combat and take a few hits. These abilities can be freely slotted and they can synergize with perks, like the example I gave earlier

Gadgets are really neat and give you a trigger ability that feels kind of like a class mod. You get one at the start that gives you a bullet time effect, you find one pretty early on that lets you spray acid to damage enemies or destroy bodies

Grenades work the way you'd expect in a first person game, and there's quite a few different damage types and even some different things like distraction grenades you can use in stealth.

Lots of damage types, different types of scopes, mods to increase firing rate or weakpoint damage, all sorts of stuff! Enemies are a little spongy but not too much, and the guns feel responsive and are satisfying to shoot. You've also got a nice variety of grenades (RB) and gadgets (LB)

I want to say a little bit about the gameplay itself, which is quite good. The controls are snappier than you typically see in first person RPGs. You have a big variety of modifiable guns that can behave in all sorts of different ways to suit your playstyle.

Oh and by the way, there is apparently no respeccing in this game at all which feels like quite a bold choice in 2025, especially with such limited skill & perk points, and no way to reverse flaws. Again I am guessing they are designing around multiple playthroughs here.

I do appreciate how these pop up organically based on how you're playing - It kind of incentivizes you to try different things to unlock these opportunities. You can always just reject the flaw if you feel the trade off is not worth it.

Anyway, there's also an interesting element of unlocking flaws, which will periodically pop based on how you play. Each of these flaws has a positive effect and a negative effect, so it's another element that can radically alter how you play.

It's funny to think about the comparison to Avowed because that game ALSO had this problem and they ended up patching it to give you more skill points. Maybe they'll do the same thing here. I get what they're going for but they went a little too far in this direction imo.

The one thing I've found a little frustrating here is that the game is quite stingy with skill points, so you can realistically only really specialize in a few things. I understand it seems to be designed around multiple playthroughs but it feels just a little bit TOO stingy here

My character is good at science for instance, and I was able to take a perk that makes my shield gadget better (more on this later) and automatically deploys it for free if I hit 25% health, effectively making my character much tankier.

You gain only a few skill points per level (3 if you start with the "brilliant" trait like I did) and you unlock perks every other level. There are quite a lot of these and they have all sorts of interesting effects that fundamentally change the way you play the game.

There aren't straight up stats here, but there are skills, traits, and perks you can take. There's a pretty large variety of skills which will do things like make guns or melee stronger, let you lockpick, science, engineering, medicine, speech, leadership, etc

Like with avowed, this does make the whole thing feel "smaller" than those big rpgs, but it also feels more focused and obviously designed by hand, without a ton of randomly generated "seen one, you've seen it all" type of shit like you saw in starfield

Structurally, it feels pretty similar to a game for earlier this year: Avowed. It streamlines some of the RPG elements of its influences, and it takes place throughout a progression of smaller handcrafted zones instead of one large world

Cover art for the outer worlds 2 featuring a moon headed mascot guy wearing a fancy suit and holding a ray gun, standing on top of a dead monster

FREDO'S GAME-OS early impressions:
The Outer Worlds 2

I have spent a bit of time with this one and it is an interesting sort of "in-between" game, occupying a space somewhere between an open world first person rpg like fallout 3/4 and immersive sims like prey or dishonored

Also, it's woke 😒

Just walked in on Mrs F watching the lion king and they are on the bit where scar kills mufasa (spoilers) and I informed her that it wouldn't have gone down like that if I was there