I’d forgotten that was on the Nvidia list. Wasn’t many misses on there. Final Fantasy IX remake was another big one that never surfaced.

I agree this is a much more plausible reason. Not only was there less choice, there was less opportunity. Adjusting for inflation, I paid over $150 for Final Fantasy VI when it came out. Games were precious, and the good games were ones you replayed because–unless you were quite privileged–you didn’t have a big library to choose from.

That’s the kind of thing that endears players, and it takes truly exceptional products to get there now. There are also far more studios that have the game-making formulas to work with today, too. I don’t think that’s a bad thing in any way.

The wild thing is how this is a complete 180 for the marketing industry. They went through a paradigm shift into authenticity, or at least the appearance thereof, not all that long ago as millennials aged into their prime spending demographic.

That demand didn’t go away, but now as wide swaths of people continue settle more into a post-truth world, I have to imagine the most effective mass market communication is the kind that can successfully serve both sides of the divide at once, almost like quantum superposition. I think of the success of The Boys, which did well because it simultaneously carried a scathing critique of fascism and capitalism while presenting fascist “heroes” that some could see as validation of their beliefs.

I think it’s a testament to the series’s formula that DQ8 managed to keep charming me despite how dark it got. There’s a late game twist with a character that I still think about from time to time.

DQ5 is my favorite in the series by a mile–it’s also rather popular in general–so that’s an easy recommend for people that like the series. There’s also Chrono Trigger if you haven’t played it yet, as another in the lighthearted/JRPG/Akira Toriyama vein.

74% describe Obama, someone that literally wrote a pro-deregulation op-ed in The Wall Street Journal while in office, as left wing.

This is what people are talking about when they say there’s no left-wing representation in America.

Andor isn’t nearly that straightforward about it. It’s complicated and messy, with self-interested people juxtaposed against the idealists. Most of it is character-centered, soul-sucking spycraft tension like The Lives of Others or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but then also exasperating bureaucracy as in Chernobyl–and Stellan Skarsgard is equally phenomenal in Andor. Your toys aren’t here either; no lightsabers, few scenes with the old droids, very little time in space. Most of the time you need the architecture and the stormtroopers and Imperial dress whites to recognize it as a Star Wars setting.

It’s completely different than any Star Wars screen production before it.

Having to use something like Windows IME on a phone for Japanese is nightmare fuel

Not gonna lie, if they get Ashly Burch I’m gonna pick it up.

It’s also going to get more efficient, like Amazon’s data centers have been over time. By the way, where was this zeal over water usage from people back when AWS and other data centers started popping up all over the place?

The water issue will end up being more in how local water tables are affected, not overall consumption.

I run 11 LTSC on a local account with tweaks from privacy.sexy. Zero issues.

Ultimately not worth the hassle of an upgrade until it’s required for an important app, though. I only did it because I had a congested 10 install and wanted to wipe anyway.

He’s kind of a JRPG traditionalist, so I’m not surprised he wasn’t big on the game.

Someone just needs to clone him so he can actually finish the new game.

If you know how to replace a CMOS battery, you know how to disable a fan. And even if you don’t, it’s not gonna bite your finger off 😂

It’s 100% cultural, a combination of generational trauma (“I did it so you have to”) and pressure from upper management leading to performative effort. We now know from productivity research that overtime periods in game dev get diminishing–and even negative–returns pretty quickly.

First year recorded.

Mind explaining what features and why?

Considering we’ve already got the one former Larian employee speaking out against this, it’ll be interesting to see how many more show up off the record (or maybe on the record anonymously). I’m sure there was an internal battle over it.

There aren’t many (possibly none) with more goodwill banked among enthusiast gamers than Vincke, so I feel like we’re about to see just how far a popular figure can step into this particular puddle without coming out soaked.

Yeah, pound-for-pound, as far as collecting stuff goes, these games get crazy expensive. Some of them are more generous than others with the in-game currency outlays, but that can become its own problem with daily grinds.

There is some very high quality writing and gameplay in the genre right now. A lot of talented people are working on these games. And generally speaking, yes, you don’t need to spend a dime to see the main content.

I tend not to recommend them because you never know who has a gambling problem (and sometimes people don’t know until they are exposed to it for the first time). There’s also the other odd quirk–not just in gacha, but in live-service and other self-insert media in general lately–where character romance is omitted from the game world because they don’t want to offend insecure people. Can make things feel flat at times.

If one knows they are fine with both of those issues, there’s a lot of great content out there.

Close enough