MudMan

Not being American, I will need some convincing about why the US doesn’t belong in the same bucket as, say, Hungary or Turkey. If you keep self inflicting the rule of strongmen and their oligarch cronies at some point that’s a core feature.

I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…

See, there’s the horrifying possibility that they just did and this is what Americans are.

Eh, forget it. they probably need a minute before reckoning with that one.

Right. So Trump and Musk actively advocating for eradicating income tax and dismantling the government is the same thing as Harris winning and not doing that because the framework of the system is capitalistic and them not blowing up the US economy enables rich people to keep being rich.

That’s the argument.

That is the least serious argument I believe I’ve ever heard. It is a magnificent crystal of disingenuousness. If you could compress unserious, fallacious political arguments into diamonds, they would be that train of thought.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is absurd whenever it pops up. Like, it was absurd on the spectrum of relative centrist Obama against relative centrist McCain. But Trump vs Harris? The degree of detachment is cosmic.

Anyway, adults have an actual real political system to worry about, so you do you. We can always pick this one up after the election if some semblance of liberal democracy remains to worry about.

I mean, one of the two sides is putting forward the poster boy for rich people as a candidate and is largely bankrolled by the richest person on Earth.

So… “vote for whoever” seems like it implies forgetting who the real enemy is by definition.

That’s fair. I do see how it being nominally a new IP instead of a numbered sequel the ways it overlaps with Persona feel like a bit of treading water.

For me there is way more than enough to separate it, though. The bonkers story alone and the super political spin on it are crazy, plus the gameplay ends up being different enough.

But yeah, it’s pretty much one of those. Still better than going full action RPG like Square has done with its franchises, though.

Ah, yeah, but the fun bit is that there are a ton of builds that let you get there. HP-based skills are powerful in this, and you can heal for cheap, so you can get there that way, and once you get a bit overlevelled and can kill mobs out of turn-based combat you’re just cruising.

I may see what happens on harder difficulties, but I genuinely don’t care too much, because just the mechanics of figuring out the sequence for each dungeon and enemy type is so fun to do with the brilliant UI that I just… enjoy doing it, kinda like you enjoy clicking things on Diablo or something. Truly smooth design.

I just wish they had figured out antialiasing better, because woof. I ended up injecting better AA through ReShade and never looked back.

Just because you can grind money easily or some other reason?

In any case on Normal I haven’t felt it at all, mostly because I’ve been single-day completing most dungeons and that gets you a bit overleveled.

But it’s still a lot faster and tighter than Persona on that front. And more flexible and nonlinear, too. For what looks like a long game, this thing moves. Much fewer, shorter stretches of just visual novelling with friends (although there’s plenty of that, too).

Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing.

I doesn’t look like it needs my help, because it’s doing pretty well, but damn, it’s good.

Maybe too much anxiety to play a game in which you’re running for office in a fantasy land, at least until November, but… yeah, it’s bonkers and it’s well written and it’s by far the most political game the Persona-adjacent studios have ever done in some really fun ways.

Also a triumph of UI. Not only does it look great, it’s so frictionless. It’s a turn-based JRPG and it plays faster and more smoothly than that abomination of an action game Square tried to pass as a Final Fantasy VII remake by orders of magnitude. Seriously, go play it if you’re at all interested in that corner of gaming.

I got into the millions with a mid-to-high end CPU and was… fine. I mean, fine at 40-ish fps, not fine at 240 fps.

To me the bigger issues were with balance and broken features that were hard to diagnose because city builders are so opaque by design. I can play a strategy game at 30 fps, been doing that for decades, but I need to have some way to figure out how the game is supposed to work.

In any case, it’s less that I’m not “accepting” of games being broken, it’s that I think I and everybody else are starting to wise up to the fact that you can just… wait. Why play CS2 at launch if you can give it a year while you do something else and play a better version of it that costs half as much?

They break down how they put it together and the recency bias is deliberate, they want to keep it moving, so they weigh newer games so they can cycle and keep driving those clicks.

I mean, I get it, it’s all arbitrary anyway and you don’t want to just chuck The Secret of Monkey Island at the top and let the list stay the same for the next four decades.

Yeah, that stands out. Is Persona 5 one of the best PC games ever? Woof, I don’t know. I’m not sure it’d even be at the top of my Persona/Megaten list.

But that’s superseded by the aburdity of implicitly having to make a call on whether Alley Cat is a better game than Cyberpunk 2077 or Ultima IV a better game than Hollow Knight. What are we even talking about at that point?

You minsunderstand what I’m saying. My point is that I would have to play all the CRPGs that ever existed before I commit to accepting any game as one of the top 100, especially if it’s a newer game.

There are just too many games on PCs to make this type of generalization in any way that makes sense.

This feels like such a weird exercise to even attempt. It’s been 42 years, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of games and dozens of generations of hardware. What do you mean top 100?

I mean, they do explain how they put the list together, I just think it is the peak of listicle absurdity. Not because Stardew Valley doesn’t belong, just as a thing to do. Balatro is neat, but there are like 200 90s CRPGs I’d have to finish before I make that commitment to “8th best PC game of all time”.

Social media killed online aliases and I have a hard time deciding if we’re all worse for it.

Instinctively I still stick by that, though, as you can tell by my anonymous profile with no bio, but when I volunteer any amount of personal info these days people are often confused that I’m not sharing openly who I am or where I’m from. Every time someone does that it weirds me out because in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.

People have been using this as an argument for renewables since what? The 70s oil crisis? As new ways to access hydrocarbons got discovered the horrified realization was that there are plenty of reasons to bail on those faster than they run out, unfortunately. The issue isn’t that we’ll run out, it’s the amount of damage we’ll cause until that point.

And also, it’ll take much longer to run out, but others have mentioned that already.

This thread is interesting to me mostly as a periodic reminder that culture wars have shorter memories than one would think. People forget hotly contested issues and the public opinion battle lines around them at a horrifying pace. You’d think it has to do with old people dying and new people growing up, but it’s a lot faster than that.

I had never heard that before. Is that a region or country-specific thing?

Well, there are a couple of caveats to that. One is that it’s far from the first time an emulator has been taken down for similar reasons and it’s historically been pretty ineffective in the grand scheme, especially when alternative forks are available. “Far reaching consequences” is a bit of an overstatement, at least for those of us that went down into the Bleem! mines back in the day. There is a chance that you may be connecting things that aren’t that directly connected here.

The second is that you’re still misrepresenting people not acting out their annoyance the way you’d like with people not being annoyed. I’m not here defending Nintendo, this sucks. I’m here saying that I don’t want to shame Nintendo into the same awkward gray area Google as an intermediary and every other IP holder currently inhabits, I want actually effective regulation that protects legitimate content creators from IP abuse, including from predatory corporations. You are looking to perform outrage in a room of like-minded people, and I get that you want to vent, but it’s not particularly useful to get mad at people that agree with you for not being in your same emotional level while they do.

That’s a good cue to mention that I don’t know the specifics of how this would work in Brazil and how they impact the situation one way or the other. That said, my objections to the current arrangement of IP and copyright are fairly international.

I did not claim that creating an emulator is illegal. You don’t sue people for a crime, either. “Illegal” and “criminal” are different concepts, and making an emulator without tapping into proprietary assets is neither.

We don’t know what Nintendo used to threaten Ryujinx, so we don’t know how likely it is that they would have won. We do know the Yuzu guys messed up and gave them a better shot than in the other times they have failed at this exact play.

You are very mad at an argument nobody is making.