You’re so optimistic! I wish my fellow Americans actually had even one data point. America invented most of the techniques of oppression and tyranny that we exported abroad and renamed fascism. But Foucault and his boomerang have always been correct, it’s just colonialism brought home to recolonize the imperial core.

Americans haven’t read a single history book if they can help it, and proudly so, while the only progress made on oppression has been finding new and ever more complex ways to dissipate and disguise it.

You’re doing God’s work danekrae! (unfortunately that means your opposition is literally Satan)

This kind of thing is why I dont get excited for steam sales now. Oh, 50% off Recent AAA Game? Haha, yeah, half off the base price, but the entire game is DLC now and each of those is still full price, and there’s a dozen of them.

Good catch, my bad, I thought it was just the trilogy collection on PS3. It’s probably been since it first came out that i played it.

I went general on MGS because I couldn’t remember which game premiered on which console generation without looking it up either, but it’s 2 and 3 for PS2 (and 1 from PSX).

One of my favorite eras to live through and emulate!

Aside from Dark Cloud 2, mentioned already, I also really love:

Katamari, but on Deck the native version is better and includes the sequel.

The Jak and Daxter trilogy, simply amazing games! The first or the second are usually the favs. 1 is a solid mascot platformer. 2 also is, kind of, but adds guns and cars and a slightly GTA inspired open world. 3 is also fun but leans harder into vehicles and generally isn’t regarded as highly.

Odin Sphere. All the VanillaWare games are great, but OS is one of the most beautiful games ever drawn, and has really fun brawler\rpg combat. GrimGrimoire is another of theirs, also good, kind of a side scrolling RTS.

Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 are both a lot of fun, especially if you love Disney or SquareEnix games. If not, they’re still pretty fun and have an… interesting, if convoluted, lore. I probably wouldn’t recommend if you dont care for Disney though. Probably worth playing Final Fantasy 7 first as well. It’s referenced quite reverently and is a great standalone game (and PS1 still counts I think, haha).

Devil May Cry 1 and 3. You can skip 2, even the fans and creators don’t care about it, and 3 is a prequel. DMC1 is a landmark game, and is required playing in my opinion for being both important and incredibly fun. It can be quite hard though. 3 is arguably the best in the whole series, and holds up really well near the top of the genre to this day.

God of War 1, 2, and 3. They’re fantastic action games, and pretty influential still. I dont like them as much as DMC, but they’re still pretty fun.

There were actually a lot of pretty mediocre DMC clones on PS2, like Gungrave or Bujingai. If you love the genre, they’re neat and OK fun. God Hand is quite funny and kind of unique, probably the best of the 3 listed here.

I see Okami in there and I approve! Although I think the remasters released on other platform more recently are a better way to play. I also preferred the Wii version back in the day.

The Sly Cooper games and the Ratchet and Clank games are also both really excellent series. I liked Jak more, but they’re distinct games with their own neat elements. Sly’s particularly unique as a mascot stealth game.

Metal Gear Solid series and the Tony Hawk games are obviously excellent, but you’ve got so many other ways to play those I’m not sure they’re worth emulating.

Zone of the Enders, 1 and 2. ZoE 1 is infamous as being the game that came with the first MGS2 demo on it. The game is fine but short, and mostly serves to set up ZoE2, which fucking rules! You pilot a badass mecha and it just has a really fun plot, great music, and good action. An underrated gem!

Not your jam I’m sure, but I’d be remiss if I didnt mention the many hours I spent playing Capcom vs SNK 2. Still one of my favorite fighting games, legendary roster and soundtrack.

If you’d like a roguelike, I’d suggest Baroque or (PS1) Azure Dreams. Both pretty fun, quite long games with lots of replay value. Baroque is uh… well titled, kind of challenging to get into.

Ah, there were so many good games in that era. Truly one of the most stacked console lineups ever.

DC2 is absolutely a must play. Its a ridiculously big game though, be warned. You’ll be deep into the latter chapters with the game still throwing new mechanics at you like “omg, I have to play golf in dungeons now too, and fishing, and base building, and photography, and and and and”

I kind of do reccomend a guide for it as there’s some permanent misables.

I’m feeling like a lot of y’all. My backlog is already immense, and i don’t even need DLC for the games I have, which are mostly all huge and never ending anyway. Have we reached peak gaming? Are we now making games faster than anyone can play them?

CB 2077 is really good and probably worth it if you enjoy open world games like GTA, skyrim, or RDR.

Atomic Heart I have been having a hard time getting into, for all the commonly cited reasons. The game looks gorgeous and its a fun setting, but you actually spend a lot of time in boring grey hallways fighting the same robots, and the combat just isnt especially great. Performance has been real hit or miss as well (I’m on Linux through proton).

I’m pretty early into the game as well, so I almost didn’t say anything. But even if theres a charm that adds HP bars later, I would be annoyed about it. Why wait so long? I’m over 10 hours in. Why take a slot with it? I get similar annoyances about the compass, but at least that one I can understand because maybe some people like the challenge of landmark navigation using just the maps. There is a skill there, and it is part of the skillset of Exploration (a major pillar of design in any metroidvania).

The yellow tools, in general, I’m iffy about the design of. So far I only have 3: compass, more shards, and auto-collect beads. Of these, auto-beads is the most obviously useful. You need many beads, and they get lost pretty easy. Shards are super common and don’t have many uses. But none of these are essential, and all of them get less useful the later into the game you get. The tradeoff is only meaningful early game, and seems to encourage a balance between memorizing the levels and grinding, neither are amazing activities.

Having the compass charm tied to ALL map markers would certainly up the utility of it, though it’s gating another feature behind both a purchase and a charm. I’ve also only found 1 semi useful trap\red-charm so far. Maybe having more traps and skills that required shell bits would put more pressure on needing them and make the charm that gives extras more appeal for a trap-heavy play style?

Again, I grant that maybe I’m too early in the game yet, but I feel like these systems should be coming together and cohering more after a half-dozen bosses and 10 hours of play.

The runbacks don’t bother me too much so far. I do think there’s some skills in the runback, but it relies heavily on the level designer as well. An ideal runback:

• is relatively short, you should have time to reflect on the boss, but not get sidetracked
• has enemies that drop currency, so repeated runs slowly build you up (assuming you always collect your shade)
• has enemies that train you on the bosses timings or counters (if the boss is parry heavy, put a tricky-to-parry enemy enroute back)
• has a “speed route” that let’s you bypass most or all of the run once you’ve figured it out

These factors make a run both interesting game play and still a form of progression. A badly designed run lacks these factors, being just a slow slog to get back into the boss fight.

My biggest complaint so far is the double damage. Every boss and so many common enemies do nothing but double damage. Why even have 5 HP instead of 3? And it being 5 (and bind healing 3) have compounding effects with this problem. Taking a single hit on the way to a boss actually costs you an entire “boss hit” so runbacks are worse all around. Trying to heal mid boss only gets you “one and a half” hits back which takes a lot of silk to build up and probably is a worse deal for you than just using the silk to power more attacks.

Double damage would suck a lot less (and be a better mechanic) if you had 6 HP to start, or if you healed 4 at a time, or if bosses didnt always do 2 damage. There’s no tension to avoiding punishing hits because every move is equally punishing. It makes fights feel very conservative which is maybe intentionally meant to evoke Hornet as a careful hunter, using traps and plans to take down big foes.

I find the opposite though, she feels fragile and reactive. I wish starting damage was higher too. I had this issue in Hollow Knight as well, everything takes too many hits. Common enemies are spongy, bosses take at least 33% too long across the board. Especially it gets annoying since a lot of bosses so far get spammier and faster towards their final phases, so you spend so much time dodging the same attacks and looking for openings to chip hits in. Skills and traps don’t do enough damage to feel especially useful either.

I also hate, and this is another compounding factor, the complete lack of enemy HP bars. On regular enemies this is annoying (gotta count my hits) but on bosses it feels negligent. Bosses have multiple phases and take so long to kill, it would be nice to know if my last run was just a hit or 2 away from the end or if I still had a 3rd phase to plan for. It adds to the poor perception of skills and traps as well. Sting Shard and Thread Storm both seem to hit several times, around a half-dozen, but neither seems to do much more damage than a couple of regular hits.

Overall I’m really loving Silksong, the art and music are top notch. The DLC for HK convinced me that Team Cherry and I disagree about some fundamental ideas in game design, and HKSS bears that out.

You’re understanding of “gig work” is comically outdated. You sound naive or trollish. “Jobs for teens” like fast food work, grocery clerking, and working at movie theaters have always been taken by people who need “real jobs” and not just teens looking for extra money. So you’re wrong that these careers exclusively for kids to get pocket money ever existed, certainly not in living memory.

Secondly, OP isn’t talking about working the carwash for the summer. He’s talking about Uber and AirBNB. Maybe you heard of them? Over the last decade, they’ve caused massive disruption of the hotel and taxi industries by allowing thousands of unlicensed and unregulated “micro entrepreneurs” 🤮 to create a new economy of pay-per-task workers who end up owning all the physical assets (which rapidly deprecate in value) but none of the infrastructure or investments (which do not, or do so on much different schedules).

Houses being bought up for short term rentals has contributed to the housing crisis. Its caused economic harm to inner cities. It’s a looking part of the polycrisis destroying the practical economy and the planet’s livability. But yeah man, the real problem is lazy people just don’t want real adult jobs, give me a fucking break.

Rich people always threaten this and never do it, because it’s a John Galt problem. Rich people need poor people to trickle money to for services and goods. If they all move to “Rich Asshole Island” where there’s no laws or taxes, they quickly discover there’s also no workers.

Fuck all of them, I dare every millionaire to leave NYC. They almost certainly cannot. All their wealth is actually tied up in business and assets. In NYC. They could sell them, but to whom? All the rich are fleeing right? If the city or collectives of workers buy them, thats more socialism and proof the rich aren’t necessary.

So no, they won’t leave. They’ll whine and cry and then fund police and paramilitaries and lobbiest to try and force their view. They’ll spend millions propping up friendly candidates like Coumo and running smear campaigns.

In other words, they’ll do what they’ve historically always done when threatened.

I agree with the analysis of the east coast, and will add that the South (“Silicon Bayou” is such a sad joke) is in basically the same place.

But I don’t think the West coast actually has all those advantages either, not anymore. What passes for “innovation” is all some variation on crypto, ai, or “being the Uber of $NICHE.” Throw in some buzzwords like IoT, quantum, blockchain, or “smart” and you’re all set to race with the other founders to get a piece of that sweet sweet VC dollar.

The financiers have taken over everything and are going to drive the economy off a cliff so they can scavenge and sell the parts. They’ve taken over film, gaming, tech, all traditional media, journalism, and they’re using the banner of “privatization” to finish off healthcare, education, postal services, and anything else they can convince idiots to sell them. The bankers are winning.

SE/SO has been on the decline for a long time now. They pivoted to find more ways to monetize the answers and started enshittifying, trying to appeal to business clients and money-people instead of the users and developers who built the knowledgebase. It was good when it felt like a community helping each other, it fell off when it felt like a company milking you to build out their monetized wiki.

At this point, from their perspective, the biggest fuck up was not locking down SE from scrapers and building their own AI. It is in every way the same situation that Reddit is in, just with a more focused and higher quality data set (and fewer, arguably “higher quality,” users).

I don’t necessarily think the MM is intentionality going against AI, they’re just following what drives engagement and the mainstream tide is turning against AI (again, AI winter 3.0, here we go).

However, I did see that “AI causes delusions” article in the NYT together with the very hilarious conflict of interest notice: “The NYT is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement.”

So who knows? It is entirely in the MM’s interests to both write about AI (hot topic, much engagement) and also to make the AI companies look incompetent, reckless, and dangerous because that bolsters their cases against them.

This is very exciting! But I’m relying on third-party addons for both Android (syncthing-fork from Fdroid, itself a fork of syncthing-android which wasn’t being maintained) and windows (syncthing tray). I think my Mac and Linux machines are using standard syncthing, but I’ll be waiting a little bit for the rest of the community/ecosystem to catch up!

Other than what everyone else has said (great taste in film, lemmings) I’ll throw out…

In the Mouth of Madness. People tend to rank The Thing as his best movie, but the other two parts of the “Apocalypse Trilogy” are also excellent. Prince of Darkness has plenty to reccomend it, but I actually have watched IMM at least 10 times. The practical effects hold up well, and I feel like I catch new little details or acting quirks on each watch. Sam Neill and Julie Carmen are both really on their game and amazingly bring a lot of both subtlety and camp to the roles. The soundtrack is really banging too, if you’re a fan of Carpenter’s synth-rock.

And for something completely different, but still an “at least 10 views” favorite: Rian Johnson’s Brick. You’ll probably need at least 2 viewings just to catch all the dialogue, which is very fast and uses a weird made up slang. The main victim makes a phone call in the first act that basically reveals everything if you understand what she’s saying, but it takes the whole movie for that to happen. It’s just a fun, good mystery story too. Great sense of style, great (slightly off kilter) acting choices all around. Its one of those movies that’s a little like poetry or a great album, just fun to watch and enjoy for itself.

Alright, so here’s my case for Thief, the Looking Glass Studios game.

Thief, on its own, is a great game and basically shares the claim to originating a lot of ideas behind stealth in games along with MGS, which came out the same year.

What many don’t know is how incredibly innovative what they were doing with their engine tech was. In another timeline, id software were mildly successful action game makers while LGS became the industry defining mega success. The Dark Engine refines a lot of ideas present in Ultima Underworld and marries them to tech that was decades ahead of its time.

Check out the opening and closing of this long talk: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI

Thief had, probably, the first ECS in gaming. They also had their own rendering technique using “portals” that was a bit slower than id’s BSP trees but allowed for insane geometry. They also had an incredible system for events called stimulus-response that was doing things like Breath of the Wild’s “chemistry engine” again, decades before it would be rediscovered.

They weren’t just making games, these were really simulations of a limited world with complex interactions. If the rest of the industry had caught onto their good practices, who knows what the landscape would look like today!

Doom

I could write an essay significantly larger than the game itself and it wouldn’t be as powerful of an argument as just saying the name with the weight of legacy it commands.

You’re correct that it’s actually a non-issue: trans people are a ridiculously small minority, most Americans who don’t live in a city have probably never met a trans person, yet the entire nation has been whipped into frenzied “debate” about fairness in sports, bathroom needs, and other very unserious issues.

The answers are also very obvious. No trans person has ever dominated a sport, otherwise you’d have heard about this. The actual problem with hormones in sports is rampant steroid abuse, trans issues distract from that. Likewise, just have unisex private bathrooms. Treating humans like indistinguishable cattle is already a problem.

None of this, however, relates to the issue of Mayor Pete. Politicians don’t really “raise issues” from their constituents, not primarily anyway. They raise issues from their donors, and they shape public discourse with what they draw attention to. Buttigieg could support trans people with a word and move on to real issues. He could ignore trans people and call out Republicans for distracting people. He could do so many things, but he chooses to focus on this. It can’t be ignored that he’s a gay man also. The intent here is to further wedge between LGB and T.

The ruler class has been working overtime on this for years, because breaking the solidarity of LGBTQ+ people destroys an important progressive bloc held together by shared oppression. If you convince male gays that lesbians and trans people are making too much noise and drawing bad attention, you can split them up and push the whole lot of us back into the closets.

These issues aren’t isolated concerns that operate as pure distractions. They’re various fronts in the class war; you can’t ignore a flanking maneuver as a “distraction” while the cavalry runs rampant over you.