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2 yr. ago

  • The legality of the emulation itself has long been established, but I've been concerned for a while that illegal DRM circumvention of the games themselves has been a viable legal avenue. Under the DMCA, even the process to dump your own legally-licensed games has arguably been in a legal grey area for a while now, with how they are locked down. If any method to playing the games become illegal, any unauthorized emulation of games becomes de facto illegal.

    I'd cite legal precedent here, but there's been a substantial right-wing, pro-corporate shift in American courts over time. Who knows how this will go.

  • I love the mods and graphical upgrades. For example, the "FFT Complete" hack on PSX is still my preferred way to play Final Fantasy Tactics, and I can get a buttery-smooth 60fps on Link's Awakening (2019).

    Lately I've also been dabbling into CRT filters with mixed success. Every now and then I'll get the nostalgia buzz, but a lot of the time I feel like I'm just looking at a game with visible scanlines. I've heard it's better on 4K displays though, and I don't have regular access to one.

  • I was mostly in the niche subreddits anyway, and it's frustrating that Reddit is essentially still the only searchable website for non-sponsored content in hundreds (if not thousands) of niches. Quality in my niches is still the same ebb and flow that it was.

    There still are questions of validity, though. Message boards like Reddit haven't really had their payola/Gamergate/astroturfed-FCC-comments moment yet.

  • Unfortunately, the shadow of Voat still looms over this conversation. Redditors are wary of platforms that have a perceived radical userbase, and Lemmy as a whole has been painted as far left.

  • Yeah, mostly in terms of the day-to-day operations of the site remaining largely business as usual, at least in terms of what matters to corporate. Plenty of impotent response abounded, too. For example, one of the largest subreddits, /r/games, never even joined the 48-hour blackout.

    There's an argument to be made that content quality is down, but that's a subjective measure, and I'm not even going to try to unpack my own personal bias on that front given I moved here because of this in the first place.

  • As a heads up, don't read the Gamespot review if you're carefully avoiding spoilers. The review tries to discuss the ending without revealing too much but wasn't entirely successful.

  • It's still a trilogy. In any case, Disc 2 of the original was much shorter than the first, and Disc 3 was almost entirely ending cinematics.

  • The wild thing about last summer was it revealing how remarkably stable their unpaid labor pool is. Take away their tools, mock them in the national press and on the site, and the worst most of them will do is participate in a perfunctory protest. They weren't willing to go to war or even organize in a meaningful manner.

    It makes me think of how nationalism has sent millions to their deaths. Who needs money? People will put themselves through hell just to protect an identity.

  • Okay. I wasn't as big on System Shock 2 as most seemed to be, but it's also been forever since I played it.

    I'll have to give both of these another run at some point.

  • Last week I went deep into Next Fest and came up with a bunch of demos, to varying success. Tried Synergy (promising), Sword of Convallaria (great, but deeply concerned about the mobile/gacha systems), Guild Saga: Vanished Worlds (not great, borrows shamelessly from Divinity: Original Sin 2), and Balatro (surprisingly interesting).

    For now, I'm kind of bouncing around, not being able to settle on anything. Might go back to Atelier Ayesha tonight.

  • I bounced off both Prey and Dishonored early on specifically because of how linear they were. I'm guessing they open up later?

  • Then please, feel free to reframe the statement here. You didn't even attempt to revise your derogatory language in the other comment chain.

  • You've been told why elsewhere, but I'll reiterate.

    It's happening because you led off with calling transgender persons and their allies irresponsible, immature cultists, with some flimsy attempt to couch your rhetoric.

    In the interest of assuming good faith--and I'm really having to stretch to see good faith here--maybe you're just completely ignorant of the history involved. "You'll grow out of it in your 30's" aka "it's just a phase" is the exact same rhetoric used against gays and lesbians a generation ago, and against any woman in general that dared step outside of the prescribed "get married and have babies" role before that. It's not a good look.

  • Great, thanks for the dose of existential dread.

  • For a long time it's been Kiseki no Umi. Composed by Yoko Kanno, Maaya Sakamoto on vocals.

  • Thief is the only one that comes to mind from that era that holds a candle to Deus Ex's open-ended level design. Lots of different approaches to take on many of the stages. Well, as long as you didn't play on high difficulties, anyway.

    There still aren't many games that go quite that hard on it. Open world games have a tendency to keep their set pieces much more simple. Maybe we'll see more of it now that Baldur's Gate 3 has made a big splash with the concept.

  • I wish I had done this for each of Supergiant's games before Hades. They've always had the writing, voice acting, music, and the aesthetic in particular down pat, but I feel it took them a while to get to solid gameplay.

  • I don't watch a ton of anime, but it's certainly the best I've seen (or heard of, for that matter). The recent Castlevania is good too, but I don't even know if that counts?

    Agreed on the Golden episodes. Wasn't the same.

  • That's near the top of the list of what I've been working on. I got snagged again by something I remembered hating about the main quest last time, getting stuck in one system working through it. This time was particularly awful because it kept sending me back to the same extreme world to do it, ugh.

    Now I'm just trying to find a semi-permanent base location. Finding a comfortable biome that doesn't look ugly to me has been shockingly diffcult πŸ˜…

  • A terrible loss for the industry, especially after getting a new startup off the ground. Beloved by the Suikoden community. His new game was only a couple months away.

    By all accounts, a good guy, too.