The Sonic fandom continues to amaze me. For every mountain of lewd fan art and crappy original characters created by fans, you get an incredible fangame that absolutely trumps official efforts from Sega themselves.
Pulling off a kart racer in the Legacy DOOM engine of all things is a seriously impressive feat.
I see Robotnik as an entirely separate character to Eggman. The AOSTH/Mean Bean Machine character was a bumbling idiot, and Robotnik Prime from SATAM/Archie Comics was a brutal overlord.
MapleStory's problems aren't just the predatory MTX shit, which got so bad that they actually released a Reboot server that disabled a lot of this stuff, but just overall content bloat.
On top of the 5 core explorer classes (Magician, Thief, Warrior, Bowman and Pirate), there are Cygnus Knights versions of these classes, and 29 overpowered hero classes that are mostly based on the 5 aforementioned class groups
Big Bang streamlined the game excessively and ruined the overall flow of Victoria Island, making it vastly more linear. It also made Ossyria much higher levelled. Whereas for example you could probably survive in Aqua Road as a level 35, it now has a level 80 requirement. One of my characters is stuck near Ariant because they changed the second zone to be a 120 zone.
They're all very successful now. This whole notion that bullies and assholes would be bagging my groceries and asking me "you want fries with that" in adulthood is BS.
This may actually be a net improvement to the Google Search experience, since the engine is borderline unusable without uBlock Origin. But also it feels weird that Google would make an AI generated prompt the focal point and not the entire rows of sponsored ads that litter all search results.
How did the big tech industry get this terminally stupid?
Databases also make the list, and again nothing from Western devs made the cut. But Alibaba Cloud's PolarDB is mentioned, as is Tencent’s TDSQL and a handful of other made-in-China efforts.
That's a big one.
Unless Chinese firms have been straight-up stealing trade secrets and code from the likes of Oracle and have produced such a blatant knock-off of their software that in any other country, they would have been sued out of existence, I can see a five week transition being messy-as-fuck.
Transitions to new database systems take months or even years to implement, not the 5 weeks mandated by the Chinese Communist Party. This is especially the case when you're dealing with important stakeholder data, huge data volumes and/or statutory requirements like financial reporting.
Why are we giving this guy a platform? He's basically a grifter who got famous from walking into a Black Lives Matter protest to stir shit up, shooting three (and killing two) protesters and then somehow being acquited by a jury.
If Trump hadn't riled up his supporters into storming Congress on Jan 6th and hadn't spurred the authorities into forensically investigating him, I wonder how far ahead he'd be of Biden.
I think if Biden and Harris were to officially endorse decriminalizing or legalizing recreational marijuana, we'd see a Democrat landslide. But that would require some actual common sense from Congressmen.