blindsight @ blindsight @beehaw.org

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6

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755

Joined

2 yr. ago

There's a double XP romhack.

"Skip the grind" romhacks are the only way I play a lot of JRPGs. I don't want to mindlessly battle to advance in the game. I have better things to do with my time, like playing a wider selection of games. I don't need games' length padded!

Not sure if it's needed for Earthbound, but I'd probably just use it anyway. Most games set up a good leveling curve, so double XP shouldn't break the game even if it's unnecessary.

Earthbound and Super Mario RPG are the two best entry points to SNES-era JRPGs. I haven't played many JRPGs since the OG PlayStation generation, though, so I'm out of the loop on newer games. But they're both better entry points than any of the PS1 JRPGs that I know of/played.

I'm more partial to Super Mario RPG, personally. Timing attacks in battle made the grind more engaging, and the Mario world is well known by pretty much any gamer already, too.

I've mostly been playing a F2P game called Minion Masters. It's a card game, but the cards come alive in 2-lane combat like a tiny auto-battle MOBA. It has short game lengths (6-10 min are typical), is generous with F2P players (I've paid $0 so far), and has enough strategic (deck building) and tactical (card playing) depth to stay interesting throughout.

It plays great on the Deck without any configuration, even though it's "unsupported". I suppose some of the card text might be a bit small for some, but that's only relevant in the deck building screen where you can easily zoom in on cards. There's a UI option to read your partner's cards in 2v2, but I've never felt the need to. By the time you're good enough at the game to react to your partner's hand, you'll already know the cards well enough that you don't need to read them.

I should maybe add that I got a bunch of free cards when they had free DLC to celebrate the release of the game on Android, so idk if my F2P experience is typical.

Just FYI that Beehaw defederated with Lemmy.world, so our experience is a bit different; being defederated from the biggest instance means we avoid most low-effort posting and vitriol, but it also means we miss most (?) of the content on Lemmy.

I'm not entirely sure how it works; I don't know if I can see if someone from Lemmy.world replies to my comments in other communities. I don't think so, since I can't remember ever seeing a Lemmy.world commenter, but I'm not totally clear on how defederation works. I think we just don't see those users at all, including posts/comments they make to other instances?

They specifically sent it a command to send a full memory dump after it went haywire. It wasn't a fluke.

JFC. Stand-up meetings with people dialed in to the speakerphone. Buzz-screech all meeting every meeting.

I typically have 50-200 browser tabs open, but I also usually have 5+ browser windows running. So, like, when I'm building something, I'll have the thing I'm building and all its parts spread across two windows, and a third window with all my reference materials. Then I can cleanly kill them all when I'm done.

I don't really know what I'd keep from those when that workflow is done. The thing is built, so I don't need any of it anymore.

Maybe it's just my ADHD, but I can't even imagine managing that many tabs.

In my workflow, I start a project, then keep opening new tabs as I need to look things up, frequently moving tabs between multiple browsers spanning my 32" monitor. So long as I'm working on that problem, I just keep opening new tabs.

Then, when I've finally squared away the section of the project I was working on, I usually just close the browser entirely and start fresh.

Needing to manually sift through the 80+ tabs I chaotically opened in the last hour or so to figure out what's worth keeping? Hell no. That's what browser history is for. It's Etch-a-Sketch time! Shake it clean and start fresh.

Based.

I think that's a much better way to start. Martin is clearly a discovery writer, but he talks like he's a plotter, and the intricacies of the political machinations imply he's a plotter, too.

He's written such a tangled mess that it's impossible to untangle everything. Plus, he's made his millions, so there's not much incentive for him to finish.

I started reading when book 5 was about "due" based on his expected release date he had previously announced thinking that book 5 would likely be out by the time I read up to that point. Over four years later book 5 finally released and I knew in my soul the series would never be finished.

Eh, idk. Depends on the person. I've been going for a "scruff" look for a few years now. I trim close-ish 1-2 times/week, just before it starts to get itchy from hairs getting long enough. I always have at least 1-2mm facial hair.

If I go clean-shaven, I have baby face and I look 10 years younger. Not a good look. A bit of scruff makes me look closer to my age, but I don't like the look of a full beard on me since I can't grow a decent mustache. It looks like I'm trying too hard.

Love it! As I was going through the list, I was trying to think of progression fantasy/LitRPG titles to match each square. (It's my genre of choice most of the time.)

I think I could pretty easily get 25/25 hard mode if my ADHD doesn't interfere with my follow-through...

Independent grocers can potentially compete. There's a great one in my small town, and I had lots of options when I lived in Toronto.

Costco treats their employees and customers pretty well (but I've heard they're not amazing to their suppliers since they push returns costs onto them?)

It's not as convenient, and not quite as cheap, but I could pretty easily exclusively shop at Costco and a few small independent stores. My wife and I already joined the boycott bandwagon. We're not using our PCF MC this month, either.

I'm feeling the same way about Minion Masters. I just play it on my Steam Deck, but it got an Android release recently. They gave away a few of their "DLC" packs (which is how I found it about it), so maybe my experience is a bit atypical, but I've just been playing for a week or so and I already have more than half the available cards and enough currency that I can craft any cards I really want to finish a deck.

I haven't paid a cent. It's so generous with its freemium model that I'm probably going to buy an in-game currency pack if I'm still playing once my Google Rewards wallet ticks high enough to buy one.

Same for me. Lots of consoles have lots of great games, and I really like the idea of the PS2 library's depth and quality. I bought a 1TB MicroSD card for my Steam Deck OLED and loaded it with a 1TB image of curated roms from a private tracker thinking I'd play a lot of the ones I missed...

...But the only non-Steam game I've played is FF5 for the SNES. I've wanted to play it since I found out Final Fantasy "III" was a lie. The Steam Deck is the ultimate SNES RPG machine.

That and my SD2SNES in my childhood SNES gets a lot of play time with my 6 y.o. son. He's almost able to beat world 1 of SMW solo, but he prefers Kirby Super Star, where he can beat world 1 and most of world 2.

Bib is notoriously hard to get an invite to.

MAM is a books-focused private tracker that's a lot easier to get started on. They have open signups scheduled weekly.

My wife and I are joining the boycott. Who knows what will come of it, but this might be a good reminder for the big grocery retailers that they don't have a right to our patronage.

I'm privvy to some of the details from this on the EA side of things, and everything in this video is accurate, from what I know.

It was quite a bit of work for EA to strip FIFA out of everything, though. All the UX elements, of course, but they also wanted to be sure to strip FIFA from database names and entries, servers, and a whole host of other places. EA wanted to be 100% confident that there was no mention of FIFA anywhere, just to be completely in the clear from any trademark disputes.

Hearing my connection in EA talk about it reminded me of Y2K patching, lol. Going through the codebase and databases meticulously to check and double check everything.

I watched most of this video (in the background) the other day. I have a technical background, but I've never made a "real" game. It looks like a really good tutorial for newbies to making games.

I look forward to seeing the later videos!

Also, I found it an odd coincidence that he chose the exact knight sprite I used for a Scratch tile-based-game tutorial project for a lesson a few years ago. CC0 assets are awesome.

I haven't taught in Ontario in over a decade, but I don't think the problems with cell phones are unique to Ontario. I'm surprised by the comments here, tbh.

The research is very clear: mental health (and educational outcomes) for youth have taken a nosedive since 2010, when smart phones became commonplace. In the case of educational outcomes, 2010 is the first ever reversal in the otherwise increasing trend.

Smart phones are addiction machines, with predatory apps like SnapChat that are full of dark patterns designed to increase "engagement" (addiction) while having the same short-attention-span-decreasing exposure to video shorts as TikTok that encourage self harm, suicidal ideation, misogyny, and eating disorders. (On average, all of the above within 10 minutes of starting to use the platform.)

Educators cannot compete with addiction machines. If we were writing laws objectively to improve student mental health, smart phones should be illegal for users under age 16 (at least).

This is an example of a shit government making a good decision. I hope the rest of Canada follows.