I couldn’t even buy it for like an hour because Steam was getting overloaded lol. I’m playing it now and having a lot of fun.

Do you realize how insane our politics are for people to think of supporting a genocide as just one thing on a list of policies?

Idk… I’ve had a few pretty shitty pencils.

While I generally agree, I think there is some value in imposing some kind of deadline or limit to a project. Nothing is ever going to be perfect. There will always be more work that could be done on something. If you let yourself just keep going until you think it’s done it might never come out.

But it’s a balance and when publishers push those kinds of deadlines they’re not really considering that.

The fact that people couldn’t tell the difference between a human and an AI made isekai is hilarious. This genre is just a sea of slop.

I think I get it and kind of share a similar belief. Most people are “good,” although I’d use a less morally relative term to describe it: Pro-social. People tend to behave in a way that works well with others. This makes sense if you think about it without getting caught up in all the “humans bad” philosopher stuff. One of our defining features as a species is our ability to work together. We form communities, developed languages to communicate, cultural norms and laws to create agreed upon guides on how we behave towards each other, etc. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if we were always stabbing each other in the backs.

At the same time, there are some unfortunate behaviors and phenomenon that emerge out of these dynamics. In group/out group thinking, an unwillingness to change things if it means causing disunity with the community, etc. And while I think most people are good, there are different people with different personalities, and clearly we have at least some psychopaths who are willing to exploit peoples’ natures for their own gain. Also, circumstances can create constraints on how people behave. If you can’t afford to be altruistic, you might end up acting in a selfish way, although even then that’s not always the case.

The fact that you can look out into the world and feel bad about all the people who are getting hurt, even if you aren’t personally affected, should already tell you that there is this “ goodness” to most of humanity. Otherwise a) you wouldn’t care and b) all those bad people would deserve it anyway. So that is the hope that keeps me from full on nihilism. Unfortunately I also think that there are a lot of other factors in place which make it increasingly unlikely that we’ll be able to organize enough to survive. Wealth disparities and technological asymmetry allows those handful of psychos to wield a lot of power and it’s getting harder and harder to fight back against that.

So yeah, I don’t think “people are doomed even if most of them have good intentions” is that contradictory of a view to hold.

I happened to read this recently. It’s mostly slice of life with a little “what weird things can my body do now that I’m part dragon?” I wouldn’t say there’s any action from what I’ve seen.

It’s kind of funny though, I don’t read much manga, but this is the second time in a row where I happened to read something only to find out Kyoani was going to adapt it not long after. Last one was CITY.

Ah. I didn’t know they said that. It’s definitely shitty to go back on that promise. Although in a vacuum, I think this is the kind of non-cosmetic content that’s somewhat acceptable to me as paid DLC. It’s not a competitive game and assuming the class is balanced, it’s just adding content that gives more variety. I’ve been fine with paid DLC in other big games as long as it’s a worthwhile amount of content for the price and it’s sold in a straightforward way without any funny business. Given that this game has online co-op, I think it makes sense that they’re gonna keep the content expansion free so it doesn’t divide people who would want to play together (also I guess there is trading, but I’m a CoF player so…) and then this is something that mostly just affects someone’s individual experience. Like if you were going to be happy enough to keep playing the game with existing classes, then this doesn’t really affect you.

So in principle I’m ok with this… but like I said, the bigger issue is them going back on their word.

Yeah I pretty much almost never buy AAA games anymore outside of some very specific creators/franchises. Price is definitely a part of that, but the bigger things are creativity and business practices. Indie games are where all the new ideas are and where you get honest expressions of the artist’s intent. And you generally don’t need to put up with bullshit micro transactions, DRM, etc.

I’m not gonna pay $60+ for Call of Duty 500 when I can find full, fun, inspired indie games for less than $30. I will still buy the handful of more creative AAAs that do come out sometimes.

Personally I enjoyed Nier Automata’s story, but I think that’s mostly because I enjoy camp/anime trash. I can definitely see why it wouldn’t be appealing if you went in looking for a more well put together story. That said, I don’t really remember the gameplay well enough to have an opinion on it.

To the point about being more granular with the difficulty settings: I’d definitely like that if it were done well. There are some types of gameplay I really enjoy and some which I don’t and depending on how intrusive the parts I don’t like are, I either put up with it or it’s enough to make me abandon the game. For me, while I like games that make me think and make decisions like RPGs, card games, strategy games, etc, I get really overwhelmed by too much complexity. I like games which enable me to make deep decisions using relatively simple interactions. So there are almost certainly some games I’d play if I could flip a switch that hid/automated all of the stuff like making complicated character builds and just let me do the parts I like. The game that actually prompted this thread was Expedition 33. I really wanted to play it because of all the good reviews it got and I enjoyed the combat, story, setting, etc. But I just got exhausted by having to mess around with the character builds. I supose I could have just looked up some builds online and who knows? Maybe I’ll go back to it some day and do that, but it would have been nice if there were a difficulty option that just said “Choose my skills/passives.” That way I could still engage with the combat at a level that was challenging for me without getting overwhelmed by the build stuff.

I played BG3 twice but I bounced off of E33. But I’m not as much of a fan of JRPGs so /shrug. I might go back to it at some point though.

I don’t know what to expect with this. Probability of it turning out good feels low. It looks like it’s just gonna be a lot of action. I didn’t get much personality from the trailer. I’d hope they add in the weird stuff. Although I guess Sekiro had less of that than Souls or Elden Ring.

It’s impressive how much the show can mix up its art style and level of detail. Lower res for the anime bits. Super high detail/realistic lighting for the camera bits, etc.

It’s been interesting getting to see more of Marin’s life/friend group and how they look in on their relationship. There’s that contrast between Gojo’s fears of how people judge his interests with how relatively reasonable everyone has been. It feels like that girl from his childhood was the anomaly, although it could also be that it was more common and most people just grew out of it after a certain point. That was kind of my school experience. By sometime in late high school the people who used to be bullies just kind of stopped. We didn’t suddenly become friends, but they didn’t go out of their way to cause problems for me either.

It makes me wonder if that girl is going to show up again for some character arc that reckons with their past or if that’s just not something the show wants to tackle now that it’s settled into a groove.

At this rate Gojo is going to be the last person to know that they’re dating. :P

Personally I think they’re still playing catchup from their launch commitments, but what’s been added so far has been pretty good. Season 2 expanded out the endgame content and crafting loop by a lot. This season looks a bit tamer in the grand scheme of things. A relatively smaller endgame content system with some new loot. Some class reworks. A new chapter in a still unfinished campaign.

Tech-wise I haven’t really had problems with it after the first few days of s2’s launch, but new patches always come with new bugs, so I’d expect some instability at s3 launch.

Also like others said, they got bought out so………………. Yeah… we’ll see what happens with that.

I tried it out when the testing started. It’s… fine. I’m not much of a shooter/action game player, so the higher skill elements of it are a bit of a barrier on top of re-learning a lot of DoTA-type stuff. I can imagine getting into it more if it came out years ago. But now it’s hard to find the time and motivation I’d need to dedicate to even get back to the level of incompetence I had with DoTA.

It’s really hard for me to separate my nostalgia for older games with what I’d think about them now. There are some games I’ve played a LOT but haven’t touched in years for one reason or another.

Some pre-Steam games would be things like Halo 3, World of Warcraft, Runescape, and few Pokemon games.

On Steam my most played game BY FAR is DoTA 2 at ~2100 hours. I loved that game and I still think it’s really well designed… I just haven’t played it in years because it makes me too mad to play with randos and it’s impossible to get 5 friends who play DoTA online at the same time anymore.

If I was going to pick a top 3 outside of those nostalgic outliers, maybe:

• Slay The Spire
• Dark Souls
• Deep Rock Galactic

Some of my favorite shows of the last few seasons have been unexpected. Off the top of my head right now the two I’m thinking of are Apocalypse Hotel and Snack Basue. I’ll maybe add some more later when I have time to look at my list to remind me.

First I can think of is the end of K-On! I watched the show for the first time in my senior year of college, so that feeling of having to go away from the friends I had made in my time there was pretty significant.

Some random others off the top of my head:

Frieren for kind of the same reason.

Violet Evergarden, especially the episode about the mom writing to her daughter.

Grave of the Fireflies.

Probably some others I’m forgetting.

Quite frankly I had such a high Inland Empire on my playthrough that the only things I’m sure are real are the things Kim or my good friend Horrific Necktie backed me up on.