A strictly anti-capitalist fever dream adventure RPG getting completely consumed and milked by greedy capitalists who added nothing of value to its creation is peak this timeline.

Not sure how you can talk about “the big three” of condiments and leave out mayo. Is it just non-existant outside of North America or something?

This.

Nothing says “I have fulfilled my social obligation, but I don’t give a shit about you” more than a low value giftcard for somewhere generic.

Alternatively, give him a halfway decent gift and feel better about yourself for not continuing the cycle of neglect, even when he won’t appreciate it. We can make the world better, even for those of us that don’t deserve it, and considering how to make it a better place as opposed to how to get back at the people who make it a worse one is just a better use of our time and energy.

Besides, at the end of the day, truly awful people already live with the worst punishment so could imagine: having to wake up every morning and continue being themselves.

I take “nice” to mean something very different than “good” or “kind”. No, I am not a nice person. I am inclined to be an honest asshole over a nice liar. I try my best to be good, kind, understanding, etc., but “nice” is, in my books, more about manners than good acts or genuine understanding. And I generally feel that time and effort spent on attempting to be “nice” is much better spent on genuinely empathizing with and supporting people, even when that support isn’t kind or well-mannered at a glance.

I think I just take issue with the word “nice”.

Infinite growth is referred to as cancer. Your friend is obviously right that we cannot sustain infinite growth, but it’s misguided to think that the only way out species can possibly survive to any length is by having more children and increasing our population year over year.

With improving technologies and automations, far less labour is required to achieve the same results. There is no reason we need an infinitely increasing population on our decidedly finite earth just to keep our species afloat. This would take a major restructuring of our social and economic systems to do correctly, otherwise we run the risk of centralized wealth mucking it all up, but the point remains that there’s no necessity to continue reproducing at the rate we have been. This supposed “need” for labour is just capitalist propaganda perpetuating the idea that work is inherently good, all designed to fuel an inherently exploitative economy. Line must go up, otherwise how can the privledged few assure that their net worth continues to grow exponentially?

Support an amazing “single-A” game that suffers none of the issues of modern enshittification by purchasing a physical copy.

OR

Refuse to hand any money to the mega corporation that shut down the studio responsible for the gem that is Hi-Fi Rush.

sweats nervously

The endgame Sephiroth fight was definitely forced. It reeked of “well, he’s been the secret antagonist all game, so we can’t just disclude him from the finale” kind of thinking.

I liked the more persistent villain lurking in Cloud’s broken mind, but they shouldn’t have felt the need to try and put a pseudo capstone on that story thread.

That’s so fascinating, tbh. I mean, different strokes, so I can’t judge, but it’s the impressively deep strategy they’ve baked into Remake’s combat that I am particularly impressed by. That said, it makes sense though that if you dislike Tales combat, you’d dislike Remake’s combat. They’re not the same persay, but they’re cut from the same cloth imo.

Calling the new game’s combat “mind-numbing” compared to a random encounter turn-based system is both peak irony and peak rose-tinted glasses.

I can’t get over just how much better Remake is compared to the original, so you do you, I guess. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised to see the ways they’re engaging with telling a different story and taking the name “remake” very literally. I was seriously concerned they were just going to sell the original story again in three seperate parts as full-price titles.

It’s weird because you’re both right and wrong.

It’s not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it’s advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, “you can play it forever”, etc. are are not present.

But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn’t suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I’d perhaps agree with your statement that it’s closer to AAA than to a “small dev” game, but it is true that it’s a “smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards”.

This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft’s gaming divisions. On the one hand, they’re cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: “this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have” while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.

“Fuck them, I’ve got mine” pro-capitalist mindset in the wild.

It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.

It’s literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can’t for the life of me understand how you can think it’s “easier” to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they’re already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.

Insane take imo. How does purchase authentication or cross play suddenly become “easier” with this change? Either it works or it doesn’t; having PC players connected to a PSN account doesn’t alleviate server load.

Sure, and I’m not suggesting said bean counter was responsible for the decision. What I am suggesting is that the only thing that influenced the decision was bottom line finances. Someone ran the numbers, and when the suits discovered that they stand to lose more money than they’d gain, they reversed the decision. Never mistake this as Sony “listening” to anything more than their investors and their bottom line.

How much less bullshit PC players are willing to put up with compared to their console counterparts, apparently.

I suspect someone in accounting ran the numbers and decided they stand to lose more to reduced microtransaction sales than they would have gained via selling scraped data.

Though I agreed with you. It’s still a win, but we have to be careful not to conflate this with Sony “caring”.

As of today, I am still able to log in. The next point I’m concerned about is the 30th, so we’ll be waiting a while, but I’ll do my best to update.

So, at first install, I actually linked my account to a PSN account that I knew was banned due to a charge back on an unwanted purchase. At the time, I figured if I discovered that I can’t play because my account is banned from PSN, I’d just refund on Steam. I feel I’ll be very justifiably pissed if my account is now banned from playing retroactively, long after the refund window.

Either “eating meat is fine because animal life is less valuable than people’s dietary needs/preferences,” or “vegetarianism is the only moral option, as all life is equally valuable,” but it seems to me like any answer in the middle is hypocrisy, no?

I dug into this more deeply in another response, but no. Life can be equally valuable and we can accept that evolution and history has led us to a place where we end life without feeling a sense of superiority over that life.

Imagine a poker game. You have been dealt a winning hand. You are incredibly confident of this and are correct to feel so. Are you a better person for winning that hand? Is this a signal that you’re not only expected to take the money of the others at the table, but permitted to do so because you are a better person?

We are the species that was dealt a better hand. This puts us in a position of power. This does not make us “better”, nor does it negate the value of those other lives, despite the position we find ourselves in. Yet we do, ultimately, get to collect as a result of that hand.