It’s digital snake oil.

Products or services that act as fig leaves for C-suites are a growth industry.

Deck Nine is also on this, and I thought their Life is Strange games were pretty good (Before the Storm, True Colors).

Ultimately, this is one of those things that needs subjective judgment and community ambassadors to be handled effectively. That requires human labor with high turnover.

I’m sure at some point one of the big players in the especially bad spaces (like MOBAs) will figure out how to do it on the cheap and create a market efficiency. But until then, all the profit chasers are allergic to creating actual jobs to solve the problem.

I do the tourist thing now with WoW but I’m still talking with players, especially since my duo partner never stops playing.

Less so now, though, since /r/wow was where I participated the most.

Zero chance this would pay better than even something like Mturk.

And yet, content quality on Reddit will tank even further because people will shitpost for pennies.

I was selling countless pre-orders at retail going back to 2001. I don’t know when this mythical time would have been either.

Ultimately, the vast majority of people making pre-orders aren’t here, on reddit, or any gaming community. And frankly, with the rate at which physical print runs are shrinking, people are going to find they will need to pre-order if they want a physical copy of anything not AAA.

Xenogears is my favorite romance story in gaming. Amazing depth to it.

I also liked the Bastila romance plot in Knights of the Old Republic. Some neat Force shenanigans going on there. Tali is my favorite self-insert Bioware romance, though.

My dude with the Xenogears shout-out.

Why I left mine intact. The Reddit “library,” as it were, remains one of the largest and most significant public goods online. I think that’s more important than burning my contributions in the hopes that Reddit management will do a 180. I also pinned a post advertising kbin/lemmy and Squabbles on my profile.

I’m certainly no longer participating, however, and I don’t think Reddit’s built to survive only on visitors from Google.

With Atlus announcing that they are going to add voice lines to all the S-Link level up scenes, I’m guessing that’s why FeMC didn’t get included. They said this will already have the most voice lines of any Persona game. Adding FeMC’s S-Links to that would have been a lot more lines on top of that.

Whether or not expanding the voicing was a better move than not including FeMC is another question entirely.

It still makes sense if Reddit’s negotiation with the subscription-based third-party apps was never in good faith and this was always about killing them.

If you’re into strategy RPGs, Tactics Ogre had a recent remaster and it has more side/postgame content than the story campaign does.

Triangle Strategy also has a lot to see, but that’s more along the lines of seeing branching story paths you missed on replays rather than actual side content.

My worst ever is a gout flare that I got in my knee once. That’s when I discovered I don’t like morphine.

But yeah, I’ve had sciatic issues associated with spinal disease, a three-hour tooth extraction, a section of flayed skin. All of that doesn’t compare to gout.

I think the one I have the most nostalgia for is Destiny of an Emperor. The main boss theme is instantly transporting for me. That 8-bit Capcom sound is so iconic.

Final Fantasy IV is what truly got me to fall in love with the genre, though. It was one of my first 16-bit games, so I was blown away by the graphics and especially the music.

Freelancer and Freespace 2 were also peak space sim for me.

Getting about 10 hours in before dropping it, I had two big issues with Everspace 2: experience level progression and immersion.

Once I got to a new system, everything was high level, and in ES2, the level scaling means it’s more of a wall than a slaughter. There’s also no experience point rubber banding to make it worth your while.

I really enjoyed the story so far, more than Freelancer (not exactly a high bar), but I’m at a point now where I have to grind levels to continue. The above already makes me not want to, and then there are immersion problems on top of that.

In Freelancer, the whole system was loading screen free as long as I wasn’t docking. I don’t think I realized how big a deal that was until now. The transitions in and out of “jump drive space” in ES2 are a stark reminder that you’re flying from node to node, and not cruising through a star system. Other little things when off the main questline like lack of radio chatter, no consequences for looting stations, and low traffic add to the immersion problem.

I’ll probably come back to it eventually as it’s good enough, but that’s only because virtually no one is making this kind of game anymore. It feels like it wouldn’t much to surpass this game.

Would be nice, but antitrust has been feckless in the US for so long that I’ll take it where I can get it.

FF4 was also from an era where keeping scripts concise was part of saving on costs.

Playing third or fourth gen RPGs is certainly going to make virtually any RPG made today seem slow.

This pace is down quite a bit from the original. With this and Live A Live having a relatively poor showing in Japan, I have to wonder if the future of the HD-2D experiment hinges on the performance of Dragon Quest III.

Hard to pick just a few tracks, but some of my favorite original soundtracks are:

Nier Gestalt
Persona 5
The Witcher 3
Stellaris

For licensed ones, I particularly like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Life is Strange: Before the Storm.

CP2077 has the best character creator music I’ve heard by a mile. Great for someone like me that spends over an hour in that sort of thing.

Dune was outstanding. If you haven’t heard “Arrakis (Wormsign Remix)” from OCRemix, check it out.