Ideally, Sony would handle the legal hurdles needed to allow PSN in multiple countries. But I imagine, as the publishers have invested tons of money into producing those singleplayer games, part of what they want in return is investment into the “PlayStation ecosystem”. Much like how Microsoft doesn’t care if people play their games on an Xbox, they just want an account.

Basically, I don’t think Sony is really in the business of putting down huge financial risks just to get the $60 entry tag of the rare singleplayer game they put out. Those games are meant to get you buying other Sony content as well.

I think there’s better patterns RPGs can use for them.

A lot of games now just put them wandering the world, and touching/attacking them prompts combat. Then, the game needs to invent various motivations for you to actually want to attack the enemy.

In a lot of games, they’re just genuinely in the way through tight corridors to a destination. A better approach can be to associate some kind of minor quest reward to directly pursuing the enemies.

But, then you get the problem that a lot of RPGs just have no interesting decisions to make in combat. And, participating in combat can lead to a slow wearing down of the party’s mana points, or the game’s equivalent. In many games, you only want to use the basic cure spell and auto-attack because you’ll survive fewer fights without mana rationing. It becomes counter-intuitive and less fun.

Some games resolve this well. Cosmic Star Heroine for instance, a short indie JRPG, heals you after every fight, and each combat is uniquely scripted in for pacing much like Chrono Triggwr.

If the original comic someone found is correct, now that word has been censored and re-edited in…

I’ll admit, I’ve kept no interest in the game or its sequel because the concept just sounds depressing. Similar to Dark Souls’ plot; “Life sucks, you accomplish nothing more than survival, and innocent people die anyway.”

“But I must!”
“Fine, well…at least take this whip. Oh, and learn the spell Hydro Storm, if you can.”

Possibly because the same person made two posts recently about it. I notice one is “Trailer 2”, but still.

I’ve started to hate the term “Hardest”.

Give me two months in Unity, and I can make a game that’s “harder” than every game on any one of these lists. It would also be unplayable trash, that would prompt hundreds of “How the fuck are you supposed to XXX” responses due to obscurity. Part of what makes those listed games enjoyable is having a decent difficulty curve, compelling progression of skill demonstration, and a good feeling of reward. They’re getting difficulty right.

Laughing Hyena

Setting aside the racism there, what exactly is the right’s obsession with Kamala’s laugh? I’ve heard “Cackling” as well.

Should I be inspired to hear that lord and savior Donald Trump never ever laughs - assuming that’s even true?

I totally get disinterest, but I get rubbed the wrong way when people “want games to fail”. I want the world to have more games that are good - and yes, occasionally those would come from publishers we traditionally grumble about.

I had no interest in Concord, but I’m not making video content laughing at its failure. I think that practice is a bit weird sometimes, and even victimizes some of the game devs that didn’t do anything wrong. I would guess at least 80% of Concord’a devs did their job well - just based around a bad concept.

I think I’ve gotten more than a little tired of the “guy walks in on girl bathing” trope in anime.

Like, somehow this is a world where no one knocks, and the first thing girls do in an unfamiliar environment is get a bath.

It’s one of those series that has expanded so far, with favoritism towards its characters, that they even decided to drop the name “Yakuza” in favor of the Japanese title, since so much of it has little to do with being a Yakuza anymore. Honestly, I can’t remember any game in which you’ve done actual Yakuza-like actions such as shaking down businesses, running loan shark scams, or executing hits. When you do end up making money, it’s through perfectly legitimate businesses whose biggest problem is “thugs keep attacking us!”

RGG studio: “We hear you…”

This is probably the biggest lesson against the gamer mindset of “Give the developers time to work, and they’ll polish it to a shine.” Sometimes, even time doesn’t improve the end product if the idea wasn’t great. It might even indicate that on some instances where publishers scrapped a ‘cool’ project that was in the works, it was actually the right call. It might have been a Concord waiting to happen.

Which perhaps makes the purchase more justifiable in Germany when you live within reach of the Autobahn…

I’ve always wanted to do this in video form - have a montage of heroic car ads that just crossfade together with tons of shots of those gas guzzlers sitting at red lights and in traffic.

FF14 has sort of an unwritten rule, that you should ignore all side quests that are represented with the plain gold circle. They’re not even worth the time for XP and rarely have anything interesting happen in them. It’d be interesting if the same rule applies for FF16.

Ruh roh.

Yeah, this is the funny thing; in some bizarre future where I run in politics, and someone does discover the weird stuff I’ve said in NSFW channels, I’d be like; “Yes, this is embarrassing, but still isn’t a big mark on my character.”

There’s a big gap between being into weird stuff that’s basically harmless, and actively enjoying the genuine denigrating/harm of others.

If we can work out which data conduits are patrolled more often by AI than by humans, we could intentionally flood those channels with AI content, and push Model Collapse along further. Get AI authors to not only vet for “true human content”, but also pay licensing fees for the use of that content. And then, hopefully, give the fuck up on their whole endeavor.

I sort of picture this happening more often at the graphical plateau. It used to be that these franchises needed big face lifts to stay relevant, but even that can sometimes happen with a lighting update.

The other reason might be if they want to do subtractive redesigns of the core concept but I’m still not sure what that should be for The Sims.