Honestly, I’m not even a fan of this take. This essentially boils down to “I don’t care if a company has shitty business practices as long as only people dumber than me fall for them.”

Cosmetic and P2W MTX needs to go in all cases. The only thing people should be asked to pay for is additional game content (actual gameplay content, not just cosmetics) developed after launch.

One more year! One more year!

Users could choose their own color scheme, default was a light blue.

Which red, blue, yellow, and green icon on a white background are you looking for?

Congrats on 1 year!

As someone who never has much time to play games these days, honestly just seeing your posts has helped keep the passion alive. I love seeing all of these games I enjoy still being appreciated today. Thank you!

In the US at least, they actually do, in many cases. If you are in a drought region, your water utilities can be shut off if you’re wasting it all on watering a lawn or filling a swimming pool, for example. ISPs cut people off all the time for torrenting, sometimes even if it’s not pirated content (though it was ruled not long ago that ISPs aren’t utilities anyways).

They’re saying that is the reverse argument, not the state of things today. As in, the only solution to the above would be to force payment processors to do business with anyone and everyone.

Butter emails!

Inside was better than Limbo for me, if that helps. Limbo was cool, but Inside had crazy atmospheric storytelling.

The worst part is that I am getting paid a salary I could have only dreamed about years ago, and yet I still can’t afford anything with how drastically everything went up in price.

Wages in general have gone up a little bit, but it’s crazy to me that I’m earning more than 5x as much as I used to 15 years ago and feel like my buying power has not noticeably improved at all. I’m still stuck living in crappy apartments because that is all I can afford.

Agreed, especially on the psyops front. It’s no secret that Russia has been manipulating global politics for a long time now, and France is another European country which has seen a rising Russia-friendly neofascist movement in Rassemblement National. They’ve just barely been kept out of power the past few election, but as their numbers keep growing, one must only wonder how much longer that can be the case.

Similar with Germany and AfD. Europe is being worn down from within and no one seems to be inclined to do anything about it.

Night and day difference between game Bill and show Bill, too. Both characters are interesting explorations of attachment vs isolation in their own ways.

Oh, banana!

Agreed, I think it also hurts the games trying to even have a singular “villain” in the first place. Halo 1-3 had villainous figures, but I don’t think anyone was under the belief that just killing the 3 Prophets would solve the problem of the Covenant, or that killing the Gravemind would mean that the Flood would never be a problem again. The Halo series relies on having compelling factions with clear purpose and ideology to act as antagonists in a more general sense.

The Prometheans in 4 weren’t bad, but outside of the Didact, they had no real purpose or personality. They were just an obstacle. I was really looking forward to the premise of 5 with the concept of going rogue and tackling the underlying themes of fascism at the heart of the UNMC, but then it just rapidly pivoted to some other garbage with Cortana and the Guardians which led to nothing in the end anyways. And so I didn’t even bother to play Infinite.

Do you mean 343/Halo Studios or is 545 some sort of reference I’m missing?

You can!

Worth noting for anyone looking to play both N64 games is that OoT Gerudo stay stunned indefinitely (until the area is reloaded) but the Pirates in Majora’s Mask who are borrowed from the Gerudo guards only stay stunned for a short time before getting back up.

This incentizes use of the Stone Mask, which can be obtained from the invisible guard by giving him a red potion. If playing the N64 version, he is located outside of Ikana Graveyard, which is a place that you can get to at that point in the game but many might not have bothered exploring yet. In the 3DS version, they moved him directly into Pirates Fortress so he’s harder to miss, but it does require just a little bit of stealth to get to where he is first.

Am I crazy or are the shades of blue in the key of that graph completely different from the shades of blue in the graph itself?

The people you’re messaging might, though.

I just think it stopped being a good deal the moment they implemented their first price increase. That signalled that they’re willing to do what every other subscription service does and raise prices as arbitrarily high as people are willing to pay, with the enticement being that once you’re in deep enough, you can’t unsub or you’re left with no games.

If you have copious time for gaming and are always on the hunt for sometbing new, is it still a better deal than buying every game at release? Sure, at least for now. But the patient gaming strat at least gives me a backlog of affordable titles too long to finish them all, and I can also return to it at any time without worrying about titles eventually disappearing from a subscription catalog.

Same here in Massachusetts back in 2020.

It’s not necessarily a GOP vs Dem issue, it’s dominant parties worried that giving voters more choice will weaken their control.