A little surprised to hear Zero Time Dilemma is seen as the weakest game of the trilogy. I played them all in a vacuum, never really engaging with the communities around the franchise, and I would never have said that myself.

If I had to pick, I’d argue that Virtue’s Last Reward was the “worst” one, but I am not happy about writing that. It was a great game that I enjoyed start to end, but ending on a “this will only make sense when the 3rd game releases in X years!” note leaves a really sour taste in my mouth. The other two games are complete experiences, and when I am playing a visual novel, the last thing I want is a cliffhanger “join us next time to find out!”

That said I think I enjoyed puzzles and philosophical musings of it the most out of the three? So my opinion is more about what was bad than what was good and should probably be discarded anyway.

I’ve gotta put this one out there because it will largely get overlooked every time the topic of “Visual Novel” gets brought up, but Digimon: Survive.

As a tactics RPG, it’s pretty mid. Character growth and customization exists, but isn’t quite as expansive as I’d like for that kind of game. It’s no Final Fantasy Tactics, for example, but comparing it to other tactics games doesn’t do it justice, because it’s one of the better-to-best written visual novels I have ever played.

Each of the endings explores the way small changes in circumstance can heavily impact people’s decisions, each of the characters and their partner monsters are oozing with personality, and some of the potential outcomes for each character represents some of the most wild, fucked up, and human emotional responses possible. Your decisions as the main character have minor impacts in the lines of which characters reach their end of their growth arcs, and which evolutions are available to your partner and some of your companions partners, and the collective value system limits which of the main branches you’re permitted to explore for your ending. Which it doesn’t boast the wide assortment of branching narrative paths that some visual novels take, it does still succeed in making your decisions feel like they matter.

And this is completely aside from the fact that it’s a Digimon game. A franchise widely viewed as “for children”, yet it engages with heavy existential themes and doesn’t shy from letting horrible things happen to good, and bad, people. People die, on screen, in ways I would not want small children to see. In a lot of ways, the game is a functional “reboot” of the franchise, sharing a lot of commonalities with Digimon Adventure, but using older characters, more serious mature themes, and never referencing the monsters as “digimon”. In fact, the term is only used once, during the epilogue of one of the endings, otherwise they’re referred to as Kemonogami, and treated like Yokai. They’re engrained in the history and legendsof the world, and it’s an amazing take on the franchise.

I’m gushing at this point, but what really matters is it’s an extremely well-written visual novel with competent enough Tactical RPG gameplay, and also currently on a rather deep Steam Sale. Cannot recommend it enough.

Why the hate?

Gosh people… Shutdown your brain

You can’t seriously be shocked that people are downvoting you when your only defense is “stop using that silly little brain to think”.

Human life expectancy has doubled in those couple hundred years. Believing that something is good just because it is old is absurd.

Alright, I’ll bite: what exactly is a “stonefruit” in this context? Google just says “fruits with large seeds that are basically rocks in the middle”, which I suspect is not the pseudo-intellectual flex your boss is going for?

It might be boring and obvious, but the speeds.

I used to have to plan ahead, set overnight downloads, very consciously and actively manage data rates and in general never plan around getting something. Today, I can get basically ANYTHING in less than an hour on FiOp. Most things, 5-10 minutes. Transfer rate has outscaled data size, and it’s fantastic.

Fantastic article.

I’ve got nothing against cosplay, but these right-wing nut jobs pretending to be Roman conqueror’s just take it too far.

Maybe if the game was anymore more than an uninspired mess, it would have sold some copies.

It kinda gets different when you’re talking about a series of actors intermingling in an environment designed by the seller. There are certain expectations for the experience that was sold to you, and another customer disregarding the social contract of what the expected environment is supposed to be like is problematic.

It’s like buying a ticket to go to a theatre. You expect the people around you to also use the product and environment in a way similiar to you. Someone on their phone, screaming at the movie, throwing their feet up on your chair, etc, isn’t okay, and the people who defend their selfishness with “I paid to be here, I can do what I want” deserve to be kicked out. Cheating on an online, competitive game is no different, and I expect such players to be kicked out so the rest of us can have the experience we were promised when we made our purchase.

Does this mean the game in question should have full control over the code you’re running on your machine? I mean absolutely not, no one is strip searching you at the entrance of the theatre, but there need to be some degree of limitations on how individuals interact with the shared environment that consumers are being offered. The theatre doesn’t allow you to take videos, and doesn’t give you access to a copy of the film to clip, or edit to your hearts content, and the notion that the consumer should have such rights seems insane. But taking an online game, editing the files, and then connecting to everyone else’s shared experience and forcing your version on others should be protected, because the code is running on your machine? To be clear, I don’t think you’re seriously suggesting that is the case, but therein lies the problem: there’s a lot of weird nuance when it comes to multiple consumers being provided a digital product like this. How they interact together is inherently a part of the sold product, so giving consumers free reign to do what they want once the product is in their hands doesn’t work the way it does with single player games, end user software, or physical products.

The real problem is the laziness of devs not hosting their own server environments, so I hear you there. But that is, unfortunately, a problem seperate from whether hackers should be held accountable for ruining a product for others.

So, AI that is strictly incapabale of generating new ideas is going to be fed decades of police reports as it’s database, and use that data to discern that makes a good police report?

Surely this won’t replicate decade old systematic problems with racial profiling. I mean, all these police reports are certainly objective, with no hint of bias to be found in the officers writing.

Sick. I’ve had Rollerdrome on my wishlist for a while now, but have never seen a good sale, nor found myself with the free time and desire to play it on the spot to demand a full price purchase. I will gladly pirate and experience this now.

I mean, fuck Take2, I’d rather be able to hand these people money for a good game, but in lieu of being able to do so, I am happy to oblige their request.

Came here to post this as well.

Just watch the first episode or two, and if it doesn’t have you hooked, it’s not your jam anyway.

But it will have you hooked, because it’s the best piece of American television in recent history.

The point of treating companies like people is so no one in those companies can be held accountable. The worst case for them that the intangible “coorporation” did something wrong and now it has to go away, so the entire board moves to a new company under a new name that owns the same properties and has the same practices. Only now they have practice obfuscating their crimes.

What ends lives and careers for people are just a minor inconvinience to coorporations.

It’s not a good article. I was following along until, 5 minutes in, it suddenly decided to be detailing and describing exactly what AI and LLMs are. Like, long after showing some of the ways it’s hurting the industry, presumably to pad words.

For every shitty article pushing AI hype out there, there’s a shittt article pushing AI hate. Extremism generates clicks.

I thinks there are some nuggets of good information in there. The bits on first-hand accounts from former and current Activision employees, and on how it’s mostly the concept artists that are hurt is interesting. But you really have to wade through a mound of shit to get there, and I genuinely don’t have the patience to wade through the second half and see if there any more truth in this soft mound of turd that Wired called journalism.

I like this. You’re good people.

BPM: Bullets Per Minute. A boomer shooter had an affair with he rhythm game genre and this was the outcome. Amazing game, assuming you don’t mind rhythm games, and an immaculate one if you actively like rhythm games.

Neon White is technically a shooter, but in most ways does not play or feel like one. It’s better described as a first person puzzle/platformer, but I would still recommend it, as it is an incredible game.

Both of the Doom ports run insanely well on the Switch. Seemingly impossibly well considering how dated the console is.

Warframe is good, free and playing surprisingly well on Switch.

Splatoon is just awesome.

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?

Hi-Fi Rush might genuinely be one of my favorite games of all time.

These guys did great, and I’ll be thinking twice about any Xbox product I consider purchasing in the future.

I just fucking want Elite to be good. I could shoot pirates and 'goids all day if getting a ship ready to do so wasn’t as enjoyable as running dental floss into my mouth and out my asshole.

As a “space games guy” is there anything out there that is as satisfying to simply fly around in as Elite Dangerous is without the absolute shit fuck of ass-backwards, tedious and boring mechanics?

I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS and VR headset, but I will be damned if I am going to roll around on a moon praying I trip over some precious metals just so I can play logistics hot potatoes trying to figure out how I am going to get my module to the relevant station, upgraded, and then placed into the ship I designed it for. Elite is such an incredible space cockpit sim, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent me from wanting to actually play it. I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.

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.