JDPoZ

When I bought my buddy’s used GameCube for like $50 back in 2005, he gave me an extra controller and Smash Bros. Melee with it.

Just on that game alone I logged more than 2,000 hours playing almost literally every day for 4 years alongside my dorm-mates and buddies.

That’s like… $0.02 and a half cents per hour… for a whole ass GameCube and a game.

…Best purchase I ever made.

The problem is the idea of working on games sounds amazing… and it allows them to pull in a constant fresh young pool of eager workers willing to completely destroy themselves to make their mark on the world and release something they’re passionate about…

And all these publicly traded ghoulish-MBA-run companies would rather have more cheap inexperienced “Pikmin” type workers to throw at endless “copycat-chase-whatever-concept-is-popular-and-constantly-pivot-toward-the-popular-right-now” type game projects than experts in their field with dozens of titles under their belt, decades of design, or artistic, or programming experience.

Actually Nintendo is one of the few companies who hasn’t burned out their designers - as easily exemplified by people like Shigeru Miyamoto literally having been there his entire life for more than 40 years at a single company.

This is something unheard of outside of companies like Nintendo, but also Japan in general. Even major industry figureheads like John Carmack, Ken Levine, Jason West and Vince Zampella (the guys who made Call of Duty that Bobby Kotick fucked over and then started Respawn and made Apex Legends - whose features Fortnite stole and added to their own game - just like Fortnite also did with PUBG) - all of whom no longer are at the original companies where they made multi-billion-dollar IPs possible… and then there’s guys like Cliff Blezinski who were on the literal front pages of game magazines and keynote speaking roles at industry events like E3 in the mid-2000s with Gears of War… who just literally quit making games after leaving Epic and then starting a studio that went out of business a few years back.

Nintendo’s biggest problem is that the old master game designers running the place basically don’t seem to “get” the internet… so they have dumb ideas about emulation and ROMs, online fan interactions and e-sports, terrible support for modern ancillary features indirectly related to gaming like voice chat, complex parental controls, advanced technical features like Dolby ATMOS sound, HDR color space, DLSS and modern shader pipelines.

The only thing I do NOT like about Elden Ring (and the From Software games in general) is the truly missable stuff that isn’t clearly shown as permanently missable until after you watch some YouTuber’s video talking about how after you cross this invisible line suddenly a bunch of NPCs die or disappear because of a story bit that action triggers without saying anything to you or warning you… this is real by the way and this is that line on the map.

If you go north of it, the DLC IRREVERSIBLY changes a lot of stuff with pretty much every NPC you have met up to this point

Another example of this though - in the base game, I really wanted to get that “raging wolf” armor set that you see in so many videos and images promoting the game but it turns out I progressed the story and killed the NPC who gives you that quest line before he gave it to me and I can’t go back and get it now unless I want to NG+ it and make the game even HARDER for myself…

…all that does is make me try harder, learn move sets, and watch videos from pros.

Yep. Same. I beat the first 🔥🗑️ this evening. Not a pro, but did make a how-to video.

To be fair, I learned it watching one of VattiVidya’s recent videos. Just summarized that one part and recorded myself on my PS5 doing it.

It’s that time again.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Slightly off-topic, but I really hate that the Rs are so goddamn horrific that the Ds can just gesture at how bad the Rs are and not actually do much tangibly for their voters compared to… say… like how LBJ did with the passing of the addition of Medicare and Medicaid to Social Security or FDR with the “Rural Electrification Act”… because they know that the alternative for voters not voting for them = enabling of fascists who will speedrun the 4th Reich.

I really wish the left was even half as powerful as what the demagogue-spouting right-wing news stations pretended.

Correct. We actually used to have MUCH higher taxes for corporations where all the write offs had to do with improvements to employee lives.

The idea was - either businesses should spend money on making things better for their employees or Uncle Sam will via taxing them.

…And he won’t do a goddamn thing about it legislation-wise. Hell, he won’t even SAY anything about it.

I really wish we would have elected the guy who - despite what he could or couldn’t have done in office - at least used the bully pulpit to call out the ghouls with dragon-like hoards of wealth that have put us all in a worse place than our parents were 60 years ago.

The neoliberal “we’re like the Republicans but as if it were still 1980” type Dems who have been in charge of the party for decades now should be scared out of their minds and doing whatever they can to get the apathetic would-be voters out and mobilized.

After what the MAGA fascist lunatics did to Paul Pelosi, Tammy Duckworth, and were GOING to do to them in the Capitol were they to have caught any of them, I can’t believe these idiots still think being rich will save them from these actual fascists if they lose in 2024.

Seriously, Jan 6th is going to end up looking instead like a dress rehearsal if Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and all the other “3rd-way” Ds don’t stop choosing appeasing capital when given the choice of trying to attract new working-class voters or attempting in vain at appeasing Republicans (who will NEVER choose “Republican-LITE” when they can get any actual R on the ticket).

Time is almost out. The increasingly large pile of historical comparisons are apt. The alarms are blaring.

For the love of all that is good, stop with the half-measure “going high when they go low one-time-partial-mail-in-rebate if you apply on our barely functioning website to request to see if you qualify” legislation and just straight up illegally pass an avalanche of populist actions designed to immediately tangibly address the needs of the working class so the Supreme Court is wasting months and political capital for the Rs trying to declare it all as not-legal even though it’s awesome… as soon as possible… or risk the literal end of democracy by allowing Trump the opportunity to disingenuously claim that he would do what only the furthest left Ds might even dare to suggest.