Elden Ring. Although that’s only because I didn’t want to start a whole new character for the DLC. Does Nier Automata count? All the extra playthroughs are kind of just part of the complete experience of the story. Then there’s harder difficulties of roguelikes like StS.
Beyond that, I tend to not end up being that interested in a NG+ unless there’s something substantially different about it like new story beats or I can play a cool build.
Game mechanic patents are such an unbelievable joke it’s hard to understand how any court could take them seriously. “Yes your honor. As you can see, we own the exclusive rights to the idea of throwing a ball at a creature in a video game.”
Oh so the turnout last time was 100%? I guess someone should go fix the data then.
By “popular vote,” you mean the % of people who voted. I’m talking about the country overall. Which includes people who didn’t get off work, have a handful of understaffed polling places, no good public transportation to get them to polling places, imprisoned people, people screwed my voter registration laws, etc. and that’s not even counting people too young to vote.
Your view only makes sense if you ignore literally everything about the broken US electoral system and all the other systems that touch it.
If you completely ignore how the electoral system works, sure. Back in reality, we have elections which, largely due to voter disenfranchisement efforts, only at best only account for ~60% of the country, only about half of which go to the fascists. So less than a 1/3rd of the country, and even that comes with the caveat that their other option sucks too.
They only get power because the system is set up to favor them and the state needs to use violence to enforce the will of that minority on everyone else. We have the numbers to change things for the better, we just lack the organization to make that happen because of a century of efforts to violently repress those organizations and socially isolate people.
So you can keep being a misanthrope by pretending most of the people aren’t worth saving or you can recognize your fellow humans and work with them to do something about it.
Even if someone wins an election by a lot, the nature of voter turnout in the US means they at best represent like a third of the people. The fascists don’t outnumber us in reality, just in a political system that will allow them into power before even a social democrat.
It’ll be one of those photos from a ride at a theme park where everyone is screaming in terror.
I played through the game long after it had been patched up. I enjoyed it enough. When Phantom Liberty released I went back to start a new save to play it and after playing through the different character background introductory bit I realized it just wasn’t going to be that different of an experience the second time around. So I just loaded up my endgame save for the DLC. I had fun with that, but going around with a maxed out character blowing everything up with a shotgun definitely trivialized things.
Not a niche game, but: day (???) of waiting for Sony to put Bloodborne on PC.
Also, this is a bit of a tangent, but I really wish Nintendo would start putting some of their games on PC. Not even so that I can play them, I do have a switch, but because there are quite a few of them that just don’t do well on console, either performance-wise or in terms of UX. For example, I’ve been playing the new Zelda game. The game’s core mechanic involves scrolling through a MASSIVE list of objects to find what you’re looking for and the best solution the game has for this is a handful of sorting options that only get you so far when there are just this many things. Without changing any of the gameplay, you could make the experience soooo much better by:
Some games just deserve better treatment than what they got from the limitations of their original platforms.
Yeah I think you’re right to some extent. It’s definitely harder to get invested in the ones with no or less VA. However, I think there’s also something to be said for the tutorials/starts of these games. The Larian games I’ve played had relatively punchy tutorials that lead into a nice amount of structured freedom very early into the experience. Disco Elsyium also gets you into the the thick of things without much explicit tutorializing because it’s so mechanic light your “tutorial” ends up just being gradual introduction to your main characters, the setting, and the case, which is what you’re here for anyway.
The other CRPGs have hit me with the double whammy of tutorials that lead me by the nose for way too long while also just dumping paragraphs of exposition on me that have almost nothing to do with the immediate characters or plot.
EDIT: Thinking about it a bit more: While you don’t need all the voice acting and cinematic to make good, dramatic, character focused story bits, I think the converse is true: It would have been a waste to get all these great VAs only to have them stand around and dryly deliver exposition. So it kind of had to be very character focused if it was going to work and be worth the effort.
Imagine how much worse the start of BG3 would be if you run into Laezel and you just stop for like 5 minutes while you exhaust all her dialgogue options so she can explain the entire history of the Gith and the Ilithid. Even fully voice acted that would have killed the pacing.
The funny thing for me with CRPGs: DOS2 was the first one I played and I really liked it. Followed up again with BG 3 when that came out. Since then I’ve tried a bunch of other CRPGs and… I don’t think I actually like CRPGs. I just like Larian. The one exception is Disco Elysium, but that’s so far removed from most others of the genre because it has no combat.
I feel like at different times either the Klingon or Romulans kind of stand in for the Soviets. Certainly TNG onward the Klingons shift in their representation and the Romulans stay as that analogue to a secretive geopolitical rival that they maintain an uneasy peace with.
Yeah I guess. Although I guess the question is how much energy does warp drive use or how much energy does the engine output given some amount of dilithium or whatever? No real way to know since it’s sci-fi. As far as I know the only physics we have on this is that paper that showed you’d need negative energy to make warp happen. Which is obviously not super helpful for figuring out what it would be in the hypothetical world of Star Trek where they found some way to make it physically possible.
I just imagine that their energy production has to be absolutely insane for warp travel to not only be feasible, but a fairly common thing more akin to launching a boat than a NASA mission.
Yeah this feels like a critique from someone who’s never watched Star Trek.
The bit about the food is pretty funny. Like sure, a few times people have mentioned liking some non-replicated food better, but in general it seems like it’s about as good as the real thing and you can get ANYTHING you want anywhere you have a replicator without needing the skills of a chef.
Then there’s Voyager where the crew prefers to use their limited replicator rations rather than eat the slop Neelix makes lol. Actually, that’s something that never made sense to me: Why were they so limited on replicator usage? Doesn’t it just convert energy into matter from the reactor powerful enough to power a warp drive? In general I find it kind of silly when they turn off the lights and stuff to “conserve power” when there’s trouble. Like the lights are drawing any meaningful amount of power compared to warping the fabric of time and space.
The problem is not seeing a problem with any of that before the bit about talking to spooky foreigners.
The rich and powerful having this much control over our government, communications, and our economic lives in general is THE problem. Full stop. What they decide to do with that power is beside the point. There’s no such thing as a good king.
Accidentally deleted comment, here it is again:
Enterprise (the last of the 90s era of trek shows) is a prequel which is set I think about 100 years after the Vulcans make first contact with humans. You get a little of that initial meeting, but mostly the show only talks about their relationship up until that point as historical context for their current situation. Basically, the Vulcans stuck around Earth to help out and keep an eye on humanity to try to make sure they were “ready” for warp travel. Although they don’t directly share any science behind their more developed warp technology.
I don’t get the sense that there was ever really a popular backlash to them being there, but there seemed to be a little resentment at least within the space program about how they felt that the Vulcans were being too paternalistic and holding them back. When they finally make the call to go on their first interstellar mission in the first episode, it’s against the recommendations of the cautious Vulcan delegation to Earth.
The series itself is kind of a mixed bag. This is sort of the start of TV Trek turning more towards action shlock, but there were still plenty of good episodes in there and it was interesting seeing the process of the federation coming together from disparate civilizations that had to work through their differences. It’s definitely a different feeling than showing up to a planet, meeting some weird aliens, then never talking to them again.
Enterprise (the last of the 90s era of trek shows) is a prequel which is set I think about 100 years after the Vulcans make first contact with humans. You get a little of that initial meeting, but mostly the show only talks about their relationship up until that point as historical context for their current situation. Basically, the Vulcans stuck around Earth to help out and keep an eye on humanity to try to make sure they were “ready” for warp travel. Although they don’t directly share any science behind their more developed warp technology.
I don’t get the sense that there was ever really a popular backlash to them being there, but there seemed to be a little resentment at least within the space program about how they felt that the Vulcans were being too paternalistic and holding them back. When they finally make the call to go on their first interstellar mission in the first episode, it’s against the recommendations of the cautious Vulcan delegation to Earth.
The series itself is kind of a mixed bag. This is sort of the start of TV Trek turning more towards action shlock, but there were still plenty of good episodes in there and it was interesting seeing the process of the federation coming together from disparate civilizations that had to work through their differences. It’s definitely a different feeling than showing up to a planet, meeting some weird aliens, then never talking to them again.
Does Star Trek count? I would be remiss for not bringing up Star Trek given the opportunity to insert it into a conversation. I bet the aliens will love that.
OOTL: I’m confused. What is this? I’ve been using Firefox for years and I have no idea what this button is/was or why people would be annoyed by it.
Only have a beginner perspective, but in school I did really well in intro CS class that used Python. 2nd class was in Java and it almost broke me I was so confused.