Hah. If it makes the active militant feel better, Meta lost a bunch of money basically giving away all those Quest 2’s and the only thing they’ll get from you by having a Meta account only for your Quest is that you bought one and didn’t buy any software in their store.
Bonus points for your “money is support” tally if you use Steam Link for wireless play instead of Oculus Link.
With the Meta Quest 3S coming out this holidays you may be able to get a used Quest 2 dirt cheap, and that’ll do just fine to play PC games.
I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…
I very much support Ukraine in the war, but… yeah, that’s horrifying. Just on a human level.
I mean, some of those end on a closeup of somebody’s face. That’s up there as some of the most haunting shit I’ve ever seen. I’ll be thinking about that for a very long time.
Right. So Trump and Musk actively advocating for eradicating income tax and dismantling the government is the same thing as Harris winning and not doing that because the framework of the system is capitalistic and them not blowing up the US economy enables rich people to keep being rich.
That’s the argument.
That is the least serious argument I believe I’ve ever heard. It is a magnificent crystal of disingenuousness. If you could compress unserious, fallacious political arguments into diamonds, they would be that train of thought.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is absurd whenever it pops up. Like, it was absurd on the spectrum of relative centrist Obama against relative centrist McCain. But Trump vs Harris? The degree of detachment is cosmic.
Anyway, adults have an actual real political system to worry about, so you do you. We can always pick this one up after the election if some semblance of liberal democracy remains to worry about.
I mean, one of the two sides is putting forward the poster boy for rich people as a candidate and is largely bankrolled by the richest person on Earth.
So… “vote for whoever” seems like it implies forgetting who the real enemy is by definition.
I moved to a snow city for the first time well into adulthood.
The big thing I have for you is that walking on snow is awesome for like two hours and then it’s constantly threatening to kill you. Slippery sludge or ice is the worst feeling in the universe and all the locals will just strut right over it like it’s nothing while you’re fighting for your life.
Just buy good shoes and plant your feet vertically, no sliding motions.
About damn time.
This thing is my favorite MMO by some margin and it’s not even a MMO at all.
Yeah, in some ways I think playable content vs cosmetics is a more functional distinction than DLC (or MTX) vs expansions. The big thing that changed is that games now will sell you visual items for bragging rights, rather than stuff for you to play.
I would suggest that not buying those is a good idea, but clearly a bunch of teens and rich people disagree with me on that one.
See, this is the part where I’m not going to dismiss your experience, because a lot of this was super regional, but I’m going to say my experience was not that at all.
I definitely spent most of the money I put in arcades AFTER I had a 16 bit console. The “arcade>marketing>console port” hype cycle went on for a decade after the NES first became a thing.
And Live Gold is just a sign of something that was going on everywhere. The first free to play hits were happening, WoW was taking over the world and making GaaS mainstream… and yeah, online gaming was becoming a thing on consoles and getting monetized in brand new ways.
But also, I’d say expansions were a thing way before DLC became a dirty word. Because Groundhog Day I distinctly remember having conversations with angry nerds in the mid 2000s explaining that there wasn’t much of a difference between DLC and a lot of the expansion packs and shovelware content expansions being pushed around all through the late 90s.
And of course there are tons of games you can buy as a complete thing. As I said above, I’ve been playing Silent Hill 2, Metaphor and a bunch of other stuff that is very classic in its structure. Another constant of gaming nerdrage is that people don’t care if what they like continues to exist, they are mostly clamoring for the things they dislike not existing, which I’ve never been on board with.
Well, we’ve gone from 24 and 5 to a 10 year compromise, so we can agree to disagree on that basis.
That said, I do disagree. You are underestimating how relevant arcades were in 2001. Soul Calibur may have been an early example of the home game being seen as better than the arcade game in 1999, but it was an arcade game first, I had played the crap out of it by the time it hit the Dreamcast.
And I was certainly aware of Maple Story before it was officially released here. And of course I mentioned WoW as the launch of the GaaS movement, but that’s not strictly accurate, I personally know people who lost a fortune to their extremely expensive Ultima Online addiction in 1997/98.
I am still not convinced that the experience of those gamers was any better or worse, me having been there in person. The kids in my life seem perfectly content with their Animal Crossings, Minecrafts and even Robloxes. The millions of people in Fortnite don’t seem mad about it. I sure was angrier about that Resident Evil business at the time than people are about the Resident Evil remakes now. Hell, I got pulled from playing a fantastic remake of Silent Hill 2 by an even better JRPG in Metaphor ReFantazio, and neither of those games features any MTX or service stuff. And of course that’s not mentioning the horde of games in the 20-40 range that are way better and more affordable than anything I had access to in the 90s.
People are nostalgic of the nostalgia times, reasonable or not, and time has a way of filtering out the nastiness, especially if you were too young to notice it. I was wired enough to hear the lamentations of the European game development community being washed away by Nintendo and Sega’s hostile takeover of the industry and their aggressive imposition of unaffordable licensing fees. I was aware of the bullshit design principles being deployed to milk kids of their money in arcades. I had strong opinions about expansion packs and cartridge prices. It’s always been a business, it’s always been run by businessmen.
Best you can do is play the stuff that’s good and ignore the rest.
Second best you can do is be publicly mad at the business driving unreasonable regulations that are meant to do the public a disservice.
Third best you can do is start archiving pirated romsets to privately preserve gaming history, blemishes and all, so we get to keep having this argument when the next generation of gamers are out there claiming that Fortnite used to be cool when it was free and had a bunch of games in there instead of requiring you to sign off your DNA to be cloned for offplanet labor or whatever this is heading towards.
They absolutely do. The market is full of remasters, remakes and re-releases. Having the originals readily available presumably diminishes the value of those, by the count of publishers.
That is not the same as saying that old games are available. Most of them are not, the market keeps reissuing the same handful of hits and landmark games (although we’re in an era of deep cuts now, we even have a Pocky & Rocky remaster, somehow). But they can’t set up regulations where you are allowed to lend out Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin but not Resident Evil 2, so here we are.
No, I’m arguing that if you’re trying to identify an era where the industry at large was not overmonetizing that’s your timeframe: From the death of arcades to the birth of modern casual gaming/F2P/Subscription services. By the numbers that’d be 2001-2005.
Before then you have arcades acting as the first window of monetization, where a whole bunch of console games started and where a lot of the investment went. After that you’re balls deep in modern gaming, with games as a service that are still live today, from World of Warcraft to Maple Story.
That’s a handful of years, at best. Any other interpretation has to ignore huge chunks of the industry that were behaving in the same way that makes people complain today. Either you dismiss arcade gaming despite it being the tentpole of the entire industry or you’re dismissing the fact that subscription and MTX games were already dominating big chunks of the space.
So no, it’s not 24 years. It never was 24 years.
And for the record, we knew at the time. We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997. I’ve been stuck in nerdrage Groundhog Day for thirty years.
Well, no, we’re talking about everything. Everything before 2010, explicitly.
I would guess most people just fill in whatever moment of their childhood there was when they would buy a thing and enjoy a thing and not worry about it too much.
Me being me (see the old codger self-identification up there), I substitute in the late 80s and 90s, when I would plead and beg for coins to squeeze in another 60 second gaming session and then go on to save for months in order to get a lesser version of that same experience at home for anywhere between 60 and 90 bucks (140-220 adjusted for inflation).
In the grand scheme of my memories, the five years after arcades were relevant and before Microsoft started charging a monthly fee to play online and Facebook started a games division are too short of a blip to consider a golden age. My nostalgia is on ranting angrily about having to purchase Street Fighter 2 for the fourth time and having Capcom re-sell the PSOne version of Resident Evil a third time for the privilege of having added analogue stick controls.
They really want to force gamers to buy the old games, just as they were, because those are next to free to adapt to a different platform and people will pay for them.
Not to be my usual old codger, but a lot of these game in questions were microtransaction-based to being with, in the very Farmville-y format of charging you a quarter for each set of three lives and then being ungodly broken and difficult to make sure those three lives didn’t last any longer than a minute each and entice you to pay for three more.
This absolutely sucks, is based on unjustifiable logic and takes the side of business over a demonstrable common good, but let’s not pretend the business logic behind it was invented in 2005. Game publishers have been game publishers longer than many of the nostalgic posters have been alive.
That’s fair. I do see how it being nominally a new IP instead of a numbered sequel the ways it overlaps with Persona feel like a bit of treading water.
For me there is way more than enough to separate it, though. The bonkers story alone and the super political spin on it are crazy, plus the gameplay ends up being different enough.
But yeah, it’s pretty much one of those. Still better than going full action RPG like Square has done with its franchises, though.
Ah, yeah, but the fun bit is that there are a ton of builds that let you get there. HP-based skills are powerful in this, and you can heal for cheap, so you can get there that way, and once you get a bit overlevelled and can kill mobs out of turn-based combat you’re just cruising.
I may see what happens on harder difficulties, but I genuinely don’t care too much, because just the mechanics of figuring out the sequence for each dungeon and enemy type is so fun to do with the brilliant UI that I just… enjoy doing it, kinda like you enjoy clicking things on Diablo or something. Truly smooth design.
I just wish they had figured out antialiasing better, because woof. I ended up injecting better AA through ReShade and never looked back.
Just because you can grind money easily or some other reason?
In any case on Normal I haven’t felt it at all, mostly because I’ve been single-day completing most dungeons and that gets you a bit overleveled.
But it’s still a lot faster and tighter than Persona on that front. And more flexible and nonlinear, too. For what looks like a long game, this thing moves. Much fewer, shorter stretches of just visual novelling with friends (although there’s plenty of that, too).
Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing.
I doesn’t look like it needs my help, because it’s doing pretty well, but damn, it’s good.
Maybe too much anxiety to play a game in which you’re running for office in a fantasy land, at least until November, but… yeah, it’s bonkers and it’s well written and it’s by far the most political game the Persona-adjacent studios have ever done in some really fun ways.
Also a triumph of UI. Not only does it look great, it’s so frictionless. It’s a turn-based JRPG and it plays faster and more smoothly than that abomination of an action game Square tried to pass as a Final Fantasy VII remake by orders of magnitude. Seriously, go play it if you’re at all interested in that corner of gaming.
I mean, up to you. As I said above, it’s not like owning one of those means actively supporting Facebook or whatever. I find the whole “engaging with these companies products implies endorsing them” capitalist view of money as support very strange, but I know it’s popular these days, particularly in anglo cultures.
But like I said above, it’s not like a Meta account used for a Quest used on PC will give Meta any view on your data, or like they would have made any money out of you from a device they built at a massive loss that you’re then purchasing used. But hey, you do you. There are other older, crappier headsets you can buy used, but Quest 2 listings out there start at sixty bucks, which is absolutely nuts for what they are.