I don’t know if I would call mandatory facial recognition for children online “the right thing.”

I would say it is the parent’s responsibility to know what their child is doing and what platforms their child is using. If something horrible should happen, my first finger to point at would be the parents not doing anything to prevent it, usually out of negligence, not the Roblox company. A company can only do so much before they begin to assume control of responsibilities a parent has, and I would prefer governments and businesses have as little control over raising children as possible.

This is why many parents used to restrict children’s access to the internet to only when the parent can directly monitor it until they were an adult. Sometimes a “family computer” in a common room with the screen plainly visible was the one a child could use. Sadly, it appears this is no longer the case, and more and more parents are ignorant of what their children do.

If someone’s dog eats all the pills they left out on the counter and dies, it isn’t the fault of the dog and it isn’t the fault of the medical company that made the pills, its the fault of the owner for being negligent by not watching the dog and leaving the pills out. This is my opinion.

Nah, its a game mode for Vintage Story now.

I am only saying I got the same feeling when I played it as SF Adventures, which did turn out to be a different game originally. I can’t say for certain it is true about BotW, only that the feeling I had while playing the game was the same to me.

Everything Yoko Taro makes is totally not weird and completely normal. Its all of us that are weird, clearly.

I don’t know if that is true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

To me, it had the same feeling as Star Fox Adventures (which was actually Dinosaur Planet before it got the Star Fox branding). To me, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild also had the same feeling, as if it was deigned as a new game but Nintendo felt it would sell badly / was too close to Zelda so slapped the Zelda name on it.

Its not a bad game on its own if you ignore the title. But without the title, I would never be able to say it is a Silent Hill game.

I agree. As a Silent Hill fan, Silent Hill f was just a random action horror game skinwalking with the Silent Hill name. It was mid at best and had a lot of moments where I didn’t feel like I was playing a Silent Hill game at all. Which is extremely disappointing considering f was the one Silent Hill project I was actually excited about when Konami showed their other offerings (like Silent Hill Ascension, lol what a disaster that was).

Except the music. It was really cool music, so I can see it being nominated for that. I mean, it wasn’t really a Silent Hill OST, but the quality of the music was still good. Akira Yamaoka always makes bangers. At least it wasn’t Korn this time.

Must have been a really slow year given nearly every category has Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2, and Ghost of Yotei. Or the people that came up with the nominees only heard of those 3 games all year and decided to sprinkle in a few randoms to make it look like they have heard of more than 3 games this year.

I guess that would depend on the front end and game support. If it is any less user friendly than Xbox or Playstation, people wont want to use it Johnny Joe and Little Timmy don’t want to fiddle with a bunch of settings and constantly change stuff to get games working. The Steam Deck does okay but I still find sometimes it needs some… coercing… to get some games to work right.

If they dial it in right, everything should work properly out of the box without needing settings changes.

For Valve it would ideally lead to a new Steam account being created. Which would make sense if someone got one as a gift or something, naturally they would set up a Steam Account if they didnt already have one.

I don’t think Rei and Asuka hate each other. I think Rei doesn’t care and Asuka is jealous of Rei.

Something interesting to point out is that Russia was not originally granted a permanent UN seat. That seat was granted to the USSR. The USSR was dissolved in 1991 and the Russian Federation basically just announced that they would take the permanent seat granted to the USSR. Most countries in the UN accepted it without issue, but there was something important about this announcement that people may not know.

The Russian Federation being granted the former USSR’s permanent seat was conditional: the Russian Federation was required and expected to uphold the responsibilites that the USSR had, as well as the USSRs treaties and agreements. Failure to uphold those commitments would mean the Russian Federation was in breach of their agreement with the UN and should lose the seat formerly granted to the USSR.

The USSR, interestingly enough, had signed many treaties recognizing the borders of its successor states before it was dissolved, one of which being Georgia. Thus the actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia in 2008 violated one of these USSR agreements they are required to uphold. This was a direct violation and one that is technically grounds for removal of the UN, at least removal from a permanent seat.

However, its not that easy. The UN doesn’t actually have a protocol for removing a permanent seat member. It does, however, have a protocol for removing a member that repeatedly violates the UN charter, which does not specify that it does not apply to permanent members. This is a little more broad, and can extend to include the Russian Federation’s consistent abuse of its veto ability to shield itself and its allies from accountability, and its current actions in Ukraine that violate the Budapest Memorandum.

Sounds like their recent games that they claimed did so well probably didn’t actually, and that’s about to be a massive problem.

I mean, we are talking about a Japanese business. That kind of thing is expected (and normal) in the Japanese market, is it really that much of a shock?

Okay, I suppose this conversation is over. Have a good one.

People have a right to know if a company worked on the game or not, just like they have a right to know if Generative AI was used, or if it funds something they don’t like. It doesn’t matter if you or I think it’s stupid or not.

I don’t understand why they feel the need to hide it.

I can liken my opinion on it to that of Generative AI: Consumers have the right to be informed. Hiding whether AI was used (or SBI/other similar agencies in this case) is not a good look. If a consumer doesn’t want to buy games that SBI has worked on, it is the consumer’s right to know if a game has been worked on by SBI so they can make an informed decision. In just the same way a person would want to know if Generative AI was used in a game, some consumers want to know if SBI or other similar companies were used during a game’s development. And this of course works opposite too. If someone wanted to buy a game specifically because SBI worked on it (which I personally can’t see being a real reason to buy a game, but to each their own) then they too should be able to be clearly informed on the matter.

Basically, hiding something like that is anti-consumer. It gives the impression that the developers are trying to trick consumers into buying something they don’t want.

For example, if there was a video game which directly funded something you didn’t like, let’s say something like directly funding Russia’s war against Ukraine, you would want to know that before you bought the game, right? When you find out where your money went, you probably wouldn’t be very happy, would you? If you had known that information before you bought the game, that likely would have changed your decision to buy the game, right? Now of course, war is a bit more extreme compared to social politics, but the idea is the same. You would feel tricked. You would feel upset. Its the same idea. Consumers want to be informed, and hiding information from consumers is not friendly to consumers. The developers should have just updated the game description to include that SBI worked on the game and left it at that. The drama would likely not have reached its current level.

Comparing scope of Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind, there is very little difference. Really the only difference is an added feature here or there per iteration, and graphics. There is no reason a studio today couldn’t make something like Morrowind, as it was developed by like, 50 people. Unless the employees and management colossally screw up. No, modern game failures are not ONLY the fault of management.

It was “Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.”

I tried it whenever it was like brand new. I think I tried the demo before the game even launched on Xbox 360, though I can’t be certain. I don’t really remember much about what I played except the main character had pink hair I think and there was a lot of blue or like, ice on the screen.

Also tried FF 7 (the original on PSX) and FF 4 on SNES. I haven’t tried Crisis Core, but I did have it on the list of games to try, even though its not a mainline game.

Ha, yes I heard X2 was pretty universally disliked.

I have really tried to like Final Fantasy. Over the years I have tried plyaing a few of them, like the FF 13 - 2 Lightning (?) demo, whichever game had “Lightning” in the title. I didn’t really like it. I suppose the only Final Fantasy I will ever like is FF Tactics.

IMO, if I am going to use that many cheats just for the story, I might as well just watch the game “movie” or whatever on YouTube.

I dont hate turn-based games as a whole. I do enjoy turn-based games like XCOM, Tuned Heart, Vagrant Story (its combat is somewhat turn-based), Galactic Civilization, and Mega Man Battle Network, for example.

I do not enjoy turn-based games where the only thing the player does is select an action from a list, with static party members and the same music/cutscene/background etc. For example: Wizardry, Octopath Traveler (I liked the art though), Pokemon, and XenoSaga. I also didn’t like Slay the Spire because of this. I didn’t like the autocombat in the XenoBlade games either.

Its hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I might like one game and dislike another even if they are similar in gameplay. Legend of Dragoon held my attention because at least I had the QTE during battles that gave me something that would directly impact my actions, but my save was corrupted and I haven’t got around to restarting the game.

The only time I actually enjoyed a game with this kind of gameplay was ironically the mobile game NieR Reincarnation (RIP). It wasn’t exactly turn-based, but it was similar in that all the player does in combat is select when to fire a character’s skill. Everything else is automatic. But I really like all of Yoko Taro’s works, and I liked the story and felt it was worth going through the combat for the story. Also, combat was over pretty fast, usually ending under 60-90 seconds.

Blitzball was interesting but I felt like it was an undercooked gamemode. It wasn’t explained super well and was frustrating occasionally. It didn’t really add to the story and just felt like filler, so except for the ones time I was forced to play it, I never touched it.