Xenia does pretty well these days and keeps getting better

“Best I can do is Mario loudly saying “Good Bye!” when you close your Nintendo DS to hide under your pillow.”

~ Nintendo

Hopefully you never accidentally click the Quit button when you didnt mean to, lol

Lets talk about QTEs as an example. Because for QTEs, a developer can easily add an option to entirely circumvent them, with just a single boolean and a single line of code in the QTE input method.

I think that, for accessibility reasons, it is perfectly reasonable to ask for an option to switch between tapping a button and holding a button to complete a QTE. I think it is unreasonable to ask developers for an option to completely remove QTEs from their game (such as auto-succeed/auto-complete). For many games, this would turn an interactive part of the game which is normally followed by an uninteractive cutscene into an uninteractive cutscene immediately followed by another uninteractive cutscene. Players that disable QTEs could easily be sitting through very long stretches of uninteractive parts of the game instead of interacting with the game, leading to those players complaining about long cutscenes since they usually completely forget they disabled QTEs.

Shenmue has Quick Time Events. A lot of them. If someone hates QTEs, it would be better for them not to play the game at all than to play without them. It is a core part of the intended experience that enhances the player’s time with the game. You get to interact with the cutscene instead of dropping the controller and turning off your brain. As a player, you pay more attention and keep your controller ready because at any moment you could be hit with a QTE and you want to be ready for that. You as a player have anticipation, excitement, nervousness, fear, etc that the developer makes you feel using mechanics like QTEs. You are more engaged with the game than someone that wants those deleted from the game, and in the end that means you will get more enjoyment out of the game. Someone that wants that turned off wants to play a different game.

Not every game is made for every person. And thats okay, thats good even.

I don’t give a fuck if some pretentious asses “artistic vision” requires the player to backtrack half way across a level on every death or thinks a shitty minigame should be played no less than 153 times every play through.

Then just don’t play that game or use cheats (if its a singleplayer game)?

I don’t see why a game developer needs to intentionally provide an option to remove mechanics they designed a game around just to please someone that doesn’t want to play the game as they designed it.

I hate this. Not because it exists, but because it reminds me how old I am, lol.

I used to know people that would all join up for Quake II, CounterStrike 1.5/1.6, and Diablo II LAN events, but it’s getting harder and more expensive to travel these days. Playing online just isn’t the same for me, so I won’t be joining, but I do hope that the community continues to thrive and remain as drama-free as it can.

As a Stellaris player, nothing is more infuriating than Paradox putting out an update that breaks the save of your 2 month multiplayer game when you havent even reached the endgame lag yet. At least we can downgrade versions.

Goddess of Victory NIKKE.

I try to be careful where I play it because the character designs are pretty uh… well the characters have huge personalities, usually. That’s not why I play the game, but I recognize some people have more of a problem with that than others so I try to be respectful about it. Also, NIKKE is a mobile gacha game, which a lot of people dislike. So I would say it counts as a guilty pleasure, although I don’t really feel guilty for playing the game.

For me, I don’t really spend money on it. Except for their two collabs with Neon Genesis Evangelion and one collab with NieR, because for me it is literally the law that I pay at least a little for IPs I really like. I am not a Whale (Richard Nixon impression lol), I am not even a Dolphin(?) I think I am called a Minnow. Whatever they call a basically F2P player that spends so rarely they might as well not spend at all. Besides, I have played for 3 years and only spent $60 total, I think that’s a pretty good deal so far.

Anyway, I like the gameplay. I realize to some people this might sound like I am saying “I read Playboy for the articles,” but hear me out.

When I was younger, I really enjoyed going to arcades. In the tail years of the arcades, newer games started to pop up, among them being lightgun games. I really enjoyed playing Time Crisis and Lethal Enforcers, and later on playing Silent Hill The Arcade, Alien, Terminator, and others. It was fun while it lasted, but now arcades are dead and game developers don’t really make those kind of games anymore. Beside my home arcade cabinet where I emulate the older games (and get a worse experience because I have neither the pizza grease and cigarette smell, nor the different shaped controllers), I don’t have new options for lightgun games these days. Then NIKKE came out and the gameplay was close enough for me that I felt that same fun of a lightgun game. I enjoy my time with the game mostly because it reminds me of the fun I had in actual arcades with lightgun games.

Personally, I emulate anything that I play on a modern display and run that straight through HDMI, or DisplayPort depending on what the display accepts.

If I am playing something older, I usually have a working console for it, but if I don’t I still emulate it. If I have a working console, I plug it into one of my CRTs via composite (RCA) as that is the input my CRTs accept and the most common output on consoles of the time (like HDMI is today). If the game I am playing is on a console that I have that no longer functions, I emulate it and output via HDMI to an RCA adapter and plug that into one of my CRTs. This has some delay but it is not noticeable to me.

Sometimes I have fun playing modern games on a CRT in 480p with the same setup. The graphics look really good since I can max everything out with a good framerate, but the text and UI is basically unreadable, even with max UI scaling in most games. They just don’t make them with low resolutions in mind.

If I am not using it, I unplug it from the TV and put it away.

For audio: CRT built-in speakers are the most authentic. But sometimes I use headphones.

Yeah, I said that in the second part of my comment. It requires desoldering the RAM chips and soldering on new ones, a step most people aren’t going to do.

I think if it is over $600 most people aren’t even going to consider it as an option.

RAM on the Steam Deck is not expandable.

Well, it technically is if you remove the current RAM chips, solder on new double density RAM chips, and flash the BIOS. But compared to a regular PC of just plugging the RAM sticks into the Motherboard slots they belong in, trying to expand RAM on the Steam Deck might as well be considered not possible. Even if you do expand the RAM, there is no noticeable performance gain.

If it is priced higher than $600 they won’t sell enough to justify their existence. It will just be a repeat of last time.

This is perfect for people wanting a new console with a large games library, but Valve seems to be trying to force the square block in the round hole by placing it in the PC market space.

PC Gaming market in Japan is treated like Second Class Gaming Citizens, sadly

Windows was built on IBM compatible MS-DOS, not regular DOS. The term “DOS” was so ubiquitous with IBM compatibility specifically, that it almost exclusively referred to MS-DOS, and not any other variant. Windows 95 does not run on top of Atari DOS, for example, and therefore trying to run any Windows 95 application in Atari DOS would not be possible.

Software natively compiled for Windows 95 will not usually run in any other variant of DOS than MS-DOS, and in some cases, even MS-DOS itself.

Quake II released in 1997 natively for Windows 95, but was not compatible with other DOS based operating systems at the time. Over the years, fans have tried to “backport” it to other variants of DOS, most notably Q2DOS. But its original PC release does not natively support any OS other than Windows 95. Many games of this era are like this, and a game released in this era usually said it was compatible with “Windows 95/98/ME,” not “DOS.”

I don’t agree. I think that the responsibilty a parent has to keep their child safe and teach them how to navigate reality has always been hard.

Parents in the 90s probably had as hard of a time with smartphones as parents do now with smartphones. When smartphones were brand new I remember many parents did not allow their children to have them at all, if the child even had a mobile phone. Not because they don’t love their child, but because they do. They want to protect them from having access to material children shouldn’t have. But children are smart, and they find a way around it with the iPod Touch or PSP that their friend has or other means. But in those cases the parents can say they did everything they could to protect their child.

The most fault obviously lies with the nefarious person grossly mistreating children. If they didn’t exist at all, none of this would even be necessary. Unfortunately, that cannot ever happen, because humans still do not know what causes them to be the way they are, or how to prevent it/treat it properly.

Now, Roblox certainly should be doing something about it, but the amount of fault they have in the issue is the least among other parties. But using mandatory facial recognition for that? I think that is way too far. I don’t see why DMs aren’t monitored. Seems like the perfect use case for AI: have an LLM scan DMs as they are sent and "flag"messages of potential suspicion for a human to then read the DM chain for context to verify. Or just remove messaging from the platform altogether.

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.