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Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Something of mild historical interest is that Magna Cum Laude had some genuinely brilliant dialogue here and there. The abusive arcade machine and tabletop RPG scene still stick firmly in my memory all these years later, and there was solid comedic timing as well ("Are those my Funyuns?"). Unfortunately, more good lines are cut up into the minigames, which act out scenes with gamified dialogue selection. Many of the games probably have to be re-attempted to clear, too, and no matter how funny a line is, it's not gonna be great the fourth time because you hit too many beers and can't control the cursor. The game's also very much a product of the irreverent college movie genre, which has aged in the worst way. Consent issues and all.

    Al Lowe's games were more highbrow, for lack of a better term, so they didn't go quite as far off the rails. They seemed to be the kind of thing aimed at a Playboy Magazine reader. One of these, Love for Sail, remains my favorite of the bunch. I think they really hit their stride with the gameplay in that one, and the writing and the visuals were solid, though I've seen better in this genre since.

    I didn't see great reviews for Wet Dreams so that was an easy skip--I've been ignoring the series since MCL--but it's interesting to see a high opinion of those games. I almost never see anyone talking about them, much less in a glowing way.

  • Woman-centered is not an absolute. One does not have to be part of a single characteristic of a group to have a stake in it, to be an ally, an advocate, a partner, a family member, among countless other scenarios.

    I would suggest reading up on intersectionality.

    By the way, all of this is covered in the subreddit sidebar, including in an FAQ in the wiki.

  • Neither the WvP subreddit nor the Discord excludes men from identifying as witches or from participating in discussions.

  • I often wonder if mobile gaming wouldn't be in the current freemium hellscape if the N-Gage had a better launch library. We knew even back then that everyone was going to have a phone, so it was a natural evolution. Unfortunately, the games weren't very good, and they also weren't again when Square Enix tried up-front pricing a little while later with Final Fantasy Dimensions and The After Years, for example.

    Now I don't know if single-price games are ever going to have a chance in the mobile market.

  • The only one I have that hasn't been mentioned yet is Suikoden II. Gorgeous sprite art, and it's also just a solid game. Ironically, it's getting a remaster very soon which is sure to clean up its biggest weakness (the English localization), though we don't know how the rest of it will shake out.

    I consider the fifth gen to be a lost generation for sprite-based games, this is one of those on the console that make the case for an interesting "what could have been" scenario (Symphony of the Night, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Valkyrie Profile also being sprite-based standouts).

  • Definitely one of my essentials. I think the gameplay is bit meh, but it's still the best story in the genre.

  • "The original NES hardware literally only had around 55 colors that were pre-programmed in and no other color was allowed," Wozniak explained. "We broke this rule by adding 5 colors to help with a few things the NES palette lacked⁠—namely, darker and desaturated colors. But we justified that decision by treating it as compensation for the fact that everyone is playing these games on much brighter, higher fidelity screens than the CRTs of the past."

    This is a great example of how some retro-style projects get it and some don't. The successful projects are the one that have the feel of the games you used to play in the context of today's gaming, not the ones that do a historically accurate, 1:1 conversion. There's an art to it.

  • For !jrpg@lemmy.zip, it's a big enough category that it should be more active than it is. The corresponding subreddits for JRPGs and retro gaming aren't super far apart at 255k and 404k subscribers respectively, but !retrogaming@lemmy.world is more active by orders of magnitude here on Lemmy.

    I've started to focus more on discussion prompts in the community as news isn't enough; the JRPG community has been an excellent news aggregator for over a year now (although it's a slow news time for the genre currently). I'd love to hear from other niche communities about what's worked and what hasn't to drive engagement.

  • Oof, sounds like you missed the whole space sim genre then. Took extra hardware for the best experience, but even with a cheap joystick it could be amazing stuff. I enjoyed first-person shooters and the like, but TIE Fighter and Freespace were 3D to me back then. I loved my Sidewinder gamepad in that era, too.

    That may or may not be why fifth-gen console 3D does next to nothing for me. Until the Dreamcast came out, it all looked way behind PC, and almost no one was doing the amazing spritework that they excelled at anymore.

  • Was the big one, misskey.io. I found a federated instance I was able to register at, I just wonder just how federated it's all going to be if the big instance is restricted.

  • Thanks for pointing this out. I've been holding fast to zero posting activity over there, but I think I'll keep an eye out in that subreddit and see if I can't grab any new recruits.

  • It would help if you identified which religion. There absolutely is a vibrant queer pagan community, but it sounds like that's not what you're talking about.

  • This succinctly covers my view on it as well. I think it'll be more of a problem a few years down the road as statist admin culture begins to influence the mods of more instances, but for now I treat it on an instance-by-instance, user-by-user basis. I wouldn't be surprised if majority of community leaders and users in general went to lemmy.ml simply because it was one of the larger instances last year and didn't think much more of it than that.

    If I have a choice, though, I'll still try to grow a community on one of the smaller instances simply because it's still one of the largest ones, and that's better for the health of the network.

  • All I can think about is how this bot is immediately a non-starter because this is the kind of attitude I can expect from the author when asking for support or collaboration. It's not just in this post, either.

    Even if the parent comment here was hostile--it's borderline, at worst--I can't possibly understand the mentality of being argumentative in a post trying to encourage the use of a service.

  • I think as long as the target community isn't just cross-posts, it's fine. There should be some quantity of original content (probably the higher the percentage, the better). Obvious exceptions for communities specializing in link aggregation.

    If you're concerned about annoying the community you're cross-posting from, I'd say don't be. I view the cross-post line as a "communities you may be interested in" feature, and it's easily ignored.

  • No editorializing was done here. That's the title provided by the metadata, which is the easier option Lemmy provides when posting links.

  • That's exactly the issue here. ChatGPT's current training set ends right around the time the Meta Quest 3 came out. It's not going to have any discussions in there of No Man's Sky with tech that wasn't out yet.

  • Newell also has overseen Valve as one of the pioneers of the most predatory monetization in the video game industry (lootboxes, etc.).

    There are no saints at this level.