I’m migrating to lemmy.zip, at least for the short term. They also have public instance reports, which was the major reason I joined lemm.ee. Transparency and accountability is essential. I guess the fact that those reports got more and more sparse at lemm.ee was a canary in the coal mine here…

Absolutely. The vast majority of my sites do just fine when whitelisting only the primary domain. I consider it an essential add-on myself.

Lemmy is one of the few that needs a little babysitting, and it’s only for the purpose OP stated.

It’s the dungeon design that’s most like Dark Souls. Encounters are a bit taxing, and there’s a bonfire-like checkpoint system that similarly respawns enemies and recharges your equivalent of estus flasks. It’s fairly generous, but there are a few stretches (especially in the side content) where you’ll have to evade combat or avoid damage enough to make it through all the encounters.

Legally distinct Super Mario RPG, eh.

Good thing this one never took off with how litigious Nintendo’s been lately.

FF12, 13, 15, and 7 Remake were all big sellers. It’s more the recent, poor performances of Rebirth and 16 that have raised eyebrows (although I can understand the argument that 15 and 16 moved away from being JRPGs from a gameplay point of view).

The big names they are left with right now are FF14 (the other MMO), Nier (the brainchild of an auteur, not regular work product), and Dragon Quest. Maybe FF17 will be end up being more traditional, but with the way that series’ dev cycles have gone on top of the restructuring, who knows when that will surface.

Kinda telling that not a single one of those revealed titles on that roadmap is new. Not even a new game in an existing IP.

I’m not sure how much time they have before they start to be perceived as ceding their long-term dominance in their major genre. Persona 6 is around the corner, and RGG has also been growing.

I’ve made a conscious effort to start doing this in conversations in general instead of opening up a browser tab. Yeah, “just google it” is a thing, but asking is often enough if you’re not in a hurry, so why not?

When it comes to semiconductors, there’s always another grift.

Unfortunately, after AI, it’ll probably be military drones.

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.

I ended up just switching

It’s ridiculous, and like they said, a bit too easy to break the game with. Just stack a couple multipliers and you’re one-shotting anything.

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.

I didn’t hate DE and really liked most of True Colors, but the first game really was lightning in a bottle. They haven’t come close to it.

The series is definitely in trouble. Who knows, maybe SQEX will shuffle it off to a different studio again.

This is another of the benefits of patient gaming, avoiding the delays caused by the double-dip fishing Rockstar does with their games. For me, the last three years’ release schedules have been so stacked that they don’t leave much room for temptation or frustration with delays. I’ve always got something to play.

I understand the frustration for the diehard GTA fans, but I would have figured those people moved to console if they weren’t already.

And it’s not just that. Half-Life also spawned Counter-Strike, one of the foundational pieces of e-sports (if not also the modding scene in general today). Not to mention being a precursor to today’s digital distribution model in the industry.

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.