A little surprised to hear Zero Time Dilemma is seen as the weakest game of the trilogy. I played them all in a vacuum, never really engaging with the communities around the franchise, and I would never have said that myself.

If I had to pick, I’d argue that Virtue’s Last Reward was the “worst” one, but I am not happy about writing that. It was a great game that I enjoyed start to end, but ending on a “this will only make sense when the 3rd game releases in X years!” note leaves a really sour taste in my mouth. The other two games are complete experiences, and when I am playing a visual novel, the last thing I want is a cliffhanger “join us next time to find out!”

That said I think I enjoyed puzzles and philosophical musings of it the most out of the three? So my opinion is more about what was bad than what was good and should probably be discarded anyway.

I’ve gotta put this one out there because it will largely get overlooked every time the topic of “Visual Novel” gets brought up, but Digimon: Survive.

As a tactics RPG, it’s pretty mid. Character growth and customization exists, but isn’t quite as expansive as I’d like for that kind of game. It’s no Final Fantasy Tactics, for example, but comparing it to other tactics games doesn’t do it justice, because it’s one of the better-to-best written visual novels I have ever played.

Each of the endings explores the way small changes in circumstance can heavily impact people’s decisions, each of the characters and their partner monsters are oozing with personality, and some of the potential outcomes for each character represents some of the most wild, fucked up, and human emotional responses possible. Your decisions as the main character have minor impacts in the lines of which characters reach their end of their growth arcs, and which evolutions are available to your partner and some of your companions partners, and the collective value system limits which of the main branches you’re permitted to explore for your ending. Which it doesn’t boast the wide assortment of branching narrative paths that some visual novels take, it does still succeed in making your decisions feel like they matter.

And this is completely aside from the fact that it’s a Digimon game. A franchise widely viewed as “for children”, yet it engages with heavy existential themes and doesn’t shy from letting horrible things happen to good, and bad, people. People die, on screen, in ways I would not want small children to see. In a lot of ways, the game is a functional “reboot” of the franchise, sharing a lot of commonalities with Digimon Adventure, but using older characters, more serious mature themes, and never referencing the monsters as “digimon”. In fact, the term is only used once, during the epilogue of one of the endings, otherwise they’re referred to as Kemonogami, and treated like Yokai. They’re engrained in the history and legendsof the world, and it’s an amazing take on the franchise.

I’m gushing at this point, but what really matters is it’s an extremely well-written visual novel with competent enough Tactical RPG gameplay, and also currently on a rather deep Steam Sale. Cannot recommend it enough.

Fantastic article.

I’ve got nothing against cosplay, but these right-wing nut jobs pretending to be Roman conqueror’s just take it too far.

Fucking real, though. The cultural group responsible for checks notes “shaming people who have the wrong bubble color in texts”?, suddenly think they’re the one’s being unjustly preached to? The joke in this image is not the one OP thought they were making.

Second. The guillotine.

Maybe if the game was anymore more than an uninspired mess, it would have sold some copies.

So, AI that is strictly incapabale of generating new ideas is going to be fed decades of police reports as it’s database, and use that data to discern that makes a good police report?

Surely this won’t replicate decade old systematic problems with racial profiling. I mean, all these police reports are certainly objective, with no hint of bias to be found in the officers writing.

I hope this is a joke. North American economy has been in a downward spiral for the past 4 years.

It doesn’t matter. Convservativea cannot accept the notion of a “good weird” because it removes all justification from their beliefs. The whole conservative belief system is founded on the notion that there is an effective normal and that normal must be protected from those that would upset it.

They cannot say they’re the “good kind of weird”, because that means admitting that weird can be good. And if weird can be good, they have no ground to plant the roots of their beliefs in. They have to be normal, because if they’re weird, all the time they spent attacking others for being weird in the defence of what’s normal doesn’t make any sense. Calling themselves the good kind of weird is a complete 180 on what it means to be conservative and alienated a massive portion of their voting base who only vote conservative because they see people who are “just like them”, not weirdos who are willing to redefine sex and gender, or question historical narratives.

The “weird” angle of attack has been so effective because it deconstructs the very notion of what it means to be a conservative. Giving them an out through the “good kind of weird” doesn’t change that.

Imo, the neat thing about this current “weird” discourse is that only right-wingers could ever find it genuinely insulting. Any sensible, self-actualized human being who isn’t obsessing over the sex and genetalia of others is like “haha, yeah, I am kinda weird”.

But the right wing is built on the misconception that they are “normal” and everything else is a problem. They’re the only ones that could ever be bothered by being told they’re weird, because it deconstructs the very foundation of their beliefs. Without the core of “we are normal and everyone else is causing problems in our normal society” backing up their every decision to threaten others over the religon, sexuality or life choices of others, they instead have to face reality: it’s normal to be a little weird, and it’s normal for some of that weird stuff to take root and become normal. And to refuse it and obsess over it is, in its own way, kinda weird.

The point of treating companies like people is so no one in those companies can be held accountable. The worst case for them that the intangible “coorporation” did something wrong and now it has to go away, so the entire board moves to a new company under a new name that owns the same properties and has the same practices. Only now they have practice obfuscating their crimes.

What ends lives and careers for people are just a minor inconvinience to coorporations.

It’s not a good article. I was following along until, 5 minutes in, it suddenly decided to be detailing and describing exactly what AI and LLMs are. Like, long after showing some of the ways it’s hurting the industry, presumably to pad words.

For every shitty article pushing AI hype out there, there’s a shittt article pushing AI hate. Extremism generates clicks.

I thinks there are some nuggets of good information in there. The bits on first-hand accounts from former and current Activision employees, and on how it’s mostly the concept artists that are hurt is interesting. But you really have to wade through a mound of shit to get there, and I genuinely don’t have the patience to wade through the second half and see if there any more truth in this soft mound of turd that Wired called journalism.

BPM: Bullets Per Minute. A boomer shooter had an affair with he rhythm game genre and this was the outcome. Amazing game, assuming you don’t mind rhythm games, and an immaculate one if you actively like rhythm games.

Neon White is technically a shooter, but in most ways does not play or feel like one. It’s better described as a first person puzzle/platformer, but I would still recommend it, as it is an incredible game.

Both of the Doom ports run insanely well on the Switch. Seemingly impossibly well considering how dated the console is.

Warframe is good, free and playing surprisingly well on Switch.

Splatoon is just awesome.

I purchased Rayman Legends on a big Steam sale because it is a great game and I wanted to play it again. I installed it. I hit play. It tried to install the Ubisoft launcher. I uninstalled it and refunded.

Fuck off, Ubisoft.

God, I wish I had a mortgage.

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Hi-Fi Rush might genuinely be one of my favorite games of all time.

These guys did great, and I’ll be thinking twice about any Xbox product I consider purchasing in the future.

I just fucking want Elite to be good. I could shoot pirates and 'goids all day if getting a ship ready to do so wasn’t as enjoyable as running dental floss into my mouth and out my asshole.

As a “space games guy” is there anything out there that is as satisfying to simply fly around in as Elite Dangerous is without the absolute shit fuck of ass-backwards, tedious and boring mechanics?

I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS and VR headset, but I will be damned if I am going to roll around on a moon praying I trip over some precious metals just so I can play logistics hot potatoes trying to figure out how I am going to get my module to the relevant station, upgraded, and then placed into the ship I designed it for. Elite is such an incredible space cockpit sim, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent me from wanting to actually play it. I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.