Lurker > Gray_Areas

electricbugs2 posted...

Nice. Been considering building a Gunpla at some point, but my motor skills arent great so Im a little nervous about screwing it up

All you really need to get started are a kit, a pair of nippers, and maybe a hobby knife, so you could get a good feel for the hobby with about $30 or less. I would recommend either finding one of the cheaper, more simplistic HG kits (like a grunt suit you enjoy the look of or something) and/or one of the newer Entry Grade kits and try them out. I've been consistently impressed with the Entry Grade line, so I can absolutely attest to them being great starting points that require no extra skills or tools to make nice, color accurate models.

Don't worry too much about screwing up your first kits. They're just plastic models after all. And if it turns out you really like the hobby, you can always just pick up a second copy of those models later on down the road when you have more tools and experience in order to build them even better.

SHRlKE posted...

How does it even work? Like is the whole thing on the knuckles cartridge or does it use assets from what you plug in?

I looked that up a few years ago because I was also curious about it. Here's a pretty good Stack answer on how Sonic & Knuckles "Lock-On" technology works. It's pretty interesting!

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/1514/how-exactly-does-sonic-knuckles-lock-on-technology-work

I'm certainly not well-versed in electronics, but I think I was able to follow most of what the posted answer was saying. Seems like the S&K cartridge attempts to read the plugged in game first to determine if it is Sonic 1, Sonic 2, or Sonic 3.

If the attached game is not one of the Sonic games, then S&K opens up an individual level of Blue Sphere that can be played. If Sonic 1 is plugged in, the game opens up a full Blue Sphere minigame. If Sonic 2 is plugged in, Sonic 2's ROM is mapped to address memory along with a built-in Knuckles in Sonic 2 ROM patch that is present in the S&K cartridge. If Sonic 3 is attached, Sonic 3's ROM and S&K's ROM are both mapped to address memory to create the full game.

RetuenOfDevsman posted...

What does make the leveling mechanics bad is when you don't know that over leveling your HP can make the final boss completely impossible, and also don't know how to not, until you get to said final boss and have to just look up the ending on youtube.

It was my sixth FF game, you see, and following typical FF logic--hell, typical RPG logic--hell, typical human being logic--you let your HP get low before curing it (I know, unthinkable isn't it) instead of making sure you end every battle above some arbitrary threshold so that you don't level up.

...

Gracious, just writing that out makes it blow my mind all over again. What were these people THINKING?

They did leave in that blood sword cheese... But as luck would have it, this being my sixth game, I decided you know, for once I'm gonna sell all this shit I always hoard and never end up needing. Womp womp.

I don't recall having that many issues with the HP percentage-based attacks when I originally played FFII on PS1, and the newer releases are even easier than that. Just gotta make sure you get plenty of evasion training to avoid getting hit as much (which should come just as naturally, if not more so, than HP). Honestly, if your HP is so high that percentage-based damage and absorbing is outcompeting the damage that you're doing, then what you probably need is a lot more strength or weapon levels to boost your damage instead of intentionally trying to keep HP levels low.

It's certainly not as good as the original FFT and arguably not as good as some other SRPGs on the GBA like Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis and Fire Emblem (known as Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade in Japan), but I really enjoyed most of what FFTA had to offer. I love the job system, the art style, and all of the various races that you can use throughout the game. I even really enjoyed most of the unique characters that you meet. But I do feel like the law system gets a little too restrictive in the later sections of the game.

For sure! I don't care what Dave Ramsey says, so that's just free money.

FFIII is on the DS/PSP is a decent enough remake that does an alright job of giving the protagonists some personalities and giving the narrative a bit more meat (still pretty "generic" by today's standards, but you can't really help that given it's an update to an old NES story), but it can get kind of grindy and has some weird difficulty spikes.

The Pixel Remaster version is easier and I personally prefer the 2D visuals, but it goes back to the original NES story and removes the player characters' personalities making the narrative feel basically just as thin as it did in FFI. I love the job system though, and the Pixel Remaster made that even better by removing the penalties for switching jobs.

Guns_of_Verdun posted...

people talk about how bad 2 was.

Pure slander. FFII is a fine game (at least the modern releases) with some good characters and a decent enough story considering it came from the NES era. Its only issues are that it's a bit removed from the rest of the series mechanically speaking (though that doesn't make the leveling mechanics bad, per se) and that the non-Pixel Remaster versions are a bit grindy, especially since most of the guest party members come to you with poor stats and little or no magic.

Despite my username, I exclusively use "grey" when I write the word. I also didn't even know that "judgement" wasn't normally spelled with that -e in the middle of the word in America. Writing out "theatre" does feel a bit hoity-toity though.

emblem-man posted...

There are 20% of non Jewish Arabs in Israel. I imagine there's still some discrimination that they should have legal protection from, but that'd ideally be closer to the path of any one state solution. Ideally being the key word...

Oh, sure, this idea is definitely better than literally wiping the Palestinians out and destroying Palestine as a whole, but it would still have a pretty clear agenda. Considering one of the options being thrown out there is literally genocide, some kind of "forced assimilation" would undoubtedly be better, but that doesn't mean it isn't still bad.

Like I said, I think this is probably the "best case scenario" given the fact that we live in the real world and the solution, whatever it ends up being, won't be perfect. I just don't think Israel is going to allow Palestine to continue to exist forever. The only question really being how they go about "getting rid" of Palestine and its people.

emblem-man posted...

A non apartheid one state solution doesn't mean "wiping them out" does it?

Hopefully not, or at least not through direct violence. I imagine it would be more like how the US took Native American children from their tribes and native cultures and to teach them to "be white." This would eventually remove any sort of Palestinian influence in their upbringing and make them more in line with Israeli thinking and culture.

Here's a quick Wikipedia reference on the boarding schools that were created to assist with the "civilizing" pf young Native Americans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools

I would love to see a solution (one, two, or three states) with a fully representative democracy that allows Palestinians to retain their identity while also allowing them full civil rights and active representation in the government of the hypothetical state or states, but I just don't see that as something Israel would be too keen to allow.

ssb_yunglink2 posted...

i do genuinely wonder how this situation ends. Im doubtful that Israel stops even if Hamas surrenders at this point, so theyre not gonna surrender and leave themselves open like that.

I cant even envision a peaceful, non-genocidal end to all of it

A nihilistic view but probably the one that will end up being the most accurate.

Even if this current violence ends, I truly doubt the tensions in the area will ease. Israel won't stop unless they're forced to stop by an outside entity, and I also doubt there were be any long term consequences for doing so.

I don't like it, but I think the most likely outcome of this situation is Israel taking the land by force and creating a "one state solution." At best, this one state grants Palestinians full civil rights, but they would likely assimilated into Israeli culture in the not so distant future (thereby "wiping out" the Palestinians). But given Israel's current views and attitudes towards Palestine, I imagine it's much more likely that this one state will end up as more of an Apartheid state where the Palestinians are treated as second class citizens (or worse...)

SaikyoStyle posted...

You wouldnt really be paying for faster gaming anyway. Youd be paying to not get your shit throttled.

Which should definitely fall under the "no throttling" rule, right?

RetuenOfDevsman posted...

It's not so much that it's a huge chore as $50k is not a huge sum. Not if you assume you have multiple decades left to live.

And with some smart use of this ability, you could probably leverage the "pretty privilege" to get an extra $50,000+ in net worth along the way.

So I'm certainly no expert on this topic, but shouldn't paying for "fast lanes" pretty explicitly fall under the "paid prioritization" part of these rules?

But no, I wouldn't pay extra for "fast gaming" or whatever since I don't play enough competitive games for it to be worth it.

Glob posted...

Yes. Thats the third worst movie about a guy who dresses like a bat to fight crime.

Really? I thought most of the internet hated Batman v Superman way more than The Dark Knight Rises?

PballDepot posted...

Nolan had no problem making some incredible Batman movies with the no kill philosophy

Batman definitely killed people in those movies. Or at the very least, he explicitly caused damage that directly resulted in several deaths and went out of his way to let people die when he could have otherwise saved them.

They make a big deal about Batman causing Dent's death at the end of The Dark Knight, but he also intentionally exploded the League of Shadows' hideout which we know killed people and sabotaged the train (with Gordon's help destroying the railway) which directly led to Ra's al Ghul's deathan act that Batman knows will result in Ra's al Ghul's death and has the opportunity to save him but actively choses not to in Batman Begins and shot Talia Al Ghul's car leading to her and her driver crashing and dying in The Dark Knight Rises. That's not to mention all of the other random goons he definitely maims or mortally wounds in each movie.