Lurker > adjl

Of those, SimCity and Ultima are probably the most influential, which I would say is the primary factor that should be considered in putting together a museum of gaming history.

Looks like I rubbed somebody the wrong way with my post, because it got modded for being "sexually explicit." That's... pretty telling about whoever marked it, really.

slacker03150 posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/2d680c1c.jpg

Not the kind of egg roll I was expecting to find.

https://imgur.com/rBHf5DC

Depends what the business case looked like for the city. Stadiums are expensive, but also bring in a substantial amount of tourist dollars and other tax revenue. It may be a worthwhile investment, in which case it's fair game. If not, not so much.

https://imgur.com/V4amA2u

Lokarin posted...

Productivity in the US has gone up 400% since the '40s, but y'all still working 40 hours... If y'all were chillo you'd only need 10 hours a week to get the same quality of life as the 1940s

8 hours, actually. "Up 400%" means we're at 500%.

That explains why it sucks so much.

*Sunglasses*

I do love me some 3-day weekends. Two days just isn't enough. It always seems to work out that I get one day of doing household stuff and errands, then one day of either actively doing recreational things or just chilling at home. That means I don't get chilling time between work weeks if I do stuff, which just makes the prospect of doing things annoyingly tiring. Throw a third day in there, though, and I get one day for each, no problems.

I really need to look into setting up a compressed work schedule. The most common arrangement we use is working an extra half hour each day and getting a day off every three weeks, but where I'm working full-time from home my hours are rarely a consistent 9-5 anyway (since it's so easy to just dip out of work for a bit if it's quiet, or stick around a little longer if I need to) and adding an extra half hour wouldn't meaningfully change that.

But the vampire didn't take it. If a vampire bites a human corpse that's already been fully exsanguinated, the corpse doesn't become a vampire any more than a rock would if a vampire bit it.

Taking their last drop of blood requires them to have some blood in the first place.

Sauron did nothing wrong.

Count_Drachma posted...

Overall, being able to walk anywhere -- without being stuck in a city -- would be nice.

To really be walkable, an environment needs to be at least somewhat urban. You don't necessarily need a big city, but businesses need a certain number of people to be able to reach them if they're to survive. That either means you get walkable areas that have a higher population density, or you get lower-density areas that are difficult to walk around because of all the car infrastructure needed to bring people in. This is why big box stores have become so common in North America: With the shift to suburban living and people having to drive everywhere instead of being able to walk, that's necessitated larger roads, larger parking lots to hold the cars of people that have to drive there, and stores that can carry a large enough variety of items to reduce the number of trips people have to make.

You can usually get perfectly serviceable grocery stores within lower-density neighbourhoods that are walkable, since everybody needs groceries fairly frequently and that makes it pretty easy to hit the required customer count (albeit with less variety than you'd see from a bigger store), and often smaller communities will have general stores to hit various essentials that would otherwise come from a store too specialized to be supported, but otherwise you can generally only pick two of having an area be walkable, having places to go, and not being in a city.

captpackrat posted...

It's not illegal if the fine is less than the amount of money they make doing it.

And that's why we need fines that are a percentage of total company revenue. Breaks are an easy one to calculate: if you keep people working for the full 8 hours instead of giving them a paid 15-minute break, you're getting 3.35% more productivity out of them. So every day there's a report of somebody being denied a break, fine the company 3.5% of their average daily income. They rack up three strikes, assume it's happening chronically and fine them 3.5% of their average monthly income and conduct surprise monthly inspections for the next year. They have another infraction within a year of the first one, fine them according to their annual income.

All of a sudden, Amazon starts caring a whole lot about making sure that every single franchise follows local break laws.

I never really have a problem with a 128 GB SSD, 500 GB HDD, and 1 TB HDD, but then I don't have many particularly large games and I make a habit of uninstalling stuff when I can safely say there's no chance of me wanting to boot it up impulsively any time soon. If your whole drive is only 376 GB, you might want to consider upgrading it, which is a pain in most modern laptops (I miss the days of just having a panel on the bottom you could remove), but nonetheless doable. You can get a 2-3 TB laptop HDD for $75-100, which wouldn't erase your storage concerns, but would leave you quite a bit more breathing room. If you want the speed of an SSD (I'm guessing that's what you've got now if you've got so little space), they're still more expensive than HDDs, but you can still get 2 TB for ~$150 depending on what formats you can use, so you can look into that as well.

EchoBaz posted...

Something is only a requirement if the rule is enforced.

Amazon factories for example do a bunch of illegal shit to their employees out in the open, they know that no one is going to stop them.

More than that, very often the punishment if they're caught is a fine that doesn't come close to what they save/make by ignoring the rule on a larger scale. Even if a given employee decides to report them and they get fined, the (wholly justified) fear of reprisal will keep most employees from doing the same, and more often than not they can easily eat the fine without denting the bottom line (and, in fact, there's a good chance they've already budgeted for the fine).

ConfusedTorchic posted...

they're such a weird group of people who just seem to want to be upset at everything despite actually getting what they want.

Eeyup. They get so frantically terrified of the idea of some SJW bogeyman coming to take away their games that they ignore basic empirical reality.

Count_Drachma posted...

I'd say the same to any "on the street" segments. Even taking everything off the table, somebody isn't likely to meet the best and brightest just out on the streets -- at best, it's the lower side of average people.

And in a city with a pronounced leaning, you also aren't likely to get as many genuine opinions, but instead what they think they can or should say.

It's simpler than that. You don't need to dip into thinly-veiled classism or political victimhood, you just have to look at the simple reality of how those videos are made: The creator goes out, interviews a bunch of people, then selects which of the interviews they want to include in the published video. The format carries an air of credibility because of how casual and random it seems, but in practice all any such video proves is "I was able to find X people that hold this opinion." It indicates nothing about how prevalent that opinion actually is because the presented data set omits every data point that the presenter doesn't want to share. There's a massive selection bias there that cannot be overcome without presenting the video wholly unedited.

So even beyond the question of whether or not it's reasonable to judge a game based on a picture of a character, the whole video exists solely to affirm the beliefs of people who already don't like that character's design, not to serve as an actual poll.

https://imgur.com/AkT9L4I

SomeUsername529 posted...

If you want to give your information to China or Russia you're free to sign up for a Vkontakte or WeChat account because US and Chinese censorship are not the same. It is an absurd mental contortion to equivocate the US rejecting direct CCP control of a major social media platform (which, again, would be totally free to exist in the US if it were controlled by almost literally anyone else) and China's all-encompassing firewalling of every single foreign media app that catches their attention.

Are they not equivalent? Certainly, China's censorship of foreign media is on another level, but it's still the same principle of "we don't want other countries being able to influence our people." I have pretty much no faith that Amazon, Google, or Meta wouldn't sell the same info to China for a sufficient price, nor do I expect that the American government is any less likely to abuse whatever data they collect or use platforms within their control to manipulate people than China is. This is solely a matter of "I'm more comfortable with people that are ostensibly on my side doing these things than people that aren't."

ConfusedTorchic posted...

what's really fun is to ask the "it's anti-woke u mad bro" fans about the game what the game is about

there's a lot of those types of people cheerleading for this game, like a lot, because "the females" aren't "ugly" to serve some "western agenda" that they fully believe exists for some reason, and the developers fired a bunch of employees who were "reportedly" feminists (they didn't do this at all btw)

but the game is about a world of feminist independent women in a world where men are utterly useless

so, y'know

They're fine with feminists so long as they can rub one out to them.

https://imgur.com/8VyusQp

EchoBaz posted...

So you're judging an entire video that's almost 10 minutes long based off of the first 30 seconds?

Did the rest of the video consist of more in-depth analysis than "I don't like the design of this character based on the picture I'm being shown"? I'm pretty comfortable assuming it's all pretty similar to save 9:30, based on the fact that whoever put the video together felt the first 3-4 people I saw were representative enough of the overall point to be worth leading the video with, but I recognize that such assumptions should be made with an open enough mind to accept corrections if they turn out to be wrong.

EchoBaz posted...

They likely talked more than the 12 or so people in the video, and got similar results.

They could talk to 20 million people and get unanimous results and I'd still consider that opinion too narrow to be useful. Judging an entire game based on a single character's design (especially just a single picture of the design) is always going to be silly, regardless of which character it is, what you're judging about the character, or what the opinion ends up being. All I can conclude from these results is that people don't like the character design.

EchoBaz posted...

They're not wrong btw, they used a beautiful looking 32 year old asian woman, and made her into what looks like a 14 year old white woman, with marketing which mostly showed off her ass. That's pretty disgusting.

At a glance, it does look like a pretty generic action game that they're trying to make stand out using some good ol' T&A, and I can't say that I see any particular similarities between the main character and the model shown. Maybe the sexualization works better in context, maybe it's just cheap fanservice, maybe there's actually a good game underneath, maybe there isn't... I don't know enough about the game to judge anything, and random people on the street saying they don't like a picture of a character doesn't give me anything more to go off of.

green_dragon posted...

I might be wrong, but I could've sworn costco still allowed you to shop there without a card, but they charge you extra. I might be making that up.

Maybe in some areas, but everywhere I've been you're expected to show your card on the way in (which consists entirely of flashing it at an employee who may or may not actually be there, so it's not exactly heavy scrutiny), and more importantly they scan the card before ringing up your order. If you don't have a card at checkout, I'm pretty sure they can't check you out.

EchoBaz posted...

Did you actually watch the video? The people reacting to it made some pretty valid complaints.

As far as I could tell, the first 30 seconds just consisted of people criticizing how the character's headshot looked. Those opinions aren't invalid, but they're far too narrow to be at all meaningful.

BlackScythe0 posted...

Is there some reason people are so upset about this game?

I don't know about any broader discourse around it, but there has been some controversy over what happened with the demo. The demo was added to the PS Store, and a bunch of people downloaded and played it, but then an hour later it was pulled from the store and anyone that had downloaded it was no longer able to access their downloaded copy. It's likely the demo was just accidentally released early, since no announcements were made that it was going up, but after what happened with PT and Sony's recent well-deserved crucifixion for taking away Discovery content users had paid for, that kind of blatant "nope we're taking away the thing you liked too bad" has rubbed a number of people the wrong way.

Past that, though? I expect there's some complaining about how aggressively fanservicey the costumes are, but I don't know any details or anything about how well the game plays.

Monopoman posted...

Well that and no way is any worker outside of one with a very strict deadline requirement pushing every minute they are at work. People find countless ways to either slow their work speed or spend extra time in the bathroom or sitting at their desk doing non-work things.

Sure if you work at McDonalds it's hard to slack off unless the place is dead, but at an office job there are a dozen ways to do so unless you have a very strict deadline or boss. I find it funny that in Japan the bosses like it more when employees stay at work longer no matter what, a guy could literally be sleeping at his desk and it's past normal work hours the boss is impressed.

It does vary from job to job, but that's pretty much what most 4-day work week experiments have found: With shorter weeks, employees have generally been found to be more productive, getting the same amount of work (sometimes even more) done in fewer total hours. Naturally, there's no one-size-fits-all solution (especially when dealing with jobs where being present and waiting for customers to show up is important), and to that end I'm not sure how well blanket legislation would actually work, but there's plenty of evidence out there that blindly sticking to a 5-day/40-hour standard yields no actual benefit to justify the impact it has on employees in many cases.

Maximothelad posted...

Why are you still replying?

Because people said things I felt like responding to. Is that not how conversations and discussions usually work?

Maximothelad posted...

Chrono Trigger is a 10/10 that every real serious gamer should play. It's a shame if you don't. Only hurting yourself and missing out on an amazing gaming experience. But hey keep being the way you are. I don't care.

I have played it. I've said this. Try to keep up.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

he did find his own sources though lmfao

Indeed. I'm not about to waste my time digging up new sources and hoping you'll approve of them, operating with zero guidance because you're unwilling to specify what the problems are with the sources I found. If you want to insist you have an actually valid point, you're going to have to provide sources of your own that you consider more credible than what I've given and explain why they're more valid.

SomeUsername529 posted...

I'm really curious what kind of warped ignorant version of the world one has to have to genuinely not at least conceptually understand that its a bad idea to have the most popular social media thing in your society be run directly by an actively hostile foreign government. China is the most famous high profile example of thinking exactly this! They sure as shit do not allow any wholly foreign controlled social media in their country.

Oh, there are absolutely concerns about Tiktok being controlled by China. There are just similar concerns about any social media being owned by any government, such that "it'd be okay if America had control of Tiktok" is pretty blatantly just a power grab hidden behind a thin veneer of nationalism and xenophobia.

Maybe he was trying to solicit a hooker while maintaining plausible deniability: Call every woman he thinks he might want to sleep with a whore, hoping that one of them might say "yep, you interested?", while being able to claim he never actually asked to buy sex if he attracts police attention.

grimhilde00 posted...

some councils here implemented 4 day working weeks and then were told to stop lol..

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-calls-time-on-councils-running-four-day-weeks

"It's paramount that we get appropriate value for taxpayer money, but we're also going to put absolutely zero thought into measuring the value delivered beyond counting the number of hours people are required to work."

Classic top-down micromanagement. Never mind that those councils are capable of evaluating for themselves whether or not a four-day week has impacted their ability to deliver the necessary services, better have people who are too far removed from those activities to evaluate anything make sweeping decisions based on what's most likely to appeal to dinosaurs that will angrily vote against anything that might benefit workers.

I never did pick up Opoona. I'd be interested in a remaster, vinyl soundtrack or no.

faramir77 posted...

The biggest problem I remember with that game is how unforgiving the game over system can be.

The only time I've played it was in the Collector's Edition for GC, and that's pretty much the reason I never finished it. Having every single death (of which there are quite a few, because it's a pretty hard game) send me all the way back to the start of the game was just miserable, even if I didn't lose any character growth in the process.

FrozenBananas posted...

Theyre both on Switch, right?

Yep. The original HW is also on WiiU and 3DS, but that doesn't mean much now if you don't already have a copy.

The Switch version of Rune Factory 5 came with a manual, which really surprised me. I do generally miss them, though it makes sense that they've been phased out with how much more efficient it is to provide instructions in-game.

FrozenBananas posted...

I do want to play Hyrule Warriors though, especially after learning about the age of calamity

The original HW and AoC are pretty different games, despite the superficial similarities. HW is much more traditional Musou gameplay, but AoC is much more focused on miniboss and boss fights instead of mowing down hordes of grunts, and in that regard feels almost closer to a character action game. Both are excellent and well worth playing, it's just worth a heads up to make sure you don't go from enjoying one into expecting the same from the other.

https://imgur.com/9TX1Yyn

https://imgur.com/p7DCz41

I don't even know what this is, nor does a video of accosting random strangers and asking their opinions on a picture tell me much.

Nade_Duck posted...

i hadn't heard about any of this, wtf.

i got her mixed up with kate upton and now i don't care as much.

Kate Upton, Kate Middleton, and Kate Downton should form a band.

What a weird topic.

Sarcasthma posted...

Guess TC doesn't.

Surprising nobody, but it's always polite to ask.

Sufferedphoenix posted...

Trump is a billionaire because he was given what a million by his dad and he made smart enough decisions to make that money grow.

Actually, a few different people had done the math, and even before all these gajillion-dollar fines his net worth would have been significantly greater if he'd just left the money in trust. The investment decisions he's made haven't been entirely without returns, but on the whole he's lost money compared to what he would have if he'd done nothing.

Maximothelad posted...

Even a worse idea. People who work "Salary" are told all the time you work when I tell you to work. No exceptions. You'll often pull 50-60 hour weeks. No overtime, no hourly wage, same pay if you work 5 hours or 100. It's a stupid flawed idea. High end corporate jobs do that.

Man, if only the idea he proposed mandated that people be paid extra for overtime. That would have completely headed off that problem you came up with and made your post totally unnecessary.

Maximothelad posted...

Meanwhile imagine doing that at McDonalds? Those people don't care about their job now, imagine if they had CONSTANT PAY . They shut down most of the time anyway and go "We don't care"

Being paid the same minimum salary regardless of hours worked doesn't preclude somebody from being fired or docked pay for failing to do the work that's required of them. It just means that employees' livelihood won't be compromised by irresponsible hiring and scheduling practices.

Metalsonic66 posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/b/be905bc5.jpg

It's a mechanic that was introduced pretty much solely to give the main character something important to do. It may also have been meant to poke fun at various real-world sports that don't place limits on overtime and can therefore end up running absurdly long, in a sort of "look at how silly these wizards and their forever-sports are," but it was mostly just a position created to star the star of the story.

Dikitain posted...

I think a better solution would be to just do away with wages entirely and move everyone to salary, in addition to requiring anyone working over a certain amount of hours a week (32 in this case) to be given compensation for additional hours worked.

"Oh, I'm sorry, you want to cut my hours because you don't have enough work for me? Too bad, you still need to pay me the same regardless!"

That, or UBI and do away with wage laws more or less entirely (except the basics like "you need to pay people what you agreed to pay them"). Most of the problems with wages and hours and whatnot boil down to the fact that pushing back against questionable practices is so rarely worth the jeopardy that puts many people's livelihoods in. Secure their basic survival such that employment is large optional, and that puts the onus on the employer to make the compensation appealing enough to keep them doing the work.

It is a gift. That's why they call it the present.

grimhilde00 posted...

the thing I've been using Costco here for is cat litter and cat food, since yeah not really sure what else to use it for. Either I don't see the point (stores are right near by) and/or don't have room to store it if it's a big bulk size.

and when I first moved, things like TV, vacuum, etc.

my bf likes to get gas for his car from there too though, and various other things.

In a lot of cases, Costco packages are only 2-3 times larger than what we'd get from the grocery store, but *much* cheaper (like those larger packages are the same cost as smaller ones would be elsewhere). Paper products, frozen fruit, some toiletries, tofu (we'd do meat if we had the freezer space, but 3 kg of meat is a lot), some baking staples (chocolate chips, cocoa powder, vanilla), butter, some veggies, sandwich meat, cheese... We're not buying like 50 lb bags of rice or anything else that might fall into the realm of bulk shopping that mostly only makes sense for businesses, but it still saves quite a bit of money without having to go too crazy with storage space. I've got the executive membership that gives me 2% cashback, too, so in years where I have to buy tires (which is cheaper there than just about anywhere else), my membership is effectively free. Then we use a regular store for stuff that we don't have the space to store, that we won't be able to use in Costco quantities before it goes bad, and/or that isn't appreciably cheaper at Costco.

Granted, my recollection is that grocery prices in the UK tend to be a lot lower than in Canada (owing in part to having more small, independent stores instead of having two corporations controlling almost everything, but also because transportation is so much cheaper in a denser country), so it wouldn't surprise me if there are fewer potential savings for you.

Yellow posted...

Yeah when I think of child safety the first thing I think about is the state with razorwire in their rivers to drown kids

That also makes sure they won't be able to look at Internet porn (on the handful of sites that are noteworthy enough to attract government attention if they run afoul of the age verification requirement). It's perfectly logically consistent if you make sure you're focusing on what's really important!

(/s, if it's not obvious enough)

Jen0125 posted...

My parents literally bought it for us as children. It's not a champagne alternative. My parents weren't buying it as an alcohol alternative for children.

It can be an alcohol alternative for children. If anything, children are some of the most likely people to see adults drinking out of that fancy foil-wrapped bottle that makes a fun "pop" sound and want to try, and sparkling juice packaged the same way lets them join in on that fun with less brain damage than the alcohol would cause.

Jen0125 posted...

It's not a champagne alternative though it's literally just carbonated juice

Bottled like that, they're going for a champagne alternative, selling an opportunity to act fancy for people who don't want to blow $50+ on a bottle of something that's actually fancy.

Jen0125 posted...

Why is carbonated juice considered "cheap" or "low class" and not just "a drink?"

Because compared to champagne (especially real stuff and not just garden-variety sparkling wine), it is cheap. That makes it "low-class" because expensive wine people like to find reasons to look down on others.

As far as I'm concerned, though, you do you and drink what you want. I don't choose beverages to impress people, I choose them because they taste good.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

costco in the uk really is just for businesses, which makes sense because an average person doesn't need a 50 gallon bucket of mayonnaise.

It makes some sense, but I'm also not surprised that household bulk purchases have taken off to enough of an extent for Costco to be more open in the US. Suburban sprawl kind of encourages that, with it being less convenient to get to grocery stores (favouring large, infrequent trips over smaller, more frequent ones) and houses being large enough to store bulk food products. Even living in an urban apartment, though, my girlfriend and I go through smaller bulk purchases like frozen fruit quickly enough that we go every two weeks. There's quite a bit of middle ground between buying 50 gallons of mayo and buying a pint, after all, and Costco offers quite a bit within that middle ground (maybe not for mayo, but for other products). If you can get through 1-2 litres of mayo before it goes bad and you've got space to store it, getting a bulk discount makes sense.