Groovin

@PopeUrban >we don't even make $200k per year and nor should any politician for that matter.

Just a friendly warning: I would rather have elected representatives with less experience that are more committed to reigning in the private sector than those threatening to quit because they want more money than the already generous compensation they receive from the taxpayer.

Looking back, millennials grew up during a genuine golden age of AAA innovation, and somehow, we responded to it with some of the most dogshit criticism imaginable. A lot of the industry's current problems are the direct result of studios trying to "fix" complaints that never actually mattered in the first place. Look back at some of the most common complaints from our time, and you'll see for yourself "The campaign is too short. It’s only 8 hours!" So now every game is padded with endless busywork, crafting systems, collectible spam, and pacing-destroying filler designed to artificially inflate playtime. We traded tight, replayable campaigns with memorable set pieces for 60-hour slogs that most people never even finish. "It has a tacked-on multiplayer mode!" A huge number of beloved multiplayer experiences started as “tacked-on modes.” Developers used to experiment because they could. A lot of those modes existed because parts of the team had downtime while waiting on other departments, so they built weird ideas for fun. That kind of experimentation is how entire genres are born. Thanks to this criticism, we barely get interesting side modes anymore. Singleplayer games stopped experimenting with multiplayer, and multiplayer games stopped shipping with campaigns. "The game is too linear and on rails!" Uhh, yeah? Sometimes that’s the point. Linear games allow developers to control pacing, tension, balance, atmosphere, and spectacle with precision. Not every experience benefits from being an open-world sandbox. Now everything has to be “go anywhere, do anything,” which usually just means bloated maps full of repetitive content where players accidentally skip important moments or experience the story in the worst possible order. "There’s nothing to do after you beat the game!" This helped create the live-service mentality where games are expected to become permanent hobbies instead of complete experiences. Seasonal progression, daily challenges, battle passes, rotating shops, login rewards. Games used to end, and now they’re designed to be work. "The cutscenes take control away from the player!" So now stories are delivered through endless walking sections where characters slowly talk at you while you hold forward. Ironically, this often feels less interactive than a well-directed cutscene because you’re not really playing, you’re just pretending to. "The game is too repetitive, you just do the same thing over and over!" This criticism pushed studios toward constant novelty at the expense of mechanical depth. Older games would give you a solid core mechanic and let you master it over time. Modern AAA games are terrified you’ll get bored, so they throw gimmick after gimmick at you instead of refining the fundamentals. "It’s just another brown military shooter!" This criticism was understandable at the time, but it led to every game becoming terrified of sincerity. Everything had to become quirk chungus, self-aware, colorful, ironic, self referential, and stuffed with marvel-style dialogue. A lot of AAA writing lost the ability to be earnest because studios became scared of being called generic. I could go on and on, but you get the point. A lot of people (rightfully) blame sarkeesian for the current state of the industry, but we really dont blame yahtzee enough, seeing as he got everything he asked for, but not what he wanted.

@Charl3sZ @gothgfdotrip Doesn't matter to them because they know capeshit fans will slurp that shit directly from the asshole and ask for seconds.

@gothgfdotrip And that people is why most American action movies stink. Because imagine telling Tony Leung that you basically don't care about the accuracy of the martial arts fight scenes in a martial arts heavy action movie.

look at how they massacred my boy T_T

Fair point! To make this happen, - I placed an NPC with a specific state (playing a sleeping animation). - Blinded him through scripting. - Placed a few props (some breakable) in the level and made sure they got their physicalization ticked. - Made a small pile of coins.

@TempestsArc @Ultima_Undead what makes me sad is that it's an Australian based dev team who decided to ape american suburban life from a time and place they only ever experienced from tertiary media. burger culture takeover is bad enough back home, and that they'd rather push it forward more is tragic

@Ultima_Undead I heard a really good complaint about these 90s styled nostalgia bait games and it’s the fact that they EXCLUSIVELY pick middle class white kids that live in suburban neighborhoods or gated ones

This is actually,legitimately,genuinely,constitutionally,damn near canonically, verifiably, veritably, without a shadow if a doubt the closest thing to jingling keys as humanly possible.

A great example of how the Experimental Anime Xabungle has a world that operates on the "Reverse Rule of Cool". If any character tries to do something "cool and hardboiled" it backfires in a gag. It is a universe controlled by a trickster god of Comedy.

20 hours of content for a single player experience is insane. Every Star Wars movie back to back is 25 hours. The LOTR extended cuts are 11 hours total. Throw in The Hobbit to get to the 20 hour mark. 10 average James Bond films will get you to 20 hours. That’s just under half the entire catalog. Open world games really did a number on the perception of expected play time with games.

@YoruReijiVT @theWellRedMage I get the idea, but I'd rather people have a good impression before getting to the less good stuff. As opposed to trying to convince someone that 5 is a strictly better implementation of jobs after they already have a sour taste in their mouth from slogging through 3

@TheGroovin @theWellRedMage I wasn't out here trying to make a list that basically says "just play these and it's all downhill from here."

Since this is a series that has a fair influx of new players, where should someone start with the Final Fantasy games?

@YoruReijiVT @theWellRedMage telling people to familirise themselves with the job system and saying to play 3 instead of 5, jesus christ

Base curriculum (any order): III: Familiarize yourself with some of the series' most foundational themes, the job system, and some combat sensibilities. IV: This is where Square really embraced the concept of a deep narrative and cast, and introduced the ATB battle system which is definitive of peak FF. VI: Fundamental gaming for not just anyone getting into FF, but JRPGs altogether. It is one of the greatest games of all time...which is the only reason you MIGHT want to save it for later. VII (original): I will not call this one of the best games in the series, but it is historically important, and how early you play it in your FF experience will likely strongly influence your opinion of it and how you look at the series. Now, I say "any order" but that comes with one HUGE caveat: regardless of whatever you play before them (or whether you play anything before them at all), choosing which to play first between VI and VII is basically tantamount to picking your first starter Pokémon. It will color your entire experience with the series, forever. Once you get through those four, you can kind of wander around however you see fit. Check out the earliest installments, maybe go through the rest of the SNES and PlayStation years, or move on to more modern stuff. You could even try X which is kind of an exception to everything, and come to think of it, might make a good optional fifth title in the introductory pack. 😂

@MyExists @Matropical just selecting all and resizing seems to mess with angled pixel placement and it tends to look really ugly after. those corners and curves would be especially out of whack. doesn't need to be perfect, but I'm still trying to keep it relatively clean.

@TheGroovin @Matropical Cant you use the select tool to make it bigger?

I know it ain't that serious, but for me nothing beats the janky "close enough" kind of creations you make in tomodachi life.

@js6875865518096 @Phantom53516962 @RoyBattyRabbit @ItemsENABLED yup, had a DS fat on release, and eventually that hinge just got too loose (and the touch screen started to die because my brothers abused it a little too hard) The DS lite was a straight improvement, especially in portability. the og felt like a prototype, but I still liked it.

@Phantom53516962 @RoyBattyRabbit @ItemsENABLED This just isn’t true. The hinge on the original DS was a huge failure point and the plastic was of a much lower quality. It crumbles now if you look at it wrong.

The Discord provides yet again

@stefmadarts FFXIV story may not be life changing, but it's still a part of the game, and skipping it is dumb. It's funny though, because there's another game out there that decided to JUST make WoW style dungeons and it flopped because doing that all day is soul drainingly boring.

People should not treat ff14 like its another wow.

One big difference between doing tabletop games and computer games is that computers have zero common sense. There can be no gray areas, and every time you ask the computer to make a decision, it makes the wrong one. Here's an example: one of the privileges we had at Ensemble Studio was that they sent us alpha versions of other games from MicroSoft Game Studios to try out. Now, in the upcoming game Zoo Tycoon animals were subdivided into "predators" and "herbivores". And so every creature was painstakingly and properly flagged as to whether it ate other animals or only plants. This is how we found out that penguins eat chimpanzees when in the same compound.

The European Tour DLC for my retro arcade driving game Parking Garage Rally Circuit is available now on Steam! 🤩 Here's me trying (and failing) to climb the leaderboard for the Paris track:

@intheriverJP Just need to never, ever, under any circumstances, hire American translators. Simple.

自分のゲーム翻訳考えている人は経緯と英語圏の声を拾ってみてください。私は怒り狂っています。お金払ったから、企業だから、実績があるから安心ということはありません。明らかに誤訳の範囲ではなく、品質以前の問題です #ゲーム制作

Playing MM rando with a setting that makes enemies move at 2x speed. Got frozen by a gibdo who freezes me at 2x speed and got stunlocked lmao

@pepperonibyte that picker works wonders on some websites that do full screen popups and overlays that you need to click through too

found out ublock origin has a picker that lets you hide specific elements so im genuinely doing the ai purge myself removing every grok and gemini button AND the stupid twitter premium popup ads that riddled the website and your profile

@Zennistrad That would be funny!

It's honestly kinda funny that all of the brazenly racist caricatures of the Japanese from the 20th century have thick glasses because of Hideki Tojo It'd be like if Japan always depicted Americans wearing stovepipe hats because of Abraham Lincoln