This likely has less to do with cheating and more to do with making sure players use the game shop, whether it's blocking third-party skins or bots that automate currency grinds.

Overall, Surviving Mars might be my favorite work soundtrack. Assorted tracks from Stellaris plus the Age of Wonders and Civilization series are also good. Something about the soundtracks in 4X games and games like them always puts me in a productive mood while not making me emotional and thus distracted like RPG soundtracks can sometimes.

Since you like FF, I'd suggest looking into Uematsu's other works as well, especially Lost Odyssey. For similar ones in the genre, there's also Yasunori Mitsuda's work in the Chrono and Xeno series.

Also love cello, and it's why I keep hoping the long-rumored new version of Final Fantasy Tactics will surface soon. Even with a fifth console gen soundfont, Sakimoto's strings are so good in that soundtrack.

For what it's worth, the game devs and LLM experts I've spoken to on the matter don't seem to think that's coming without another big advancement in AI tech. Some games will try it, but similar to the visual phenomenon, there will be an "uncanny valley" with dialogue that won't be crossed anytime soon.

Thanks for all your work, Tamlyn!

I'll echo that it would help a lot if more people shared discussions/opinions/reviews. I think we're something like 90% news at this point, and while it's good to have that stuff here, topical discussions probably drive more engagement. We get well over 100 users a month, so the lurkers are certainly out there.

One thing I'll say specifically on the matter: don't be afraid to post! I highly doubt responses to community posts would be as hostile here as they are on Reddit, if that's a concern. Discussions in other gaming communities on Lemmy that I've seen have been almost entirely chill, even in the larger communities.

Also, tell a friend about the community! Lemmy is continuing to see growth, so I don't think it's going to fall apart anytime soon.

Americans--especially those older--tend to hold favorable views of past presidents even if they didn't approve of them in office. W had a majority favorable opinion even among Democrats in 2018, and I wouldn't be surprised if the number were higher now.

Voting millennials are why a Republican presidential candidate hasn't won the popular vote since then. They are also why there's actual, durable, leftist representation in local governments for the first time in decades.

Change is coming, if for no other reason than the comparatively low wealth of the generation blocks the typical path to conservatism.

My ex somehow ended up with my copy of Suikoden II. She would have known to sell it and not toss it, but no idea if she did sell or for how much.

On the r/privacy discussion, I was on Reddit almost ten years and I never once had an interaction like that over karma. I barely even remember seeing it in discussions. People can get prickly when being asked for evidence, so how you ask is also important (and for good reason, sealioning is a thing).

I think the takeaway here is what's asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and not to worry about conversations with people obsessed with imaginary numbers. It's not worth giving it this kind of headspace.

It's a hot take in the JRPG/FF communities, but I'll be right there with you to die on that hill. I still can't believe that it has one of the highest metascores in the series to this day. I thought I was crazy when I was reading reviews back in 2000.

It's not just the transitional load times either; the load times in battle were also so bad that they messed up the ATB. These technical issues had all sorts of weird side effects, like making anything with a cast animation worse than alternatives or making Haste the worst it's ever been in the series. Bizarrely, the best way to avoid the action queueing was to turn down the ATB speed in the options (or to use a mod that sped up the FPS and thus the battle animations, because the ATB ran separately).

The whole thing was technical overreach on Sakaguchi's part. Games had voice acting for years by the time FF9 released, but he was obsessed with film-making so he packed the disc storage with voiceless CG animation instead. The Dreamcast had been out over a year with its titles alongside PC games that were regularly pushing 60 FPS, but this game just had to have a fourth party member to really gum things up. By the time it finally came out in the West, we were already seeing footage of PS2 games out in Japan. Final Fantasy has never been as far behind the curve as it was with IX.

I didn't click with the story or characters at all. Was I just so annoyed by the tech issues that it was a non-starter for me? I never played through the game with the newer releases/mods that address some of these issues, so I still don't know if I would have liked the game. Maybe I'll play the likely remake.

Uh, while PlayStation's first-party studios certainly have their cost issues, the current generation is the most profitable the division has ever had.

Unfortunately, NIMBYism comes into play should teens start making heavy use of any outdoor spaces, including trails and parks. Low or zero-cost can't be the only factor in providing places for kids, there also have to be protections against or ways to assuage older persons that are being fed constant streams of fear.

The recent, developing post-Web 2.0 era of the Internet is what I've been thinking about lately. The old social media giants are falling, and big corporations are scrambling to establish the Next Big Thing to attract all the displaced users. Combine that with growing nationalism in cyberspace (e.g,. banning TikTok solely based on xenophobia) and problems with foreign-borne propaganda, and I could absolutely see us being a major incident or two away from a splintered, de-globalized set of intranets.

Not sure about the rogue AI-patrolled frontier in between, though.

In the US, since the conversation began with an American retailer? No. The larger trend in this reference window--since the early 90's--is flat wage growth versus inflation (productivity has increased massively, but the implications of that are a whole other conversation). There was a recent, brief period of inflation outpacing wages as a result of the pandemic, but that trend has also since reversed to a small degree. New fast food hires weren't making $15 an hour in 1992. There's been wage growth, just closely in-line with inflation over the long term. It's an apples-to-apples comparison here, unusually so.

Video games are dramatically less expensive now to purchase than they were in the fourth gen. It's easy to see why, too; the marginal cost of a cartridge-based game was substantial, owing to a relatively complex manufacturing process. That marginal cost dropped substantially with disc media (with a corresponding drop in game prices at retail), and then again to near zero with digital distribution.

It's easy to forget the negatives involved here (or some you maybe never knew as a kid). Games used to be very expensive for 80's kids. Adjusting for inflation, you can get two full-priced AAA games now for what A Link to the Past cost in 1992. It's part of the reason there's so much more choice now. Also, games came with manuals because they were so strapped for storage space that they couldn't put tutorials and instructions in the games themselves. Kids that rented games or purchased them secondhand often didn't have the manuals available, so they'd get stuck (before Internet info access).

I agree with the others that you should look into PC gaming; aside from the occasional live service game, I've only ever updated my games when I want to. In general, indies are a good way to go to mitigate many (if not all) of the issues brought up, but so are quality PC ports. For example, I just bought Trails through Daybreak from GOG, which so far looks like something I'll never have to update, I can be in the game action within literally four seconds of launching it, and it's mine forever.

That's setting aside all the value considerations like access to mods, full control of your save storage, getting to play with the gamepad of your choice, supporting small devs/publishers, etc. Even without diving into indie gaming, there are tons of quality AA titles around, too. Compared to a console, It's trivial to offset the larger hardware costs with cheaper games.

There's definitely an argument for that, even if it can be hard to see at times because Reverie is all wrapped in the "Cold Steel" software package.

Big part of why I liked Reverie is because I'm a huge fan of Crossbell. Azure is one of my all-time favorite games. Loved Zero, too.

Civ5 has been my favorite in the series. They did a great job with the AI on that one, and it gave the game so much replay value for me.

A lot of great options named in the thread but I'll also add Slice and Dice and Crypt of the NecroDancer. Seconding FTL too, that was one of my top games of the 2010's.

I also recommend Cobalt Core, which is not quite patient as a past November release. Great for FTL fans or anyone that likes tactical card battlers.

I hadn't heard about the charm mods, thanks. Wayward Compass being permanently free by default should have been a thing. If it weren't for the awful map system, I would have felt Hollow Knight was a flawless game.

You're fully clearing Pure Fiction, Memory of Chaos, Swarn Disaster, Divergent Universe, and Apocalyptic Shadow?