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Why make a better UI when it’ll probably introduce a slew of new bugs?

Yeah, that’s what happens when the LLM they use to summarize these articles strips all nuance and comedy.

For what it’s worth, this was largely my own opinion, and on a personal level, I found 4 to be enjoyable, if vaguely bland, while Apocalypse was the first mainline SMT game whose story and characters I legitimately enjoyed and found engaging, even while I was insulting Asahi every time she opened her goddamn mouth. Yeah, the game falls victim to the whole “this entire mess would have never happened if the main characters weren’t fucking idiots” syndrome, but at least I felt something while the plot was happening, which is more than I could say about SMT 1, 2, & 4 and their cardboard cutout characters with the depth of a sheet of paper. (Not to say that I didn’t enjoy SMT 4’s story at all, I found the world and overall plot engaging. But the character writing and dialogue is some of the weakest I’ve ever seen, and I’ve read bad fanfiction. I’ve written bad fanfiction.)

OK, so I actually know a fair bit about this series since I went through (a good chunk of) it semi-recently myself!

The mainline SMT games all take place in post-apocalyptic Japan, where your party is yourself, maybe a few other humans, and most importantly, demons that you recruit, level up, and combine together to make new, more powerful ones. Like someone else said, SMT is sort of like Pokemon, but instead of fighting with cute electric rats and furry bait, you fight alongside various mythological figures (…and furry bait). The SNES games are first-person, grid-based dungeon crawlers, but later games largely drop the grid-based aspect.

Anyway, I started out with Shin Megami Tensei 1 on the SNES. It was pretty darn enjoyable, though I used a walkthrough–if you play the SNES games, I strongly recommend doing this, because both games are basically one giant labyrinth with an overworld. A walkthrough is pretty much mandatory to navigate which demons are worth recruiting and merging together, and to find the various secrets and treasures scattered throughout the world. A nice thing about the first game is that the level scaling is well-paced; as long as you don’t run away from battles and are smart about your recruitment and demon fusions, you should generally be able to keep up with the power level of your enemies.

As for SMT 2… well, it spikes the difficulty up much higher than the first game. to the point where I actually wound up giving up about 10-15 hours in, even with a walkthrough and using save states. I had reached a point where the enemies were outleveling my demons and killing them over and over, I couldn’t easily afford to revive them, and I was having trouble recruiting new demons to merge with my existing party into more powerful ones–there were multiple instances where even when I used save states to explore the demon’s entire recruitment dialogue tree, it either took my valuable items/money and ran away, or attacked me. Forced to choose between sitting and grinding for at least 5-10 hours, or moving on, I moved on.

SMT 3 on the PS2 is the first real “modern” shin megami tensei game, and it introduces the press turn mechanic that forms the core of the mainline SMT series from that point on. Press turns work by giving each side a number of actions they can take based on how many members are in the party–in other words, if you have 4 members active in the party, you have 4 actions. If you hit an enemy’s elemental weakness, you’re given bonus actions you can take (up to a max of 2x your base actions), and if you miss an enemy, or attack them with an element they nullify, reflect, or absorb, you lose turns. Crucially, this also applies to your opponents as well, making combat tense, tactical, and deep: your demon is the only one that uses ice magic, which the enemy is weak to, but your demon is weak to lightning and the enemy can use that element. Do you switch out this demon to cover your own weakness, or keep it in to better exploit the enemy’s weakness? Remember, if the demon dies, you not only have to spend a turn summoning a replacement, but your baseline actions go from 4 to 3, so you’re penalized twice.

Admittedly, I didn’t play SMT 3 myself, because it has That One Fucking Spell called Beast Eye, which is something only opposing demons can use, and spends a single action to grant the AI two turns (or Dragon Eye, which grants four turns). This gives SMT 3 a reputation for being incredibly difficult, even by the standards of SMT, and frankly I had no appetite for that after having just given up on SMT 2 over difficulty. That said, everybody I speak to who has played SMT 3 says that it’s one of the best RPGs on the PS2, however, so it’s still highly recommended, and later games mercifully got rid of Beast/Dragon Eye.

SMT 4 is… odd. It starts out looking like a much more generic fantasy setting, but it most assuredly is not. It’s good, but it also very clearly is straining against the limits of the system it’s on. SMT 4 Apocalypse is also extremely good, and I would suggest playing SMT 4 just to play SMT 4 Apocalypse. I won’t say too much about SMT 5 except to note that it’s also good and I recommend it strongly.

There’s also Persona. Where SMT is a post-apocalyptic dungeon crawler, Persona (at least from 3 onwards) focuses much more heavily on time management. You play as a Japanese high school student in Persona, so a lot of your activities are based around juggling a schedule: attending classes, going to after-school activities, working part-time jobs, spending time with your various party members to build relationships, and saving the world in between. Persona is also different in that instead of having mythological figures fight alongside you as distinct party members, they’re instead Personas that act more like Stands from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure–they just give humans the ability to cast magic. Notably, the main character is typically the only one who can change their persona-- your companions all have their own persona, but they’re stuck with the one they have, which conveniently gives them their own static elemental strengths/weaknesses and roles. The other big difference is that (up until Persona 5) the main dungeons were more roguelike, procedurally-generated designs, than the static designs of mainline SMT.

If you decide to play Persona, I’d start with Persona 3–either Reload (the recent remaster) or Persona 3 Portable (which has some extra content like that wasn’t included with the remaster for some godforsaken reason). DO NOT start with Persona 5 like I did–to be blunt, it’s way more polished than 3 or 4, and it’ll be hard to go back and enjoy the previous games afterwards. You can also technically start with Persona 1 and 2, but they’re waaay different than the later entries–they lack the time management/dating sim aspect entirely, and honestly there isn’t a whole lot of reason to play them unless you wanna beat the shit out of Hitler for some reason.

Copyright is the only thing protecting us from getting absolutely fucked even harder by the rich than we already are, yes.

Do you want corps just stealing every new idea and product, cloning it, and muscling out the original inventor without paying them a dime? Because abolishing copyright entirely would be an excellent way to do that.

God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.

I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with you…?

The problem is that as far as I’m aware there’s literally zero evidence of this doomsday scenario you’re describing ever happening, despite publicity rights being a thing for over 50 years. Companies have zero interest in monetizing publicity rights to this extent because of the near-certain public backlash, and even if they did, courts have zero interest in enforcing publicity rights against random individuals to avoid inviting a flood of frivolous lawsuits. They’re almost exclusively used by individuals to defend against businesses using their likeness without permission.

Holy fuck how do you not see the difference between “random nobody does an impression for free while hanging out with their pals” and “multi billion startup backed and funded by one of the richest companies on earth uses an impression as a key selling point for their new flagship product that they are charging access for and intend to profit from”

Yeah, and without Pence, it would’ve been Lindsay Graham acting as president pro tempare, and he would have gone along with the fake elector scheme as pretext to refuse to acknowledge electors from states Biden won, leaving him with less than 270 electors. Election stalemates, it goes to Congress in a one-vote-per-state contest, and Trump wins. That was the entire plan behind the coup–find a pretext to deny Biden 270 electors to throw it to the backup mechanism where Republicans outnumber Democrats.

I don’t, because IIRC the plan was to take Pence out of the picture, have Graham assume the role of Senate president pro tempare in his place, and then Graham would use the fake electors as a justification to refuse to certify Biden’s election. From there, it would get thrown to Congress, where each state’s congressional delegation get a single collective vote to decide who becomes president. Republicans outnumber Democrats in enough state delegations to throw the election to Trump.

In other words, the timeline Pence dies is the one where the coup succeeds.

There’s something primal about making something with your own hands that you just can’t get with IT. Sure, you can deploy and maintain an app, but you can’t reach out and touch it, smell it, or move it. You can’t look at the fruits of your labor and see it as a complete work instead of a reminder that you need to fix this bug, and you have that feature request to triage, oh and you need to update this library to address that zero day vulnerability…

Plus, your brain is a muscle, too. When you’ve spent decades primarily thinking with your brain in one specific way, that muscle starts to get fatigued. Changing your routine becomes very alluring, and it lets you exercise new muscles, and challenge yourself to think in new ways.

That goes against his long and storied history of being in the tank for the Republican party. He convinced Bush Sr to pardon the few people who were convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal to execute a cover-up, he slow-walked and misrepresented the findings of Mueller’s report on Russian interference, and he’s always ascribed to the unitary executive theory. If his history and career is any indication, I suspect he talked about it because he legitimately thinks the president should be able to execute his political rivals (as long as they have an elephant pin on their lapel, naturally).

Funny, I tweaked my Linux PC at work to look like Windows XP. It’s so cursed, I love it.

Funny, I thought of mentioning Crash Bandicoot, but when I put myself into the shoes of 12-year-old me, the single game that came to mind when I thought PlayStation was Final Fantasy 7 more than anything else.

I’m no game designer or coder so I’m just going off what I read on Wikipedia, but… Apparently the Saturn was a mostly 2D focused system, so it had a processor that could do warping and manipulation of sprites. So when it drew a “polygon” it was really drawing together a bunch of sprites and manipulating them.

…yeah.

Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn’t access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.

Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.

Y’know what? I’m gonna be even more of a furry now, just to spite you.