Yiazmat

little bit of good news: At least one LA city is terminating their contract with ICE due to the protests

https://xcancel.com/MyGlendale/status/1931915078212952336

much respect to Yemen for actually doing something about this genocide

Because it’s been like 20 years since I’ve played it I unfortunately can’t recommend any mods by name so instead I’ll tell you about this goofy mod I installed once: It added a pretty long quest in which the creator added their own fully-voiced NPCs—including children—so when you interacted with a kid you’d hear them talking in a voice that was very clearly a grown man trying to pitch his voice as high as possible. That memory has stuck with me all these years because it was so unexpected I burst out laughing the first time I heard it. I have to give them credit for going through the trouble to record all that dialogue though.

Also if this is your first playthrough be sure to do the Dark Brotherhood quests at some point; they are some of my favorite quests in the game. My only other suggestion would be to occasionally stop and watch NPCs interact with each other. Oblivion has a well-earned reputation for having some really funny NPC interactions.

I pretty much only watch these things for the new game announcements so I had it streaming in the background while I did other stuff but had to close the tab because I kept cringing lol. Honestly just reading a recap of the announcements the next day is a way better use of time. Excited for the sequels to Slay the Spire, Solasta and Okami. Also I can’t wait to see what Fumito Ueda’s new project is about because I love his previous games.

Just checking but have you equipped your characters with materia? Pairing something like Healing materia with the Magic Efficiency one will allow you to heal more often (or MP Absorption paired with damaging magic will refund you a little bit of MP when the damage hits). Using the Speed Up materia also increases how fast your ATB fills which in turn allows you to use abilities more often.

A couple things off the top of my head:

• Barret is a pretty easy character to play since he’s ranged and has an ability (Steelskin) that boosts his defense by a lot. Enemies will usually target the character you’re controlling so it can be useful to switch to him and use that if someone else is getting their ass beat. Also his Focused Shot ability is really good at staggering enemies.
• Like someone else here said you’re kind of meant to switch between the characters often. Also remember to fill out their Folio skill tree thing because you can unlock a lot of really powerful synergy skills that way.
• Always have at least one character with the Assess materia and always cast it on every enemy the first time you fight one. It shows you exactly what strategy you need to beat them (usually in yellow text) and what elements they are weak against. The First Strike materia will also let you cast Assess pretty early in the fight.
• Aerith is a really good. Aside from healing the whole party, she can also put wards on the ground that do things like double cast offensive magic, change her attacks to hitscan-type lasers that build a ton of ATB and stagger (good when you need to heal ASAP) or temporarily stop any enemy that tries to melee attack her. By the end of the game she was my favorite character to play.

Also this isn’t really related to the difficulty but one piece of advice I’ll give is: don’t feel like you need to 100% each map as you get to it. I started off doing that and around ~60% through the game I was getting really burned out. Just do what looks interesting and you’ll be fine. After you beat the game you can go back and finish any stuff you missed anyway. Damn, typing up this reply made me want to go back and play the game again lmao.

I wanted to play the new Dragon Age game so I’m trying to blitz through Inquisition before I start it. Origins is one of my favorite RPGs and DA2 wasn’t as good but I still liked it, but I’m not totally sure how I feel about Inquisition. I think if I had played it back when it released and had time to explore everything I would have liked it a lot more but as it stands now I’m just trying to rush through it lol

ah I was referring to the plane in which they crashed, which was in Washington state during some kind of training mission or something. I agree with the spirit of your comment though

I just had someone who was apparently a part of Operation Prosperity Guardian reply to me on reddit really mad that I made fun of the two US pilots who bombed Yemen and later died in a jet crash in the US. I told them if I were flying the jet it wouldn’t have crashed lol

Biden: hey cmon guys. what’s going on over there. knock it off, will ya?

Regarding the performance, I tried the demo on PS5 and it ran pretty well. I haven’t finished it yet but got about ~2 hours in and liked it a lot. The whole “monsters are called ‘humans’” thing was a bit on the nose but I don’t mind that much. There’s something about the art style of the game that I can’t quite describe; it almost feels like a watercolor painting but also cel-shaded? Either way it’s unique and the UI is pretty striking as well.

Like you I will shovel into my mouth whatever Persona/SMT slop they give me so I’ll probably get it when it comes out.

For what it’s worth the new GPU is a decent upgrade and it will support that PSSR AI upscaling tech they’ve been working on. I still don’t think it’s worth it, especially if you already have a PS5 or a relatively modern PC. This seems more aimed at people who have an outdated PC and haven’t bought a current gen console yet.

The price is still nuts, though. I would be interested to see how well it sells because with everything being so damn expensive now I would imagine not many people are racing to spend $700 on a console (with only one game included lol).

I’ve never been much of a movie person (I watch maybe one movie a year, if that) but every time I unwillingly see a clip or meme from those marvel-style movies it’s just so off-putting. It’s such a relief to be oblivious to it all

damn I remember when machinarium came out; I picked it up on a whim and ended up loving it

linux gang stays winning

I mentioned something similar in another thread here but the “git gud” fans are probably the worst consequence of fromsoft’s games gaining popularity. Basing a large part of their personality on “I can beat this (perceived) difficult game and anyone who can’t is trash” is just so pathetic. My 12-year-old nephew can beat these games so bragging that you can do something a pre-teen can is so weird. It’s to the point that I actively avoid any kind of souls game community because interacting with them is so off-putting.

I swear in every video like this, these IOF bozos are always standing near windows or out in the open, just making themselves excellent targets. Remember that video where the resistance poked a camera out of a hole like ~6 feet away from a group of them just sitting in a circle talking to each other and they didn’t even notice? You can just tell they’re so far out of their depth. Clown ass army.

roughly a month after the game came out someone on r/eldenring posted a thread titled something like “what do you not like about the game?” I made a comment saying kinda the same thing as you: I thought making it open world was a mistake because now there are just large areas filled with nothing particularly interesting, tons of duplicate enemies (and bosses!) and due to the nature of its open world it’s super easy to miss important NPCs, sometimes permanently because you unknowingly triggered something on the other side of the map. The last time I checked my comment had like over 70 downvotes with a ton of people replying with some variation of the extremely tired “git gud” (even though I’ve beaten literally every other souls game solo; Fromsoft fans who base their personality around “I good at hard game” are some of the most insufferable people in this hobby).

The parts of the game I really liked were the legacy dungeons. I thought to myself “I wish this game was just entirely legacy dungeons instead of this open world stuff” and after a while I realized I was just describing their older games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or Sekiro.

Idk what point I’m even trying to make here other than you are not alone in being a bit disappointed in the game. I still don’t understand all the “this is the best game From has ever made” praise because I think their older games, while not having as much content, easily outclass it in focused design. I hope their next project isn’t open world but seeing as how they just announced the game sold over 25 million copies I’m guessing it probably will be 😑. Also I just realized this thread is 10 days old but I’m gonna post this anyway

can’t wait to see libs get mad about this, completely missing the irony

it genuinely makes me happy to know how mad liberals are that it didn’t work lol. like you can hear it in how they talk about it. they fucking hate that China is powerful now

was speaking to a family member who mentioned her coworker talking about “standing with Israel” which sent me into a full blown rant about how fucking evil Zionists are and how Palestinians are 100% justified in their attacks on Israel and I think my indignant rage kinda shook her a bit lol.

I feel like I’ve had this anger boiling just under the surface for so long and I finally opened a release valve and just went off about how Israel and the US are unequivocally evil. I ended up apologizing to her because once I cooled down I felt bad about blowing up on her but man it felt good to finally just release all that anger. I need a better way to channel it though