McCarthy would be proud to see his legacy alive and well.

I can’t say I am surprised, but a bit disappointed.

5 is great, and also pretty underrated in my opinion. I recently replayed the first six and I think I had greatly underrated 3/5 and overrated 4.

Not obscure, but I always felt FF3 never got enough credit. Largely because it never got a western release at the time I imagine. It was incredibly ambitious for a NES title, the nested world maps was absolutely bonkers at the time and it was really the first real form of the iconic FF job system.

Yeah the party was just a blob of blank slate characters, but overall I think it actually holds up pretty well.

They are not. Asia (this comprises most SE asian countries), China, Japan, and SK are each separate regions.
Not quite as uniform as Europe, which is basically just one big region.

This is correct, I use a US PS5 in Japan and there is no issue.

I just have multiple PSN accounts for different regions. Even if you wanted to use the off-region PSN account outside that region you could, you would just have to do some workarounds to fund the digital wallet. Though there are plenty of sites that sell PSN codes that would work, I have used in the past and never been an issue.

Yen too, even factoring in exchange rates it is about 850 USD in JPY. In terms of relative purchasing power, it is well over 1000 USD.

We designed the damn thing and it is the most expensive here. I can’t imagine they will have all that many domestic sales.

It…depends probably.

You can definitely build a competent gaming PC for less than a PS5, depending on the games you want to play. If you are playing like Factorio and Rimworld, you don’t need a 4090 or something like that.

I think a PS5 is probably better value if you are just looking at raw tech specs for technically demanding games. Historically consoles (except sometimes Nintendo consoles) are sold at a loss because the platform holder makes money back on software. I have no idea if this is true for the Pro, though I imagine it is.

But on the high-end, PCs are definitely more expensive. The PC I just built cost me several times more than a PS5 Pro would have. It is almost certainly technically more powerful than the Pro would be and I can do a lot more with it besides just play games.

For me, makes no sense to replace my PS5 with a Pro. I don’t even care about the whole disc drive thing people are in arms about, I haven’t bought a physical game since the PS3 era. My PS5 has a drive that has never been used once. I just don’t really see the benefit of the upgrade when I have the base version and a PC already.

" If the player allows the counter-revolutionary Trotskyists to take over the Supreme Soviet, it is possible to establish socialist governments around the world through Permanent Revolution and even dismantle the United States in less than six years"

That is certainly an…optimistic viewpoint of Trotskyists.

I really liked the Devil Survivor games. Tactical strategy RPG in the Shin Megami Tensei series. Incidentally one of my favourite big franchises.

They re-released the first game on the 3DS and it’s a solid port. Speaking of SMT games, SMT: Strange Journey is another good one. It has that very classic dungeon-exploring RPG vibe though, which isn’t for everyone. Think Etrian Odyssey or the old Wizardry games.

I think this is extremely unlikely, the days of the government actually pushing back against corporations in any meaningful way in the US seems largely over.

Even if somehow it did go through, there would be functionally very little impact. They’d sulk a bit about the government stifling “innovation”, walk away with their tail between their legs, and then go back to operating almost entirely unchanged.

Pajitnov moved to the US in the 90s, started the Tetris company, and has had political positions pretty sympathetic to the US. Tetris company mostly just exists to liscense out Tetris and sue people.

The Dead Cells takeover wasn’t anything shady really. Evil Empire (the current team) was created by Motion Twin because they wanted to expand development as a bigger studio and found their structure made that difficult. Motion Twin remains a coop and retains creative control of the IP.

I have a real-debrid account (that’s 30 usd/year) and I use the infuse app (10 usd/year) to access things I’ve synced onto my Apple TV. ATV isn’t the best way to sync stremio content, but it works with this setup and I don’t need to buy any new hardware.

I’ve considered setting up a streaming server at some point, but it works for the time being.

Part of me is morbidly curious what they try to do. I would never give that studio money now after what they did, but I want to see how mainstream they try to go.

They’d probably make it an action RPG or something.

I am mixed, it depends on what I am trying to do and also if I paid anything for an app.

“Free” apps in the west are just a marketing case-study and trying to funnel me into as many additional purchases as it possibly can. Chinese is maybe an overwhemling amount of information, but often at least more relevant. It also tends to make a lot more sense for somebody who is engaging with mobile devices primarily, rather than as an extension of a home ecosystem (which the video does touch on a bit).

It also makes perfect sense to have a “one size fits all” app approach in an environment that doesn’t need to parcel your attention out over a bunch of different companies.

“Premium” apps that I already bought into, I admit I often prefer the minimalistic style of design more. That could also just be me, I prefer that in the way I decorate and organise most things I do, digitally and in real life.

I haven’t been into a Zelda game in a LONG time. The last one I really loved was Link to the Past, though I liked Ocarina well enough.

Couldn’t stand Breath of the WIld or Tears of the Kingdom, and I was worried that was all the series was going to be moving forward.

I am curious about this one. I would put it on my “wait for a sale” shelf, but it is a Nintendo game so that will never happen.

I migrated my whole media setup to Stremio earlier this year, it is a fantastic bit of software.

I pay a grand total of about 40/year (for RD and an app I use to stream to on different devices). Theoretically could probably swing it for nothing, but 40 USD is well worth the convenience and improved UI. I know people who pay more than that just for one month of streaming subscriptions.

It is pretty recent that taxis started consistently taking credit cards in my country, I used to have to ask everytime I got in as I don’t carry much cash. So the currency issue can definitely be a big problem.

Uber has always been way more expensive than taxis here to the point that they are virtually unheard of. If you say Uber, most people think of the food delivery service, not the car rental.

Apparently the high cost was due to taxi lobbies having a lot of sway.

Tetris I suppose, but that kind of is the low-hanging fruit. Especially since it was basically made by one person who has gone on to be…pretty capitalist.

Disco Elysium is probably the best example, but the developers were basically ousted and the license was usurped. I would suggest finding alternative ways to get the game that won’t profit the usurpers.

Dead Cells used to be developed by a workers collective (Motion Twin) though the team that took over (Evil Empire) is not a coop. Motion Twin was still involved in the Evil Empire projects as far as I am aware.

Stray Bombay (The Anacrusis) is organised as a co-op, I think.

Welcome, we sometimes get a touch defensive because folks often come in with outright hostile intentions and no desire to learn. However, most of us were probably in the same shoes as you at some point. I am not an admin here but I think I can say you would be welcome as long as you have an open-mind. We don’t require people all be MLs (Marxist-Leninist, probably the most common branch of communism most of us subscribe to) necessarily.

I remember back in my social-democrat days coming across some online communist communities that I was initially dismissive of, because of all the anti-communist indoctrination I had been subjugated to all my life. A few conversations lead to reading a few books, lead to where I am now.

A nice thing is we can often criticize each other without becoming instantly defensive, because we generally realise we are all in varying degrees of learning/studying still.

I think it depends on what you’re looking to do with it. I don’t think it is going to replace a full gaming PC for most people, for instance.

I like mine, but it is mostly the “hang out on the sofa” device while my partner is watching TV. I only bring it out of my flat on long trips, with the expectation I will use it in my hotel room. It is too big (and drains battery too fast) to be used on my regular commute. I don’t really play games on commutes though.

For that use case, it is fantastic. It does make using anything like a Switch afterwards feel like a child’s toy.

It also is fun to tinker with, it is basically just a PC running Linux so there are plenty of other things you can get working on it outside of Steam.