Gdi, that was a fantastic 10 minute ad.

“I read it somewhere” lol

Fuckin’ rad.

I was just a tiny bit too young to get into it properly, as my brother and I would turn off enemies and just explore the world in that game (I loved vents and secret door). Instead, I got heavily into its level maker.

I was 9. Lol

Nice, earlier this year I wanted to to likewise but with Professor Oak challenges, which is get every Pokemon as early in progression we possible. I did it on Blue but it was quite miserable grinding lvl 36 Blastoise fighting only lvl 6 stuff prior to the first badge.

Suffice to say I took a break after that, but I’ll hit Silver next. Fast forward on emulation was a godsend, as well as achievement tracking for keeping track of how many more I had to grab before the next badge (it got really weird because you can skip Lt Surge and just keep going without the HM lol)

I agree we don’t know if they’re loss leaders yet. I will say that even if the hardware is priced at a loss, though, it’ll sell more Steam games. Ultimately I don’t know if it really matters.

Though yeah, people should get past headlines. Lol

Before the Internet got social media, we had the GameFAQs voting thing; you’d get head to head popularity contests of coolest characters. Cloud always won, but it was nice to check daily to see who was most popular.

I still use GameFAQs, though. Even after the buyout, the guides are important to those of us RetroAchevement-ing through some older titles.

Haha, your quote is almost the exact line I’ve read. HR email was literally saying how they should talk to them first and about them failing. Lol

I can’t speak to Rockstar directly but I do know some game companies send anti-union propaganda emails regularly. To take the next step and fire people is entirely believable given when I’ve seen HR push out.

Mumble was… fine. My friends actually moved to Discord from Mumble for our MMO stuff but that was primarily because it was easier to invite randos to the chat. That quality makes it almost impossible to break away from atm.

I recall the latency being only a little worse than Discord, but I think that’s because a friend set up the server at his work as a side thing (he also hosted Minecraft and Terraria). It’s not too complex to setup, but your quality will depend a lot on the computer and network you’re running. At least, it did for us, back in the day.

We’ve thought about alternatives to Discord. Old names were Ventrilo and TeamSpeak but they’re just not very modern. Plus, now almost every chat app has voice, too. Just, for features, it’s hard to beat Discord at this… though I’m willing to read the other comments to get for ideas, too. Lol

Marketing weirdly effective, for one. They pump a large portion of their budgets into hype and they make just enough back to keep going. It’s like the same people who watch an ad for a fast food place and go even though it’s never as advertised.

And most isn’t direct marketing. They very much pay influencers to buy this slop and worse. You pay a half million to a guy to make something look popular and it becomes popular. It’s very annoying.

Knowing the kinda people who join ICE, they’ll probably do it for free beer and a chance to kick a Latino.

Real answer though, the admin is giving them two months pay of residual cash they have, same as military and FBI, possibly via their ill gotten tariff gains: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/some-federal-law-enforcement-receive-pay-during-government-shutdown-2025-10-16/

It’s actually prolonging the shutdown because Congress tends to cave in the moment the military doesn’t get paid.

I’m playing through an old PS2 title Radiata Stories. I don’t get why this title is so overlooked! It’s really fucking funny to play in 2025 cause its weirdly apt with nepotism, classism and going to war over wage theft (kinda, anyway).

I don’t wanna spoil it though.

No, we ARE contrarians. Take that!

I went from full lurker to participant since I felt like I’m not completely drowned out by others. That made it more fun, since Lemmy all feed is pretty small relatively speaking and lurking gets boring if you’re expecting an endless feed of random junk. Plus, since it’s small, you can also feel like you’re contributing to the Lemmy community, since without your comments and posts, it won’t exist.

Although get to the bottom of the all feed and things get wild.

Too bad PS4 emulation isn’t quite there yet. You can, however, pirate the fuck out of the earlier games, DLC and all. Truly a better way to play, cause that DLC was hella expensive.

I was thinking about this deal and… I guess it makes sense the Saudis want in on the gaming industry. I recall a long while ago an old article about the industry (probably second hand via Polygon) that noted just how much Saudis whale on mobile and loot box games. It was so disproportionate, their nobility was like 2% of a mobile title’s revenue… literally just a few big families.

So my thinking is, EA, being the kind of shitty company it is, is actually probably pretty popular among Saudi nobility. That and FIFA, of course — imagine pay to win when you have infinite money.

I prefer to not bloat my gaming experience anymore then I have to, and I already get get annoyed when I’m playing on Windows and haven’t completely disabled that said Xbox game bar.

I think my line stops with in game overlays. Steam and most emulators have that, and that’s kinda fine to me (adds to the console feel). I just don’t want AI draining my resources as I’m playing, that’s asinine, and MS doubly so since they’re a redundant layer on top of my overlays.

Huh, feels like a Mandela effect but only because we’re all just echoing each other’s memes. Lol

Hyperbole, much? What a bananas way to say you like a fun remake of a relatively solid JRPG.

Like 98% of people had no idea (guessing), which I think is why a big % are not sure how to mourn or laugh. They do recognize the Change My Mind meme and sometimes Toilet Paper USA though.

Lemmy would likely have a different % than typical though. And even then, you always will see a comment like “don’t use that meme, he’s an asshole” and a bunch of TILs.

It’s a fantastic documentary; as an LA native, I recommend playing through the story to better understand our diverse culture of shallow rich folks, inner city gents, and meth-addled drug countrymen.

In fact, pirate it to truly honor my culture. Lol