This kind of thing didn’t used to bother me at all before it very much bothered me and now I’m somewhere in the middle. I think cartridges/discs for consoles should not require an Internet connection to play them. That said, this isn’t the PS2 era anymore. Many games release with patches day 1 and most will have at least some updates post launch. A lot of games kept offline end up missing out on a ton. Keeping a physical copy of a game is only preserving a portion of the game for a future without the servers to supply the final version, which is my main concern when it comes to physical vs digital media. We still have to rely on hacked consoles running custom firmware or emulation to properly preserve games.

Some life, sure. We’ll extinct untold millions of species on the way out. Michael Crichton, the author of Jurassic Park, was a climate change denier, not a scientist.

I don’t even remember the last time Stephanie Sterling did anything like this, so it was just a weird blip. Not that she doesn’t goof a bunch. Still a great channel to stay up to date on the things that actually matter in the games industry instead of the usual hype machine shit. The only thing I don’t care for on the show is the wrestling stuff and when the editor does some schtick.

I re-played the first a few years back and it’s one of the very few games I’ve 100%'d. Despite the years long gap since my last time playing, it still felt like I just jumped back into the world. So far I’m liking the new characters, but I do miss the original cast of camp kids.

I will say the constant references to the in-between VR exclusive game is frustrating. That feels like a crucial bit of story being dangled over my head that I know I’m never going to see because a VR headset is just not in the cards for me for at least the next few years. Maybe I just need to watch a Let’s Play.

This is probably one of the more active communities I’m in, actually. Lemmy’s just not that big, I guess? And that’s fine with me. I don’t need an endless scroll of posts daily. I catch up on my subscribed pages within 20 minutes each day. But if someone wants to encourage more conversation I’m all for it.

As for what I’m playing this month, I just got a used Steam Deck and that’s dramatically opened up opportunities for me to play through my PC games that I haven’t gotten around to. Started Psychonauts 2 and I’m pretty impressed with how little Double Fine had to change since 2005. It feels like 20 years just never happened and it’s so far a very natural progression of the first game. Having a great time with it.

Jak 2 (OpenGOAL) on the pre-owned Steam Deck I bought on Tuesday. Just very excited to be playing PS2 games on a portable device.

Great water

After Oblivion, I really wished I had the option to quick load my last save.

I realize I’m biased having experienced this era at my most influential (as another user easily defined it as ages 12 - 22), but this was definitely it for me. I only had a Gameboy before I finally had a PS2. The big mascot character games of this console were formative for me. Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper. Kingdom Hearts and Shadow of the Colossus were everything to me. Tons of other huge titles made this generation.

But it’s the weird little games that I think about fondly. Katamari became a franchise, but it was just a funny novel idea when it dropped on the PS2. Kya: Dark Lineage, an adventure/fighting game absolutely packed with fun ideas from a studio that just made racing games prior. Magic Pengel - basically DIY Pokemon - was pretty much everything I wanted in a game. Even Eye Toy, which completely sucked and barely worked, offered a new way to play games.

Things were just different then. I think it was maybe the last time we thought of games by their budgets. Most titles were what we would maybe call AA these days, something that almost doesn’t exist anymore. Where indie games didn’t exist yet, but small studios were prolific. For me, any game that let you run around as a fairly detailed 3D character in a cool setting was magic to me in a way the flat, pixelated worlds on my GBC never were. The worlds in my PS2 were believable.

Dang, Valve stealth indoctrinated console gamers to Steam with the Orange Box lol.

Returned to my beloved 3DS to play a fan translation of the Japan-only Rocket Slime 3. The translation itself is solid, though there are a bunch of text rendering issues. Nothing that ruins the experience. I loved the previous game and this one is a very similar experience, but I think I preferred the mecha fights of 2 over the pirate ship battles of 3.

The gameplay balance is all over the place, unfortunately. Regular adventuring off-ship is dead easy and a little dull. The boss fights in particular are incredibly uninspired. But the ship battles wildly fluctuate in difficulty. Some I manage to Perfect without much challenge, others have me hanging on by a thread and landing me on the Game Over screen more than once.

I’m on the last chapter of the main quest and will probably give up soon on trying to complete everything as I’ve read the final post-game gauntlet is absolute hell.

Not OP, but I recently beat P5R years after P5 vanilla. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it myself, but will try to elaborate a little without spoilers.

I found myself mostly disagreeing with the Phantom Thieves in the new chapter and electively went through the “bad” ending first. I do like the story that was explored, however, and I think it was genuinely fascinating to see how the team approached their most complex dilemma yet. Ultimately, I appreciated what they were trying to do even if it felt a little trope-y at times. That said, the ending cutscene is leagues worse than vanilla’s and even kind of walks back some of what made the new story great.

I’m currently playing Strikers and I’m unfortunately getting kind of bored with it after the second area. I was very impressed by how many of Persona 5’s systems translated to an action game so well, but now I’m feeling like I’ve already seen the extent of the gameplay and all that’s left is to repeat again and again and again until it’s over. The story is vaguely fun and the road trip framing is a wonderful follow up to P5’s ending. The writing is fine and the characters haven’t become flanderized quite yet despite being at about that point in the Persona spinoff cycle. But I kind of don’t care what the cast has to say about everything. Maybe that’s the problem of starting a big adventure with a full party. At every cutscene, there are at least 8 characters there to react to what’s happening, which holds up for about as long as one would expect. Considering skipping out on the rest and moving on to Tactica, since that’s way more my style of gameplay.

I really liked Cities Skylines, but I’m getting the impression the sequel isn’t exactly being embraced by the community. Are mods not possible yet or is it that there aren’t many that have been released?

Edit: Realized you said one year or longer. I was focused on the “waiting for updates” part.

Definitely waiting for Persona 3 Reload to both come down in price significantly and get the mostly confirmed epilogue content. But I’ll be very patient with this one. P5 Royal took me years to finish and I’ve already played through the original P3 back in the day. No rush at all from me.

Was it the buyer giving it up to anyone who wanted it or were they under the impression G2A customer support would be refunding it?

Kind of weird to admit to stealing someone’s purchase. Dick move, really, regardless of how dumb that was of the buyer.

It’s not really worthy of Patient Gamers because I bought it shortly after launch (in an actual box at Best Buy), but the Orange Box was one of the most absurdly good deals I’ve ever seen. I can’t even calculate how many hours I’ve gotten out of it because it ended up on an old Steam account, but TF2 alone is easily my most played game ever.

I agree with much of what you’re saying, as well. With Israel holding all the cards, I just find it worrying that Gaza would be forced to give up its one and only leverage. We’ve already seen that Israel does not care if hostages are involved when attacking a location. It’s hard to imagine how much more aggressive they will be when the risk of Israeli collateral damage is removed from the equation.

It’s a misleading headline, whether deliberate or not. Read the context of the resolution. It was a highly conditional ceasefire proposal that would require Gaza to give up all hostages while Israel would be permitted to continue controlling the region. Not immediate and clearly untenable for Palestinians. The US submitted the proposal knowing it would not pass just so they can act like they’re trying to negotiate peace, only being shot down by the usual bad guys. It’s a propaganda tactic and it’s clearly working.

No, the US resolution was distinctly bullshit and did not call for an immediate ceasefire. The previous resolutions that the US vetoed did. Let’s not pretend the US proposed this version of a resolution out of humanitarian interest.