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, I played the NES release of DQ1, and then a translation of the japan-only SNES release of DQ2 recently (I actually beat DQ2 last week) and I found DQ2 to be a much better game than DQ1 overall. DQ1 was… interesting, but it was very much a game that did not respect the player’s time in the least, to the point of expecting the player to fight literally hundreds of battles in order to grind up enough money and experience to afford the gear. The most charitable thing I can say about it is that the battle system was so rudimentary and so grindy that the gameplay felt more like it was focused on resource management–there was a tension in deciding whether you could afford to take another fight, or if you needed to return to town and spend money sleeping at an inn to heal (setting your grind back at least 1-2 fights with how piddly gold and XP drops were), optimizing efficiency in spending your MP to heal vs. the risk of dying to the next monster, etc.

DQ2 meanwhile was a much more robust and much less grindy game–the simple addition of multiple party members and multiple enemies in a single battle meant that your gold and XP gains were multiplied over the first game. While it still demanded grinding, it was much more reasonable about it, and it felt much more like a “modern” JRPG like you’re used to seeing.

Really? Fusion stops holding your hand around the time you get to sector 4, but it’s strictly linear until you’re literally about to go fight the final boss–the game explicitly blocks you from backtracking to areas that aren’t immediately plot-relevant.

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.

They did use them as best they could. They were hamstrung by a filibustering Senate, and two conservative Democrat senators (Sinema and Manchin) who refused to support getting rid of it, making killing the proposition of killing the filibuster DOA. As a result, their only choice to pass legislation was budget reconciliation, which aren’t subject to filibuster. The issue is that reconciliation has several big limits:

1. The bill has to be related to government spending, revenue, and the debt ceiling. You can’t toss in things like minimum wage increases or voting rights legislation.

2. You can only pass one of these bills per year (theoretically you can do more, but additional reconciliation bills have to go through the budgrt committee and with a 50/50 senate the GOP can just skip those meetings to deny quorum and keep it stuck)

3. Whatever passes still has to get at least 50 votes, which means either appeasing Manchin/Sinema or getting Republican votes (which ain’t gonna happen)

And despite that, we still got the CHIPS act, an infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which–even with Manchinema throwing as many grenades in the process as they could get away with–was the biggest climate change bill in our country’s history. Not perfect, no, but a sizable step in the right direction, for once.

I’m utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the “I have XX decades of experience” types come from. They’re also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I’m talking to them it’s fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they’re at risk of losing all their data, and that’s usually enough to get them to shut up.

But god, some of the tickets I’ve seen from other employees…

In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:

• Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT

• Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.

In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and “please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren’t debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there’s a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won’t call you to handhold you through this, I’d literally just be reading the steps in the article” is pure suffering.

God, the unrelenting misery is killing me in this platform. I think the thing I’m most sick and tired of more than anything else is the constant stream of The Usual Suspects butting in with “But what about Gaza?!” on Every. Single. Post.

Post an article about Biden proposing a ceasefire agreement in the war? Complain about Biden giving support to Israel!

Post an article about Biden celebrating pride month? Complain about Biden funding Israel!

Article about Biden forgiving another batch of student loans? “BUt Biden supports israel!”

Article about Trump getting convicted of felonies? “But Biden! Gaza! Israel!”

Article about a small town library fighting LGBTQ+ book bans? “GAZA! ISRAEL! BIDEN! BAD”

Article about a goddamn random topic completely unrelated to Biden, Trump, Israel, politics, or the US at all? “GENOCIIIIIIIIIIDE!”

It’s at the point where I’ve cut back on Lemmy usage entirely because every comment thread I click on is like navigating a fucking minefield of misery. Nothing good can ever happen, no policy changes can ever be celebrated, no events can be remarked upon, without someone butting in with a reminder that Genocide Mother-Fucking Joe is personally shoveling coal into the palestinian child incinerator. No post can ever leave you with any emotion other than the thin veil of doomerism settling upon your shoulders, a pall of depression casting itself over the tragedy of the world, and a sense that modern society is an Aristocrats joke that has long since crossed the line from “horrifying” to “funny,” then back to “horrifying,” then back to “funny,” before settling itself so firmly in “horrifying” that the audience is casting nervous glances and hoping that someone else is the first to call the police.

How about you fuck off and chug a diarrhea dogshit smoothie :^)

Don’t bother, he’s one of the many trolls whose entire purpose on Lemmy is to shit on biden

Holy shit, Stamets changing their name because of the last season is probably the single most damning condemnation I could think of if

Trump doesn’t like the commission that normally hosted the debates because of the typical “concerns” over bias (read: they don’t let Trump say whatever the fuck he wants and run roughshod over the entire thing). Biden doesn’t like the commission because they did a shit job at moderating trump last cycle and didn’t follow their own rules (especially regarding COVID, since they let Trump lie about getting tested and go on the debate while he was infection with the virus).

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

And on the other side of the coin, hard-right Israelis work to paint any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, regardless of legitimacy.

So on the one hand, you have antisemites using this as an opportunity to blame all the world’s ills on tHe (((gLoBALiStS))) (I really hope that came across as sarcastic enough), and on the other, you have ultraconservative Israelis using the first group to lump the people saying “please don’t do a genocide” in with them. And on top of that you also have Hamas doing the goddamn Goofy “and I’ll fuckin do it again” meme, along with a bunch of people in Palestine who are literally taught antisemitism and hatred in the classroom, while Russia, Iran, and the same goddamn Israelis painting everyone as antisemitic pour money into the group that would genocide Israel back in a heartbeat. And caught in the middle of this category 5 shit hurricane are a bunch of innocent people who just want to be treated like human beings with equal rights, and to be able to go to the goddamn grocery store without worrying about getting exploded by a piss rocket / laser-guided cluster bomb made by Lockheed Martin.

I’m so goddamn fucking sick and tired of everything with this. Literally the only “good guys” in this entire fucking 70-year conflict are the noncombatants on either side of the Gaza border wall trying to go about their day and whose entire lives are reduced to a casualty sheet and a propaganda blurb, while both sides just keeps fighting and killing because perverse incentives mean it’s the only way both Netanyahu and Hamas can cling to power, innocent life be damned.

I think it’s because Spotify frequently includes the same song as being on multiple albums separately–for example, if a band has a greatest hits album, Spotify considers the greatest hits album as a different song, even though it’s identical to the song on the original album.