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.

Need a fork of an app that replaces a Google app to get a fork of an app that replaces another Google app.

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

I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn’t ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you’re looking for most of the time.

I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.

But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.

This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.

History would suggest that, but I’m starting to believe we’re in a tech service bubble that’s ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it’s becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they’re all a mess.

Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they’ll find a way to profit. They won’t. It’s an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you’re buying. Uber/Lyft already isn’t keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they’ve coasted too long on VC funding and it’s time for them to start making money. But they still aren’t and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can’t sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.

The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we’ve already had it as good as it’s gonna get and we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.” I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it’s not going to stick around in any form we would want.

Please don’t leave me hanging.

It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.

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.