This is great advice. There’s so much content to enjoy from the past 20+ years that I don’t feel the desire to immediately buy the new thing. You can usually get it for far cheaper down the line.
There are communities such as PatientGamers for videogames that preach exactly this.
By design, AI is only able to regurgitate the info it’s been trained on in a slightly different pattern. So I’m not sure how this is supposed to work out.
I have a better proposal for you, Lionsgate: cut the CEO and all their cronies. I’m pretty sure you’ll save a lot more money that way, while keeping the people who actually produce the stuff that makes you money.
What a horrible timeline.
I got the Resident Evil bundle from Humble and decided to finally give RE2make and RE3make a go. But before that, I replayed the original games on my PS1. The last time was quite a few years back… I remember learning English by playing RE3, lol.
Short review of each under spoiler (although they are very much spoiler-free)
RE2 was a lot more… Boring than I remembered. Rooms are static, encounters are scripted, zombies are not really aggressive, and ammo is everywhere. I remembered pretty much nothing of the game outside of the main gist of the story and a few puzzle solutions, so it was an almost blind run. However, I still finished all scenarios with the item box overflowing with ammo and herbs, and I only died once at the beginning of the first scenario while I was still getting accustomed to the controls.
Despite the criticisms, it was still fun. The story was better than I remembered! At least Claire A + Leon B, which is more intertwined and definitely better written. Leon A + Claire B is a lot more straightforward, features fewer interactions between the cast members, and even has a glaring continuity error. Gameplay is pretty straightforward, fairly predictable, not many jumpscares - and it’s difficult to be frightened when you have enough ammo to clean the entire RPD station twice and keep some spare - but I had fun throughout.
The “zapping system,” as it’s called by the fans (basically the actions in the A scenario carrying forward in the B scenario), is greatly exaggerated. I can only remember three instances of choices carrying forward (using the cord in the eastern or western wing, leaving the machine gun or the item pack or both to the B character, and registering both characters’ fingerprints to open the secret door in the lab). In addition, the two A scenarios and the two B scenarios do pretty much the same thing and fight through the same rooms with slightly different item placement and enemy encounters. I honestly don’t think there’s enough “meat” to justify playing both scenarios with both characters unless you’re an RE fan and want to see everything the title has to offer. For the others, I’d recommend playing Claire A + Leon B and calling it a day.
Each scenario took about 2 hours to finish, so it took me 8 hours to complete all four scenarios and 100% the game.
RE3, on the other hand… Holy shit. Zombies RUN, Nemesis RUNS, and there’s a lot of randomization involved in how items and enemies spawn to always keep you on your toes. Sometimes it’s zombies, sometimes dogs, crows, or hunters - and maybe there’s the Nemesis thrown into the mix as well! The rooms are a lot more dynamic as well: while traversing the same rooms back and forth in search of the key items necessary to go forward, zombies keep pouring in, smashing windows, car doors, and even respawning after being killed. Compared to RE2, where a “cleared” room would stay safe until the end of the game, RE3 always makes a point in reminding you that the dead are in control of the city, not you.
There’s a decent amount of choices scattered throughout the game that alter how the events unfold, but as with the scenarios in RE2, I don’t think that the changes warrant a second playthrough unless you are a diehard RE fan. Fighting the Nemesis at the RPD entrance allows you to retrieve the STARS card earlier than intended; finding Carlos in the Restaurant or in the Press Office triggers a different Nemesis encounter; and the ending of the Clock Tower and Dead Factory is slightly different depending on your choices. There are other choices as well (some are spelled out by the game, while others are triggered depending on which location you go to first), but for the most part, it’s just a slightly different cutscene and that’s it.
Where the game shines, however, is the freedom of choice that the player is given. You can choose the order in which you explore different locations to retrieve key items; you can craft different ammo (and even specialize in one, giving you the ability to craft improved ammo for a specific weapon if you so wish); you can run from the Nemesis or fight it for additional rewards; and with the randomized enemy spawns and placement, even dying and reloading feels like a fresh experience. The improved controls (including a quick 180 turn and a tricky dodge mechanic) are the cherry on top.
The story wasn’t as interesting as RE2’s, in my opinion. Although I enjoyed the characters, the Ada-Sherry-Annette dynamic from the previous game was more fascinating than whatever the deal was with Nicholai. Despite that, I appreciated the throwbacks to RE1 (although I would’ve loved to see more in the RPD; Jill enters the police department, grabs the lockpick, gets out, never interacting with anyone or reacting to anything, which was a bit disappointing) and the additional insight into Umbrella.
My time count at the end of the game was 7 and a half hours, slightly shorter than the complete RE2 experience, but much longer than each individual scenario (and as I said, most of the scenarios involve passing through the same rooms and solving the same puzzles, so there’s a lot of repetition involved).
Overall, I’d give RE2 a 7.5/10 and RE3 an 8/10. Both were very much enjoyable and I’d still recommend them to modern players. Tank controls and fixed cameras may take a short while to grow accustomed to, but the entire game is masterfully built around them and they add to the experience, instead of detracting from it. Listening to the sounds and noises to check which enemies are in play becomes second nature, and before you notice it, you are completely engrossed in the game.
Hitchcock didn’t make Birdemic
No, but he sure wishes he did.
Oversexualization. Panty shots, ass shots, boob physics, the same old jokes from the ‘80s about a guy “accidentally” groping a woman, guys peeping into a girls’ space, suggestive poses, barely-disguised fetishes (included, but not limited to, harems, incest and pedophilia).
It got to the point where a friend would recommend an anime, I’d watch it, and walk away halfway through the first or second episode because it was just unbearable. Friends would tell me to turn a blind eye, but why the fuck should I put up with sexualizing minors in a show? I’d rather spend my time doing something that doesn’t make me feel sick.
It also attracts the wrong kind of audience. Since the medium is so keen to produce oversexualized content, that’s all people look for and talk about. Any anime discussion thread degenerates into gross memes about “flat is justice”, “twincest is wincest”, people patting each other in the shoulder while calling the other “man of culture” for sharing their kinks, and shit like that. It’s so extenuating that, back when I was interested in the medium, I still actively refrained from interacting with fellow fans because I felt grossed out by them. Fun fact, I had a female classmate back in highschool who was interested in anime, and I thought that I could find common grounds with her, but no, it was the same thing, just reversed (she would only watch anime with sexualised boys).
The medium also forgot what its name stands for. I haven’t seen “animation” in “anime” in years. It’s just still frames and more still frames and whenever there’s an action sequence, the characters will constantly interrupt them to explain or think about the thing that I’m already watching and needs no explanation, or having flashback sequences, because it’s cheaper to animate. The fact that Ghost in the Shell and Akira from thirty years ago had better and more fluid animation than the shit they produce now is just sad.
Never heard of it, but it sounds like it was a great place. Sad to see it fail against established giants of the internet. I would’ve been interested in trying it out before the end.
I think this is a problem that multiple small realities like this (including Lemmy) are facing. There are people interested in them, but they don’t know them, so they can’t join.
Oh boy. Just one?
I guess I’d go with “signing up to a random online forum back in 2012”.
I was a very shy and introverted kid back then, without friends or social life to speak of. I would spend all my time playing videogames and reading books.
That online forum gave me a chance to speak to other people while staying “safe” in my shell. Without realising it, I slowly gained confidence and social skills that helped me make friends both online and irl, some of whom I still speak with to to this day. Thanks to one of the people I knew on that forum, I now have a job that I like.
I wouldn’t recommend online forums nowadays to fight depression/lack of social skills, as the internet has become a cesspool. Online chats are breeding grounds for political extremists. But in my case it definitely helped.
A close second would be having a girl in college confessing to me. I had never really thought about my sexuality back then: it just wasn’t on my mind, like, ever (which should’ve been a red flag, but whatever). She was really nice and wasn’t pushy at all, but I knew that I couldn’t leave her hanging forever, and I had to give her an honest answer in a relatively short time.
Well, long story short, I realized I wasn’t straight. At first I thought I was bi, then gay, but a few years later I understood that I am ace (again, should’ve been obvious by the fact that I literally never thought about sex for the entirety of my teenage years, but I’m dumb).
But seriously, there are so many important moments in one’s life, it’s difficult to choose only one or two. Watching nature documentaries with my brother as a kid turned me into a huge animal lover, to the point that I’m literally unable to kill a fly because it makes me sick. Thanks bro, those are some of my most treasured memories!
Oh don’t worry, they hate foreigners playing soccer as well.
The brothers Grimm for me. I don’t see many people discussing it online, but I enjoyed it. That scene where the horse eats a kid is still distressing to me years later.
There are no mechanics for that, but my DM so cool that he would’ve allowed it :D
Jokes on you, my Undead Warlock was already dead to begin with.
Respectfully, I believe this incident serves more as a learning opportunity for the admin team rather than a reason to amend the rules.
This isn’t the first time I’ve observed Rooki acting inappropriately for an admin of a community. As an admin of a (admittedly much smaller) corner of the internet, I’ve learned to interact with users in a way that is polite and ensures they feel safe and heard. This is at least the second instance where I’ve seen Rooki respond emotionally and rather adversarially towards users, which has, in my view, undermined their credibility, to the point that I hope to avoid future interactions with them.
I understand that managing LW, one of the largest and general-purpose instances, especially with Lemmy’s still rather limited moderation tools, is challenging, and I appreciate the hard work all of you, including Rooki, put into maintaining it and making it run as smoothly as it does. I’m NOT asking for their removal; however, considering that this is not the first time I’ve seen Rooki behave uncivilly and antagonistically towards users, I hope that this will be a formative experience for them.
(Edit for clarity)
I said nothing about Ukranians’ actions being unjustified, nor do we have any reason yet to think that war crimes are being committed in the area. If this brings them an inch closer to winning the war, I wholly support them.
Still, laughing at people suffering because of war is such an abhorrent behaviour to exhibit, and the fact that people are bending logic to justify it is wild.
You all should learn some empathy.
You are underplaying the struggles of civilians in a war zone just because they happen to live on the wrong side of the border.
Civilians have all the rights to not want war on their country, at their doors, no matter which side of the border they are, and they are allowed to lament the incompetency of a government that hides critical information from them in an attempt to cover up its failures.
The Ukrainians have the right to keep fighting, and I hope they win this war. Putin is a criminal and he must pay for his crimes. This doesn’t mean that civilians caught in the crossfire are being petty.
I really liked GI. No drama, no ignorance, great articles: quality journalism, which is rare today, and even rarer when talking about gaming publications.
I’m not much of a gamer myself now as I was in my youth, but GI was still one of my main connections to the gaming world that allowed me to keep in touch with the hobby.
It’s sad that the talent of all those people is being unceremoniously dumped like this by executives who only care about money. I wish them all the best.
It doesn’t matter though whether Homer is a single person or many, real or fictional. What matters is that we’ve not lost the context of the story.
We literally did. We don’t know how much - if anything - written in the Homeric poems is true. If it did happen, we don’t know when, only rough estimates.
For hundreds of years those poems were thought to be an accurate retelling of history, to the point that political diatribes between ancient Greek cities could be settled by consulting the Iliad.
If our civilization falls, there’s no guarantee that our common knowledge survives. It could very well be that people see a lightsaber and think that we had the technology to build one.
It’s not just about losing history, but also mixing it with incorrect/wrong retellings of the story and fake news.
For example, you mentioned Homer, the writer of the Iliad and Odyssey who lived 3000 years ago. Homer’s existence is hotly debated, and even if he did exist, “he” probably didn’t write both poems. It’s far more likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were created as part of an extensive oral tradition by multiple travelling bards, who independently added, changed or removed verses; the story we know today as the Iliad is just one of many who happened to survive for a variety of reasons.
We also know very little of the broader trojan cycle (Cypria, Little Iliad, Sack of Troy, etc…) of which only fragments have survived. It would be as if, 1000 years from now, only the original SW trilogy survived, and only pieces or fragments of the other movies/TV series in the expanded universe remained - And to be fair, even this example is wrong, because it compares the Iliad/Odyssey to the “original” trilogy, but there’s no consensus about the relationship of the two Homeric epics with the broader epic cycle: as far as we know, they could have been created independently, and later edited to flow from one to the other seamlessly.
Dude, you literally say at the start of your comment that:
nerds used to be a little more “I know oh-so-much more about this media than you ever will” and a little less “I’m eternally uncomfortable about the changes being made to my media.”
You then proceed to call a movie director “selfish” and “fart-sniffing” for telling the story the way he wanted to tell it. You’ve got to admit the irony in all this.
Also, it’s true that big companies are following trends and fostering memes to drive engagement, but I very much doubt that they are willingly antagonizing their own fan bases to drive negative engagement. That sounds like a nightmare that no social media manager would purposely walk into. Nobody is willingly stirring the pot by making people theorize conspiracy theories about a secret leftist agenda. That’s just humanity for you. Some are good people, a lot suck.
The entities that are willfully stirring the pot are social media platforms, who have a lot more to gain by having those people scream at one another in their feeds, because controversial takes can populate comment sections more and faster than mild takes, which drive engagement on those social platforms even further.
You hate it because of the internet
I hate it because I’m Italian
We are not the same