About a year ago I got a high-speed (so-called “gaming”) hard drive on sale for about 100 USD. It has 8TB, so I kinda stopped uninstalling games or worrying about file sizes.

I don’t really play any games that have more than 80GB file size anyway, but I imagine at around 90-100 is when I’d start being reluctant to download.

As for what I prefer, I feel like smaller file sizes usually yield better games on average. If I find a game that has 100MB download, I’m already lookin like this: 😏
I’m pretty happy with anything up to 10GB. If the original Dark Souls (my favorite game) is 8GB, surely that’s within an order of magnitude of the maximum file size a game can reasonably be, for me at least.

I’m not complaining about the Ghosts 'n Goblins series though, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is one of the best games ever

I did find it more difficult than DS1 but, as in my metaphor, in a more artificial way. I’m thinking of the nerfed rolling frames (before you level ADP), more difficult parry timing, far more multi-opponent bosses, and especially the way that dying will reduce your max health. Any of these on their own would be totally unremarkable, but all together it feels like there was much more explicit focus on adding things to make it more difficult (which I believe was also reflected in the marketing of the games).

I also think that the atmosphere and artstyle of DS1 was much more serious and unique, whereas DS2 has comparatively much more ghoulish cartoony vibes, which just made it feel incongruent. Eg: the undead are now green and less scrawny, making them seem more like generic goblins rather than how they were in DS1. I just feel like there was an overall shift in the focus to be less about the unique world and its story and more about a Ghosts 'n Goblins -esque rage game.

I don’t think Dark Souls 2 is the most difficult in the series but I think it’s the first one where the difficulty started to feel unfair and like it was missing the point.

Basically here’s the vibes I get from each game:
DS1: A somber and holy journey
DS2: Ghosts 'n Goblins but 3D
DS3: Killing cool bosses is so cool
ER: All of the above

I agree with your critique of souls-likes, but there was something really special about the original Dark Souls that none of its successors really captured. This was before they decided that “ultra-hard” was a good selling point and the attack patterns were far more simple. The atmosphere and difficulty were still there, but they made sense and fit with the rest of the game and its ideas very cohesively.

Not sure if anybody will understand this, but it’s like the difference between spicy food that’s spicy because it has peppers and spicy food that’s spicy because they added a bunch of artificial stuff. Spicier usually means tastier, because it has more of the flavorful peppers. But in the case of, for example, Dark Souls 2 or Elden Ring, it’s like they just added a bunch of capsaicin (difficulty) without including any more flavors of the peppers. The difficulty is beyond the degree to which it was artistically meaningful in the original Dark Souls.

If Alyx counts as Half-Life 3, surely Opposing Force was Half-Life 2, Blue Shift was Half-Life 3, and Alyx is like… Half-Life 7 or something.

It’s not actually a tier list, I just used a tier maker website to put together this play order and put rough labels on them. BotW and TotK are far apart cause we didn’t want to play them back-to-back.

Also, who’s the genius that said we don’t play Hyrule Warriors, and what is wrong with them?

I humbly admit that I am the genius in question.
Doesn’t really look very fun or interesting, and it’s certainly not mainline. So to be honest, I didn’t even consider including it. Maybe I will try it at your recommendation.

Currently playing through all the Zelda games with a friend in this curated order:

So far I recommend it, although I’m only 3 games in.

I just finished Wind Waker and it was far worse than I remembered, and I didn’t remember it being very good in the first place. Probably a conversational opinion, but I think Wind Waker is the most lazy and forgettable Zelda game. Curious if anybody liked this one for more than just the music and artstyle.

I can’t wait to move on to the DS games which I really like, but I’m waiting for my buddy to play Wind Waker first.

I used to be always on vibrate, but then I found out I can schedule do not disturb via calendar events, so I have started leaving my ringer on with it automatically disabling when I don’t want it on.

This is my ringtone: Moment (instrumental) from Marmalade Boy. Watched this anime with my friends and this track is unforgettable. The show is about this girl whose parents divorce and get remarried to another couple who also got divorced, and then she tries to date her step-step-brother who is both her mom’s husband’s son and her dad’s wife’s son.
This track plays any time something dramatic happens, which is like every 5 minutes.

“Learn” and “bird” are pronounced very differently depending on the accent of English. Wiktionary has “learn” RP pronunciation listed as lɜːn and American as lɝn, although personally I don’t believe in ɝ so I would write it as lɹn and bɹd.

Slight rant about American English IPA, but Wiktionary even has American “bird” listed as bɜɹd, which is frankly ridiculous. Say bɜɹd out loud and it sounds absolutely insane. Be’rd. Nobody says bɜɹd, it’s gotta be bɹd. English spelling treats R as a consonant, but American English functionally treats it like a vowel. If we spelled with R the same way it’s pronounced, it would be brd, lrn, teachr, wrking, etc. Not suggesting a spelling reform, because the current system works so well for uniting different accents of English, but it seriously bugs me when people talk about how American R (ɹ) is a consonant. It’s not!

Are you on a permo? A permanent trip?
https://youtu.be/BHbZD68SGoE

I have some screen recording software on my computer that I occasionally accidentally leave running. One time, without knowing that I was recording myself, I ended up watching a whole movie with my friends, so the whole movie and our conversations were recorded.

A couple years later I found the video file and decided to rewatch the movie via the recording I took, so I was also hearing my conversations from the past.

So many times during the movie rewatch, I would come up with the exact same response in the conversation just before or after my past recorded self would say the same thing.

So cute, are you watching CITY?

My dad didn’t have a wedding when he got remarried, but he invited me to be there when the papers were signed. Then he did it without telling me 🤷‍♀️ so “no” I guess. One day he was just like “oh yeah we got married yesterday”…

Looks like the Wikipedia app

Mine:

• Bugsnax
• Sigmund Freud
• Doug Ducey
• Racial discrimination in jury selection
• Jaguar
• City of Gastronomy

Pseudoregalia is insanely good

I don’t have strict standards, but generally:

• usually upvote someone who responds to me with something substantial, even if I disagree
• downvote things that are antisocial (self-hate/self-harm, antinatalism, misanthropy)

What length of hair did you have?

Whatever you are… MAKE ME A PIZZA (Zoombinis)

Picture is of “Front Mission” (1995). I’ve never played or heard of it, tbh it is just taken from the Wikipedia page for tactical RPG.