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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I stopped playing it after the credits rolled only for someone to tell me there’s a secret Act 3 if you do some really specific stuff. I don’t really care for games that require guides, especially if they gate a bunch of content behind it, so I never came back to it.

    However, I did enjoy the first two acts of Silksong much more than the first game. I was never a big fan of Hollow Knight and considered it among the worst of popular metroidvanias. But Silksong was pretty good outside of the fetch quests. Unlockable alternate move sets was probably my favorite bit


  • isyasad@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.worldPragerUle
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    14 days ago

    I know you are /s but I will respond /srs.
    The fact that people in support of trans rights often can’t give a satisfying definition of “woman” is certainly not very problematic or even important at all, but it’s a big sticking point for conservatives and it would be nice to have a real answer.

    I haven’t tried this on real people yet, but I think that you can use a simple comparison to show that they also can’t simply define identity words. For example, they probably can’t come up with a simple definition of “father” that includes/excludes all the right people. Pester them on this point. Is a sperm donor a father? Is a man who adopts children a father? Is any male caretaker a father? Is a father-in-law a father? Is a step-father a father? Is an absent father a father?
    If they end up with a very complicated & unintuitive flowchart definition, ask them: when someone says “as a father, this concerns me” or “I’m not a good father”, what do they actually mean? Are they referring to your definition? or to a vaguely-defined identity that’s really based in feelings and values?
    This really easily transitions into talking about gender because then you can ask them to explain what people mean when they say “man up” or “be a man”. Nobody says those things to mean “be a penised adult human”, it’s obviously about feelings and values.






  • Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are totally unrelated languages. Chinese languages are sino-tibetan, Vietnamese is austro-asiatic, Japanese is japonic, and Korean is alone in its own family. Totally unrelated to each other as far as we can trace.

    Despite that, they all used to use the same writing system and, shockingly, they were mutually intelligible when written down. In Japanese this method of reading Chinese (without actually knowing Chinese) was called kundoku but I think that the other languages also had ways to read & write Chinese writing with very light translation. Even today, Chinese writing unites the different dialects/languages of China.

    My proposed lingua franca is the Chinese writing system. Everybody should keep their own writing systems, but they should also learn to transcribe into Chinese, the only extant written language in which this is really possible.


  • I stopped believing in toki pona when I heard somebody say that “watermelon” would be “kili telo” (fruit [of] water). It goes without saying that “kili telo” would not be understood as “watermelon” unless they had heard it in English before, or heard someone use the English-derived “kili telo”.
    If you’re going to use English-language ideas to form words, then English is a prerequisite language for speaking toki pona, and toki pona becomes useless.

    I think if toki pona is developed as you describe, it could be much more useful than it is today.



  • P3P uses the same combat system as Persona 4 and 5, while the original P3 and P3FES system was quite different.

    The actual changes are pretty subtle, but it makes the whole system feel totally different. The “1 More” mechanic did not activate on partial knockdowns with multi target moves, and being knocked down would result in skipped turn. Being hit while knocked down would also undo the knockdown.
    Basically, multi target moves were much more situational, type weaknesses were much more dangerous (for both player characters and enemies), and there was a lot of potential strategy in getting enemies to skip turns.
    I think it was a lot more interesting this way and P4/P3P/P5 simplified it to the point that P5 added a “play the game for me” button that autoselects the best move.

    I agree with the other commenter that both P3Re or P3FES would be mostly the same as what you’ve already experienced, but I think it’s worth it for the epilogue, especially if you liked the characters in the base game.
    Between the two, I would personally recommend FES but I think most people would recommend Reload.







  • 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 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.