My most Luddite opinion is that you must pick one

a) the ability to connect with arbitrary numbers of people simultaneously around the world

b) rich, multi-modal, interaction that mutually exposes vulnerability among participants

At Christmas, many of us are getting new computer games.

With the season, we also turn to nostalgia & looking back on the past. It's often hard to shake the feeling that games of our youth were simply better than games coming out now. Let's explore why that might be (1/22)

"Well, that's clearly because games in the 80s and 90s didn't have any politics and forced inclusivity"

Nope, that's complete bollocks, and nothing to do with why you remember those games so much more fondly

(maybe I should have started the thread with this, lol) (2/22)

For the purpose of this exercise, I'm going to arbitrarily draw the line between modern and old games at roughly the early 2000s.

For many, the 'golden age' of gaming is the era from the SNES/Genesis to the early years of the PS2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast. (3/22)

There wasn't just one thing that made games from that period feel so great. In my opinion, it came down to 7 interlinking key constraints. As development teams & players looked to overcome them, they had to either mitigate or innovate.

Let's look at each of them in turn (4/22)

First up we have:

'Just enough' hardware performance

Games were finally able to look *amazing*, as long as developers knew the limits of the platform they were working on. You couldn't push for realism, so instead you had to commit to an artstyle. Reply with your favs! (5/22)

Hello friends, let's talk about gamer expectations of work/life balance & why they need to stfu.

There's a certain type of Gamer w/ a Hard R that believes their video games are the center of all existence. They've made their identity so fixated on gaming in general, or a game/games in particular, that nothing else comes close.

To those obsessive gamers, those in the game industry should consider themselves privileged to work on such important material. And w/ that privilege comes accepting that nothing in the employee's life is as important as The Game.

B/c gamer identities revolve around a game, they literally cannot comprehend that an employee might have other things in their life. They don't understand that employees, esp devs, have a right to boundaries b/c The Game trumps all.

There's also very little understanding among gamers about how game development, you know, *works* & they usually assume a lot less work is needed. So when combined w/ a lack of belief in employee boundaries, they truly expect immediate results.

this game definitely didn't have any problems in localization

ahh yes, I remember when my father went off to look for the dragon
(Brain Lord by Enix)

I'm just looking through SNES RPGs for ones that'd be good for the generator.
This is Arcana.

The pouch is empty!
This is Brandish

Breathe of Fire

Thread about THE MOON

So this week I was playing the game 'To The Moon', which is fantastic (later I'll post my review here). The amazing soundtrack was created by @Reives_Freebird and @supershigi.

When the 'Moon' subject shows up, I always think about the mythology of this celestial object, and also about the differences between languages to refer to this object.

To be exact, what I really think is: why the hell "the moon" is a masculine word in German (der Mond)?

On this matter, I also think about the Sun: why is it feminine in German?

Nonetheless, I'll focus on the Moon in this thread.