The Elden Ring Tiger Electronics LCD game is pretty fun.

Yeah, definitely depends on who I’m recommending to. If it’s someone who’s pretty familiar with games, I think it would be Elden Ring. Love the sense of exploration and discovery in that game.

I switched fairly recently. I was on Ting before, and they appear to be quietly sunsetting that service after Dish Network bought them a few years back. Hoping the same doesn’t happen to Mint. It’s been great so far. Incredible value!

Yeah, come to think of it, I think this is a larger issue I have in life: I always have to be working toward a goal or else I feel guilty. I can see your point of view too though. If there’s no beginning and end, there’s no minimum amount of time you need to play. The goal is just to enjoy.

My perspective is basically the inverse: if there’s no beginning and end, there’s no maximum amount of time I need to play. 😅

I don’t feel this way about open-world games because they do usually have an end and you can skip a lot of the open-world filler content. I get this anxiety about sandbox games. I hate it because I really enjoy games like Cities Skylines and I’d love to get into Dwarf Fortress, but I can’t play them anymore because I could spend 1,000 hours in one of them and never finish. That open-endedness keeps me from playing.

Greater transparency under capitalism is always a good thing. I have to admit, one thing Trump did that I liked was to force hospitals to publish their prices. I can’t think of a good reason people buying a thing shouldn’t know how much it costs beforehand.

I would like to make a distinction between a “content creator” in the literal sense — just a person who creates content — and a “content creator” as the phrase is commonly used today — a person who makes a living by selling content or by giving away content to market something else.

I, for one, would be very interested in seeing more people on the fediverse creating content, but I’m not super interested in the fediverse becoming a marketing channel for professional content creators.

Of course, it’s an open platform, so pro content creators are more than welcome to join. I’m just not super excited about approaching them and saying, “please come hock your wares to us on the fediverse!”

Illucia: the town of Final Fantasy. This was a Final Fantasy fan site, but themed as a town from a Final Fantasy. This isn’t a town ripped out of a particular game though. Illucia was an entirely original town with original art created by fan Tatsushi Nakao.

Before the release of FF7, it was themed after a town from the 16-bit era of Final Fantasy. To navigate the town, the user was presented with a clickable server-side image map, where clicking on different buildings in the town would take the user to a page on the site that was thematically appropriate to the building.

Quick aside: a history lesson on image maps. Image maps were a technique that allowed for a single image to be linked to multiple different places based on where the user clicked it. In the later years of image maps, the web site developer (“webmaster” to use the period-appropriate nomenclature 😜) could define the different clickable areas in HTML and the browser would handle requesting the correct URL based on where the user clicked. This is a client-side image map. Before browsers had this capability though, browsers would instead send the clicked coordinates to a server-side script — often written in Perl, I think — which would translate the coordinates and send back the corresponding page.

Anyway, after the release of FF7, Illucia was reworked in that style. I believe in this iteration, the user would interact with it by using the arrow keys to walk an actual character avatar around the town and enter various buildings rather than clicking on a (relatively) simple image map.

Just like the FF series did, the site sorta lost its luster for me at that point. Final Fantasy had gone from an ensemble cast of quirky but warm characters and brightly colored pixel art to a blue and gray mess of blurry, pre-rendered environments and low-poly brooding characters that looked bad at the time and aged even worse. I pretty much stopped visiting, but I still fondly remember those old pixel art days of Illucia.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any trace of it online anymore aside from one brief mention in another online article. If anyone knows of anything, please send it my way!

Sliced turkey, pear, and feta 🤌

Sounds like you’re talking about Home Assistant maybe?

Maybe for future astroturfing?

I had a similar experience with The Witcher, but the first one. Bounced off the game twice. Third time was the charm. I fell in love with it and then ended up playing the other games in the series as they came out. I’m not sure what made me keep trying, but I’m glad I did.

Long before that, when Morrowind was released, I couldn’t quite understand it. I had grown up on JRPGs, and the openness of Western RPGs was confusing. I kept trying and eventually fell in love with it too. This opened up a whole new genre for me.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown had a similar effect for turn-based strategy games and Elden Ring for Soulsborne games. I’m still looking for the games that will open my eyes to several genres. I occasionally try games in genres I don’t typically like in hopes this will be the one. It’s really cool to have that new door opened for you.

• The internet was way better before it became a giant shopping mall.
• Those cars that don’t have the flecks in the paint look like children’s toys.

Then, I have a couple that pre-date even boomers by many years 😅:

• Handkerchiefs kick the shit out of paper tissues.
• Cars have made the world a worse place.

Just got around to playing (most of) Mother 3 last year. It has a lot of the same charm and is really interesting in its own way… but it still didn’t hit me quite the same way Earthbound did.

Let’s see if I can offer one suggestion for each of these platforms. 😀

• Batman for the NES was the best Batman game until Arkham Asylum came out something around 20 years later. Sunsoft was pretty amazing in that era.
• Earthbound is my favorite JRPG ever. It was pure wish fulfillment for a tween boy, but even though I’m no longer that, it still holds up because it’s weird and charming as hell.
• I didn’t care much for the N64 — it always looked like a bunch of blobs with blurry textures to me, and the release cadence was abysmal — but I do fondly remember Blast Corps. It was great fun, and I never hear anyone talk about it.
• OK, four in, and I’ve already failed. 😅 I never owned a Master System.
• I’m not sure if Panic for Sega CD was actually any good, but it was cute and silly and that was enough for me. The correct recommendation here is probably Sonic CD, but that’s a boring recommendation.
• Uh oh. I never owned a 32X either. 😞
• I hardly remember anything on the Saturn. Someone has already recommended Nights, so maybe give Christmas Nights a shot. Games with a Christmas theme are relatively rare. 🤷‍♂️
• I can’t recommend my favorite Dreamcast game Samba de Amigo because you won’t be able to play it properly without the maraca peripherals, but the Dreamcast lineup was absolutely loaded so it’s not a problem. I feel like Shenmue embodies the promise of the Dreamcast: unbridled ambition but without the pieces necessary to quite meet that ambition. It might be rough today, but it’s one of very few games where you’ll be able to spend hours driving a forklift around. That’s gotta count for something. 😅
• I’m pretty sure Windjammers is the best Neo-Geo game.
• We’re spoiled for choice again on PS1. I have to go with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It’s a classic that holds up better than just about anything else on the console.
• I always thought most of the Game Boy’s library was garbage. Qix was neat, albeit simple. Oh, wait. You like JRPGs, right? You should try Pokemon!
• I’ll go with the 800 pound Gorilla for my GBC pick: Link’s Awakening
• GBA was another one of those killer platforms with tons of great games… but the best one is WarioWare.
• DS just had a near endless library of hits. Rhythm Heaven is one of my favorites. Bonus JRPG pick: Bowser’s Inside Story
• The only PSP game I played much of was Lumines, but it is actually really good.
• When I was a kid, arcade games were incredible because the tech was years ahead of what I had at home. Now, I see how predatory they were and have trouble feeling good about many of them. Here are a few I like that fly under the radar sometimes. Tapper is a really good game that’s fun for 5-10 minutes. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is one of those 90s beat-em-ups, but with an interesting theme. If you like those, you might also like the D&D beat-em-ups. They have some really light RPG mechanics. Shadow over Mystara and Tower of Doom. Was there another one? I’m not sure. Then, I know there’s near zero chance you haven’t played NBA Jam, but it’s just my all-time favorite.

Hope that helps!