Which ones and why?

I sense a fun story and I’m here for it.

…trying?

Who would’ve thought that making your product more readily available would increase sales? That’s so much more counterintuitive than “double down on NFTs and release schedules that require knowledge of calculus to figure out.”

Seriously. For the same price as McD’s I can go to In-n-Out. That’s just comparing fast food places. For the price they’re charging for a Quarter Pounder I may as well go to a sit-down restaurant.

If you compare that to the average cost of living in Japan it’s a bit closer to $300 in terms of spending power.

Either way it’s a lot cheaper than I’d expect to have to pay anyone for sex work, much less something that blatantly illegal.

Oh, as for the age of consent thing that change just made it a national crime. Every prefecture in Japan had already raised the age of consent to 16 (or higher) well before last year. The only places it didn’t apply were some remote military bases and IIRC the portion of Antarctica that Japan claims. Still a good move but it’s not like Japanese pedos were just having sex with 13-year-olds without consequence before then.

If you want to bypass grinding entirely then you’d need something like that, but it might trivialize certain parts of the game. Won’t trivialize all of it though since several of the key fights rely on strategy.

That was someone’s insane interpretation of the ending of the first Mother game (a.k.a. Earthbound Beginnings). It’s not as out there as the guy who filled the Silent Hill wiki with claims that it was all symbolism for circumcision trauma (yes, really), but it’s still kinda nutters.

Yeah, you do have to grind a bit. Nowhere near as much as some games (looking at you, basically every Final Fantasy game) but the leveling is designed around you doing some extra fights for XP. Every new area generally has a “grind spot” that is moderately to incredibly obvious, typically some grouping of enemies that are enough to fight but not enough to overwhelm you, placed within reasonable walking distance of a bed, hotel, or other way to refill your HP/MP for cheap/free.

For the first town, before you take on the punks roaming the streets you should get some levels fighting crows, dogs, and snakes up near your house. Once you can kill them in two turns or less head into town and try taking on a single punk. If you survive that fight without being nearly dead, keep fighting punks. If you almost die, go heal up and farm a little more. And if you DO die… well you only lose half the money you have on you, so as long as you keep most of it in the ATM you haven’t lost much of anything.

EarthBound was the first JRPG I ever completed and the first JRPG I ever enjoyed. Before it I’d never been able to get into JRPGs: there was just too much complexity while also having too little going on. Wandering an overworld only to be randomly pulled out of it for no apparent reason was maddening. As a kid, trying to piece together the backstory of some undefined thoroughly detailed fantasy world while also taking in the emerging plot in the opening sequence wasn’t anywhere near as appealing as firing up Mario or Mega Man and getting straight to the action.

EarthBound neatly sidestepped all of the things that had stopped me from liking JRPGs. The equipment system was simple without being braindead. The setting was a pastiche of suburban life that I could easily understand. The stakes were high but the tone was still whimsical and amusing. And above all I knew why I was suddenly getting dragged into battle with a snake or a crow or a dog instead of just being clotheslined by combat.

EarthBound still is my go-to recommendation in the (increasingly unlikely) event that someone says “I’ve always wanted to get into JRPGs, what should I start with?” It is the perfect “intro to JRPG” game without feeling trivial or like it cannot stand on its own. It singlehandedly made me love the JRPG genre, and I probably would not have played literally every other JRPG I’ve ever played if it wasn’t for EarthBound.

There? Really? There is where you draw the line? Killing a dog is fine, but lying about meeting a dictator is too far? Just trying to keep track here.

Screw it, go make the actual Starship Troopers game not suck. That thing is in dire need of help.

While 177 countries sounds like a lot, it’s not where the majority of players are. PSN operates in the top 15 countries by GDP and the top 4 by population.

Of course there’s still the question of why they work in so few countries when literally none of their competitors (that I know of) have those limitations.

Welp

If you’re going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies.

This, a thousand times. I can understand requiring anti-cheat for Ranked matches, but some of us just wanna screw around. If there’s no progression tied to the match why should they care?

(Microtransactions, if I had to guess)

The “distributions” argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)

My thoughts exactly. It is not unheard of at all for Linux ports to only be guaranteed to function on specific distros. It’s well within the realm of possibility and this is not a real stumbling block at all.

He may have been a jerk but the town officials were raging assholes who were doing blatantly unethical if not outright illegal things aimed at screwing him over.

Try to see if there are any that do that little Javascript-evaluation-to-render-the-client-side-site thing, and if there are, have them mine cryptocurrency for you.

Using your evil powers for good I see.

You say, I feel that, and yet every time another poll about the economy comes out its like I live in a different universe entirely.

The upcoming Fallout series on Amazon Prime. This is a screencap taken from one of the most recent trailers.

The other guy is worse, so we really don’t have to listen to a damn thing you say at all and you have to vote for our guy, get that through your poverty addled brains.

I mean I hate to say it but this is unironically true. As bad as things are now The Other Guy absolutely would make things worse. Neoliberals may be a scourge but MAGA is cancer. One of the bad cancers. Not even prostate cancer, like pancreatic cancer.