They were that style of sprite derived from prerendered 3D art that was popular in the late 90’s/early 2000’s.

It’s unfortunately looking like ports of this game are going to come later.

Calling out the Jenis Academy stretch would be bold in the fandom, lol. I mostly agree with you though, I think that whole chapter was a low point for the series.

Sky SC in particular has some brutal pacing, so it’d be reassuring for the future remake if they shuffled up this game a bit.

I haven’t seen a lot of chatter around live-service games in Patient Gamers communities in general over the years, but from what I can tell, very little of the Warcraft community made it over to Lemmy. I can think of a couple possible explanations for that.

First, because everyone uses Discord for voice chat over WoW anyway, with the Reddit exodus last year, Discord was always a more natural fit for discussion. Second, /r/wow has increasingly become a place for discussion around the game among former players, especially after Shadowlands. Seeking out a new space on Lemmy and actually participating in the necessary, proactive contributions to grow a community requires more enthusiasm than I think the jaded players have.

It certainly feels like there are fewer MMO players, but I’m not sure. I think we can be certain that younger players are being captured by different forms of live-service games though (shooters, various gacha) rather than traditional MMOs.

Images in particular have been very slow for me lately.

You’re not getting it.

Racial segregation is rooted in legislative and legal process, and that is also the scope of free speech. It does not go beyond that to private communities.

Even if you hadn’t been snide in your reply, the mods could have taken a look at your comment history, quickly found the uncivil behavior there, and upheld the ban.

To paraphrase xkcd, free speech doesn’t shield you from consequences. The people listening found you unwelcome, and they are showing you the door.

And I’d like to block users with consistent negative behaviours.

This is where I’m at it with it. Votes are already public to those who really want to see them and that cat’s not going back in the bag. Anyone that goes out of their way to inject it into the conversation is showing their ass and adding a (likely extra) level of toxicity that blocking would fix.

The Cloudy Mountain one is more like classic Intellivision stuff. I think that one was well-received at the time, but I actually don’t often hear much chatter about Treasure of Tarmin. Tarmin being a first-person dungeon crawler gives it some legs since it’s an inherently “classic” style, although calling the graphics and controls dated would be a huge understatement.

Players are absolutely going to need the game manual, and even then some item use cases will have to be figured out.

I still play Treasure of Tarmin (Intellivision, 1983) on my phone from time to time. I don’t think the core gameplay loop would be entirely out of place in a small roguelite game today.

Yes. One of my moments is a certain event late in the game where the world map music changes after pounding the player with an oppressive atmosphere and some very low lows for a couple of hours. It’s amazing how well a 16-bit game was able to make it so cathartic.

Disco Elysium isn’t part of a series (and probably won’t ever be, super disappointing news there). Going in blind for that one is a good idea.

I don’t use the subscription services much but I did try a month of Xbox Game Pass a few months ago. Ended up being disappointed by Persona 5 Tactica and a little bit surprised by Dune: Spice Wars. The plot pacing felt undercooked in P5T and Spice Wars reminded me of a bit of the early 2000’s vibe for Dune games, probably a plus for some people. Ultimately it didn’t keep me interested for more than a few hours (4X games have a very high bar to clear for me). Also tried Hi-Fi Rush, but didn’t stick with it long even though it felt like a solid product.

Didn’t continue Game Pass because I’m kind of a mercurial player, bouncing from game to game. What I end up sticking with depends a lot on vibes and mood. The service wasn’t the best fit for me.

It was a toss-up at the time but I’d argue FF7 has aged much more gracefully. Sure, you’ve still got the Lego figures and messy navigation on pre-rendered backdrops, but the battles still feel snappy and dynamic even with the low framerate. It isn’t a slog like FF8 and especially FF9 turned out to be when they started pushing the hardware.

Ocarina, meanwhile, has full-on 3D camera jank.

I was never much of an /r/all user, it’s always been niche communities for me. I feel like almost all of my niches have content here now (if not quite as much engagement as I’d like). !retrogaming@lemmy.world in particular has exploded with activity lately and arguably can now serve as a full replacement for its subreddit counterpart.

Thing is, when I try to bring people on Lemmy, it’s always “why?” and if I make it that far, “how?” With the how, I’ve been using the analogy of signing up for email, though it’s still not as smooth as it could be. Eyes glaze over when anyone starts asking me about how the Fediverse in general works.

The why is harder. I don’t know how much user bleed-over niche Reddit got from /r/all users but I’m guessing it wasn’t a trivial amount. I’m sure a lot of Reddit’s growth was owed to AMAs, so it’s possible Lemmy might need something flashy to draw in users who will then filter into communities waiting for them. Some sort of content unique to the platform. I do think before we get there we need a friendlier way to help new people find communities they may have interest in.

I’m out of the loop, what are the highly requested features?

The biggest change is the visual redesign, which uses a brighter color palette and slightly more blended sprite designs to approximate how the original games would have looked on a CRT (along with miscellaneous small changes, such as a FF6 party member being redone to look closer to the concept art). They also all have new, optional soundtracks. Most notable is FF3, which is a full update of the Famicom version and doesn’t have any similar releases. The old DS 3D remake had different characters and a light story too, so the FF3 Pixel Remaster also has a completely new script for Western audiences.

I’ll emphasize what was brought up already–none of these have any content added in the various ports over the years. Extra dungeons, job classes, FF4’s late-game party change, all that isn’t here.

Some filters are better than others for certain tastes. The glow effect on CRT Royale is what gives me the nostalgia buzz, but it looks much better on 4K displays. On my 1080p displays I use a package that adds a bezel for the display to reflect off of which gives me a similar effect.

I’d rather have a native CRT display, but I’m used to larger displays at this point and I couldn’t physically handle anything even in the high 20 inches range.

The PS2, bad third-party relationships, and a limp Western market strategy. Even with competent management it’s quite possible, even likely it still would have been the last console Sega produced, but it could have gone a full generation with better support.

My ex somehow ended up with my copy of Suikoden II. She would have known to sell it and not toss it, but no idea if she did sell or for how much.

On the r/privacy discussion, I was on Reddit almost ten years and I never once had an interaction like that over karma. I barely even remember seeing it in discussions. People can get prickly when being asked for evidence, so how you ask is also important (and for good reason, sealioning is a thing).

I think the takeaway here is what’s asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and not to worry about conversations with people obsessed with imaginary numbers. It’s not worth giving it this kind of headspace.

It’s a hot take in the JRPG/FF communities, but I’ll be right there with you to die on that hill. I still can’t believe that it has one of the highest metascores in the series to this day. I thought I was crazy when I was reading reviews back in 2000.

It’s not just the transitional load times either; the load times in battle were also so bad that they messed up the ATB. These technical issues had all sorts of weird side effects, like making anything with a cast animation worse than alternatives or making Haste the worst it’s ever been in the series. Bizarrely, the best way to avoid the action queueing was to turn down the ATB speed in the options (or to use a mod that sped up the FPS and thus the battle animations, because the ATB ran separately).

The whole thing was technical overreach on Sakaguchi’s part. Games had voice acting for years by the time FF9 released, but he was obsessed with film-making so he packed the disc storage with voiceless CG animation instead. The Dreamcast had been out over a year with its titles alongside PC games that were regularly pushing 60 FPS, but this game just had to have a fourth party member to really gum things up. By the time it finally came out in the West, we were already seeing footage of PS2 games out in Japan. Final Fantasy has never been as far behind the curve as it was with IX.

I didn’t click with the story or characters at all. Was I just so annoyed by the tech issues that it was a non-starter for me? I never played through the game with the newer releases/mods that address some of these issues, so I still don’t know if I would have liked the game. Maybe I’ll play the likely remake.

In the US, since the conversation began with an American retailer? No. The larger trend in this reference window–since the early 90’s–is flat wage growth versus inflation (productivity has increased massively, but the implications of that are a whole other conversation). There was a recent, brief period of inflation outpacing wages as a result of the pandemic, but that trend has also since reversed to a small degree. New fast food hires weren’t making $15 an hour in 1992. There’s been wage growth, just closely in-line with inflation over the long term. It’s an apples-to-apples comparison here, unusually so.

Video games are dramatically less expensive now to purchase than they were in the fourth gen. It’s easy to see why, too; the marginal cost of a cartridge-based game was substantial, owing to a relatively complex manufacturing process. That marginal cost dropped substantially with disc media (with a corresponding drop in game prices at retail), and then again to near zero with digital distribution.