Well these guys from Super Mario Galaxy would probably look pretty round from the side I guess.

Must live on a busy street, most of those would be multi year totals around here.

Hooray I’m average, at least for some fraction of a marathon…

Gives new meaning to ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’.

This may be the most soft-slap low key form of war protest in history…

My single user Lemmy instance is targeted by Chinese scanning, as is pretty well every other IP on the web…

What is DLC vs an expansion has become somewhat blurry. There was StarCraft BroodWar that was really an entire separate game to the point of launching them separately at the menu. Now things like Rimworld (which I play far too much of) have these expansion/plugins that add new mechanics and features but don’t create a separate game in their own right.

I actually read an article recently about 20 years of Oblivion horse armor or some such. They made an interesting point that a lot of the acceptance of micro buys came from online games letting you show off your new gear to the masses.

As a fellow ancient of the game world, I would say 20ish years is not far off give or take. The Atari 2600 was around in the 70s and the original NES came out in 1985(?). The NES was really the beginning of the end for the arcade scene. True that a lot of the arcade ports where terrible, but the power just wasn’t there to do it in a small box yet. $1 rentals from the local video shop would let you play a game all night or longer depending on who it was from.

While the online game services from Xbox and co could be seen as returning to a pay-to-play situation, they where never a must have. You could still play with friends locally without a subscription and the mass push for DLC buys wasn’t there yet.

I would really put the return to money snatching along side the rise of mobile games. Buying addons and in game coins to get an advantage really picked up with the ease of always on connections and purchases with a simple swipe of the finger. Once that ‘just one more boost will do it’ addictive mechanic was made the norm it was all over for the concept of a game that you just bought as a complete thing. Now it’s a novel thing to see a game offered that you just buy and play as it is.

There actually was something many years back called the ‘too small a bill for Bill’ index. The idea was that if it took roughly 4 seconds to pick up money off the ground but he stopped gaining money for that time, what was the smallest amount Bill Gates would stop to grab. The last I saw it was about $4,000 but having a time trying to find it now.

I not sure public displays of genitalia, even fake ones, has ever been argued as a matter of free speech. If it was, the TV landscape would probably be a lot different.

Been a while since I used it, but what it does it does well. I wonder what the complexity is for a relatively mature app to have someone else pick up maintinance

Speak for yourself, I rather like potatoes, or as the French call them ‘pomme de terre’ which if I recall would literally translate as ‘apple of earth’.

Voter fraud and pretty sure you can toss in some vits about mail tampering/fraud, maybe ID theft, and a few others. Knowing that the stats put the majority of mail in early voters as Dems of course they would try this.

Would love to see a big blue wave and have Donnie flip out ‘they can’t have won, we have thousands of Democrat votes right here in my bathroom…’

Yeah, that’s the tough part. I would say base it on those who use both platforms but I suspect those who use multiple platforms tend to use a primary first and others if they can’t find it. Maybe a survey when you buy it asking why you chose this format could help?

Defiantly, GOG is the first choice here old or new even if it’s cheaper elsewhere just to support that model.

This is of course assuming they wouldn’t have had those extra 20% of sales if they went without.

Someone should try a comparison to release on one platform with the DRM and also on GOG with a discount for the amount the DRM would have otherwise added to the price and see which sells better.

Frankly fo my time, best gaming series ever. With a few exceptions each one stands alone as it’s own story, but there are the ever present threads that in some cases turned into almost easter-egg items in a given game. Where are Biggs and Wedge going to show up this time? Can I get my hands on a choccobo? Hey Cid, thanks for the airship…

My thinking with a lot of those games where you have the handful of over-the-top ‘spenders’ is that at least a few are employees of the company given a free pass to add to their accounts. It’s not like it costs them anything, but it sure incentivizes a bunch of others to buy to try and compete.

You mean there are people who LIKE pay-to-win?

Indeed, I don’t particularly even want it to auto fill unless I give it the OK to do so, even if that’s as simple as a PIN.

I’ve got things worked up with bitwarden to a point where I can put in a short pin to unlock it after a timeout (usually set to 15 minutes) and it will pretty well always work so long as the fields for where the user/pass go are found cleanly.