Basically trivia to make noise, nothing else. Advertisement is advertisement, even if the game is probably like 10 years away at this point.

Me, a Turk: Black tea my beloved, you’ll always be hot for me every morning, second breakfast, noon, afternoon, 5 o’clock, evening.

Ah, I didn’t wanna give the impression of completely ordinary so as to be a character from Dostoevsky’s novels, but I guess how I wrote it can easily take the topic there. Just wanted to make the distinction between “you are someone special’s descendant, albeit without yours’ or viewers’ knowledge till the story ends” vs “you are someone special only through your efforts, even among the specialty group of ninjas, heroes, devil fruit users etc.” The first one has been pretty much trodden with either last minute revelations justifying huge power-ups, or setting the stage for the plot armor of the protagonists.

I’d argue that the will of ancestors is different, and even their effect on Luffy’s development is rather through direct action than just being related by blood. Without Dragon directly interfering, Buggy would have got Luffy in Loguetown. “Strong blood” was never something openly used in One Piece before, even more it was pretty much criticized through some villains like Axe-hand Morgan’s fascist ideology and the showcases of Celestial Dragons.

The illusion of re-emerging endurance through hardships all over again just thanks to willpower is just as a basic, and as a tired trope for plot as the use of ancestry, but it can nevertheless result in a good variety of situations like the post-Shabody separate training arc, and is a much more comfortable aspect to cheer for a protagonist through.

Having the ancient and most powerful spirit emerge through the protagonist to beat up the bad guys is pretty much against how Luffy’s efforts are portrayed. Yes, Luffy does not acknowledge such a thing and plays the usual fool to not understand it, but for all intents and purposes, except for one to subvert later for a possible plot-twist, Luffy is regarded as Nika by the other characters and the audience. In my opinion, Luffy should have been rejecting such a thing as reincarnation or even personification of someone else outright so as to assert the quality, fun, and morals of his own efforts than to utilize ancient bloodline powers, like rejecting Raleigh’s offer for the explanation of One Piece and being played favourites as well as being deprived of the fun of overcoming things by oneself.

Inherited will being a culture, thought structure, morals, or aspirations vs being some ancient person’s spiritual being has been pretty distinct for me in One Piece till about Nika exposè.

It is a taste issue, and as far I can see you try to help out with the reframing the problem I have to resolve it, and I thank you for that.

Tbh I am really pissed about this in One Piece’s rather latest track. The will of D. and people with the D. names could have been pretty ordinary people with strong wills, good nature, social skills etc. opposing the injustices we see in the manga, but lately with all this reincarnation of Sun God Nika stuff, it is no different than what Naruto and Sasuke have been reduced to.

I know it is 25 years in the making and cultures and perceptions change, along with perception of tropes in entertainment, but can we at least go beyond this “the special one” or “the chosen one” stories?

I also know Oda has been a spectacular surpriser and a mangaka that can connect and change most trivial things to most core stuff to do unforeseen changes to the core of his world-crafting, but my doubts in One Piece being as unique as it was before the New World has been increasing these last 10 years of commercialization of it.

Same here after all these years and a whole slew of anime. Haven’t seen Detroit Metal City, tho. Will check it out.

They may be overcharging, they are most likely overcharging if it can make a billionaire among them. Is it anti-consumer? In the context of current capitalist economy and comparable, even rival companies present? And if you have reading comprehension, you’ll notice that there is a paragraph in all of my comments to you mentioning Gaben’s yatches being obscene and shouldn’t be. Anyway, skip to the part below, ending it there:

I never had a dream of becoming a billionaire, or dreaming about those yatches. Or being aspired to and been jealous of through riches. As you have noted, I’m from Turkey and we don’t have the fucking American Dream here, dude. But what we had is: Cheapest gaming PC game purchases thanks to Steam for all the goddamn years. Even when we had quite a competitive economy before our glorious economist-god-emperor Tayyip fucked our economy, we were able to buy your 60€ all-stores-including-own-store triple-A games for like 5€-10€. Indie games? Man you won:t believe it, but cents. Now you make the calculations about how much Steam exploited us.

Anyway, I, too, can enjoy this criticism-deflection game, so here goes my response to your personal background digging: Go suck Tim Swiney’s epic child-addiction-exploitating-Fortnite-whatever-the-fuck-ever-is-exclusive-dick after you find solace that you supported grinding down the best gaming store that is practicing the most pro-customer policies reliably in a stable and self-sustaining capacity over more than a decade and a half.

And what you don’t understand is that this whole affair about “Valve taking 30% cut is overcharging” is bogus. Valve and whole others can sell fully-fledged carrots at $1M each, with Valve adding better packaging and better preservation while doing discounts regularly, all the while Epic can sell a malnourished and cut-out one at $500k each and give away a stale and cut-out one for free regularly.

Both are expensive if their base prices can be discounted by electing smaller margin of profits. (That is another topic as Steam is doing jackload of live-service that can’t be served as an offline service, without any form of subscription or recurring payments.) Even so, picking on the one that offers a sustainable price plan and fully-fledged product with extra benefits just because it is pricey for your wallet while all others in the market do a poorer job at the same prices or price-per-value is just grabbing your pitchfork because someone else started a riot against your cordial and caring overseer while the world around you is rife with jackals who’d like to be your king.

Go bug Gaben to spend more of his personal wealth gained through Valve’s distributed earnings on betterment of the product they serve rather than on the yatches. Don’t go around asking just Valve to get less cushion for experimentation, being generous in return, lax bout worker load and project development, etc., while they are the sole company doing that. Better yet, push your governments to install blanket resolutions against exorbitant wealth accumulations or uneven wealth distributions so that both better product development is prioritized and all employees are rewarded fairly if any single one is to be rewarded.

Anyway, I’m changing the discussion to be about how Stephen Hawking’s name is on Epstein’s list. Lets talk about this, I don’t care whether there are more concerning people named on that list or whether Hawking is unique for his contributions in some fields. Hell, I am not even interested in if the discussion is worthwhile through the factuality of the claim or the scope of the claim because why, this is a discussion about Stephen Hawking being on Epstein’s list now.

What everyone is debating with you is that you are wrong in picking your target while your base claim of enabling someone, anyone at all, to be a billionaire is correct.

You are wrong in picking Valve or Gaben as exploitative wealthy scum, because Valve is the closest thing to something that is not exploitative corporation, while Gaben as the head and sole person having the final say in which direction to go and which not to go, has been the best guardian of unexploitative gaming entertainment. If you think I’m making these up, please search around to see if you can find the equivalent of these features in any of the meaningfully-accessible companies: Family sharing, Proton, Steam Friends, Steam Network, Steam Workshop, Steam Community Hub.

Steam Family sharing: The current version enables players to have access to the games in other’s libraries as long as those accounts are not having access at the same time. The upcoming version allows for access to other’s games as long as there are enough copies in the sharing pool. In the age others in the entertainment industry is cracking down accessibility with ever increasing prices, like Netflix’ oppression on password sharing or even having access to your own account on multiple devices, please don’t tell me this Family sharing improvements by Valve isn’t extremely pro-consumer.

Proton: Provides an almost silver bullet, or an easily configurable base template, for gaming on Linux. You can be a Windows or Mac user all you want and never give a thought to Linux, but you can’t argue not letting Windows have monopoly over PC gaming by enabling access to gaming on free OS isn’t a completely pro-consumer endeavour. It is also open source, so they are not even gatekeeping their own work on this.

Friends and Network: While having no-DRM copies from GOG is great and all, having your games connect to your friend’s games, or forming completely random lobbies in seconds, with just a couple clicks requires some always-present middleman. Your no-DRM copies can stay with you till eternity, but you’ll have to configure your own methods of connection to your friends outside your local network.

Workshop: Mods hosting for games that support it, and easy installation with 1 click. Yes, there are still free alternatives like Nexus, but they show you ads to meet their hosting needs, so in that sense they are as free as Valve sparing budget from their 30% cut from game sales to Workshop.

Community Hub: A catalogue of all game-related stuff, from guides to memes, troubleshooting threads to feedback, promotion space for developers to knowledge database for players. Open to the whole world wide web and not restricted to account walls or pay walls.

Now, I agree that even providing these services with the best quality-and-features-per-buck option out there, there shouldn’t be billionaires while there are starvation and wage slaving ones life this prominent in the world. While these issues persist, having yatches to one person’s or a few people’s name is an indecent behaviour that should not be allowed in a working social contract. However, when you look at the rest of the companies in the same industry, or even other industries, there are way worse offenders of this wealth inequality that don’t even come close to Valve in providing the same quality-and-features-per-buck value, while having billionaires and actually striving to make them more wealthy instead of providing more for the customers and workers.

Case in point: You are not even looking a gift horse in the mouth; you are beating your most hard working horse for eating a hearty meal, claiming you are right in that amount of meal is not needed to survive, all the while letting the rest of your slacking horses raid your pantry without batting an eye. Pressure the others to provide better services per buck, also at a self-sustaining rate so as to not be deprived of it a year later, first.

If you are going to point out that Valve is a capitalist company, I’d say you are picking on one of the rare ones that return more value than many others in the whole capitalist world economy. Gabe having a yatch is an indecent use of wealth? Yeah, no person needs or deserves a yatch while we have famine and wage slaving in the world.

If you believe the company that has the best pro-consumer practices in the industry (maybe tied with GOG thanks to their no-DRM policy) should be the first to take the responsibility to be the one that is even more altruistic, I’d say you are asking for destabilization of an already decent company to give way to the literal vultures waiting for it to die so they can have their fat shares for their shareholders.

I have more than a soft spot for Valve. Their price recommendations over the years Turkish Lira reached the moon was stellar for the consumers here, and it wasn’t just us. There are whole regions of countries that Steam has provided affordable game prices, which would otherwise simply have to resort to piracy completely.

On another side, Steam’s many features like lenient refund policies, extensive yet on-point and open profile/library/workshop/community infrastructure add more than 50% of the content and quality on some games, and a complete easy of use for consumers.

Whatever one can say about their specific policies on some topics, I’m going to argue no other for-profit company has ever put this much feature on display without immediate gain from all of them. This is almost on par with many FOSS projects with such development behind them.

However, on this price-matching practice, I believe it is totally not a pro-consumer one. It is not exclusivity, which could completely bankrupt and erase all other competitors long ago if Steam went that way, but it is still somewhat meddling with blocking cheaper options for consumers.

All that said, and with another commenter mentioning that 30% price cut is standard in the industry and a developer selling a game expensive on Steam and having the possibility to sell it cheaper on another wouldn’t make sense with the same cuts in place, I don’t think this policy completely lacks any merit. Having unreachable presence on Steam and using it as an advertisement platform thanks to its reach while selling the game cheaper elsewhere with the same cuts, or even no-cuts in their own stores, would open a hideous scam many of the well-known companies in the industry would jump on without blinking an eye.

Yeah, I think Exodus made quite a unique blend of linear and half-open world gameplay. It is still very much different from the openness of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but a Metro game with that much of a different atmosphere could only be done in that way while being as good as it is. Hacking through the vanilla S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl was quite hard after that, and not having the time to try to manually mod such an old game on core mechanics was something I didn’t have time for then. Finding OGSR was right at the breaking point for me about the series, but I’m glad I’ve found it even if it took 3 tries.

Link is what I remember downloading back then (should be a “standalone” file meaning it has all the game files, exes etc and won’t need any vanilla installs at all). For the other 2 games, Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, I went with the big community bugfix mod called SRP only iirc. For Clear Sky and Gunslinger for Call of Pripyat, both of which being smaller in scope but good enough for the latter games than needing OGSR-equivalent for them.

There is also a whole lotta different “game” called Anomaly that is basically a tremendous engine upgrade by the community and an open mod ecosystem, which you keep adding to build something yourself. It is a hassle, as much as modding Skyrim with 200 mods, but Anomaly is quite the technical improvement on the base games. It is rather storyless and with bits of “go here, meet this person, go here and fetch this”, kind of thing making the whole progression. And yes, it, too, has curated modpacks, one of the biggest ones being G.A.M.M.A with its own setup of mods on a tidy Mod Organizer profile, with the options to add or remove mods yourself.

I apologize if this turned out to be an overhaul/modpack advertisement. There surely were many more overhauls I tried briefly before settling on these, so when you have the time, go ahead and try. Hope you’ll have quite the nice experience to overcome the difficulty in adjusting to such an old gem’s quirks.

Which was also used repeatedly over the course of 3-4 months to gain access via a non-corporate laptop without the IT doing anything about it.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an open world game whereas Metro is linear. As such, there are many differences between the two:

• Open, outside maps vs literal underground metro tubes.

• Almost no stealth (bonked) vs split into stealth/combat gameplay.

• Regular, duplicates and misc and survival inventory management with wide variety vs limited choice and specialized upgrades.

• Wonky but unrestrictive vs fine-tuned but channeled.

• Simple but great story (rather small scale and non-heroic, like the inspiring book “Roadside Picnic”) where you wake up and try to find an #1NPC called Strelok to kill him vs journey of a hero through the gutters in a post-apocalyptic world.

• Anomalies crancked up to 11 and are a core part of the gameplay vs anomalies are rather world-building elements.

• Extensive modding (Oblivion-era game still keeping its modding community alive and theiving with tens of complete overhauls and completely new games, few-click-install modpacks and complete modding frameworks) vs out-of-the-box and as-is experience.

The similarities are:

• Great storytelling. Both do good storytelling that hooks the player, although with different types of stories.

• Good character writing. Metro has memorable characters with names and actions attached, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has no name loners and misers that will leave you with great campfire/guitar memories and novel-like stories.

• Excellent environment design. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are older games so graphics are rather worn out compared to Metro, but the environment design is so good that places hook you up anyway.

I have simply glossed over the Metro parts because you already know about them. So don’t think I’m thinking less of them. On the contrary, as someone who played all Metro games on their authentic experience difficulty first, played Exodus when it was released, then later a couple years ago struggled to start playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. due to how old and what a slog it was unmodded. Even though I am still fond of the games from my childhood and can play them despite (actually sometimes thanks to) their old graphics and rough mechanics, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. took me 3 attempts and finding OGSE/OGSR (Old Good Stalker Evolution/Remastered) overhaul to enjoy them in 2021. And boy, what an enjoyment that was, taking up about 300-400 across all 3 games.

Tbh, even letting the platforming aside, the difficulty levels were pretty glossed over in Eternal.

Choosing hard for the pushing yourself for fast paced gaming turned the health of every enemy to 11, making some weapons pretty useless instead of leaving them satisfying gameplay parts. Enemy animations were rather broken, too. In 2016, you could see every attack being prepared no matter how quick they were. In Eternal, it felt like playing an online game where animations were simplified and as if you were playing through a tick rate game where the game skipped cues for next enemy movements. A scrawny, naked possessed taking several melee hits wasn’t fun at all.

On easy, it is not even Doom.

With one, you have to be cautious against infrequent exaggeration. With the other, you have to work your way through their constant denial. Both are not on point in scale of truth, and both can be used to completely subvert it for some intended purposes, but I think one is closer to the truth more frequently and by a lot than the other.

You can definitely pick the exaggerating side to start with, then work your way to the truth as much as you can from there and you’d be closer to it than starting with the other one, having a lower rate of going astray.

Not what I expected to see from a Bebop fan. I guess they weren’t wailing the blues when the doctor whacked their bottom on the day they were born.

Have you tried Googling everything and spending tens of hours making optimal progress flowcharts that require hours to read over instead of playing the game?

Or, you know, just pour everything into science and forget don’t dare about getting distracted by other game mechanics.

s/ in case.

From summers when we slept under quilts to ones we can’t even sleep almost naked in spring/fall, just in 15 years. From 2 weeks of snow each month on December, February and March to a day of light snow for 3 years and one medium snow once a year, if it comes once again.

Yeah I’m definitely not optimistic about the next 15 years, let alone thinking of raising children beyond that.

A nice boulder in the quality of a badass boulder.

I had been using Reddit with my custom feed right from the very beginning. It was pretty good, I got more community recommendations from friends and people in the communities I had subscribed to, and I even started dropping some communities I no longer had much interest in, so my feed was pretty dynamic with popular and niche stuff alike.

I still miss my custom feed and having content in some niche communities, but it has been more than 6 months since my preferred 3rd party app has been deployed for Lemmy and I have been completely scrolling and commenting on Lemmy only, still. Never scrolled on Reddit since July 1, never succumbed to desktop-only alternatives like old.reddit, although it is still my default with RES settings applied if I’m to click on Reddit links for info, since the platform was going to be at its shittiest moments from then on, not just the interface.

Primary news communities are good enough to not avoid them like the plague they were in Reddit, riddled with propaganda bots. Big, general meme communities are the same, without many daily reposts in the same community. Movies/series fan communities are very much lacking, except a couple big fan communities. Tbh I prefer Star Trek communities here over any series/movies fan communities anywhere else, although I haven’t watched even one episode of Star Trek so far in my life. Game communities are almost completely dead, but I have started getting my game updates from Steam “Home” screen blog feeds on the library. Big, all gaming and new gaming announcement related communities here are the same as they were in Reddit if I want digital entertainment poisoning anyway.

Overall, fewer content flood of Lemmy with also almost non-existent bot or discussion-disabled loud mouth count feels like a way healthier engagement procedure on this kind of a platform. Writing paragraphs-long comments never felt like a drop in the sea they were on Reddit, even if these comments get only a handful upvotes/downvotes here and maybe a couple replies at best.