I’m gonna say probably not, if he were Valve would be full-on employee owned. I will say he seems a little less uh… warped than most prominent billionaires, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear. Overall he seems like an okay guy but I don’t know him and have no way of telling whether he’s secretly a dick or something.
If you’re worried about the grind, go install the Untitled Project X mod. It has an option to give exp to all party members regardless of battle participation. It eliminates the “swap everyone in to Guard for a single turn” hassle. Because by default the game forces you to either swap everyone in for a turn, or grind like hell to get everyone properly leveled.
UPX fixes a lot of the issues that the remake has, so ironically that option is buried and was only added as an afterthought. But it’s one of the biggest and most impactful changes that you can make, because it completely eliminates the need to grind. Since every member is getting exp with every battle, you aren’t forced to wait for the relevant enemies to spawn before certain characters level up.
Undertale, for me. I have 0 problems with the game. Art style is great. Controls are great. Story is likely the most compelling I personally have seen. Not to mention the very appropriate humour.
Chrono Trigger: every aspect (graphics, gameplay, story, music, replayability…) has such level of polishness that it’s still outstanding almost 30 years later.
No other JRPG has come even close and, as a Final Fantasy fan, that’s hard to admit
What bothers me most about such decisions is that I am denied access to the official discussions (and sometimes even the tech support) of the product I paid for, unless I’m willing to accept the third-party platform’s terms of service. Discord is another common one. It’s a sure-fire way to lose me as a customer.
Honest question. Where do you draw the line and why? Because I do not believe that you can make full use of almost anything you paid for in this age without relying on / utilizing a third party.
Want to get tech support for a game? You might have to use Twitter/reddit/Discord
Want to have your hardware repaired? You’re very likely to have to use some post service unless there’s a repair shop you can drive to.
Want to get tech support via phone? You definitely have to use a phone carrier as third party middle-man.
Want to use the internet on your phone? Definitely need to use the infrastructure of some big corporation.
So I must ask, if you draw the line at “requires a third party service to receive support”, is it because of the third party in question specifically?
If we’re going really old school, then Space Invaders. Its way of leveraging the hardware at the time to make the enemies and music speed up after you defeat more of them is elegant. Back then, the more things a game had on screen, the slower it ran. So, destroying more enemies removes more things from the screen, causing both enemies and music to speed up.
This is something that’s taken for granted today, but I think at the time, it was genius.
He’s a hardcore capitalist, albeit one who happens to support free software (probably because he believes in it, but also because it means a bigger user base for his platform and $$$)
He’s significantly more likeable than most of the other CEO billionaires but when you look at his peers that isnt too hard.
I used to play it a fair amount. I got to the point where I had beaten at least a run with each of the characters. I stopped around when the update that added its own music came in. I should try it out again, it really is a solid game
Shattered is my roguelike of choice on mobile (along with Hoplite if that counts). On desktop I play DCSS and Brogue. Used to play a lot of Nethack too. Never ascended in any of them but that doesn’t make it any less fun.
Firstly, it’s fairly short, which I appreciate in a game that’s primarily story-driven. Secondly, the story is damn near perfect. When I got to the reveal towards the end I actually sobbed (quietly, in a manly way). No other game has ever affected me that way.
This is a bit further back that the era of gaming being presented, but a type of existential crisis occurred the day I discovered that I could download not only a decent Commodore 64 emulator but virtually all the games ever publicly produced. I had a huge collection of disks back in the day, stacks of diskette containers, indexed and sorted, and it was probably a percent of what was truly out there, names I never even heard of.
The crisis hit me when I realized I could stick the entirety of the C-64 revolution (emulator, games, music, demos) on a single USB flash drive.
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