Making my way through FF16. According to the PS5 dashboard completion percentage I’m at about 70% complete right now. So I might be able to finish over the weekend, but having a six-year-old at home might make that harder to accomplish.

Either way, I’m really enjoying it despite it being absolutely archaic in terms of its actual game design. It’s really carried by its presentation, soundtrack, and decent story. They’ve arguably stripped away too much of what typically defines a Final Fantasy game here, but I’m still having a great time by just choosing to appreciate what it does do well.

It’s B all day. Close the polls because it ain’t even close.

They absolutely did. So much more room for air/sound to flow through those speakers in CRTs. That’s why most people resort to sound bars at a minimum to get halfway decent sound for today’s flat panel televisions. You just can’t fit powerful speakers into them.

I’ve tried them all, and as of right now Connect feels the most polished and feature rich. So that’s my recommendation.

Nostalgia is really interesting in that it’s inherently bittersweet. It’s nice because it grounds us in a shared timeline and focuses on mostly positive aspects of some past point in time, but it’s also sad because it means thinking back fondly on a time that will never be again.

So maybe it’s the bitter half of that bittersweet feeling that you’re subconsciously averse to? Either that or maybe your past/childhood was mostly negative or even traumatic? I’m no psychologist, so really I don’t know what I’m talking about.

An empire that we lived in and got to experience when it was thriving. That’s why dead malls in particular have a distinctly bittersweet feeling to them. Those of us who frequented malls in the 80’s and 90’s can vividly remember when they were filled with people, commerce, and social activity. They were such lively social spaces back then, so seeing them slowly succumb to the ravages of time and fade into irrelevancy is both sad and fascinating.

Nah. It’s morbidly interesting IMO.

Yep. Still have my black one with AmberElec installed. I love everything about it other than the display’s somewhat muted colors and mediocre battery life.

We’re so fucking cool, aren’t we?

Phew.

Lol. I read this in an entirely different context, like you were implying that they’d go to hell for this.

This is exactly what I was going to say. The feed on Threads is absolutely abysmal. Just an endless stream of bullshit that I don’t want to see. That might improve in the future as they continue to update the app and its feed algorithms, but as of right now it’s pretty terrible at showing the user content that they’re interested in.

That’s really cool that someone thought to preserve this and put it on display in a museum. It’s like a modern historical artifact from the golden age of computing.

“Shouldn’t we wait for reinforcements?”

“I am the reinforcements.”

• Vagrant Story, PS1

I do remember Lost Souls, yeah.

And that Papyrus font… I can feel the 90’s-era PC gaming vibes radiating off of it. Love it.

This was my first reaction to the article as well. The only one around me suddenly vanished a few months ago.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread because I would also love to know if I’m missing out on some good games journalism out there. Sadly, sites like what you’ve described are increasingly rare in the modern era. Nevertheless, here are a few that come to mind:

NintendoLife is pretty great for this if you’re looking for Nintendo-related news, reviews, interviews, and feature articles.

One of their affiliate sites, Time Extension, is also really good for long-form articles and retrospectives about retro games.

And while it’s mostly just news, like you said, Polygon will sometimes surprise you with some really excellent feature articles that have a lot of thought and research put into them.

Oh, DLC. I thought this was a full-blown sequel out of nowhere.

This is sadly still the case and one of the main reasons I use Samsung phones today instead of Pixels. One Hand Operation gives me more ergonomic and easy to use gestures while also playing nicely with third party launchers.

There’s just no way in hell I could use the pixel launcher as my daily driver. It’s too simple and lacks the bare minimum customization options that I would need to be able to tolerate it.

Haha, yeah. I think that’s the intent of those first two panels.

But then the last two subvert expectations and reveal that it was about data modeling all along! 😲