FF14 is basically unplayable at resolutions below 1080p. There’s simply not enough pixels to display all the detail needed for serious play e.g. hotbars, buff/debuff bars, target/focus target, party list, castbars and enough empty screen space to see the boss. It’s also complete ass trying to raid at below 50-60fps. If your framerate is low enough it starts to become a dps loss since the time you can queue your next skill is delayed until the next frame is drawn, effectively increasing your global cooldown. On top of that no access to 3rd party programs on PC that would help alleviate these issues e.g. framerate locking, zoomhacks. Only way this works out is that the new nintendo switch is a 1080p+ 60fps+ capable machine with specs equivalent to a midrange PC from 3-4 years ago. Or Yoshida is talking out of his ass giving a japanese PR response, which is pretty typical

My understanding is that captchas were never supposed to be impenetrable, just difficult enough that to have bots (or mechanical turks) solve them at scale is expensive enough to deter that kind of automation. It’s probably getting a lot easier for a computer to solve nowadays though.

Feels weird to review an expansion before 90% of the content has been released. We have the main story, main story dungeons, and 2 “hard mode” trials so far? And one of the EX is hot garbage, probably the worst fight released in the past 4 years or ever (subject to personal opinion). There’s still 12 raid bosses, 5 more EX trials, large scale field content, a deep dungeon i think, and an ultimate raid or two on the way. Still remains to be seem whether they are going to continue with good fight design, or endwalker fight design. Music has some good points for sure, and story as always is a non-factor. It’s really nothing special as far as JRPGs or even previous final fantasy games are concerned.

Midrange systems from 3-4 years ago are the ones that are struggling a little bit. It’s playable but noticeably slower. It can mostly be mitigated by turning all the bells and whistles off though, and I guess if we really wanted the extra frames we could turn down the resolution. But playing the game at 720p for instance is a serious disadvantage, theres not enough pixels to see your hud elements and the fight mechanics without a super ultrawide monitor or a zoom hack. 1080p is ok but 1440p or 4k are ideal

The progression is absolutely time gated, and they definitely calculate the travel time to make each zone take some given amount of time to complete. When they need to pad out the zone a bit longer they add one of the trailing quests (autoscroller). It’s the business model and the same reasoning for why they don’t increase the weekly tome cap and also why there’s a weekly loot lockout during the raid tier, if players could grind out all the gear they need for a patch in 1 week, they would. That said if all you want to do is the msq and normal content, you can probably beat that in 30-40 hours watching cutscenes if you can dedicate a weekend to it and unsub until the next patch. I finished the msq + all aether currents in about 16 hours after launch with a couple friends, skipping all cutscenes, and the leading edge progression groups were probably done in closer to 10-12 hours so they could hit the EX trials.

word of advice for anyone thinking of buying soda for the promo event

Dont

Instead, consider waiting a couple years for when all the rewards are gonna get put on the mogstation. And it’ll probably be cheaper than however much mountain dew you would be pouring down the sink. Really, think about what you’re missing? “Mountain Zu”? Think of your favorite mount, is some random zu any better? Zu is a regular enemy, you can go out and fight one anywhere, its not some Bajamut Blast or anything, the mount is just a fuckin regular green bird. If you don’t participate in the promo then you aren’t missing anything spectacular.

This has been a cynical XIV PSA

Pretty crazy for a program to have that egregious a vulnerability, but also the version of the emulator with the ACE exploit (1.6) is more than 12 years old at this point. As the video states, the modern releases are freeware-nagware anyway so everyone is better off switching to a different (+open source) emulator entirely. I like the “virus” shown off at the end of the video too, that was fun

The joke is that the article doesn’t list a single name.

The name of the company that produced many of the greatest shmups of all time, starting with donpachi, is CAVE, unrelated to the indie game Cave Story

It’s a great movie. I saw it in IMAX on opening night. If i’m not mistaken, this is an original plot that doesn’t have any manga source. Beautiful visuals, great opening theme, all of the key elements that you would expect from a Spy×Family arc. Anya and Bond have their Forrest Gump-like tendency to get into big trouble and do great things, Twilight shows off his cunning/perception and dexterity, Yor has some great action scenes where most of the budget went and she also gets very drunk. The only thing I could dock points for is toilet humor, not my thing but it’s a kids/family movie we’re talking about.

I’m glad that it’s getting licensed for international release. Stuff like the most recent Seishun Buta Yarou film will probably never see US theaters (though that’s a much more niche audience).

Manjaro’s packages being separate from the main arch linux repository is really the kicker. It’s a completely preventable source of dependency issues especially when it comes to the aur. Instructions on the arch linux wiki won’t quite line up with what you need to do on Manjaro sometimes, and eventually you’ll be SOL if you only follow the arch wiki. You won’t understand the components of your system as well if you install Manjaro so a first-time user will have a harder experience fixing their machine.

It’s a classic case of “if it aint broke don’t fix it”. Manjaro fixes a problem that never existed. Arch linux works perfectly as a daily driver. The installation process continues to get easier, and really there is no experience required, if you can follow instructions, the wiki goes into great detail on everything you need to do to get to a working system and keep it that way.

Yes, plugins work really well on linux. Use xivlauncher, available through git or aur. Every addon that i have tried has worked flawlessly. Use IINACT for parsing, it’s a plugin version of ACT that is much more stable than standalone ACT in my experience, albeit with fewer config options

My recommendations are Dodonpachi Resurrection, Mushihimesama, and Deathsmiles. They’re all on sale, they’re all made by CAVE. One more CAVE game, Akai Katana, is also listed but it’s not on sale. They are all extremely difficult if you have never played the style of game before (Japanese arcade bullet hell / scrolling shooter). Heavy emphasis on learning bullet patterns and doing precise dodges. It feels so good when you manage to dodge a pattern, or time a screen cancel/hyper just right.

If you only try one, Mushihimesama is 6 dollars right now, has an awesome soundtrack and a cool fantasy forest and insect theme. It’s relatively beginner friendly but you will definitely notice a sharp difficulty spike going from stage 3-4-5. I got to play it on an actual cabinet at PAX west, definitely my highlight of that weekend.

I don’t know how far you got into the first one but they are pretty similar games in my opinion. Everything that was good in Octopath 1, got better in Octopath 2. So: music and sound design, still amazing. Art, it’s the same HD-2D style that’s popular nowadays and Square is good at it. Character storylines are still mostly separate and not extremely complicated. The endgame scenario of Octopath 2 is more fleshed out than the hidden/True Last Boss of Octopath 1. I had a lot of fun in the endgame but in my opinion it was still too short.

The battle system is even more broken than Octopath 1 and largely revolves around setting up a team that can generate lots of BP, stack all your buffs onto a single character and maybe a debuff on the boss, then break it and deal 10k or 100k damage in a single round with your strongest attack. I think with certain setups it would be possible to deal 2 million damage in a single break. No boss has that much HP, though.

You still get powerful by exploring the map for gear and stealing/path-actioning good items from the end game cities. Grinding isn’t really necessary to beat the game but there are multiple setups that can turn trash encounters into 1-button wins.

The sub-job system is more flexible in Octopath 2. In addition to Break, characters have unique Latent Power “limit break” skills. There are so many ways to build a team that works well and part of the fun is figuring out what skills you can spec onto your characters and combine in order to win the game. That was also the case in Octopath 1.

Takumi Shu… will you write another game? I’m begging. Ace Attorney 7. DGS3. Ghost Trick 2. New IP? Anything, I want it so bad.

I am partial to Apollo Justice, the first one on DS. I personally loved the storytelling and this ominous aura of mystery that begins in Case 1 and looms over the entire game. Also Trucy. It was also the first time I remember that I, as a kid, was challenged to think about why we believe certain things to be true. And it has a great soundtrack and art / character designs which on their own are enough for me to love a game to death.

I don’t think emulation is going anywhere. Well, it may become more illegal than it already is, but that’s not going to stop many people from continuing. We are already too good at file/software sharing and preservation.

The ‘legal’ part of emulation (with precedent) is the development of emulator software through reverse engineering a console system. The angle Nintendo+co is most likely to attack is that emulator software allows users to circumvent first-party security restrictions that are meant to make games run only on authorized hardware, thus violating the DMCA.

FE engage is great. It feels really strategic, compact maps with powerful terrain effects and chokepoints to take advantage of, units don’t have a lot of movement, positioning and formation can let you do a lot of cool plays.

The new mechanics, chain attack and break, are very powerful and interesting to play around both on player phase and enemy phase.

The Emblems have some really powerful effects between AoE dance, AoE warp, a billion range nuke, +500 movement on one of your characters, and some other combat steroids. There are a lot of options and I think the game is fun on any difficulty.

The story… uhhh, I liked when the Fire Emblem: Engaged. The plot is very generic and pretty much the same as a plurality of previous fire emblem plots. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

As soon as I saw Dia suit up for the bike I was waiting for the iconic bike slide. Did not disappoint. Another one for the montage :)

As a whole, this anime has been incredibly faithful to the manga. I can basically hold up my book next to the screen and it’s more or less panel-for-panel, sentence-for-sentence. I loved being along for the ride. I don’t watch a lot of weekly anime but since I have been reading Oshi no Ko weekly since the day the first chapter dropped, I thought I ought to give it a watch.

One of my favorite panels so far was included in this episode:

And in the manga:

On screen for a full 24 frames! Kana bros taking the W this time.

There is also the title drop by Arima Kana in this episode - “アンタの推しの子になってやる！” in response to seeing Aqua waving all three cyalume colors. “hako-oshi”, or “box pushing”; not picking a favorite, supporting the entire group.

I do think that Oshi no Ko feeds a lot on weekly hype. This was definitely true for the manga, Aka constantly leaving on a cliffhanger, often times with not a lot of actual plot progressing, but further insight into the thoughts of the characters, backstory, or just straight up lecture on some aspect of modern artist work culture. For sure there are going to be many people who rightfully believe that Oshi no Ko does not live up to the hype, but for me, it just gets better and better the more I re-read and re-watch it. There is some quality that makes me want to go back through and scrutinize every detail again and again.

I definitely enjoyed the anime because I enjoyed the source material. But on top of that, the animation is strong in its own right, bringing a lot of spectacle and impact to the key scenes. In this episode, I really enjoyed the dance choreography as well as Aqua’s wotage.

E: Spoiler tag didn’t work on mobile so I deleted it all.