I'm gonna be hopelessly far behind on this series forever (currently on Ayesha).

This is a dimension of the conversation I wish was talked about more. By linking strict norms to behavior in public, we're telling petite women of the age of majority that don't have curves that they can't ever be sexually attractive because it's extremely immoral and taboo. It's especially a problem for trans women who can't afford/don't want breast augmentation surgery or otherwise can't develop biological markers that we code as adult. Being told only pedophiles will be attracted to you is harmful to everyone involved.

With today's news that a licensed song is being removed in a future update of Alan Wake, I'm reminded that television shows have also been getting similar "updates" for a little while now. The staggered release schedule of television shows makes it the only medium off the top of my head that does anything similar. Pilot shows were generally unpolished products, often followed up by recasting or other major changes. Abrupt cancellations also could mean unfinished stories (no, I'm not still bitter about Stargate Universe).

Game development is an iterative process, so as soon as I first started seeing open beta testing come about as a part of digital distribution decades ago, I figured it was only a matter of time before profiteering got us to where we are now.

I'll have to ask you about this one sometime. Been meaning to play it for a while now.

They were that style of sprite derived from prerendered 3D art that was popular in the late 90's/early 2000's.

It's unfortunately looking like ports of this game are going to come later.

Calling out the Jenis Academy stretch would be bold in the fandom, lol. I mostly agree with you though, I think that whole chapter was a low point for the series.

Sky SC in particular has some brutal pacing, so it'd be reassuring for the future remake if they shuffled up this game a bit.

This point is premature for Wukong until we see some data that this was anything more than a domestic market success. Steam data scrapers speculate that China sales are over 80%, so we might be looking at (an optimistic) 1-1.5 million sold in the US so far. Not amazing numbers for a AAA project.

The real story here is that this game's success is the clearest sign yet this vast market has been activated. I'm sure Japanese, Korean, and Western AAA publishers--especially those with a console focus--are very interested.

Didn't finish any last month! Been playing other stuff.

I've been (very) slowly nibbling away at Chrono Trigger in Japanese. Probably will do some more of that this month.

There aren't any new releases I have my eye on until Metaphor: ReFantazio. My shortlist right now is Live A Live, Ys IX: Monstrum Nox, and Atelier Ayesha if anyone has any strong arguments for/against any of them.

That's exactly the issue here. ChatGPT's current training set ends right around the time the Meta Quest 3 came out. It's not going to have any discussions in there of No Man's Sky with tech that wasn't out yet.

It's hard to top the inkjet printers I've owned. I still can't believe 30 years later home printer tech is not only unimproved but worse between lower quality production and squeezing people on ink costs.

Can't help but wonder how much of this is due to Hasbro's mismanagement.

As much as I'd love to see more content from them on BG3, seeing what Larian can do now that they have scaled up to being a major studio is exciting.

Edit: Swen said on Twitter today that it's not on WOTC.

Archived link so we're not sending any traffic Reddit's way.

I love the "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" admin response downthread, too. They've really gone full mask-off over there, haven't they?