They are mostly a toy store now. Last time I visited a GameStop I was told they don’t even stock new games at release, except for pre-orders. There doesn’t seem to be a point in going there anymore.

Nah, just the sad message of “Pretty please love me (because we sunk a bunch of money into this).”

One of the things I initially liked about Pixels was that I could uninstall/disable a lot of the proprietary garbage that would be mandatory on other phones. But now it looks like Google is abandoning that flexibility in favour of shoehorning Gemini into everything.

My only interaction with Gemini so far was telling it to kick rocks when it sent me an unsolicited text message. I also barely use Assistant to begin with. So once my current phone dies, I guess I’ll have to find something new.

Furthermore, there is an option to destroy the special “gift” if you can resist accepting it. However, all you get for doing so is a few brief lines from the Emperor. Your companions don’t seem to notice, and there isn’t even an quest log update.

Anxious Times by The Luka State or Hardship to Sail by Excuses Excuses.

So say we all.

As I said in another topic, this is the only way to play FF3 in its original form (or at least close to it) and in a language other than Japanese, outside of emulation. The DS remake is fine, but it is definitely a different experience.

The Stone Angel.

It’s a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It’s also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.

And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was “hope” and docked marks for having any other interpretation.

Protip: jump back in the water after you raise the level for the first time.

If that doesn’t make sense right now, it will in a few hours.

I’m 188cm (6’2") and grew up in a fairly insular community of Dutch people and their descendants. I thought I was average height until I left that bubble went to university.

Canada’s military is small enough that there is typically only one officer with the rank of General (or Admiral if they are from the navy), and their position is the Chief of Defence Staff. I think a second General is appointed if Canada gets a seat on the UN Security Council, to act as the senior military advisor for the delegation.

There are more Lieutenant Generals (and Vice Admirals), and the CDS is appointed from their ranks when a new one is needed.

EDIT: To clarify further, there are multiple ranks with the word “general” in them. In order of increasing seniority, they are (with equivalent navy ranks in parentheses):

1. Brigadier General (Commodore)
2. Major General (Rear Admiral)
3. Lieutenant General (Vice Admiral)
4. General (Admiral)

They do seem to have half-assed it. Maybe they searched something like, “who built the ark in the Bible,” and ended up on the page for the Ark of the Covenant by mistake.

It took a lot of inspiration from Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, but the two games had basically the same creative team anyway.

I think those screenshots look like something closer to Ogre Battle or the recently released Unicorn Overlord rather than any RTS.

The story seems generic at first, but it goes places later.

One feature I really liked about this game was that you can adjust the encounter rate, even down to 0%. No in-game consumables or equipment needed, just an option in the menu. If you want to gain a few levels, you can crank it up. If you just want to revisit an old location because you missed an item, you can turn it off.

The hardest part of the Water Temple is that one of the keys is hidden way better than the others, and if you start opening doors in the wrong direction you will run out of keys without it. Combine that with the clunkiness of swapping to/from the Iron Boots and raising/lowering the water level, and the place quickly grew tedious and frustrating.

The 3DS remake added an extra camera sweep and some decor highlighting the hidden passage where that key is found.

I’ve never experienced that, and I’ve definitely told Google Assistant to fornicate with itself on multiple occasions.

Octopath Traveller is a game I should have theoretically liked because I have so much nostalgia for SNES RPGs. Unfortunately, it felt more like a proof-of-concept demo stretched to a full-length game than a complete experience in its own right.

I’ve heard that the sequel is better, but I haven’t tried it.

I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading Engadget’s review of the thing, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to use.

Maybe I’m too old-school and impatient, but I’ve never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It’s a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using it in the future. Even the thing I’ve used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.

The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I’ve never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond the most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.

I mean, Traveller’s Gate is still good, if a bit unpolished in hindsight. It’s just plain fun, especially if you’re familiar with fantasy and anime tropes, though I recommend keeping a glossary nearby to make the comprehension of the the various terms easier.

The Last Horizon, the series he’s working on now, is also a lot of fun. It mixes sci-fi and fantasy, and all the main characters are already able to bench-press continents (literally or proverbially), so their development comes via different avenues than Cradle, where Lindon’s personal growth was tied directly to his power level. I wasn’t as enamoured with the second Last Horizon book as I was the first, but it was still good, and unless Will Wight starts writing Nazi propaganda or something I’ll continue to read everything he publishes.