Lunacid was extremely enjoyable to explore but the gameplay is a little lacking. The “holy” element is extraordinarily powerful against most foes, so your weapon choices are effectively limited. It’s also quite easy on default settings, while the difficulty slider seems to do nothing but inflate or deflate monster HP and damage.

I’d love to see a Lunacid 2 someday.

How’s the gameplay stack up as compared to P5R and SMT5? Do they go with baton pass, single-aspect party members instead of swappable summons and other Persona things or is it closer to mainline SMT?

P5R is fun but definitely harmed a lot by the combination of silent protagonist and the characters being children. The game being stupidly easy doesn’t help, either.

There was also a big issue with Anne’s backstory involving sexual harassment and assault by the teacher we’re investigating and our forced fourth party member being a bog standard “anime sex pest character” who immediately begins harassing her the moment he meets her. Kind of tone deaf writing there.

There’s some genuinely good character moments that are unfortunately hamstrung by the silent protagonist, especially when other characters get voiced lines in the same scene. I don’t expect P6 to change this but it’s a serious design flaw, IMO.

Great music and visuals and possibly the best UX I’ve seen since Dead Space. The definitely final boss added in Royal is on my top 10 favorite villains because… shit, dude maybe kinda has a point, don’t he?

Replayed Blasphemous and Blasphemous 2 for the fourth time since Blasphemous 2 just got a pretty good “legally distinct Castlevania” DLC for free recently.

Blasphemous 2 is still pretty far up on the list of greatest metroidvanias and can be had pretty cheap these days.

It’s not insanity, it’s planned. If people can’t afford to stop working, they can’t afford to strike. You want to keep people just on the side of solvency. So they keep their (rented) home, their (liened) car, etc. But they never save up enough to feel truly secure. Bad things happen, take on some more debt (credit cards, loans, etc) to compensate and then spend years paying those debts instead of saving. So you can do it all again.

It’s all planned.

It’s why governments crack down hard on community outreach and organization. People growing their own food will be less dependent on the grocery stores that are increasingly owned by only a handful of companies. If your community can at least partially feed itself, it removes one potential barrier from striking. If people in the community own their homes, they can shelter others. This removes another potential barrier. And on and on.

Capital lives in mortal terror of organized labor and thus spends gobsmacking amounts of money doing everything it can to prevent it from happening.

Easy - they’re never punished for failure. If execs lost their jobs and didn’t get a cent for being fired due to incompetence, they’d be more cautious.

Golden parachutes mean that you have no serious incentive to do a good job.

Ahhh, okay. Yeah 3 grand would get you a beast. Or, you know, like a car or something.

I think people willing to pay that much are idiots that don’t deserve the money they have, though. Somehow I don’t think that’s a mom or dad wanting to get a Nintendo for their kids or whatever.

Not by much less. I’d say you’d need at least $800 to be sure to run most games at at least 1080p60. I’ve been playing with pcpp lately, using Belmont’s Curse as an upcoming game with fairly tame recommended specs (10th gen Intel and a 3060), and I couldn’t really come in under $800 after case, reliable PSU, etc were all factored in. Maybe if you went for specifically used/secondhand parts but I limited my choices to just new or manufacturer refurbished since used inventory will vary widely in availability and price from area to area.

Of course, the minimum requirements are like an 8th gen Intel and a 1650. So you can probably hit 1080p60 with a lot less than the recommended.

I’m curious how low we could go, requiring all parts be new or manufacturer refurbished. I tried for $500 but couldn’t get anywhere close.

Even as grim as things are getting there’s still a lot of people with far more money than they deserve.