Blackbraid - Blackbraid II (Black Metal)

I honestly need to credit Jon for his work as a one man band. The first Blackbraid album last year helped me re-discover a love for black metal. And this album is an improvement in almost every way.

A lot of good recommendations. Especially Fullmetal Alchemist. I went on a bit of a manga reading binge a few months ago. I read through 3 different series from Naoki Urusawa. I read: Monster, Pluto, and 20th Century Boys.

Urusawa is one of the best in the business at building up tension. I would say between these 3 I would go with Pluto or Monster first. 20th Century Boys is good. But very long and wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been. Pluto is technically a remake of an Astro Boy arc that Urusawa grew up loving and worked with Osamu Tezuka’s family to create. If you like Hunter x Hunter, the creator made one of my favorite series ever in YuYu Hakusho. It’s a timeless classic.

I think there are some people who get out of touch due to things like kids or work and it was just seen as something you grow out of. But I think people generally have more of a work/life balance now. And they also realize that you can play games with kids when they are old enough.

I know for me personally, what will most likely happen is that I will always love and cherish video games as an artform no matter what. What will change is the amount of time I have to play.

As long as you are still enjoying gaming. Keep going!

I’m hopeful that this will be a strong showing for RPGs. Even if the 2D Mario rumors prove true. Their holiday season still sounds like it could be light. But it would be a good opportunity to for FFT remaster, DQ3 2D-HD, or some other RPG to show up. Persona 3 Remake has an unlisted video that lists Switch even though the updated press release excluded it. So that might show up here too. I’ve seen some speculation about F-Zero being back or a Paper Mario TTYD remaster coming. But while I’m not saying it is impossible. I just really don’t want to get my hopes up too much.

If we see anything longer than 30 seconds for Everybody 1-2 Switch, this thing will be doomed.

This is incredible work! The Vita was a gem. I’m glad MVG made a video showing the progress. I had not been keeping up with the progress.

I thankfully still have my Vita and it is modded and working. But there are some games unfortunately stuck on that thing.

Mostly relaxing games like Unpacking to kill time while I wait for FFXVI. I’m afraid of committing to other games at this point. Though I think I might get back into Vampire Survivors to help kill time too though.

Arkham Collection as a whole is worthwhile purchase IMO. It nails the mood and atmosphere of Gotham. While emphasizing on Batman’s ability as a detective as an important factor to the gameplay.

Arkham City is a sequel to Arkham Asylum. I say go in order.

This, it’s so relaxing and satisfying.

Also would add Unpacking as well.

Boy hits things with key

That was informative. Thank you! It makes me actually want to experiment. It sounds like the best results are on Sonoma. But I’ve heard some of the glitches with the software are not in a tolerable state yet. But I’ll try the beta when it goes public or when I feel confident about the stability.

The tools for this are interesting. But I think the headline was slightly misleading to be called a Proton-like tool. This is more of a diagnostic tool than a translation layer to play games for troubleshooting than anything else. Even maxed out M2 Ultra devices are only getting like 30-40 FPS on Cyberpunk because of how many resources the tool uses. I personally hope it does incentivize some devs to port to macOS as a primary Mac user. Devs need to see a cost benefit to do it. Apple convincing one dev per year to port a AAA game to Mac is not enough of an effort to actually convince people of anything.

That being said, Apple has had very inconsistent messaging regarding gaming in the past. And Steve Jobs notoriously did not care for gaming. Really, the only gaming success they are having right now is mobile games. And despite on/off rumors of a dedicated gaming device. I would just not be encouraged based on the majority of offerings on Apple Arcade that there would be much worthwhile. The only reason I even have it is because my phone plan includes it. Otherwise I would never touch it.

I regretfully still have mine. Mostly because I love sports and a lot of Twitter accounts I follow for news are still active. And accounts like Wario64 for when things go on sale for games or 4K blu-rays. That said, Elon will never get my fucking money.

Neither will spez.

I don’t know if it will be the end. But the quality is likely to go down. The power users were using 3rd party apps. And without a lot of those being around. It’s going to go down in quality like Twitter did when Elon acquired it.

What will really kill them is when they officially go public. That will kill the site dead.

It’s a website tracking the subreddits that are private. Here is the link: https://reddark.untone.uk/

Have Reddark on a tab. Seems like the number of private subs keeps dropping. :(

Are they caving or is something nefarious up like what happened to r/AdviceAnimals and r/tumblr yesterday?

FFXVI, Armored Core 6, Starfield (after that presentation, was highly skeptical before), Mortal Kombat 1, Alan Wake 2, and Spider-Man 2.

I think all of them look great. FFXVI is my most anticipated overall. Ever since it was revealed in 2020 I’ve been sold on that game.

Yeah, it is completely different than what it used to be. There would definitely be times when a hivemind mentality would get borderline insane. The first subreddit I discovered was r/atheism. And it was nice seeing other people like me. But I remember asking honestly about a girl I was dating at the time being Lutheran and wondering if it could work. Some were supportive. But some people were vile. It was then I could see how nuts it would get.

The communities are so large it has almost gotten too big for its own good. It’s made the people who run the site into total monsters. I started off lurking the site about 14 years ago. And the finally made an account 3 years after. 11 years down the drain, I remember recommending the site to people all the way back then. Especially when I started discovering a lot of the meme subreddits that I would share with friends.

This is a big reason why I’m here as of today. I just can’t in good conscience support what Reddit is doing. I’ve been an Apollo user since it launched out of beta. I jumped at the chance to have paid Christian twice for both the original premium upgrade. And then the Ultra one later down the road. I just adore the app. When I switched to Android I still found myself missing it terribly. Since switching back to iOS. I’ve averaged 15-20 hours per week just using Apollo.

End of an era :(