Yeah, I don’t have much hope in that regard. I am sure Takahashi’s involvement with the series will mean that the original manga’s casual misogyny will be toned down, but I doubt that Takahashi will change much about the overall plot.

My ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt is raising question already answered by my ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt.

Yes and no. Like in Stardew Valley, technically you can romance every NPC in your party, but in practice you have to meet certain criteria to do so and those differ from character to character. Of course, it is possible to “game” that system.

The most famous one ATM is probably “Baldur’s Gate 3” which offers a wide variety of mechanics and stats to measure if an NPC member of the player’s party is romantically interested in the player character. Two examples given in the talk I linked are the VNs “Monster Prom” or “First Bite”.

I love this game (500 hours played), but I have to bring up a point of criticism…

One aspect which has not aged well IMHO is the “kindness coin” mechanic: The exchange of goods for the NPCs’ friendship and/or affection. You give the NPCs stuff, then you give them more stuff, then some more on top, then you get a cut scene and then you get back to giving them stuff until you trigger the next one.

Yes, the requests on the blackboard and the occasional personal quest mix up things a little bit, but overall the mechanic remains the same and for me over the years this has cheapened the interaction with the NPCs for me somewhat: They are mostly transactional and predictable to the point where you can calculate their outcome.
You have to give character A so-and-so many objects X to romance them. It takes so-and-so many days to do that.

Sure, the “kindness coins” mechanic was industry standard at the time, but I wish there were more variety in regards to the interactions with the NPCs, because they are amazingly written and I wish there was more to do with them besides giving them stuff over and over again.

So much this.

It is the very definition of being cis to not understand wanting to be a different gender than the one being assigned at birth. People who are uncomfortable with their assigned gender are not cis.

But many need a while to realize that other people do not feel the way they do.

WillStealYourUsername has already given a very good overview, to add to that…

It is a highly individual process and while many trans people share certain experiences, no two trans people will have exactly the same kind of journey.

While the public perception of trans people is very much focused on the rather rare cases of young children who will insist on being trans from an early age on. While these cases definitely exist, far more trans people are going through a gradual process of realization. There may be a final “egg crack” (the moment of final realization), but it is usually preceded by a slow process of smaller realizations and it is nowhere near a linear process…

As WillStealYourUsername describes so well, in hindsight all the signs and individual quirks make sense, but most people have to attain a certain level of self-acceptance before being able to recognize the various symptoms for what they are.

In my personal case, it was an intense jealousy of fem people that would never go away and culminated in a moment where I had an emotional meltdown over a fictional character who transitioned from male to female in their storyline. That’s when I finally realized that I could do the same thing if I got my shit together and accepted being trans.

Yeah, I was pretty much convinced of the same thing while still in school: How could my class mates not want to change their gender? It’s the most amazing thing in the world to do! Who would say no to that?

How often does it need to be said? Do not preorder games based on what they looked like in the trailers!

It is the internal voice of the female-presenting person in the far left corner of the first picture. All of the text is essentially the internal monologue of the comic’s creator, MilkyTrickster. He retells his struggles with his looks, until the moment he realized that he doesn’t need to pass as a man in order to accept his own trans identity.

Yeah, Majestic was incredibly interesting because it was an attempt to create an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that was more than just a marketing campaign and could support itself financially. Its failure led to ARGs being abandoned as standalone games and ARGs mostly remained marketing which - ultimately - led to a slow, but inevitable decline of the ARG as a genre when the marketing money dried up.

They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.

As mossy_ writes: Some people just like looking at girls, but when it’s compulsive for someone, it is one possible indication of being an egg.

It can be very small things. Personally, if games have a character creator, I can’t play games as my assigned gender. Impossible. If I chose my assigned gender, I will rather not play the game at all.

This! This was the real perfection.

I have a theory what happened: The original newspaper where the story came from (Luzerner Zeitung) is a small local one. It seems like they misunderstood the spokespersons of the company they interviewed, Fortinet. Fortinet has had several postings about hypothetical DDoS attacks using IoT devices, often using toothbrushes as their examples.

So it seems like the reporters did not realize that Fortinet spoke about hypothetical scenarios, rather than something that actually happened.

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Sure, the death of the live service hype plays a role, too, but in my view it is mostly due to the gravy train of cheap money coming to a halt: Lots of companies are scaling back because they had funded themselves with loans while laundering profits through tax havens. Gaming companies are not much different from tech companies and media companies in this regard. Those are also in hot water ATM and fire people in order to stabilize their cash flow.

At the end of the day, gaming companies are going to invest far less in the future. Games such as “Spider-Man 2” and other AAA titles with exorbitant budgets will become rare. This has been a trend for years.

Thus I am rather certain that 2023 was one of the last years where we have seen a strong line-up of high quality, high budget titles alongside indie success stories.

I wonder if 2023 will go down as one of the last good years for gaming (and even that only works if you ignore all the layoffs that already happened).

As far as I understand it, the studios are trying a different angle: They are not suing Reddit this time, but an ISP and want Reddit to provide the data of costumers of that ISP.