voxpoplar

voxpoplar wrote (edited )

I am going to offer a counterpoint to the Dark Souls promoters here and as someone who hated Dark Souls when they first played it and then came back to it years later and finished it and thought “That was pretty alright this time” what made it click with me was accepting that the game is badly designed and fails to tell you how shit works properly and, despite what everyone says about these fucking games, it actively punishes experimentation. After that I just looked shit up. Just read fucking stupid, annoying wiki pages to understand basic game mechanics and how I should be using upgrade materials and shit.

People who think Darks Souls is intuitive have either played so much of these games they have forgotten what the first experience is like or watched other people playing it first before playing it themselves or were playing it at the same time as a bunch of friends and sharing information.

To put this in a nicer way and meeting the game more on its own terms: These games were designed to be collaborative. That is why they have messages from other players. That's why you can summon people. They are not intended to be sat down and played by yourself with no extenral input. You aren't actually meant to figure everything out, you are meant to collaborate and share information. And if you aren't caught up in the initial frenzy and excitement of a release and have a bunch of friends sharing information the first time you play one of these then you are not getting the actual experience the game was designed around and you need to look up forum posts and wikis about how upgrading your weapons works.

Or just play a better game.

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voxpoplar wrote

When I read Eire I think of the Irish name for Ireland (Éire) so pronounced it like "air-ah" in my head but is it intended to just be like "air" or "ear" or something else?

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voxpoplar wrote

I have not read up a huge amount but I think the standard answer is something along the lines of that anarchism does not mean lack of organising, just lack of hierarchy.

After a revolution there would still be larger structure and organising but would, ideally under an anarchistic viewpoint, be bottom-up, voluntary and truly democratic.

There’s a lot of different types of anarchism and lots of different answers to how this would theoretically work. E.g. anarcho-syndicalism is focused on the idea of anarchist trade unions seizing control of production.

How to prevent people concentrating and amassing power under these sorts of systems is obviously a big problem and I don’t think there’s any good answer other than you need mass class consciousness and people motivated against allowing that.

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voxpoplar wrote

I played this recently. Never played the unmodded game for more than an hour or so so I don’t have first-hand experience of the normal version of the game but I think without the easing the requirements to the missions and making unlocking the ending easier it would have been a much more miserable experience.

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voxpoplar wrote

A re-release of Sonic Generations just came called Sonic × Shadow Generations that ads a new campaign just for Shadow. Sonic Generations was already the best of the boost-style Sonic games but the Shadow Generations portion they added might be even better.

From the 2D side of things Sonic Mania is really good and there’s also a port of all the old Mega Drive games to the same engine on modern systems called Sonic Origins.

Sonic Frontiers is janky as all hell but I also love it and it’s honestly just really fun to move around in an open world as Sonic and I feel like the first game where they were finally figuring out how to actually do boss fights for Sonic (though they are still also janky as hell).

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