If I remember correctly, I think one of the Rayman games were one of the first to try a gameplay loop like that. They definitely tend to feel better, but I think it depends on the game too.

Like some of the Souls games can have fairly punishing boss battles, where losing comes with the penalty of a painfully of a relatively long and dangerous trek just to get your ass handed to you again. If they did that for every boss I would hate the games, but that they throw usually just one of those in there makes them just frustrating enough to be extra spicy.

The biggest pain point of the oldest games is that they came out of the arcade era, so they were specifically designed to lack save features, and be so punishing that you would spend more of your quarters playing them.

I did a playthrough of both Castlevania 1 and Megaman 1. After a while I gave in and started using savestates, and suddenly both games became amazing. Jumping over Dracula’s fireballs is a lot more dramatic when you have to do it with pixel precision.

OoT hasn’t aged the best, but it’s still a solid experience for a game that pioneered mainstream 3D graphics. The Ps1/N64 generation was all about innovation and experimentation, so it’s a bit unfair to judge those games so harshly. Now the Ps2/Gamecube gen was when things became refined. In the same franchise, Wind Waker is a retro game and still one of the absolute best in the series.

It’s a case by case basis. I’ve heard the Dynasty Warriors Origins is really good but I can’t speak for that since I haven’t played it. Other than that, compare the Ps2 musuo games to more modern ones like DW8/9, or the Pirate Warriors series. The classics are way more fun and engaging.

Or just look at Square Enix. Some of what they do now days is good, but most of their stuff is gacha-laden garbage now. Even their Pixel Remaster collection traded in a legacy of their own source code for a toy built in Unity, for a pseudo-classic experience that doesn’t even have the additional content of previous remasters.

Or, in the fps genre, I dare you to find a modern fps that’s as packed full of amazing content and features as Time Splitters 3: Future Perfect.

I agree, paid services are a good option too. I pay for my Posteo email service for one example.

Viva Longevity has become one of my favorite channels for anything nutrition and longevity related. Chris MacAskill is a retired Earth scientist who started the channel as a passion project. He claims to keep all possible ad things shut off, doesn’t accept donations, and is doing the channel out of his own pocket.

The gist of it is to push back against all the misinformation, by providing a platform for the most cited and respected health and nutritional researchers, who do actual science, to talk about their work. He also has episodes about how industry-funded disinformation campaigns work to undermine the scientific communities.

There’s a goldilocks zone where our own individual longevity can be met while simultaneously causing the least harm to all life, within practicality. That zone being within the territory of the blue zones to one degree or another. Or to be straight to the point, it is completely unnecessary for the vast majority of people to ever need to depend on animal products for food.

I’m sure it’s disrespectful to our ancestors if we could work for a livable wage as well. Some of us care a little bit more about future generations.

This fucks with my brain so much. The last time I looked at the original pic, it was white and gold and nothing I did could change that. Looking at this one just now, it was white and gold again but this time as I started scrolling down it shifted into blue and black and now that’s how it’s staying.

This is the page I’m referring to, where one of the main RA devs is shown saying a lot of really toxic things about byuu. It’s kind of hard to find any reliable info about the dramas, but there are various threads online where people bring up a number of dramas, like this thread.

I’ve been using Iceraven with uBlock and it’s been pretty great so far. I use Obtainium to keep it updated directly from the repo.

This website details various issues. I’d suggest looking at the Byuu page - as I understand it the RetroArch devs played a large role in the harrassments that were being done to the developer of Higan/bsnes, which eventually led to them killing themself.

Batocera is a relatively minimalist Linux distro for emulation specifically. It’s one example that kind of highlights the problem I’m referring to. All of these retro software stacks still use RetroArch to varying degrees, and depend on it. Even alternative frontends like Emulation Station are just built on top of the same libraries. Or as another example, for most game systems, RetroAchievements only currently work on RetroArch.

Yeah it kinda mystifies me that anyone is still recommending that shitty bigotware.

In the emulation scene, RetroArch is in a similar boat if I’m understanding things correctly. Awful maintainers, but people keep recommending it and supporting it. Sucks too, because there are even fewer alternatives there.

I’ve played with and without the analog inputs, and using a real DualShock 2. By default it’s not L3, it’s circle for cqc, and square for pressure sensitive controls for the gun.

The controls were even worse on ps2 because even though they are technically analog buttons, they have a very short travel distance which makes it too easy to accidentally do the wrong thing. I found the modern controls slightly more intuitive.

There was also a time I tried to play the ps2 version on pcsx2, but could only use a DualShock 4 then. Since that controller doesn’t have analog face buttons, I remapped cqc to L2 and gunfire to R2 and found that control scheme worked surprizingly well.

But the basic controls are the least of those game’s problems.

Despite my best efforts, I never got to a point where I felt like I wasn’t fighting against the controls and mechanics. As somebody who has played a fair share of other stealth games, they just are really bad.

I’ll talk about the boss fight that was the final straw for me.

The whole thing was an exercise in annoyance and frustration. After getting past it, it made me realize how hard I had been trying to ignore the way these things had been annoying me throughout the entire game. I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Just hate it, the games are not for me.

These days when I play Bethesda games I always end up using console commands to expand inventory space. I’m so done with hyper-limited inventory systems and having to waste stat points to increase them.

I really want to like Metal Gear Solid games, but after playing a fair way into MGS3… I kind of hate it. The controls and mechanics are so bad.

It has been for me. As a fellow tea enjoyer, lung function, gut health, a melting away of aching joints and physical malaise, seasonal allergy alleviation, and a shockingly boosted immune system are all benefits that I’ve personally enjoyed since going fully plant-based. Most likely heart benefits as well, but I won’t know for sure until I get my cholesterol levels tested.

But of course personal anecdotes are not valid evidence. Which is fine, because the science largely favors diets that are at least mostly plant-centric anyway.

In my experience sacrifice is a relative matter, and soon dissipates. Every abstained choice gets replaced with an alternative, and the more alternatives that are explored the more it becomes apparent that there is an entire culinary world that has been ignored. It becomes apparent that what felt like sacrifice is in fact opportunity, and those opportunities are well worth investigating in full.

If you keep exploring plant-based options you will be a lot more likely to find what works for you, than if you just give up.

It should also be noted, dairy impairs the bioavailability of beneficial plant-based compounds. Here are a few studies. Milk and coffee. Milk and blueberries. And Milk and tea.

Oh no, you’re owning the vegans! 😵

But, uh, what’s going on here? Do you think animal abuse is funny?