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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Believe it or not, the Catholic Church is far less into the “Satanic Panic” idea that anything that mentions magic and stuff is evil and should be avoided than most Protestant Christian churches, especially the Evangelicals. Pretty much the only thing they consider sinful outright in the media is porn, otherwise you’re just advised to avoid stuff that influences you to commit other sins. This includes things like Baldur’s Gate 3. If it’s not influencing you to sin, it’s not a sin to play. Same with Harry Potter and other stuff like that. It’s just some extreme folks in the Church, influenced by the Evangelicals, who push the Satanic Panic farther than the Church officially teaches and give the Church a bad name in that regard. Lots of priests are sci-fi/fantasy/gamer nerds, and Tolkien (author of Lord of the Rings) was a faithful practicing Catholic.



  • Exactly. This has much more to do with pirating games, especially before release, than any emulator crackdown. He’s the poster child of every reason Nintendo has used to go after anyone not using legit hardware. And frankly, I think more people than many are comfortable admitting are like this guy: they use emulators primarily for piracy. I’m not 100% totally against emulation, but that’s where we need to point companies like Nintendo who are hyper-aggressive with their IPs to the real target: illegal ROM sharing sites and other avenues of game piracy, instead of the emulators. People who are emulating just for backup/preservation of games, as many claim they are (and I don’t have a problem with), shouldn’t really have an objection to the real pirates going down.







  • To be fair, they’re both Japanese companies, but yeah, Japan’s patent/trademark/copyright laws, or at least the way they’re enforced, make America’s look like China’s. It’s a big part of how Nintendo can be the copyright bullies they are: they’ll do this, file suit in Japan, and steamroll anyone who dares oppose them in court. Because both companies in this case are Japanese, though, all the Japan vs foreigner stuff doesn’t really apply here.

    And as a foreigner who lived in Japan in the past, I will say there’s some truth to the above, but it’s a bit exaggerated. Due to that homogeneity, 90+ percent of any racism anyone might experience there is due to stereotypes, not hostility or hatred. It’s still wrong, but more due to ignorance. That is, unless you’re Chinese or Korean. Japan, China and Korea HATE each other (each one hates the other two) for many historical reasons, and while the hostility isn’t as overt nowadays, it still simmers just under the surface. The US is basically forcing Japan and South Korea to play nice and be “allies” so that China and North Korea don’t run them both over. Otherwise, they would all be at each other’s throats.


  • Fun fact: at least in the Catholic Church, “cult” is a neutral word that basically means “popular following”. In the Church, it’s mostly used to refer to particular devotions or holy people that catch on in local communities and spread to a wider area, which the Church may look into for official " approval" for anyone to participate in or promote worldwide, or as a beginning sign that a holy person may become a saint. Even if the Church doesn’t officially canonize a person a saint, they may still say the person has a “cult” in a particular area.

    EDIT: meant to post in reply to the OP, not the above comment, sorry about that.


  • So the first two seem to deal with throwing a capture item at a creature (wild pokemon) and/or releasing a character’s own creature to fight it (essentially first seen in Legends Arceus, tossing a ball at a pokemon to aggro it and then fighting it with your pokemon). The third one is, as others have said, Mount transitions (at least in pokemon, also first seen in Legends Arceus if you only count ride pokemon; if vehicles are included I believe the first would be Sword/Shield). Though if vehicles are included Nintendo would have a hard time fighting that one. Vehicle transformation, especially in racing games, has been around forever.





  • Origins tends to be the “forgotten” title in the Arkham series since it wasn’t developed by the same studio and doesn’t feature many of the iconic characters/villains of the others (just Penguin, Deathstroke, Riddler and Joker), but IMO it’s still a very good game that can be held up with the others in the series and can introduce players to a variety of other members of Batman’s rogues gallery they may have not heard of before.