I totally get that. Every other game has A for jump, B for shoot, with some subtle variations on top of that. That muscle-memory runs deep. Then this game comes along like “I’m going to destroy this man’s whole career” by changing out jump for “do wildly different stuff depending on which way the d-pad is leaning.”

Just reading this makes me irrationally angry. I’m sorry for your loss.

Yuuuup. I think it’s well past time to let Temu Uncle Fester go.

Very true. I’ve had the pleasure of playing NES Contra on a Play Choice 10 cabinet. The cabinet and arcade-stick experience makes this contrast even stronger: it’s simply more fun than the arcade version, even if the only thing that’s different is the software. And if you want to get technical, it’s also running on inferior hardware to boot.

Hands down: Bionic Commando (NES).

The arcade game is an exercise in quarter-eating frustration, with difficulty on par with Ghosts and Goblins only with harder movement tech. I promise you, the next time you boot this in MAME, you’ll move on in under three minutes, possibly never to return.

The NES version is a platforming masterpiece of difficulty scaling, minor backtracking, lightweight inventory management, all with a nice side of world exploration to tie it all together. It even has Commando-style mini-games to break up any possibility of monotony. It’s a solid playthrough that has all those elements, but nothing is overdone or gets in the way of the action.

On a voodoo 6!

It also ran admirably on a Pentium with zero acceleration. A testament to the strength of its software renderer. It wasn’t pretty, or high resolution, but it was playable.

Front Mission games are turn based tactical RPGs and you can customize your mechs a lot.

It’s worth mentioning that as a Square/Enix property, the mech customization is much more Final Fantasy than Mechwarrior though. It doesn’t matter to me, but it doesn’t have that “paper doll” UI that is core to Mechwarrior style games. That said, the actual mech body is far more customizable with swappable legs and arms.

I thought this was standard practice, especially once you have the C-bills and/or chassis to pull it off. Glass cannon builds are tons of fun.

Then you read the mission specs and see that you’re landing on an ice planet this time…

I hate that I even know what you’re talking about. May this upvote be mentally cleansing for us both.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I had no idea this has been going on for this long, even though all this stuff was in plain sight the whole time.

More likely: Erik installed some NexusMods stuff that he’d probably rather not talk about.

I completely missed something with this whole trend. I get wanting to go metal (or glass) to avoid microplastics, but is it all just conspicuous consumption after that, or am I missing something more fundamental?

Meanwhile, I’m only using a steel flask on hiking trips; a freebie from a previous job at that. A coffee cup or glass does the job for me at the office.

so responsibility part was skipped.

The article mentions that the datacenter is run by a 3rd party. I’m not arguing to absolve Meta here, but I think this is a classic case of diffusion of responsibility. The more contractors and subcontractors that get involved in stuff like this, the more these kinds of problems crop up.

I got this a lot when I was an actual boss. It was always done in a brotherly, jokingly left-handed, kind of way. This fits perfectly with my management style. It was nice.

because we spent all of the wired rollout grants/funding on bullshit.

Oh, it’s worse than that. The grant money was the wrong party color, so it had to be disposed of rather than lead to a positive outcome.

Of course the real problem is when someone in the change swaps out from a benevolent manager to dick :)

Had this happen with a VP seat. The resignations that followed made the office look like ground-zero for an extinction-level event.

In summary, they‘ve developed incredible killing machines that are able to act autonomously, which is very good for them right now but probably not very good for humanity in the long run.

It’s possible that this becomes the new “mutually assured destruction” we had back in the 20th. Basically, a cold war brought on by drones instead of nukes. It could mean a near-future of peace, however uneasy. I can’t say that living with the looming propagandized threat of the USSR was good, but I think it was a far sight better than being in an active shooting war with them.

Most companies are politically fiefdoms of a sort. This is by design. You’re completely dependent on the benevolence of the management chain above you. This also explains why decadent or malicious management is nearly impossible to overcome without resorting to involving lawyers.

Agreed. Stop the bleeding first, then triage based on wounds and prognosis.

Recovering the broken relationships with allies will take decades.

I’m fully prepared to not live long enough to see that repaired. Not that it’s hopeless, but it really will take a lifetime.

There’s a few that come close. This situation is about as bad as the more milquetoast vault outcomes: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_known_Vaults