In Dark Souls 3, you are an unkindled, a historic warrior that was strong enough to attempt to link the flame but who failed in their life. So there is some precedent for your character starting with skills of their chosen profession. Who knows, maybe they even made it as far as the Kiln before falling? You rise out of your grave because the Lords of Cinder, who actually linked the flame, had been revived at the end of the world and convergence of time and space (or something like that) to link it again, but refused. I like to think there is some ambiguity in these games, and you can write your character’s own backstory for who they were and what happened to them.

Thats hilarious.

I was thinking of showing up as the Ice King from Adventure Time earlier, but I'm not sure the joke would land.

Pretty sure ladybugs eat aphids, so why not have your cake and eat it too?

I dunno, there were pretty big anti mask movements back in the 1918 “Spanish” Influenza pandemic. I think it’s completely possible that ignorance can persist, even in the face of obvious oblivion.

I love it, I can just say the snow melted off of me before I got to the party.

The DLSS 5 effect is less like a different pair of headphones that don't have a flat response and more like if your music player added AI generated instruments to the songs in your music library. I think that was what the previous poster was arguing (I agree with them).

Part of me wonders if it is internally consistent, or if Leon's face changes just a little every time he pops up in a new scene in the new RE with DLSS on.

Imagine the Crimson Skies (game) universe but with a more interesting story.

Sorry if you liked the plot, I loved the game but the story wasn’t particularly memorable for me.

Exactly this is what I feel like Elden Ring has been missing from the start: factions with rewards to encourage multiplayer engagement. I even miss Aldrich invasions and being a mound maker. Half the invaders in Elden Ring play like mound makers anyways and attack everything indiscriminately... may as well get some shackles for it.

That and the removal of the ember/humanity requirement made it less likely that people would be exposed to invasions. I remember beating bosses, forgetting I was ember-ed, and run into an invader at the worst/best possible moment. I know that some people hated being forced into PVP, but it got the blood flowing and made every play-through feel just a little unique. It added character to the world, made it feel alive.

Edit: What would some interesting factions be for Elden ring that would be lore friendly? I like the idea of maybe a SOTE invasion class being fire knights. In hindsight they could have locked some of the spells and weapon arts behind this instead of the NPC invaders. The bloody fingers and recusant fingers were clearly based on some of the invasion factions in previous games, would have been cool to see at least one of those have rewards based on invasion success/spoils. Golden order would seem to be the closest analogue to the Warriors of Sunlight, and has a handful of relevant spells and weapons that could have been chases. Maybe a faction for Those Who Live in Death that could have been like the Gravelord Servents or something?

I was hoping someone would mention Samurai Gunn. Did you ever play 0space made by the same developer? I have very fond memories of crowding around my friend’s computer with a handful of USB remotes in college and fighting it out with each other.

I guess it depends on how you want to interpret the analogy. It looked to me to be adding facial features, details in the background, and changing lighting from the videos and images I saw.

So maybe with your parameters for the analogy it’s more like if you went to listen to a Lo-Fi, basement recorded song using cheap gear and microphones, and your AI music player “sharpened details” to make it sound like it was recorded in higher detail by shaping the tracks and adding frames and increasing the bit rate while adding impulse responses and other emulated effects to make the recording sound more detailed/hi-fi.

For many people this would ruin the song, but I’m sure there are people out there who would love that sort of feature.

whoops... yeah definitely could have worded that better.

Found a video on Technopants itch.io page:

https://youtu.be/Gfwqkj9Jljc

Basically a no gravity samurai gunn with bombs. I think it’s a free/pay what you want sort of download.

Do you have any recs for romhacks?

Nice, I’ll have to look into that one.

A couple that I’ve been following are:

• Pokemon Lazarus, an emerald romhack in a new region based on Greece. Lots of custom pixel art for the trees/architecture/terrain and apparently has megas.
• Pokemon KEP, a red hack that adds some of the original beta Pokemon back in to the game along with regional variants of Kanto Pokemon, and adds a couple new locations/characters/music/features.
• Pokemon Extreme Yellow which adds in some of the Kanto megas as final evolutions. A bunch of other goodies too such as expanded maps, quality of life stuff, crazy hard puzzles. The creator is trying to implement a bunch of other crazy stuff for an unreleased update including diving mechanics.

“I am the only one who thinks I’m going crazy And I don’t know what to do”

Its not inherently better than sending someone a playlist by any other means but on the other hand I just think its neat to have a physical thing that you have to intentionally plug into something and listen to in a specific order and way. That and the way that tech/streaming is changing the ways we interact with music on a personal and cultural level is overwhelming to me, makes me nostalgic for the limitations of older mediums. When you had to be intentional about what and how you listened, it (at least to me) made a deeper connection between me and the music as a listener. Fortunately we can still be intentional in many ways, its just easier to not do that with streaming and algorithmically recommended stuff.

I do wish that my friends would still send each other playlists in any format.

That looks clean! I wish I could find an aftermarket replacement or 3d print model for a 2ds shell, but nobody seems to make those for some reason.

I really like that line of thought.

I still use a Tesseract Deepcool case for my home PC that I got in the mid 2010s. Nothing groundbreaking, could have more fan slots. It didn’t change the world, but it did open my world to building PCs and picking parts, so that’s cool.

100% not what you are talking about.

Bad Books - Bad Books II (original version)

Thrice - Beggars

O’ Brother - Death of Day EP

Frightened Rabbit - Midnight Organ Fight

At the Drive In - Relationship of Command

Edit: also any of Elliot Smith or Jose Gonzalez’s stuff too, especially for fingerpicking