I’ve been talking with a friend about beat em ups and arcade games in general so that’s got me on an arcade kick recently. I gave Streets of Rage 2 a try since I’ve never gotten into this genre before and it sounds like it’s a good game for beginners. I also played some Fantasy Zone and Parodius da!, both are pretty fun. Something else I learned is that I can use a tool to run Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3 DX+ on my computer so that’s been pretty cool. It feels pretty similar to the Initial D games I’ve played, though I’d say it’s easier since it’s focused on racing stretches of highway instead of winding mountain courses. I think I can run the newest Maximum Tune release in that series as well but I’ve been having some technical issues lately so I just felt like playing what I know works rather then messing with something new for now.

Being a delivery driver is also a way more dangerous job. Sounds like your place’s work balance was fucked though, where I was drivers had to do dishes, prep ingredients, work the oven, and help take phone orders, plus do most opening and closing tasks since insiders were basically only around for rush. Basically the only thing you were exempt from was working the make line. I’ve done both and still think being a driver was better overall, though. It’s a lot easier to sneak away for a break when I was getting stressed and the pay was definitely better even with the cost of car maintenance.

Little Rocket Lab

Oh lol well I hope you enjoy it then!

How do you like it so far? I downloaded it like a week ago but haven’t gotten around to trying it yet.

I hope that if they do a new Ace Attorney it’s an entirely new cast of characters, AA 5 and 6 were so disappointing.

I was watching someone play UFO 50 and that got me back into it, I’ve been trying to beat Valbrace and I think I’ll finally play Barbuta as well once I’m done with that. I’ve also been playing Final Fantasy VI again, last time I played it I was having a great time but ended up burning out a good ways into the game. I just started over and this time I’m gonna back up my save file when I get to the turning point so I can start from there if it happens again.

There’s a guy that follows you around for like 20 minutes who does not shut up and is really annoying but then you leave him behind. He still contacts you over radio occasionally after that but far less frequently. People are talking like he ruins the game and I’d rather he not be there, sure, but it’s really only a minor part of the game as far as I’ve seen (which is not that much to be fair so I might not know the worst of it yet).

I finished Dragon Quest II last night. I had a good time with it until I got to the area outside the final dungeon and the game gave me a giant middle finger. Basically every random encounter there either nearly or completely wiped my party just from damage alone, and they gave the enemies there a skill that has a chance to instantly kill you and that targets your whole party. I tried a few different strats to see if I could make it through but realized I was just severely underleveled, so I grinded for like an hour but then realized I still stood no chance and had hours of fast-forward grinding to go just to even unlock the revive spell, which only one party member learns and he might just get insta-killed anyways. With the only other revive being an item you can only hold one of and that you need to travel to the opposite side of the map to get another of, I kinda just didn’t feel like playing any more. So I decided to abuse save states to clear the last zone just to see the end.

Otherwise I’ve been back into NetHack lately, playing the 3.7.0 pre-release. I’m still not very good at the game, but I’m getting better. I’m still a long ways off from ascending, but I think with some practice I can start getting deep into the dungeon at least.

why is this screenshot grainy lol

I think they are still working on FF3

It’s funny because I wasn’t that into 1, like I didn’t really dislike it and found it charming, but I didn’t actually have that much fun. But I watched someone stream DQ1 HD, and I kept getting annoyed by the changes lol. It’s too different, it’s like a completely different game now and the changes they made didn’t seem that great to me. I guess there’s nothing wrong with it being completely different, but it wasn’t what I was expecting at all. Maybe if I played it myself I would enjoy it more but watching it I was just like “what is this…”

OK, so again I got curious and went to take another look, and there’s also a stats_by_character.csv file in their repo. So I just went and found the numbers for each of the party members and added it up to see how that changes the stats.

Women party members making up the majority of dialogue makes sense to me since Marle and Lucca are both introduced so early and make up a large share of the total. Again makes me curious what it would look like if we expanded the pool a bit to just exclude unnamed characters. I get the feeling it would shift back towards men making up the majority of dialogue, but that’s just vibes. Side note, I find it really strange that Crono has almost 10% of the lines, but the links to the scripts they used don’t appear to be working for me so I can’t check what they count as a Crono line. My guess is dialogue choices are attributed to Crono? But even then that seems surprisingly high. In any case, I figured I should include it to be consistent with their data. This is pretty interesting to me though so I might try setting their project up locally later so I can mess with the data some more.

I don’t think I can answer with any confidence, but my guess is that most of the minor NPCs with only a little dialogue are men. So even though men make up an overwhelming share of all characters, the women that are in the game play a more prominent role on average. I’d be really curious to see this recalculated with just, say, named characters to see how much the data shifts and if my guess is on point at all.

Yeah I’ve heard 3 is really good, I’m looking forward to it! I know 2 has a pretty poor reputation and I can see why, but I dunno, something about it just clicks with me.

It looks like the scraper python script pulls the game script from here: https://www.ffcompendium.com/h/faqs/ffx2scriptaschthehated.txt

I’m not familiar with X-2 or their method for parsing the game script, but the project doesn’t look too hard to set up and you can submit issues on their GitHub so if you want to take a look I would say go for it. If they made a mistake I’m sure they would like to know

Still working my way through Dragon Quest II. I’m a pretty good ways into the game so far and I like it a lot more than Dragon Quest I. It feels a lot less grindy and I’m enjoying the variety in monsters. Pretty harsh game though, your party members will drop dead instantly if you aren’t careful. It feels like the best strategy a lot of the time is to just smack with the player character and defend with the other two, then heal up after. There’s still times when there are other good strategies though, and having party members at all gives you more freedom in how you approach things, and I like that they each have strengths and weaknesses (even if they aren’t super well balanced about it) so still a big step up from DQ1 for me. They give you no room for items either despite there being a lot of key items. I still haven’t even tried the lottery yet because I only have room for a couple consumables and I’ve been holding on to them for emergencies lol. Still though, I’m liking it. The harshness of the game plays well into the general hopeless vibe the game’s setting has in my opinion.

As chgxvjh says, I’m pretty sure it’s analyzing entire scripts. I did notice in the linked research article on their GitHub that they took a look at that as well though.

Chrono Trigger is in their dataset, I was curious as well and went to check:

• 13.7% (31 / 226) of characters are women
• 35.7% (13,571 / 37,982) of words spoken by women
• 37% (5,021 / 13,564) of sentences spoken by women
• 38.1% (1,638 / 4,187) of lines spoken by women

I thought it was interesting as well that 51 of the 226 characters were classified as neutral. Probably because of all the monsters and Nu? But I’m not sure.

Oh that’s a good idea, I might just do that