Making my way through FF16. According to the PS5 dashboard completion percentage I’m at about 70% complete right now. So I might be able to finish over the weekend, but having a six-year-old at home might make that harder to accomplish.

Either way, I’m really enjoying it despite it being absolutely archaic in terms of its actual game design. It’s really carried by its presentation, soundtrack, and decent story. They’ve arguably stripped away too much of what typically defines a Final Fantasy game here, but I’m still having a great time by just choosing to appreciate what it does do well.

Daaamn. The lighting and thick atmosphere in this picture are sublime. I want to go there.

They absolutely did. So much more room for air/sound to flow through those speakers in CRTs. That’s why most people resort to sound bars at a minimum to get halfway decent sound for today’s flat panel televisions. You just can’t fit powerful speakers into them.

I’ve tried them all, and as of right now Connect feels the most polished and feature rich. So that’s my recommendation.

Another hot tip: don’t refer to people as “normies.”

Nostalgia is really interesting in that it’s inherently bittersweet. It’s nice because it grounds us in a shared timeline and focuses on mostly positive aspects of some past point in time, but it’s also sad because it means thinking back fondly on a time that will never be again.

So maybe it’s the bitter half of that bittersweet feeling that you’re subconsciously averse to? Either that or maybe your past/childhood was mostly negative or even traumatic? I’m no psychologist, so really I don’t know what I’m talking about.

An empire that we lived in and got to experience when it was thriving. That’s why dead malls in particular have a distinctly bittersweet feeling to them. Those of us who frequented malls in the 80’s and 90’s can vividly remember when they were filled with people, commerce, and social activity. They were such lively social spaces back then, so seeing them slowly succumb to the ravages of time and fade into irrelevancy is both sad and fascinating.

Nah. It’s morbidly interesting IMO.

Yep. Still have my black one with AmberElec installed. I love everything about it other than the display’s somewhat muted colors and mediocre battery life.

We’re so fucking cool, aren’t we?

Phew.

Lol. I read this in an entirely different context, like you were implying that they’d go to hell for this.

This is exactly what I was going to say. The feed on Threads is absolutely abysmal. Just an endless stream of bullshit that I don’t want to see. That might improve in the future as they continue to update the app and its feed algorithms, but as of right now it’s pretty terrible at showing the user content that they’re interested in.

That’s really cool that someone thought to preserve this and put it on display in a museum. It’s like a modern historical artifact from the golden age of computing.

“Shouldn’t we wait for reinforcements?”

“I am the reinforcements.”

• Vagrant Story, PS1

We’re done here. That’s the one.

Yeah, this sums up the situation quite nicely. I have nothing more to add other than saying it’s one more reason why it sucks to be a Floridian right now. We already had it bad enough with the oppressive summer heat and lack of seasons here, but now we’ve got some of the worst state leadership in the country to add a nice cherry on top of the shit sundae.

I do remember Lost Souls, yeah.

And that Papyrus font… I can feel the 90’s-era PC gaming vibes radiating off of it. Love it.

Jeez. What a pathetic loser.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread because I would also love to know if I’m missing out on some good games journalism out there. Sadly, sites like what you’ve described are increasingly rare in the modern era. Nevertheless, here are a few that come to mind:

NintendoLife is pretty great for this if you’re looking for Nintendo-related news, reviews, interviews, and feature articles.

One of their affiliate sites, Time Extension, is also really good for long-form articles and retrospectives about retro games.

And while it’s mostly just news, like you said, Polygon will sometimes surprise you with some really excellent feature articles that have a lot of thought and research put into them.