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.

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?

“Shouldn’t we wait for reinforcements?”

“I am the reinforcements.”

• Vagrant Story, PS1

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.

Yeah, that surprised me, actually.

I just took Mastodon for a spin only a week or so ago, and it felt much less active than most of the communities on here do. Just my anecdotal experience, though. I couldn’t find more than a handful of Twitter-migrated accounts on Mastodon that I cared to follow. There just wasn’t much happening on there that I’m interested in when I last checked. I’ll look again.

Because it’s just an incredibly small userbase made up mostly of tech/privacy enthusiasts as of right now.

I wouldn’t say that I’m against subscription models as an option alongside a traditional purchasing paradigm for games, but if what we’re seeing now is simply a trojan horse for a wholesale upheaval of that traditional purchasing model sometime in the not-so-distant future then I’d happily see it fail. Just in general the constant push toward an all-digital gaming future consistently concerns me.

But I’m old. I’d be willing to bet that most young people and teens gaming today probably couldn’t care less about that prospect since they’ve never experienced this medium during a time before digital distribution, day 1 patches, etc.

Do they? I’m not so sure.

While exclusives certainly limit access to those who own a certain platform, they also usually benefit from being developed for one specific piece of hardware in terms of polish, stability, etc. Some of the most ambitious and polished games ever made have been exclusives, mostly on Sony or Nintendo platforms.

They also help to engender a distinct identity for each platform, IMO. This is a more ephemeral thing, mind you, but I think that both Sony and Nintendo have succeeded in carving out a clear brand identity for themselves via the kinds of exclusives that they’ve gotten onto their platforms from their stables of first- and second-party developers. Does that make sense, or am I just talking out of my ass at this point?

More options is always better for consumers, of course, but I think that exclusives also come with their own set of unique positives as well. I’d be curious to know how most people feel about this topic. I could very well be an outlier here.