Chozo

I’m going the 100% free-to-play route and I’m actually enjoying this game so far. I’ve tried to get into some other Hoyoverse games, but had a hard time because of how cheesy a lot of the writing was, and just not being that into the general gameplay loops for those games, so I wasn’t going into this with very high hopes. But the writing is significantly better this time around, and the gameplay is a pretty good balance of being engaging enough to be fun while not being a total grind.

Defederating/blocking doesn’t stop Meta from datamining you.

I put about 6 hours into it, and it largely feels pretty shallow. I don’t know if the gear you get later in the game significantly changes the gameplay too much, but the basic combat loop is pretty simplistic. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of variety in your abilities, as each character you can play as seems pretty locked-down. Right now it feels like 99% of the player base is using a single character, Bunny, so you and all your teammates are basically just doing the exact same things all the time.

The PS5 version has some pretty bad performance issues. Certain areas just drop the game down to 30 FPS as soon as you cross an invisible boundary. Some player/enemy animations start rendering at lower framerates when there’s a lot of things on the screen. The “fidelity” mode is basically unplayable, and enabling ray tracing is literally unplayable; I’m not sure why those options are even available on the PS5 version in the first place, to be honest.

The plot is kinda weak and generic. Half the time I spent playing was listening to characters exposition-dump on me, and I still have no idea what’s supposed to be going on or why I’m doing what I’m doing. The game does little to compel you, as a player, to actually care about the plot.

The monetization doesn’t seem too out of control. I’ve not looked too deeply through the shop, but it looks like it’s mostly cosmetics. I didn’t see anything that screams “pay to win”, and at no point did the game purposely direct my attention to the shop; I had to find it on my own, which is actually great because I hate when games stop you to force you to look through the shop as part of the tutorial.

If the gameplay gets more engaging or exciting in the endgame, that’d be great, but so far it really doesn’t look like it. I want to like it, so I’m probably gonna keep playing throughout the week and see how it goes as I progress further. But right now, I’m at least just glad it’s free.

If it’s the same game I’m thinking of (but can’t remember the name of), I remember it feeling like a much more shallow version of Katamari. You never realize how important the rolling physics truly are to the Katamari experience until you take them away. It was a pretty neat idea, but just didn’t capitalize on it very much.

Good. Hopefully we see some similar suits take place over here in the US, as well.

EDIT: Not “good” that they discriminated against him, but good that the tribunal determined it to be discriminatory.

different work ethics

This is a pretty big one that would get overlooked, I think. What we in the west would consider “crunch” conditions are often considered normal, or even bare minimum in some Japanese companies.

This was my thought, as well. It also reminds me a bit of this classic xkcd.

Is it common for Japanese URLs to use non-Latin text like that? I rarely end up on Japanese websites, but I feel like I’ve always seen romaji domains when I’ve ended up there.

I feel it! I feel the cosmos!

“If you can’t reinvent the wheel, then just make the wheel more expensive.” -Tim Apple, probably

Oohhh, that sounds delicious! My old boss at work was telling me about Brazilian lemonades a while back and I’ve been meaning to try it at some point.

While it’s a series, it’s really the only franchise like it, so it kinda is its own genre: Katamari.

So what’s the reason to go to a mall? Crappy food court food?

The last dozen or so times I’ve been to a mall, the only thing I’ve spent money on was food. It’s hard to justify spending money at the mall when I know I can get just about anything there from an online retailer for a lot cheaper. But I can’t get an Orange Julius online. Yet.

Naturally there is always going to be a certain amount of player decline over time, but I have to wonder how much of this could have been saved had Sony not created a PR nightmare for the game with the required PSN account linking.

That said, I’m sure there’s going to be a sharp spike in players very soon, as Arrowhead should be releasing a new enemy faction into the game very shortly, which is going to bring a lot of players back again for a while. Hopefully they’ll find a way to keep those players interested again.

You can’t prove there isn’t!

“Oh yeah, are you sure about that? Then why does my AirTag say it’s already landed on Jupiter, hmm? I’d like to speak to your manager.”

Probably move on to YouTube Shorts or Instagram reels.

Likely YouTube. While neither are great, between Google and Meta, Google’s got the better reputation. YouTube also has a larger audience, because it includes a ton of users who wouldn’t fall under traditional social media usage. Reels might be used as a periphery platform to drive more people to their main channel on YouTube.

Any TikTok creator who moves to Instagram full-time is either shooting themselves in the foot, or got a good contract from Meta.

I used to buy these little pocket-sized Sudoku books that I’d keep with me, usually play a puzzle or two while commuting to work or something.

That’s really cool! I wonder if there’s a way to find the previous owners of the house, that’d make for a really fun story if you were able to track down the original owner somehow.

No wrongdoing was found!