The character designs honestly don't look nearly as weird or bad as people are making them out to be. If anything, they look the original Hyrule Warriors.

The developers of the Sony PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 have told their social media followers that it is now possible to play games straight from discs. As announced by the RPCS3 devs, the emulator’s latest refinement works only with certain internal and external Blu-ray drives. Happily for retro gamers, there’s a lengthy compatibility list of drives featuring many models and brands, and the same drives are also compatible with dumping your media to fixed storage.

“You can now play your PS3 games on PC... DIRECTLY FROM THE DISC DRIVE!” boast the open source emulator programmers. “PLUG AND PLAY! Owning your games as physical media allows you to play games released as far back as 20 years ago without relying on any servers!” The RPCS3 team thanks digant73 and Megamouse, specifically, for contributions making this feat possible.

Though the Tweet mentions PC, specifically, extended disc drive play support is also available on Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS. You just need to check that drive compatibility list. Moreover, all users can enjoy “optimized install times for package installations from the disc drive.” It has also been confirmed that PS4 and PS5 console users with Linux installs can launch PS3 games directly from disc using RPCS3.

Context: At the end of the lastest FFXIV stream, it was noted that the next session could wrap up A Realm Reborn.

To which Woolie said, "One more... and then I can DELETE JO GUNS LIVE ON STREAM IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY!!! ... And then never acknowledge her ever again." (pretty sure this was said in jest, btw)

This is the [possible] result that I decided to draw

But seriously, these have been great to watch, especially as someone who was always intimidated by MMOs like FFXIV. Thanks for everything!

Never been more proud of you Agumon.

I have a couple of examples: Nolan's Oppenheimer and X-Men Apocalypse

Oppenheimer had a great buildup to the Trinity Test but Nolan decided gas explosions could mimic a nuke. Nolan ironically had a more convincing CGI nuke in The Dark Knight Rises.

The titular villain of X-Men Apocalypse was portrayed by Oscar Isaac in prosthetics. He looks like a ridiculous blue guy and Oscar Isaac couldn't have been wasted more. Just a couple of years later, we got Thanos, a big purple CGI villain and he looked amazing. The MCU also had a villain with a similar appearance to Apocalypse with Roan from Guardians of the Galaxy, and he was done with better prosthetics.

I hate I have to say this, but please just know that I'm joking, Ocarina of Time is clearly one of Nintendo's most important games they ever made alongside Mario 64.

I think, now that Fortune Weave is inching closer, they'll probably be showing even more of the game in detail.

Trailer just came out, saw it. Gotta say, I recognised that screech almost instantly

SEGA president and COO Shuji Utsumi recently talked to The Nikkei about the company’s pursuit of a global “transmedia strategy” in recent years – including the expansion of popular gaming franchises through movie adaptations, merchandise and other media. One of the topics he discussed within this context was the phenomenon of “game fans who don’t play the games” and why Sega considers such audiences important.

According to Utsumi, the company has in recent years seen an increasing number of fans who don’t necessarily play games. While he mentions this is true of all of Sega’s IPs, he singles out the Like a Dragon series as an example. Like a Dragon-related merchandise has been performing extremely well for Sega, with about 60-70% of customers being women. Utsumi explains that this layer of the fanbase often becomes acquainted with Like a Dragon’s story and characters through official YouTube content or by watching streams by popular content creators, and “many of them have never actually played the games.”

Yesterday I played through a Pokemon romhack called FRLG.IPS after it showing up all over my algorithm and having some friends recommend it. The whole thing is basically an enhanced version of FireRed/LeafGreen but with a Deltarune style weird route. Said route is only accessible through solving an ARG (or looking up youtube videos that already solved it). Going into it, the whole thing stank of stereotypical edgy romhack with some lazy analogue horror mixed in. Playing the first few hours made me think I was right. The game's "weird route" fully kicks off when you evolve your Blastoise into a kinda fucked up version of itself that has a new OKHO move you use to kill (not faint) Blue's Ratticate.

I was ready to stop and wave off the whole thing, but after the playing the rest of it, it turned out to be a really endearing love letter to old school playground rumors and early internet forms that surrounded Red and Blue, and other old video games. Stuff like the hidden route behind Bill's house and getting Mew by using strength on the truck. In fact, nearly every new location or item you get in the game's Weird Route is a reference to one of those old school rumors. And it's not references for reference sake, the corrupting entity that's messing with the game is literally our collective childhood desire for those rumors to be true.

The whole rom is basically the version of the game your lying ass friend in grade school tried to convince you it was. Secret extra evolutions you can only get through special items, secret areas you can only access through weird glitches, seeing where the SS Anne goes after its voyage, Blue's dead Ratticate, and of course Missingno being at the center of it all since that was what spawned all these rumors in the first place.

The rom being very Toby Fox inspired means that it also has it's own version of Sans. Something I again thought was eyerolling, but kinda won me over. There used to be a rumor that the sailor outside the SS Anne was actually a piracy prevention measure that Nintendo put in place. This was caused by the fact that old romhackers used to give him dialogue that would threaten the player for using a rom instead of buying the game. So in this version he becomes aware that you're playing some fucked up pirated version and tries to stop you.

It's not perfect, and maybe it does have some of that romhack edgy writing, but it was also made with so much love for a bygone era of video game culture. When games felt super mysterious because they were filled with secrets you couldn't just look up online.

I recently, as of two months ago-took some steps to start living a better life. And so far at least, it's been working out and I've struggled a lot less with depression as a result. It's a lot of little things like working out, journaling, going out once a week, and heading back to school. But one thing that I think has really helped is just cutting out short form content.

I had, and have had for the longest time issues with attention span. And I have this bad habit of passively absorbing repetitive or short form content instead of playing games or reading my backlog. So I made the decision to delete shorts, cut most social media, and just focus on actually playing games instead of getting sucked into online rage bait. It's still early in but, holy hell it's really been so helpful, and gotten me actually enjoy things again instead of agonizing over what the 'right' thing to buy or try is.

I think nowadays with all the negativity in the world, and stuff like social media or tik-tok and sensationalist clickbait, it rots away at people's ability to enjoy things. And more importantly, leaves people feeling down, dejected, and struggling to enjoy things. So I want to ask, what are some things you've done that have helped you break through the negative-and just enjoy games/books/films, or even life more?

Do you try to take deep breaths and go on walks? Send pictures of the most amazing trees? Or is there something else you've done that has really helped you find joy in everything again?