You still have to declare things in customs. If you don’t and get caught, you could end up far worse than high prices.

I don’t use it at all, even with various bank apps and such yelling at me to do so. Yeah, a $2 wrench could still eventually get it out of me, but you can’t just use my face/finger to do so.

I’ve used firefox on android for years now. The only time I do anything in Chrome is when I need to translate pages easily (Japanese translation only recently hit desktop version and it’s very poor quality and google lens is inconvenient).

So, in Japan, this has a couple of functions, but one major one. By keeping salaries low and offering bonuses, employees can basically be only compensated the bare minimum in the case they (a) are no longer wanted (since firing is very hard here), (b) not performing as well as expected for whatever reason, or © the company did particularly poorly.

As mentioned, it ties into one of the levers they have to pull for under-performing or bad-fit employees they might want to get rid of in a country where workers have a fair bit of rights on that front.

On the other, it does make some applications/calculations a little weird as some home loans etc. have repayments that expect those bonus payments (either a higher amount twice-yearly or two extra payments per year). Most companies in Japan pay monthly (and most of those on the 25th or closest preceding business day).

The steam reviews put me off a bit (and my PC these days barely meets the min spec) as a few mention stealth being broken somehow and that’s typically how I like to play. Definitely keeping my eye on it, though.

Nope! I don’t think I ever played it.

This is really hard. Dungeon Master on the Amiga500 is up there, as is Unlimited Adventures. Today, these don’t look so interesting, but man they were great at the time. Amiga also had a neat RPG maker as well whose name I can’t recall.

Prices here in Japan are ridiculous on all graphics cards. They’re still fairly niche for people into gaming, certain creative pursuits, and, I suppose, crypto. They’re also in short supply so they go to a lottery system in many sellers and to scalpers at the rest. Even then, the price can be what feels like spending double or triple that. I have a 20xx (2080, I think)? and I just don’t see myself upgrading anytime at all soon. It used to be that it was cheaper to use something like NewEgg (who have their own problems, apparently), but as the JPY and USD went further apart, that stopped being worth it. Sorry, makers of new games, I can’t afford to buy a PC good enough to buy your games.

Yup. This is how I treat exclusives.

I was excited, but it’s a pass from me. No reputation, no freedom on whom to fight, little ability to customize my character from what I’ve seen… no thanks.

Duke3d might be a next logical step in terms of probability of running on all kinds of random crap without being too big or resource intensive.

When I was a teen and got Blood 2, I was already interested in game development (I was thinking of DigiPen with hopes of working for Nintendo, but that didn’t work out financially). I emailed them if I could take a tour to see a game studio since I was interested in it as my career. I got a reply from them (someone named Bob, I think? I don’t have access to that email anymore), and they thanked me for my interest but politely let me down citing secrets and proprietary stuff.

I just looked at their website and I think Blood 2 was the only game I played on their engines. Maybe a demo of FEAR at some point, but I don’t think so.

There are plenty of countries with better worker rights in which to set up shop as well.

Gamestop was a much-lampooned company with awful practices and many a horror story from employees and customers alike. I found it gross that the internet would rally behind such a company and never understood the whole thing (aside from the people with neither shame nor ethics wanting to make a buck).

Fuck take two, fuck gearbox, fuck pitchford, and fuck borderlands; that series should’ve stopped once pre-sequal and BL2 were out.

I enjoyed return to castle Wolfenstein when it came out and competitively played Enemy Territory for years and even made a mod for it. I have no idea how it would hold up today, however

Unfortunately, it’s complicated. There are in-country tax considerations for the overseas entity and, as Americans are often shocked to find when moving here, something like an LLC is going to cause a huge tax headache with taxes

I meant how my characters might moved and be obfuscated by things between them and the camera. I can’t recall exactly. I think there was a crater and I kept getting annoyed because I’d press one direction on my controller to go to somewhere that looked accessible, and then end up not being able to. Camera was probably a poor choice of wording.

I played the original one in '98 or '99, but never beat it. Went back to it later in my late 20s or early 30s and was even more frustrated by the camera and controls as well as some other things. I basically never played the non-MMO titles that followed due to a combination of being poor/busy and just not liking 7. Getting into MMOs and having loved the first handful of FF games was the only reason I was convinced to try those. There’s zero chance I’m buying the 7 remake.

I have plenty of dislike for Nintendo, but incremental improvement evey otherish iteration isn’t why. If innovation stops in a couple iterations, stick a fork in it, but things take time.

I’ll take it if it’s well done. I’m fine with it also not being done all at once (think expansions in MMOs). However, I’d rather the game be smaller (and priced appropriately) if quality will suffer.

I honestly have no idea. I did my semi-annual playthrough of Skyrim (as a wizard for the first time rather than giving up shortly in) and finished everything I meant to last week. I have to look at my steam library, I suppose

I had at least one quest which, when certain choices were made, would not complete. They never fixed it, but did release a cash-grab level-cap-increasing version later. Left a bad taste in my mouth. (There were other bugs and issues I faced that also never got fixed, but I don’t recall what they were anymore). I mostly did enjoy the game, otherwise, and the size was fine in my opinion.

I don’t know if I’d still call myself a gamer. I still play games, but I just don’t have much time for them. As such, I do have videos on in the background frequently and it is frequently people playing games (though how they’re doing it or what they’re doing in the games is the interesting part and, in some cases, I’d watch the same content if it weren’t in a game but that’s how it happens to be packaged).

I just never buy those games. Epic released with exclusives but couldn’t process payments in a number of country leaving gamers there SOL. That and some of the higher-ups there just left a really bad taste in my mouth. Anything that also releases as a timed exclusive there doesn’t get a purchase from me until years later when it’s more than half off (and I think I’ve only bought one game like that). A Steam monopoly is bad, but Epic are not the solution to that.

A lot aren’t going to have a huge opinion because easily-modded games aren’t a thing due to platform. PC gaming was always a very niche hobby here with most people not owning PCs. That has somewhat started to change recently, but that basically left other platforms where mods were either available (for free or paid) from the publisher or very difficult to go about at all as compared to modding common games on PC.

Based on my incredibly non-scientific “watching some stuff on youtube over the years” method, my money would be on Minecraft turning things around a bit as I did see Japanese creators playing a lot of modded minecraft on youtube.

Not all modding goes that far, but I do think you put well how many see it. I should also note that things like ALTTPR do not make money and are free for any to download and use with their own ROM (i.e. require that you own the game yourself). The are simply meant to add replayability and variety.

Re-arranging the items, varying the power/defense of enemies, etc. doesn’t seem to fit that case very well to me. There are, of course, mods that do a lot more than those are definitely more akin to what you wrote.

I love ALTTPR (link to the past randomizer) and my wife is amazed that people would upload themselves playing it because it alters the author’s work (even though it just removes custscenes and moves around items and screen transitions, basically). People have apparently gotten in trouble for streaming it in Japan on monetized channels. As someone who lives in Japan, it’s why I don’t upload it even on something not monetized. I own a physical copy of the game as well.

Most Japanese see it this way which, to me, is really weird when all kinds of grey-market anime and managa stuff has a blind eye turned toward it.

Because of decisions that Blizzard under Kotick made, both in terms of products but also how they treated their customers, employees, and fans, I haven’t given them a cent of my money nor playtime. Maybe someday I’ll be convinced to come back to them. Bethesda’s basically there as well for Fallout76 leading up to its release and after. Take2 and Gearbox as well.

Everyone I’ve known here who works in film, anime, manga, etc. work ridiculous hours with shit work-life balance. I’m sure that’s not true of everyone, but especially the smaller studios. It is something that needs to be addressed and, to its credit, the government has imposed more penalties on crazy work hours and upped enforcement, but it’s hard to catch the people who aren’t reporting their actual hours even if there are now penalties on the employees themselves as well for not doing so. There need to be some big, systemic changes in a lot of those areas here because it is also, in part, a culture issue.

identifying anime and video games as core industries in its revised Cool Japan strategy.

I’ll be impressed if the ‘Cool Japan’ program is proven to be more than primarily for domestic consumption to say “look! we’re doing something!”

I still have a lot of old blizzard games on floppy and played wow for years. Based on their behavior and treatment of both their workers and communities, they’ll not see a cent from me again until they prove themselves in the long-term. I don’t pirate so also no unofficial numbers from me, either

But don’t worry; well make you buy those legacy games in the shop again because fuck you pay me for the 4th time for a game from the 80s/90s. ~ abe Nintendo, probably

We’re not even through the first half yet, so it’s pretty impossible to say, I think. BG3 could be in there, but we could also just be blown away by other things unforeseeable from here/now.

I use Mac for work and despise it. It also wouldn’t cover the national tax authority and other apps that don’t support mac (though some do support iOS,but those all also support android and not an issue there). They could have sneakily added Mac support whilst I wasn’t looking do I will definitely check again before deciding anything finally.

It’s not learning linux for me; I’ve worked with it professionally for over a decade at this point and started with old distros on floppy at home (with poor success; it got better once I got gentoo and broadband).

The pain of switching is non-zero, but it’s also not high. By this I mean just the process of moving data around, settings, etc.

Finding replacement apps can be annoying.

There are some things that still bother me, though. Certain games still won’t work or aren’t stable. This impacts some people more than others depending upon the type of game. For me, it’s still being gun shy because updates have caused me huge headaches including requiring a reinstall even in fairly recent times. I’ve had to fix one windows update problem in that same period of years and it did not require a full reinstall.

I have a full-time job, house/yard maintenance, and a small farming business. I require reliability with security (so not updating is not an option) and don’t have time to spend diagnosing and solving issues. I also can’t not fulfill orders, etc. because of an issue bother from a customer retention standpoint but also because when selling farm goods, those are mostly fresh produce with a limited TTL.

I have 12 months to reassess things, but I’m not liking my current position. It doesn’t help that a lot of the software for the Japanese side of things (tax office, accounting, etc.) do not have cloud versions and require Windows to work. I’m not sure if any of those work under WINE or similar at this stage.

I wonder how much ship-of-theseus work can be done. I doubt they made things terribly modular but hopefully certain functions and groups of them are replaceable for some improvement. But, yeah, not ideal at all.

For me, it’s their greed regarding old titles. I bought some older games on the Wii and/or 3ds stores. Well, those go away and you don’t get a license for that same game on the new system (even though, presumably, all the porting/emulation work has already been done). Little things like that

Indeed, but I still do somewhat keep up with various gaming news, so it seems weird that XVI didn’t leave any real impression in my head unless I did somehow just totally miss it

I remember seeing a video at some point but not if it were cutscene/promo or gameplay

I might have to get to them at some point, then; time is the limiting factor now as I work 1.5 jobs and have all the normal home maintenance/work on top of that.