I don’t know about the existing save file. It should be compatible, though. It’s worth a try.

As for Monochromon, yes! It’s a lot less frustrating now.

it was easily a net positive as training a champion had much larger gains than a baby.

As long as you don’t do it for the first few generations! All training stations get silently upgraded if you train a Baby I or Baby II digimon there a few times each.

So now it’s possible to actually hit all marks? Because I couldn’t get it with fucking save states.

Yeah. In the original game, the slots are rigged so that you have a set chance to either hit three symbols in a row (40%) or three jackpots (10%), and if the guaranteed chance doesn’t trigger, you automatically fail.

With the Maeson patch, you still have the rigged chances to win, but you can also attempt to win the minigame manually if the rigged chance doesn’t trigger. Imo it’s a bit too good (I liked it better the way the Randomizer handled it, by removing the rigged chances altogether and only allowing the player to win the minigame manually), but it’s still an improvement on the original.

I wish some big-name YT/Twitch personality helped raise awareness for the petition. It’s ending in a few months and if nothing changes, I don’t see it reaching the required signatures in time.

It may be surprising, but most of the difficulty of the game comes from it being very cryptic. Once you understand the underlying mechanics, the game is not hard. You are thrown into a completely foreign world and are asked to just figure it out; and most people go in expecting Pokémon mechanics, which doesn’t help at all.

What it’s worth remembering when playing it, is that the game encourages you to fail and try again. Your Digimon dies of old age and reverts to an egg every few in-game days anyways, and while it’s technically possible to complete the game with your starter Digimon, new players will probably repeat the cycle a few times at minimum.
It can be off putting at first, but it does provide the advantage that it doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, you can just retry next time, and you actually have it easier each time, because you keep all your items and progression, some of the Digimon’s stats, and of course the knowledge you’ve gathered up to that point.

The Maeson patch doesn’t fundamentally change any of that, but it does remove some of the bloat. Just a few of my favourite changes:

• Battling against wild Digimon is a waste of time in the original game, but with the patch is a perfectly viable way to farm money and learn new techs.
• Exploring in the original has you filling your bag with mushrooms, but the patch allows you to find actual useful items that will help you raise your current or next Digimon.
• Made a few mistakes on the way, and now you’re stuck with a Numemon, Sukamon, or another Digimon you don’t like? Just buy a Reset Radish to revert to an egg and try again (younger me would’ve loved that item).
• Removed “trap” options, such as providing a fix to the “bonus try” in the gym and making evolution items useful, thus encouraging the player to try out things instead of punishing them for doing so.

I replay it every other year. It was one of my first games ever, started playing it when I was 5 or so and kept grinding on the same save file for more than 10 years.

For those interested, the Maeson patch fixes all the bugs that afflicted the game on release and adds a lot of QoL improvements, including persistent music across screens (in the original game, the music resets every time you change screen), diversified evolution lines, and rebalanced progression.
I replayed it last summer with the Maeson patch and it was very enjoyable while still keeping the “core” experience intact.

Some of the readability updates (monster location, possible loot, ability scores and initiative bonus) are cool.

The stat blocks themselves, though, retain the usual problem, imo. These monsters are not up to par with a party of their level. The CR6 cyclops has no legendary resistances, for example, in a game where every martial character forces a saving throw on a hit with the newly introduced weapon masteries.

They also removed some flavour from the stat blocks. The dragon doesn’t make claws/bite/tail attacks, for example, but generic “rend” attacks.

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I honestly have no idea how I’d approach writing the script for a movie about Shadow of the Colossus. It’s one of the few games where the sense of discovery, wondering alone in a desolate landscape is such an integral part of the experience, that removing it and turning it into a movie would ruin the experience imho.

I’m not hating on the movie before it even releases, mind you. I’m just saying that I certainly wouldn’t know how to do it, and that it seems, to me, an odd pick. Would 100% watch it if it’s good.

A friend showed me once a video of someone building fireproof armor out of a pineapple.

In an alternate universe, Byzantium conquered half the world, and the other half is fending off greek fire using pineapple shields.

It’s been almost twenty years and I still can’t find a game that gives me the same chills. I was hoping that they’d release a Medieval Remastered the same way they did for Rome Remastered, but it didn’t happen.

I hear that the 1212 mod for Attila Total War provides a more “up to date” experience for today’s standards (graphics, historical accuracy, AI, diplomacy). But I can’t fathom playing Medieval without Duke of Death.

Both the first game of 2024 and the last one was Medieval II: Total War.

Conquered the world with France at the start of the year, now doing the same with the Danes.

I’m just saying what they could do if they were willing to. Your argument was that:
A) Valve should not stop casinos from profiting off vulnerable people, because they have already made money off those people and it would somehow be unfair to stop now, which to me sounds ridiculous.
You are using this as an argumentation that the government should ban them instead of Valve, but the end tesult would be the same. The casinos would walk away with the money, and the victims would be left to cry over it.
B) Poor Valve could not compete with their competition if they didn’t have the money they are gaining from their gambling-adjacent market, which to me sounds even more ridiculous. When Epic attempted to pry open the market using one of the biggest and most successful games ever as a leverage, they largely failed because the Steam user base was too entrenched. Steam is literally printing money right now and they don’t need the CS skin money to compete with anyone.

It wouldn’t be his place to provide a solution if he was arguing that the practice is a problem and prehaps pushing for further study. It is his place because throughout the video, he tries to argue that solving the problem is not only possible, but easy - and yet, despite supposedly being easy, his best solution is to basically propose that the industry self-regulate. That is the main issue I have with this video.

He is not proposing that the entire industry must self-regulate and that it’s the only solution to the problem. He is saying that this specific instance, the CS skin market, could be solved by Valve taking a firm stance, which not only they are not doing, but are actually working against, such as them side-stepping the regulations imposed on them by the French government.

I’m all in for stricter regulations on gambling by government agencies, but that doesn’t mean that the people side-stepping those regulations aren’t to blame too. While they are not doing anything technically illegal, they are purposefully operating in a grey area to profit off vulnerable people.

And how would they do this without screwing over normal users and victums of the casinos in the process? They can’t get money from these casinos, nor collect casino records to redistribute scammed money. All they can do is disable trading or their marketplace, effectively seizing the poker chips (or metals balls, following Coffee’s pachinko comparison) but doing nothing about the money casinos have taken from victims nor preventing the casinos from either walking away or re-investing in a new casino. To prevent new ones from popping up, you could disable all trading and marketing, but now you’re punishing 132 million users for the acts of a couple thousand.

They can’t do anything about the money the casinos have already made, but can stop them by making further money. That happens pretty much all the time in every market.

They could, but A) this is just one game on their platform, and B) this would leave them directly competiting against those who don’t regulate themselves and can make and reinvest significantly more. This is exactly the situation that Coffee argued was systematic and needed to be adressed further up the chain previously.

A) The video is explicitly about Counter Strike and the gambling market surrounding that specific game; not the whole industry. I agree a more systemic approach (ie. on a government level) should be advisable, but until that day comes, Valve could put an end to this specific problem, which they are currently choosing to ignore because they are profiting from it instead;
B) Valve makes literally billions and can invest to their heart’s content. They are not a small indie dev.

Again, exactly like their competition. The recent talk of Balatro’s PEGI rating being a prime example, with the industry self-regulation body declaring that virtual slot machines and loot boxes aren’t gambling but featuring poker hands was.

Cool, their competition does it too. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

This is the problem I have with this video. Valve is being held to a different standard, and told to self-regulate while others in this very series are having blame redirected away from them because its unreasonable to expect them to self-regulate.

Valve literally created the market. If you take the bigger share of the profit, you also take the biggest share of the blame. Casinos are obviously bad, but they are ultimately leeching off the system that Valve put in place.

It’s not his place to provide a solution: he is a journalist exposing a problem. Do you have such expectations for all journalists talking about any topic?

When articles get shared about any other company using micro/macrotransactions, predatory tactics or gambling-related schemes, people’s consensus is unanimous, but when Valve is involved, suddenly people have double standards.

Valve is fairly tame for their direct involvement with lootboxes and is competiting directly against companies that use them far more agressively […] Ubisoft and EA have already been attempting to dislodge Steam for years, and its not because they think they can be more moral than Steam.

Valve could shut down the entire gambling market today and nothing would change to their market position. Steam is not the number one marketplace because of the skin market. They are leaving it as is because it nets them money. I don’t know how can you call Steam “fairly tame” when they are literally allowing multimillion dollar casinos to exist and operate without impunity. They sent a C&D to casinos and then washed their hands of the problem, because ultimately they don’t really care about shutting them down.

They could ban accounts linked to the casinos, but they don’t, because they profit from them. They could have some sort of account-level check to make sure that minors don’t spend their steam gift cards on CS skins (which, by the way, Coffezilla proposes at the end of the video) , but they’d rather use the gambling loophole of “akshually, it’s not gambling as defined by law”. Then they lie through their teeth by saying that they “don’t have any data” supporting the claim that the gambling aspect of the game has profited them by leading to more interest in their games, which is bullshit.

PC players, and Lemmy users in particular, have a huge double standard for Valve.

I always forget when I’m muted and when I’m not :(

Because the term means nothing, really. It’s just a vehicle for hateful rhetoric, incorrectly applied to everything that they don’t like. Yet half the things they like would be considered “woke” by their standards if they were released today.

Considering how it went the last time… Lol

I also think that they have plans for a Xanathar/Tasha-esque book with Artificer + additional updates to 5e classes.

It helps convince people to make the jump to the current edition, and updating old content is a lot easier and less time-consuming option compared to creating new content, which seems pretty much on par with WotC’s general laziness/budget constraints as of late.

Considering that the standard PS5 is still selling for higher than its launch price 4 years later (despite still facing challenges building up an exclusive library to justify the cost), I’d say that people are just dumb and will pay any price to have their shiny gaming console.

The real reason they are doing all these remasters is so that they can delist the old game and sell it again with the PSN requirements.