I wouldn’t discount how having that access to cartoons probably made them more friends on its own.

School may have been a long time ago for some of us, but I don’t think buddying up with the kids who could get you access to things has ever fallen out of style.

I’m with you on it, because my completionist tendencies saw me trekking between one too many copy-and-pasted side dungeons in the 50 hours I gave Elden Ring before I couldn’t take it any more and never came back to finish the game.

It’s not like the moment-to-moment combat is any less fun than the games that came before it, but since the game lets me indulge in my worst tendency of finishing every optional thing before progressing things it just felt like a meaningless checklist slog.

It’s definitely a “me” problem, but it’s just one reason why I tend to prefer a more focused experience than a sprawling open world.

Somewhat paradoxically, I consider immutable distros to be a net improvement for power users and a bigger hurdle for casual users.

Mostly that’s because immutable moves the pain in the ass to the setup part of the application/OS life-cycle, while theoretically eliminating the kinds of issues that crop up months or years later when something stops working, or when a custom config used to get it working originally breaks something else as things relying on it mature over time.

On the other hand, mutable distros make setting up new software a breeze (in most cases, anyways) with far more under-the-hood tinkering available and have a significantly lower barrier to entry as a result, but become difficult to manage when the user no longer remembers all the customizations and dependencies they have introduced.

So really, there will still be pains in the ass either way. Just kind of a choice on which kind of issues the user would rather predominantly deal with.

I was all over Ep.1&2 on the GameCube back then. So many fond memories of nights spent chilling online and grinding out whatever we were going for that night.

My main was a HUcast who made it up to level 168 before memory card corruption took him, and I didn’t have it in me to play seriously again after that.

Though the timing on this post is funny because I’ve just started Phantasy Star Zero like a week ago. It’s incredible having a game so faithful to the PSO-style gameplay with just enough updates to feel fresh. And a bit surreal to have that with an entire new cast of enemies to get used to.

Makes me regret somehow not hearing about Zero back when it came out. I did drop a few hundred hours into both PSO2 and NGS each, but it just never was quite what I was craving - a new PSO.