Sickday

I say it every time I have to hop onto a production box at work. If I'm in a call while it's happening I usually drop a one-liner. Gotta have fun with these things.

These are a few I've played over the years and really enjoyed. I think most are still available, but some are unfortunately only distributed via discord servers.

No particular order to these:

• Pokemon Prism - A very in-depth mod of Pokemon Crystal with 2 entirely new regions and a large catalog of Pokemon from multiple generations to capture. To my knowledge, it is a successor to Pokemon Brown
• Pokemon Brown - A very in-depth mod of Pokemon Red. This was made 2 decades ago, and was the first mod I ever played. Includes a new region and many Pokemon from different generations.
• Polished Crystal - A faithful (or not) upgrade to Pokemon Crystal.
• Pokemon Crystal Clear - A mod of Pokemon Crystal that brings in many new features and vastly upgrades the AI.
• Pokemon RedStar/BlueStar - A mod of Pokemon Red/Blue that includes the SpaceWorld 1997 assets.
• Pokemon Crystal Kaizo - A mod of Pokemon Crystal that adds in much better AI and a fair bit more difficulty. All Gen 2 Pokemon can be captured and just about every trainer presents a new level of difficulty.
• Altered Emerald - A massive mod of Pokemon Emerald that adds "(almost) every move and ability from gen 1 to 7" along with a few extras while making all 386 Gen 3 Pokemon capturable.

Edit: Just realized this wasn't strictly Pokemon mods... Oops lol.

Seems like it

• https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/employees-witnessed-co-worker-stab-company-president-court-documents-show/ar-AA1w6DXF
• https://wwmt.com/news/local/employee-stabs-anderson-express-president-staff-meeting-muskegon-fruitport-township-police
• https://www.woodtv.com/news/muskegon-county/police-look-for-motive-in-stabbing-of-company-president/

Why, is it impossible or difficult to enforce?

Not sure, that's why I asked out of curiosity. But I would assume so; it's very easy to get WireGuard setup on a Raspberry PI or just about any SBC. For example, you could setup a SBC with a usb WiFi adapter, travel to a state where VPNs aren't banned, connect to public WiFi and with a little additional config (changing ports), you're good to go.

Just curious, but how would that be enforced?

Sounds good to me. My only gripe is that I don't think Ciri needs to go through the Trial of Grasses. She kind of already had well-established abilities (Elder blood) that made it easy for her to deal with most threats and we got to see that on full display in like half of The Witcher 3. Frankly, I had more fun playing with her abilities than I did with Geralt's.

I've never understood this. You go through all the trouble of switching OSes, presumably because you don't like something about it, and then proceed to make it look exactly like what you had?

What's hard to understand about familiarity?

"Larian, we love your work and the passion you put into your games. Some of us have been modding or making tools for your games for years, through multiple games, through thick and through thin. We do this because we care, and we want to see the community improve. All we ask is that if you do “love [us]," then please talk to us."

Those DAMN BRATS!!! Look at how entitled they are!

Do you need to own a platform to have a de facto grip on game distribution?

It helps immensely to own the platform you're also distributing software for if you're planning to enforce platform-specific restrictions, such as restricting which storefronts can even operate on your platform. Yknow, like Apple ~~does~~ did. But that aside, Valve does not have a de facto grip on game distribution because multiple platforms exist where Steam doesn't even distribute games (Microsoft Store, PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop, etc.), and the only gaming platform that Steam does occupy has multiple competitors (Epic, Uplay, EA Play, GoG, itch.io, etc.).

I like Steam as much as the next guy, but it’s totally douchey the way nerds fall all over themselves to shit on Apple, but not Valve for charging the same thing

There's reasons to shit on both of them, but Valve taking an initial 30% cut of games sold on their own platform makes sense. They offer way more services than the competition, and frankly developers don't have to use Steam. They can use any of the other aforementioned platforms to distribute their games, or just roll their own platform if they're daring and patient.

But, I guess not “owning” a platform makes you immune from criticism.

No idea how you came to this conclusion. Both companies have legit criticisms made against them that have pretty much nothing to do with the case discussed in the article. Apple does flat out anti-consumer, and sometimes anti-developer shit all the time, Valve's work culture isn't near as diverse as it should be in the 21st century, and they don't seem to do any sort of audits of new games they distribute, they also don't seem to care about abandoned titles people have already paid for, etc.

Given that “owning” the platform is the problem, then I’m hoping to see an equal amount of rage at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft for their online stores that charge 30% to distribute games.

That's... not the problem though. Did you read the article? This is in relation to a class action lawsuit made by some disgruntled developers being put off by Valve's 30% cut on a platform where they have the option to use some other service lol. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are the only official distributors of digital games on their respective platforms.

That'd be false equivalence. Valve doesn't own the platform in which they distribute games. Valve doesn't own Windows, macOS, or Linux, and to my knowledge they don't enforce any platform-specific restrictions like Apple does. Not sure why you'd swap the two with regards to this case.

I figured this was true back when the Nintendo Gigaleak came out, but shortly after that a series of romhacks were released that included assets from the Gigaleak. One I can think of off the top of my head is the Pokemon Crystal Spaceworld 1997 Romhack that would've only been possible with the Gigaleak.

So theoretically, you'd be correct but I think it ultimately depends on how passionate the modding community for this game is.

Wouldn't the acknowledgement of minorities being treated differently be "Woke" by definition? They really hate that word lol