PSP still rocks. I’ve been playing Phantasy Star Portable (edit: it abbreviates to PSP, oh my god were they doing a Sony equivalent of the DS thing? brilliant!) for the past two weeks and it’s really scratching an itch. Solid 7/10 game, excited to check out 2 Infinity (there’s a fan patch).

This article is a lot about the hardware itself, but I’d just like to take a moment to talk about old portable games from the 3DS/Vita eras and prior, they’re still very much worth your time. It’s before DLC and a lot of gacha/roguelike/gambling mechanics really set in, they’re designed to be both lean due to processing and battery constraints as well as set down at a moment’s notice because of the implied nature of portable gaming. Instead of purposefully hammering your attention and engagement, they expect that you could put them on pause at any moment to pop the device in your pocket and get on with your life. It’s seriously helped heal some of the fatigue I’ve been feeling.

On one hand, Etrian Odyssey can be a difficult and grindy game, but there’s something soothing about playing it on a little portable device while I casually watch a show in the background vs. fucking Wizardry Variants Daphne where even a bronze sword now has upgrades and star ratings and several different modifiers applied to it (do I want more attack or hit?) and can be used at the blacksmith as upgrade material for the next sword, etc. etc.

I’m straight fucking fatigued, bro. I don’t have ADHD, I have burnout from everything following the same dark patterns. Do you know how cool it is to play an old school RPG and open a chest and get legit excited for a silver sword again because of the simple, satisfying, understandable, and immediate upgrade it represents for your party?

… anyways, give it a try, yeah? What’s some of your old school favorites from PSP or other?

I absolutely agree with you but I think that take is a bit short-sighted and undercuts just how evil this stuff is.

Tom Nicholas did a Youtube video on the metaverse a while back (oh my god it was 4 years ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM00M-dRMBk) and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. The pivot towards VR was an attempt to get even deeper ahold of our attention and what better way to do that than with goggles that are constantly in front of our eyes? The same with AI as it attempts to insert itself as a substrate layer of all technologies, and again with the smart glasses.

It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as hilariously misguided but they’re not. They’re extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it, and I think there are others that realize this as well. We just gotta keep praying that these efforts burn him out before they strike it big. I’m neither a praying nor gambling man, but praying is all we got right now to stand in his way and I wouldn’t put money on the certainty of Facebook’s failures …

I’m still absolutely flabbergasted at how quickly we all moved on from Trump literally getting clipped in an attempt on his life.

They tried to muster some outrage and solidarity, but most of us just shrugged and went, “Damn. Oh well, maybe next time.”