RH

I remember when Microsoft bought Minecraft/Mojang. I really thought Minecraft was on a downward slope and had reached it's prime. There was no way they'd make their money back on that one. In all my predictions about games and business, that one has probably been the most incorrect, ever. I'm quite shocked at the longevity of that one game. I mean, I get that they hyper-expanded it, but you're basically running around in a super-blocky world. I'm surprised no one's tried to do the same thing, but with better graphics. And I'm not talking about anything wild here. A generative sandbox, even voxel based, can look way better. And yes, I'm aware of the mods. I fooled around with many of the high-def ones and such, but certainly we can do way more than what Minecraft has to offer and, yet, still be all the same. I'm just bitter that Microsoft bought Mojang and immediately killed Scrolls.

I think Candy Crush refined that wretched process, but I don't think it set the trend. I'd have to research, but someone, I'm sure, put the pieces together, probably raked in a few hundred million and then got the attention of all other game makers who then realized this was the next big way to make billions off of the masses. Candy Crush might have been the first real game with mass casual appeal, though. I really think it all started with some gacha, but gachas aren't as casual as they seem. Some of the ones I got deep into, I spent hours on and never spent above my limit. They all tend to limit your gameplay by making level advancements based off of so many turns you can earn per hour. Of course, you can pay to unlock more points for more turns but there's always to earn those, or you can wait two hours and try again. Of course, when these games are new, they sprinkle all kinds of incentives, plus each time you level, however that works, you get all of your points back to play through levels. This means that for the first 10-20 levels, usually you can play as much as you want, and the point of that mechanic is 100% to get you hooked. I still have Survivor.io on my phone, but I only open it once every few months. It was pretty reasonable at the beginning and, IMHO, the first 3 months of any of these games is when it's best to play. For free, you can usually do pretty well and get out of the game what it has to offer. I don't know why I keep Survivor.io around but I guess it's because I just don't play it much and I only get the itch to play it every 6-8 weeks, I play it a couple of days and then I'm good. I probably dropped $20 on that game? Again, I know these things are semi-predatorial, but I also believe in personal responsibility. I go more than $20 out of that game when I played it a good bit when it launched, so I see no harm. I'm not going to be dropping $1,000 on it over a few years, though. If anyone has seriously kept up with that game, even casually, it wouldn't surprise me if they've spent that much as a "low spend" player.

Bum

I'm not sure which one to pick, but I think another option is an early, Pay-to-Win gacha style game. Are these things terrible? Yes, but whomever invented/perfected the model changed the gaming industry, though for bad. I can't remember which specific medieval based game it was, but I remember seeing Kate Upton in a commercial for it and I thought it was insane that they'd pay a super model, in her prime, to film commercials. I then researched and that specific mobile game had already raked in over $1B. I was wrong--paying for a commercial like that was probably cheap. Is that the most profitable game, ever? No. But these game makers learned that with loot crates costing hundreds of dollars and some influencers willing to drop $10-20k on your game as soon as it launches, masses will follow and will drop $100-200 a month, just to stay in the top 1% of the leaderboard. It's insane, and I don't get it. I have enjoyed some of those games and for a few, before I started collecting, I allotted myself about $20-30/mo for the gacha-du-jour for my personal preference. I was gainfully employed and it was casual entertainment and it was my way of keeping the servers running. However, when I started looking into the top-tier players and how much money these games make, I was blown away.

Yeah, to be clear, this isn't my personal choice by preference but that one game sold millions of Wiis across the globe and is probably only rivaled by Tetris, especially paired with the Game Boy. Plus the Wii was a difficult sale, but Nintendo did what Nintendo does and found that magical, secret sauce to allow the whole package to work and have mass-appeal. Did the Wii experience translate well past Wii Sports? Not for most games, but it did for a few. Regardless, everyone including their Mom, Dad, Grandparents and Dog had a favorite game on the Wii Sports disc and it was literally a global phenomenon.

So far? Wii Sports if I'm trying to be 100% objective.

Many decades ago, when the internet was not afraid to be non-PC, there was a site called "Engrish.com" and I think it might have even been a part of the "Cheezburger Network", which was a series of sites that made most of the images we call memes today. This was back around 2001, or so. Anyway, Engrish.com was dedicated to all of the random English words that are, and were, posted all over Japan, often with no contextual relation to whatever "thing" it was stamped on. I recall they had a FAQ page and, supposedly, the site was ran by a Japanese-American who could speak both English and Japanese with high-proficiency. According to him and his personal knowledge, it's not much different than someone getting a tattoo with a Chinese or Japanese character or two that says something meaningful to that person. Except, in Japan, they put a LOT more English everywhere and it's less about what it says and more the aesthetic of having English plastered on something. Often the context works, but other times, the context is wrong and potentially funny... much like someone who has "Soup" tattooed on them, rather than "Hope", but in Japanese. Assuming that information is correct, there's probably an element of that desire when they put the English name on these boxes--they simply like English and the way it looks. Keep in mind, they tend to only do this with English and, from my observation, it's American English too, not British English. If I had to guess a reason why English is singled out, it probably goes all the way back to the General McArthur era when the Japanese people gained a deep since of respect and appreciation for America when we helped re-establish them as a prosperous nation and we then became strong allies with them. In other words, they probably like English for the same reason several generations have been obsessed with Mickey Mouse--it represents a lot of good after a very tragic era.

Here are the sealed, non Switch titles I have that are not on eBay. Make offers. Can go for cheap.

I've been working with AI a lot these past several months. I honestly don't think it's going to replace as many jobs as everyone hopes, at least not as fast or in ways they expect. We've seen a remarkable pace of capability increase in the past year alone and it makes it feel like we might be on the cusp of singularity. But I don't think that's the case. If you dig into the history of OpenAI and the current AI movement, we've largely gotten hear because Sam Altman and his original crew basically said, if we dump a lot of money and resources into LLM generation, we can get a lot better results that we see today. In other words, there was a major psychological tipping point that was initiated by OpenAI, they produced remarkable results and then the floodgates of companies investing in their own initiatives kicked off. This resulted in AI being the next, big hot investment. ChatGPT-4 is amazing. It's helps me a lot with my work and where I use to always research tough engineering questions on StackOverflow, I now entirely ask ChatGPT questions and I get results. Fast. It outputs code I need and it can explain it. However, it's not perfect. Some times the models output strange, additions to code that don't make sense from a mental processing stand point but usually when that happens I can see what the LLM was pulling together and I can modify it to work for my needs. But I digress. The problem is that we've scaled out the tech to our current, max capabilities. Models like ChatGPT-4, Claude-3 and others are massive and require to be run massive GPU servers. Significant advancements are taking place to shrink the size of LLMs so they can be ran on desktops but I think what we're going to see is that we're about to hit an AI cap. Specifically, what this cap will equate too are nominal increases in AI capability year-over-year. This is because for the models and the outputs to improve, we're going to need more processing power and GPUs generally get better at a Moore's Law pace. We've not hit that cap yet. Nvidia in particular has made some major re-designs of GPUs to be specialize for LLM learning and generation. Taylor-making the hardware for LLM generation greatly increases the capability of the GPUs but they are still using the same amount of power and the transistors are still the same size that are in the traditional GPUs that have been used so far. My point is, by doing a full-chip redesign, we are likely to see something like a 10x increase in processing performance (if I recall correctly), per GPU unit, however, that's a one-time 10x increase. That's very significant, but not scalable year over year. After that, GPU (or what's actually called TPU) performance will only grow nominally at Moore's Law pace, at best. I'm not a naysayer of this technology and I fully embrace it. However, I don't think we're on the cusp of some form of super-intelligent AI that's about to rocket to the stratosphere and takes over all work. I think we're on a massive-ramp up where the results from the efforts are about to match the technical capabilities of the equipment we have today, however, I have no clue when we'll catch up to what's technologically feasible. Regardless, this stuff is expensive to implement and a lot of big tech companies are investing billions at a loss, in the hopes of finding that perfect AI product that will not only be super-lucrative but will change the world. Personally, I think they are over-investing. Regardless, I think we'll probably hit a major growth cap in 6 to 18 months, shooting from the hip. ALL THAT TO SAY and TL;DR in response to your question: I'm not worried much. I think the fields that could have the biggest impact in the near future is honestly artists. With the capabilities we have today already, still images at high resolution are of remarkable quality. Results from Sora are impressive, but they are not perfect and it's obvious to tell that you're looking at AI generated video. Also, those videos are low resolution so scaling up impressive 1080p footage to a resolution real studios would want to use (8k?) is going to take a lot more power to produce than we have, while also yielding perfect results. Anything we get today will likely need human, post-processing to work in serious video production environments. Regarding technical fields, I think these LLMs will only enhance our work. You can have all the LLMs working together to build code but real engineers will be needed for troubleshooting and they must know and understand their code when it needs nuance to be fixed. That takes experience. LLMs can do a lot, but they are not magic. I think the tech field has more life in it than we may thing, and the CEO of NVidia may hope, but it will (and already has) have to evolve a bit. Other fields like doctors and the medical researchers will be safe too. I think we are way to many years away from accepting AI doctors because people want the human expertise and touch. Machines and LLMs can make mistakes. People can too, and there's a reasonable chance that LLM-doctors could quickly become more proficient at diagnosing and prescribing solutions to diseases and aliments than human-doctors, but people are more accepting of a human making a mistake, versus a machine making a mistake that ends up hurting or killing people. In short, psychology of the doctor-patient relationship will keep them relevant. And last, lawyers will always be people. Why? Because lawyers make the laws and they'll be damned if the won't pass laws that protect them. Lawyers and law-makers are often one-in-the-same, so be sure that politicians will also pass whatever laws they need too to protect themselves and the special interests. Ok, yes, I've rambled a lot. Thanks for reading that, if you did. But I agree with Gloves. I'm encouraging my kids, especially my son, to get into skilled labor work. For one, he's remarkably good at it. He just knows how stuff works. He's diagnosed broken things in our house and I've told him "No, that's probably not possible and how would you know that any way?!" only to take something apart and doggonit, he's right and he then explains how the item probably broke, and how he knew it was the problem. Now, I'm pretty good at that as an engineer but he's amazing and he's 10. He's like Anakin Solo from Legends. As the current skilled labor, Boomer labor market is coming to an end, I think he'll be at a good place to get a well paying job as some form of mechanic or repair man and, probably, will start his own business. For him, I think the future looks very bright.

Title playfulness aside, I managed to get an exceptional deal (and I mean literal pennies on the dollar) for a brand new PS5 Blu-Ray Edition from someone who didn't know how to use discs with the system and said the "drive didn't read". I did my research and they were wrong and I think they used it as an excuse to make a return and I managed to get this through the retailer. I have set this up, loaded and played Astro Boy from DLC and Sonic Frontiers from disc. Both games, and the controller work 100% fine. I wiped the unit so now it's otherwise 100% new and comes with everything but the box. It has cables, the one controller, and the two manuals and the PS5 stand. To be clear, what this bundle is for is: Sony PlayStation 5 -Blu-Ray Edition Sonic Frontiers - Opened Spiderman: Miles Morales - SEALED Make an offer. I bought this as a small part of a LARGE lot of almost 100 new, modern titles that are almost all entirely sealed. I'll be posting more photos later, but I'd like to use this PS5 to recoup much of the costs. That said, as a deal for VGSers, if someone wants to make an offer, feel free. I can let this go for a good price if anyone's interested. If I don't get any takers in the next couple of days, it's going to eBay. Also, I'll add photos of the games and add them to this post at some point. Overwhelmingly, most are Switch titles, but I probably have about 10/15 other X-Box Series X, X-Box One, PS4 and PS5 titles. Some of them Triple-A's, so check back on that too.

Exactly. Regarding your last part, though, it didn't prevent companies from trying to hide behind really great and imaginative art! It might not have made a game good for a review, but if you have a killer box art, there was a reasonable chance you'd sell more than a few copies of your game.

Ha, right when the pandemic was in full swing, we were doing grocery pick-ups at Food Lion and every time, they had a bag filled with trial items. I have no clue how or why this was organized, but it was and it lasted for about 6 months. Every time in the little bag was a Red Bull, which no one in our house drinks. By the end of the promotion we probably had about 20 Red Bulls in the top of our cabinet. Eventually my wife just put them on FB Marketplace a Free with Pick-up. I did try one, which was my first time ever, it wasn't bad but I wasn't a fan. No shame to those that like it but, honestly, I didn't get the appeal. I wish they'd bring back Sobe Dragon Fruit (or something like that), though. That was my drink jam.

I'm going to go with the N64 personally, even if I was 15 when they came out. I wonder how much one of those kiosks go for?

Ah, thanks for that info regarding where the "mass" of these late sales on eBay came from. One of the main questions I had was that all of a sudden over the past 2 years or so, almost every single game on the market on eBay has come from the St. Andrews Blockbuster, since you can identify the shop from the game number. I'm assuming when this experiment ended, someone at St. Andrews must have ended up with the lot of 50 or so, sat on them for ages and then ended up hawking them to a game company. Jeez, I wish I could have known that before any were sold. It would have been an info gold mine to have pictures of all of those carts.

If I had just $100 to spend, I always browse the NES tapes for ones in good shape I don't have that are $10 or less. If nothing catches my eye, I head over to the N64 area and then last the PS1/PS2 section. Of course, I am trying to get a full set of Game Gear games but to this day I've not found anything uncommon in the 4 shops I have around me so, even though I'd prefer to put it all in Game Gear, that's just not gonna happen.

I think what he meant by "your local spot" is your local game store... unless your store also sells groceries. That's both cool and a hard-to-accept pivot for game stores to make it these days. Still, seeing groceries would be a better experience to me than seeing all those Pop Vinyls littering stores these days.

I agree with @Sumez comments but to it more simply, there's a difference between a game that kids can enjoy playing vs. a game designed specifically to appeal to little children, and I'm not knocking older fans either. When my son and daughter were both under the age of 5, we enjoyed playing Candyland together. If you're familiar, there's no skill at all. Role a dice, land on a square and, occasionally, you move forward or backward extra spaces. The only appeal to children is that it's "candy" theme and since it's luck-based, they can beat their parents. But then there are games like pick-up-sticks or checkers. Each is very different but a 5 year old could learn how to play them. However, skill will vary from person to person. A 5-6 yo kid who's played a lot of checkers a lot with his grand pa could probably mop the floor with an adult who's only been casually exposed to the game. A kid can learn it with a degree of mastery. Same with pick-up-sticks. It's a dead simple concept but the skills involved to be good are earned with time and young kids, maybe as young as 3 can start to get into it. You literally pick up sticks, plus getting hyper-focused to see if your opponent moves other sticks is "fun" to smaller people. So Pokemon is like Candy Land to us seasoned RPGers. Super Mario Bros is more like checkers. The analogy isn't perfect, but it gets the point across. By the time Pokemon came out, I wasn't offended by it's existence, nor did I laugh at anyone who enjoyed it for being "simple' minded. It was cool. It just wasn't for me. I had matured as an RPGer well beyond it.

I played this around 2005, I think, and I recall having the same general opinion. I struggled between giving it a 4 or a 5 and went with a 4. I also know it shouldn't matter but for some reason, sprite-based RTSs are more enjoyable to me, running in an isometric perspective. It seems like it'd be cooler in the 2000s era for any game to high quality 3D graphics but when it came to the overall experience, I preferred playing all games like this in 2D.

Regardless, Nintendo has to give the stamp of approval on these games.

Earthbound? Regardless, they stamped their name on it. I didn't know all of there RPGs were made out of house, though. Maybe Earthbound is too? There's also the Xenoblade games, though those might not entirely count since I've only tried XC2.

1211.

Well, I know this will be a hot take but other than the Paper Mario games, Nintendo can't seem to make an RPG that I neither enjoy or feel isn't uninspired. Even for the Paper Mario series, the appeal is largely playing an RPG in the Mario universe. If it were some other generic theme, I wouldn't enjoy it. I'm not saying RPGs have to be complex to be good but, eh... Nintendo needs to do a bit more work in their storytelling for me to really get pulled into their RPGs. The ironic thing is that some series like Metroid tell fantastic stories and those games have used little to no dialog to get the point across.

Yeah, I had the same general experience but as with most British humour, to me most of it isn't funny until about the second or third viewing. The first time I saw it, I thought it was dumb and then didn't get it. Then I heard people quote it just in general and a few months later people were watching it again. I had more chuckles that time. The next year on another viewing, I found it more enjoyable by a wide margin. I wouldn't say it's the best comedy ever, and I've probably not seen it in over a decade, but it was definitely fun to watch more than a few times. Regardless, that first viewing felt rough and I just didn't get it.

Corn mash is good for catching pigs too, apparantly.