oh shut up. you've never been to china. you've never talked to a chinese teen and probably haven't talked to an american teen either in a long fucking while. teens don't watch fucking video essays, like what are you even talking about.

Fromsoft games aren't designed for masochists. Their difficulty has only ever been in service of pulling you into their worlds and making you interact with the games mechanics. The thing that makes these games special is not that they are hard, but that they are carefully designed, handcrafted experiences, that while allowing you to approach them in a myriad of different ways, that allow you to struggle with and against them, that put up resistance against you in trying to explore them and that allow you to get lost in their world.

It's obviously completely fine to criticize specific parts of these games for being too hard, or that are just unfun. If you can only beat the bosses in the Elden Ring DLC by constantly switching aggro between yourself and whatever summon you choose to use, meaning you don't actually have to engage with the bosses themselves, that sucks. Melania is probably mechanically broken. That's obviously something you should criticize. You could definitely argue that these games would be more engaging if they were overall easier. The level of mechanical execution these games require has definitely risen over time, but they've also simultaneously given you many more ways to regulate what level of execution these games require: Elden Ring has turned NPC summons into an actual mechanic and made it much easier to play multiplayer with friends and has lowered the barrier to online play much more than any previous game. If you just added a slider that changed around enemy health and player health (which is what most videogame difficulty settings are) you would have made a game that is much less engaging and interesting no matter if you touch that slider or not. These games would no longer be the handcrafted experiences that they are.

If you read a book that has words in it that you don't understand you look them up. If you are at an art gallery and see a piece of art that you do not understand you can ask someone about it. If you can't beat a boss in Elden Ring you can ask for help online and you could probably even find someone who'd help you with it in co-op. That is a much more engaging, interesting and most of all fun way to engage with the difficulty in a video game than simply moving around a slider (although there should obviously be ways to modify the game itself to move slower or faster etc. videogames should all be open-source and moddable by default).

In this shitty fucking medium that is videogames under capitalism, where the vast majority of games either bend over backwards to keep you engaged, being mostly occupied with hitting your serotonin receptors at the optimum level for completely braindead and lobotomizing play, or even worse, use pressure against the player and frustration for the sole purpose of getting you to hand over more cash, FromSoft is a genuine and rare relief from the shit one is usually served.

I just watched a YouTube video about plans for Mars colonization from the 50s until the 70s and it's really something that scientists fully believed there were plants on Venus and Mars until like the mid 60s. They sent probes up there fully expecting them to take back pictures of plants and maybe even animals and turns out Venus is a complete hellhole that's got an atmosphere that's 700 degrees hot and extremely corrosive and Mars is just a stone as dead as our moon.

Starting to think everything of importance that has ever happened happened in the 60s and we've just been coping since then

I turned off my YouTube watch history a few months back and installed an extension that disables the related videos, comments and shorts because I spent way too much time endlessly watching shit that really just was neither particularly informative nor entertaining.

It's all hype, high production values and name recognition. There's nothing particularly special qualitywise about Baldur's Gate 3, it's just the first CRPG that we've got since the original Dragon's Age that has actual cutscenes. There are a ton of people who will not play a game that stays in the isometric perspective for the cutscenes or doesn't feature full voice acting. People do actually really like these long-ass RPGs with party members, they just need to be that slight bit more approachable than games like Pillars of Eternity or the recent Pathfinder games have been.

The DS was so fucking good. Probably the best console of all time, not even joking

considering you can still just search on google for "super nintendo full rom set" and find a working link within two minutes, all these only clickbait.

if you want to actually talk about preservation, talk about copyright abolishment, everything else is basically irrelevant. also stop shilling these fpga trashboxes, you've got a million devices that can emulate games just as good that aren't single-use electronic trash.

You should be allowed to have a party and play music and have people dance at your home.

But if you have a party and play music as loud as possible even though no one is dancing you should be send to the gulag no questions asked. Like some people do actually get off on being annoying pests

if your goal is to keep people on netflix it's obviously against your interest to make your content available anywhere that isn't netflix.

why sell someone a dvd box for 40 bucks if you can instead get money from them every month? i don't know how you can be in that industry and not understand this basic fact.

Living on this planet and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible.

"repetitive quest system"

what is that even supposed to mean????

Nah fuck off. Some lib getting beat up by a bunch of right wing car nuts isn't something to celebrate. Fuck Cars.