Do You Even Mana?

rule34.xxx

I don't really leave the house much anymore these days, what with me working at home and most of my friends and family living on the continent. So I don't really have any need for handheld devices, meaning I've never actually owned a smartphone and I had to throw away my ancient Sony Walkman cellphone when the battery had started to get all bloated and massive for some reason. Sadly, this also means that my PSP is collecting dust in a dark and damp corner of the crap shack. But I went and turned it on the other day and fiddled around with the emulators on there and tripped over an old favourite: Seiken Densetsu 3.

This isn't just one of the best SNES role playing games, but one of the very best games of all times. I will never understand why Square didn't release it outside of Japan, but the game has been translated by fans a long time ago and a ROM has been available for what must be well over a decade by now.

Look, I don't care about how you normally feel about emulation - if you don't speak Japanese and you can't get your hands on the original, then there's no excuse for you not to play this thing right away if you care about 16bit games at all. It helps if you've liked the previous titles of the serious, Secret of Mana on the SNES and Mystic Quest (or Final Fantasy Adventure for you Americans) on the Game Boy.

This game features some of the most amazing visuals of its generation, it has multiplayer, six playable characters, which all come with their own personal story, branching class upgrades and some fucking great music. Most importantly, it's insanely fun to play, even twenty years after it came out.

And yes, we're still fucking playing Everquest. Turns out that you can spend a lot more time playing only one game when work doesn't force you to finish half a dozen or more titles all within a month. I can run it in 4k (not so great) and in 1440p (slightly less not so great) and record the latter, which looks like this:

I had an interesting conversation on Facebook last night. Apparently my uncle is unhappy with how Facebook displays personalized ads based on your used apps and liked websites, so he's taking a break from it. Fair enough. Of course you can also just disable this feature if you don't like it, but to each their own. His announcement also sparked a strange response from a lady, who suggested giving up on Facebook altogether to go back to "normal communication".

Aww, how romantic. Or something. I asked what she meant by "normal". Post cards, maybe? She said meeting in person, talking face to face, having a conversation, that sort of thing.
Right. By that definition writing a simple letter would not be normal. I mean, where do you draw the line? Is a phonecall normal? Maybe landline is, but VOIP is not? I have no idea and I'm not getting any more responses from her, because she refused to talk to me ever since I've asked whether or not communication by post is normal.

Look, I get it, people update their statuses all the time, like and dislike shit, share pictures of their food and "oh my god, people don't really talk anymore". But maybe it's time to accept we've reached the 21st century. If online communication isn't normal, then the way I've met my partner and stayed in touch with her before we started living together wasn't normal, the way I do my job isn't normal, the way I talk to friends and family back in Germany isn't normal and all you people reading this blog right now so aren't fucking normal! Now if only somebody could tell me what the fuck "normal" is even supposed to be. But hey, gimme another 20 years and I'll moan about telepathic implants and how I miss normal Facebook conversations.

I have found the most amazing Everquest 2 artwork, featuring some of my favourite playable races. Too bad it's all porn. Had to censor that image up there a bit, but I sure as fuck wouldn't mind having my ingame character drawn by that guy. Though maybe with a little less of all the dick sucking.

-Cat