vili's recent activity

  1. Comment on Looking for movies that combine religion mythology and supernatural elements in ~movies

    vili
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    The Pope's Exorcist (2023) with Russell Crowe didn't get great reviews but I enjoyed it. It's cliched but it's fun in the sort of bargain basement discovery sort of way. I loved Crowe's...

    The Pope's Exorcist (2023) with Russell Crowe didn't get great reviews but I enjoyed it. It's cliched but it's fun in the sort of bargain basement discovery sort of way. I loved Crowe's performance. My wife didn't.

    I haven't seen it in decades, but I have very fond memories of the 1987 Hong Kong film A Chinese Ghost Story, which features spirits and demons in a temple setting. It was beautiful and exciting.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
    Link Parent
    Thanks for the link! Before this month's CGA, my familiarity with the Dragon Quest series could be summed with the phrase "some Japanese game?". With the stress landing quite heavily on that...

    Thanks for the link! Before this month's CGA, my familiarity with the Dragon Quest series could be summed with the phrase "some Japanese game?". With the stress landing quite heavily on that question mark.

    Since then, I have learnt a lot from the videos that I linked, as well as from other sources, but I must say that the video that you shared and especially your personal recommendation is the first time that I really started to consider actually playing a Dragon Quest game. I have now added XI into my watchlist.

    The reason I hadn't seriously thought about playing the series until now is that from what I have gathered, while the games look quite interesting, they also look very grindy, which is not my favourite thing in the world. And they are also very very long. But Kotaku's video makes a point about there being as much grind (and challenge) as you want, and perhaps ultimately it's just a case of me needing to slightly shift my mindset and preferences.

    Chrono Trigger was very good at teaching me this, taking me this October from someone who was convinced that I'm just not in tune with JRPG battle mechanics or storytelling, into someone who is currently quite excited about a whole new genre of games that I could explore. I always thought that, for various reasons, JRPG games should be my jam, but I had never found one that I actually enjoyed playing to the end until this month's CGA. And this was also my third or fourth serious attempt at playing Chrono Trigger. I fully expected to give up once again but I'm very glad that I didn't, as something eventually clicked and changed me.

    A fun side-note: I lived in Japan back in the 1990s and I remember a couple of friends having these cute teardrop shaped plush toys in their rooms. I never asked them about those since Japan was so full of everything that I had no reference for and it just wasn't possible to ask about everything, but those plushies clearly made an impression since earlier this month, when I started watching those Dragon Quest video essays and first saw the slime monsters, my brain went oh, that's what they were!, having not thought about those plush toys for well over a quarter of a century. Now I kind of want to play a Dragon Quest game just to see those guys in the wild.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
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    I did a fair bit of side questing this month, exploring the history and context of Chrono Trigger from a few different angles. I've posted about the music separately in this thread, and wrote a...
    • Exemplary

    I did a fair bit of side questing this month, exploring the history and context of Chrono Trigger from a few different angles. I've posted about the music separately in this thread, and wrote a bit about the game's release in the other thread.

    In case anyone is interested in watching some YouTube videos, I though I could list some that I have found particularly interesting. I came into Chrono Trigger with very little understanding or appreciation of the JRPG genre, hence the fairly holistic approach.

    I'm aware that there is at least one large piece missing from my side questing, namely the Final Fantasy series, but that's intentional. I'm thinking about playing through Final Fantasy VII at some point in the near future and want to explore it without too much context at first. It will be my first game in the series and if it tickles my fancy as much as Chrono Trigger did, that'll be the time and place for me to jump into the history of Final Fantasy in more detail.

    Any additional suggestions what to watch or play or listen to or read for a better understanding of Chrono Trigger are more than welcome.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on Supermarket rewards card- yes or no? in ~finance

    vili
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    I haven't used rewards cards, but not so much because of privacy reasons. I pay everything with a credit card and have always assumed, based on very limited research and therefore perhaps wrongly,...

    I haven't used rewards cards, but not so much because of privacy reasons.

    I pay everything with a credit card and have always assumed, based on very limited research and therefore perhaps wrongly, that each store can connect my purchases at their store and at any affiliate stores through my card ID. As they see exactly what I buy, they should be able to profile me quite thoroughly. Meanwhile, my credit card company sees a wider picture of all the places where I shop and how much I spend, but not the exact items I purchase.

    I don't like any of this, and I suppose I could prevent it by using cash, but using a card is convenient.

    That is also the reason I don't like rewards cards: I just don't like the hassle. I don't want to hunt for deals, I don't want deals to influence my shopping, and I don't want to remember to scan loyalty cards for points or coupons. I don't want to gamify my shopping. Money is already imaginary enough, loyalty points that stand for money or items are thrice removed from reality.

    However, the sad reality is that, like many here have already pointed out, most shops also in my area have continued to maintain artificially (?) high prices after the inflation spike a couple of years ago, and many regular prices are now only available as "member discounts".

    So, we have reluctantly subscribed to some loyalty programs since it does save us money. Since I don't want any more apps on my phone than I already have, we have the apps on another phone, and I've just taken a picture of the QR code needed for the checkout and I use that with the machines.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
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    I would love to hear what everyone's favourite track from Chrono Trigger's soundtrack is. I know it's a difficult choice but if I had to pick just one, it would be the tune that plays when the...
    • Exemplary

    I would love to hear what everyone's favourite track from Chrono Trigger's soundtrack is.

    I know it's a difficult choice but if I had to pick just one, it would be the tune that plays when the party dies. Basically, the game over track. It is such a peaceful, lovely melody that it always took away any frustration that I might have had with dying, which is such a brilliant design choice. The game wasn't laughing at me, it wasn't calling me a failure, it wasn't punishing me in any way. Instead, it rewarded me with beauty and serenity. The characters were just lying there, as if sleeping, with the lullaby-like song playing for them. Everything was ok, they had given their all, the struggle was over, nothing could harm them any more.

    The track also contrasted really well with the battle tune, which I would inevitably hear soon after, as I went back to kick the butt of whatever had just killed me. That song has such a "let's do this" vibe. A great contrast, there.

    My love of the the game over lullaby ended up influencing a decision at the very end of the game. After a long final battle with Lavos, I failed to beat it. And I was surprised to discover that I wasn't just given a regular game over state, but an actual ending. And that ending included a version of the game over lullaby. It made me happy, so I decided to call it my ending. In the end, the future refused to change. I felt that it was a poignant way to end the story.

    I also found the title of the game over track hugely meaningful. "The Day the World Revived", it is called. Which is a beautiful way to call your game over track. And there are so many interpretations you can derive from that. But later on, as I got sucked into the rabbit hole that is the Chrono Trigger Soundtrack, I went through the Japanese track titles, and realised that the official English title is likely a translation error. The Japanese reads 世界最期の日. Or, something like "The Last Day of the World". A slightly different vibe, there.

    Another song title that I got excited about was Memories of Green. It is another one of my favourites and I was curious to find out if it had anything to do with Vangelis's 1980 track with the same title, which was later also used in the film Blade Runner. I couldn't find any connection, though.

    All in all, I spent quite a bit of time with the soundtrack this month, and learnt a few things. One is that both the Frog's Theme and the Robo's Theme were featured in the opening ceremony of the 2020 (2021) Tokyo Olympics, demonstrating the cultural place that the game and its soundtrack have in Japan. And speaking of Robo's Theme, it has some similarity with a certain pop tune. If you want to dive deeper into that, and why Japanese game and pop music often sounds so "Japanese", read about a chord progression called the Royal Road Progression. I did. David Bennett also has a good video about it.

    I mentioned the brilliant battle tune earlier. The game's original ROM actually included another battle tune, as well as a tune called Singing Mountain, neither of which were used in the SNES game. But both were later utilised in the DS release with the added areas. However, it seems like the first time the track "Singing Mountain" was used in a video game was actually in the Game Boy Advance title The Hobbit in 2003. Here's the tune very briefly as part of a playthrough, and here's the full tune from the game. I don't know how it got there.

    There are also many other interesting places where a Chrono Trigger song has ended up. First, refresh your mind by listening to something like ten seconds of Schala's Theme from the timestamped section. Then, head over here to the timestamped part of Whiz Kalifa's song "Never Been", which has apparently been fairly popular somewhere at some point, as it has over 50 million YouTube views. His Never Been Pt II also sounds very familiar. And if you think that's interesting, there are actually dozens of other songs that have sampled Chrono Trigger over the years: head over here for more examples.

    The original soundtrack has of course also had multiple official releases over the years. These include the game soundtrack itself in both the SNES and DS versions, as well as several orchestral releases. Personally, I found the jazz arrangements the most interesting, of which there are two official ones as far as I can see: the 1995 acid jazz release Chrono Trigger Arranged Version: The Brink of Time (YouTube), and the softer 2022 Square Enix Jazz release (YouTube).

    Apart from the official releases, there is also a plethora of cover albums, too many to list really. But some of my favourites that I have come across are this AI assisted ambient lo-fi drum loop album, this synthwave collection, and this jazz album which I couldn't find on YouTube but is free and well worth downloading.

    Did anyone else get sucked into the soundtrack vortex? Any thoughts on the music and its influence? If you happen to know any other Chrono Trigger album releases that are worth checking out, I'm all ears! Quite literally.

    7 votes

  6. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
    Link Parent
    I actually surprised myself by preferring the real-time battle system, which is what I used apart from briefly testing the more turn based variant. I typically much prefer being able to take my...

    I did try playing in full real-time briefly, but found it made the game way more difficult than I was prepared for. I'm curious if anybody else stuck with this successfully.

    I actually surprised myself by preferring the real-time battle system, which is what I used apart from briefly testing the more turn based variant.

    I typically much prefer being able to take my time in games, but I also typically don't really like JRPG battle mechanics. The time pressure here was fun, and witnessing myself make one suboptimal move after another kept the game fresh. My problem with JRPGs is typically that I discover combos that I like and that are effective, and then I just spam those for 30 hours, in a UI that reminds me of Windows 3.1, and that isn't exactly my definition of fun.

    That said, I also ended up mainly repeating the same moves in Chrono Trigger, but at least there I had a few different approaches depending on enemies and which phase of a battle I was in. All in all, I must say I really enjoyed the battle system, and I think for me the pseudo real time aspect of it was a huge reason for that. Bosses felt like speed-puzzles that I needed to solve.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
    Link Parent
    The Steam version on a Windows PC.

    The Steam version on a Windows PC.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Reusable rockets are here, so why is NASA paying more to launch stuff to space? in ~space

    vili
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Another thing that the article doesn't seem to take into account is what is being launched and where. For instance, if we look at the three launches that you mentioned and a SpaceX launch that...

    Another thing that the article doesn't seem to take into account is what is being launched and where. For instance, if we look at the three launches that you mentioned and a SpaceX launch that happened around the same time:

    • The Atlas V in 2017 put 3453 kg into a geostationary transfer orbit (source) for $179 million
    • The Atlas V in 2018 put 694 kg into a heliocentric orbit (source) for $220 million
    • The Delta II in 2018 put 1514 kg into a low earth orbit (source) for $134 million
    • The Falcon 9 in 2018 put 362 kg into a high earth orbit (source) for $118 million

    They are all different orbits and the payloads range from 362 kg to almost ten times as much.

    Now, I am not a rocket expert, and these are just numbers I took from Wikipedia, but my understanding is that the weight of the payload, the orbit required, and the launch site used all affect costs. As probably does the type of payload launched. It's just not as simple as comparing one rocket launch price to another, like the article largely does.

    I like Ars Technica's space coverage, but I feel that Stephen Clark in particular has the habit of sometimes veering a little too much towards clickbait and sensationalism. Or perhaps it's just naivety. Now, his colleague Eric Berger isn't a stranger to attention grabbing articles either, but his tend to be a bit better researched and argued. Or that, anyway, is how they come across to me.

    Edit: After writing this, I realise that maybe the naive person here is me and payload weights and target orbits actually don't affect launch costs as much as I assume. Would someone here happen to know?

    14 votes

  9. Comment on Microsoft warns that Windows 10 reaches end of support today in ~tech

    vili
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    When I entered my wife's laptop for the ESU, I gave it permission to do the backup. It attempted to do so but for some reason or another failed. I think I may have blocked something related to the...

    When I entered my wife's laptop for the ESU, I gave it permission to do the backup. It attempted to do so but for some reason or another failed. I think I may have blocked something related to the feature earlier. It then said that it can't do a backup but here's your ESU anyway.

    I also have three office computers, none of which have received any offer for ESU yet. I have no idea why. This whole thing seems so poorly planned, coordinated and explained by Microsoft.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Keeper | Official launch trailer in ~games

    vili
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    Anyone else looking forward to playing this? I love Double Fine's games and this is their first release since Psychonauts 2 back in 2021 -- the longest wait between games from them in their 25...

    Anyone else looking forward to playing this? I love Double Fine's games and this is their first release since Psychonauts 2 back in 2021 -- the longest wait between games from them in their 25 year history! It seems to be getting good reviews.

    The lead for this one was Lee Petty, who also directed Stacking, Headlander and Rad, and he has also worked on many of the company's other titles. I really like his approach to game design, based on both the games that he has led, as well as his appearances in the various Double Fine documentaries.

    Christmas really comes early this year for those of us who grew up with old LucasArts games. Not only do we now have this new title from Tim Schafer's studio, but in a week and a half, Ron Gilbert's Death by Scrolling comes out, which is his first game since 2022's Return to Monkey Island. What a month.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 INSERT CARTRIDGE 🟢 Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
    Link Parent
    I agree, that fight is one of the weaker parts of the game. I might even go as far as to say that it is a rare example of poor game design in an otherwise highly polished game. The core mechanics...

    I agree, that fight is one of the weaker parts of the game. I might even go as far as to say that it is a rare example of poor game design in an otherwise highly polished game.

    The core mechanics of the fight are actually quite interesting and clever, so the problem is more that the game fails to communicate the rule set clearly enough, or at least in my case failed to do so. I think I see how the game is meant to tell you all the relevant information but I too failed to pick up on what was going on and came out of the fight feeling frustrated, and slightly bored, rather than feeling clever or accomplished.

    It would help if an average party had a little more time in the fight before being completely wiped out.

    1 vote

  13. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 INSERT CARTRIDGE 🟢 Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
    Link Parent
    I used to be like you but then made an observation that changed how I approach story driven games. I love narrative experiences, but for me it is very rare that games come in quality anywhere...

    Maybe it's just my FOMO brain, but knowing there are things I'm missing adds to the temptation to look things up

    I used to be like you but then made an observation that changed how I approach story driven games.

    I love narrative experiences, but for me it is very rare that games come in quality anywhere close to the heights that other forms of storytelling often reach. Literature, theatre, film, television and others just tend to do stories much better. Not because of any sort of limitation that is holding games back, but just because stories in games simply aren't usually that well written or narratively presented.

    But the quality of a game story doesn't actually need to be terribly high to gain my interest because game stories have something that books and films and such don't: they can be interactive. Rather than me being a passive recipient of a story, I am, at least on some level, an active participant in that story. I am not only experiencing, reacting and interpreting a story, but I am, with some level of agency, creating it.

    This can give me the power of not only choosing what direction a story goes, but also which parts of the story I engage with and which I leave unexplored.

    However, if I systematically try to make sure that I'm not missing something, I am depriving myself of that agency. The interactivity gets diminished and what I am left with narratively is, usually, just a substandard story that I'm now trying to consume from A to Z much in the same way I would any passive form of storytelling.

    When I realised this, I stopped caring about the need to try to experience everything or find out every secret, and instead embraced the act of just going where the story and my unguided actions take me. Missing things, doing most things sub-optimally, and ignoring a lot of content has become empowering. My playthroughs are uniquely mine. And games feel more alive for me this way, more infinite, since it becomes less obvious to me what the boundaries are, what the alternatives would have been, what is possible and what not. It makes games feel less like systems and more like experiences.

    That said, if a game interests me a lot, I will often return to it later for a new playthrough or post-ending gaming where I no longer approach the game as a narrative experience but more like an investigation to take a look behind the curtain. But that is a very different experience.

    This has also influenced how I approach other types of narrative media. I no longer feel so bound by structures and predetermined formats. I can read a book by jumping around in the narrative if I want to. I can skip episodes or stop watching season 1 of something and jump into season 3 that others say is better. I don't feel bad about never finishing things. I am better now at experiencing things the way that best works for me.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 INSERT CARTRIDGE 🟢 Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
    Link Parent
    That is... quite something. Actually painful to look at. I remember as a kid buying C64 games largely based on the pictures on the box (not much more to go on), and even if I knew that the box art...

    Just look at what they did to my boy!

    That is... quite something. Actually painful to look at.

    I remember as a kid buying C64 games largely based on the pictures on the box (not much more to go on), and even if I knew that the box art had nothing to do with the graphics in the game and that the gameplay pictures in the back couldn't have been from the C64 release and were most likely from the Amiga version, as I sat in the car on our way home, holding the newly acquired game in my hand, I still allowed myself to imagine the graphical brilliance of the game that I would get to play soon. And once we got home, I rushed into my room, placed the tape into the cassette deck, loaded the game and... well, I don't think any game ever graphically exceeded my young mind's expectations.

    Or well, maybe The Last Ninja 3 did.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on Babies’ brains recognize foreign languages they heard before birth in ~humanities.languages

    vili
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    A meta question: should articles like this be under ~humanities.languages or ~science? I never know. It feels wrong to post them under ~humanities, as it feels like promoting the view that...

    A meta question: should articles like this be under ~humanities.languages or ~science? I never know.

    It feels wrong to post them under ~humanities, as it feels like promoting the view that linguistics isn't a "real science" but some kind of a softer more philosophical humanist enterprise. Not that there is anything wrong with philosophical humanist study, far from if. But it feels different than what the formal, applied or social science of actual linguistic research is.

    But then, it also feels wrong to post these in ~science since we already have a separate language related group. Of course, it is "languages" and not "language", so perhaps this is meant to cover only common language use and language arts, not the study of the nature of language?

    Surely, I'm overthinking this. Or am I?

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Babies’ brains recognize foreign languages they heard before birth in ~humanities.languages

    vili
    Link
    The link is to a Scientific American article. The original paper can be found here with the following abstract: I don't think anyone in the field will be particularly shocked by the results of...

    The link is to a Scientific American article. The original paper can be found here with the following abstract:

    Newborns have an immature brain network responsible for speech processing that resembles the adult language network. However, it remains unclear how prenatal experience modulates this network. To test this, we exposed 39 fetuses to a story in their native language and in a foreign language during the last month of gestation, while another group of 21 fetuses received no experimental prenatal exposure. Within 3 days of life, neonates’ brain responses were recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) whilst they listened to the same story in their native language and in two foreign languages, one of which neonates had been prenatally exposed to. Results revealed that brain responses to the native language and the prenatally exposed foreign language were similar, whereas they differed in the left temporal and right prefrontal regions when listening to a prenatally unexposed foreign language. Findings indicate that foetuses’ linguistic environment influences speech processing at birth.

    I don't think anyone in the field will be particularly shocked by the results of this study but it is still an interesting data point.

    Also: I like the word neonate.

    6 votes

  18. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 INSERT CARTRIDGE 🟢 Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
    Link Parent
    I was also thinking about this the other day. So far (I'm about 20 hours into the Steam version of the game), there has been absolutely no grind or micro managing things, and I love that....

    I was also thinking about this the other day. So far (I'm about 20 hours into the Steam version of the game), there has been absolutely no grind or micro managing things, and I love that. Experimentation has never been punished. Exploration has often been rewarded with some little wink and nudge. Combat has never been tedious, and I must confess that I am usually very easily bored with JRPG mechanics. The game is also very generous with its autosaves. And just when you think the game is settling into some groove, it throws a bit of a curve ball at you. All in all, it's been a very pleasant and engaging game to play.

    That said, narratively I've been a little bit more lost. I usually know roughly what I should probably do next, but I don't always know where (or when) to do it. And I have often also been confused about why I should do something. So, there has been quite a bit of aimless wandering around for a while, and then opening a walkthrough to check where to go next. But maybe it's just me and I'm poor at understanding the game's narrative guidance. It would be interesting to hear from others who are playing the game for the first time.

    In any case, I feel that I'm more invested in the characters, the world and the game mechanics than I am in the story, if that makes sense? Which I don't really mind. I'm very much enjoying my time with the game.

    4 votes

  20. Comment on CGA-2025-10 🕹️⏰ 🗺️ 🐸 INSERT CARTRIDGE 🟢 Chrono Trigger in ~games

    vili
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    As I wasn't a console gamer growing up, I hadn't realised how big a deal Chrono Trigger was at the time of its release. I knew that it was a major event, but reading about the game's history now,...

    As I wasn't a console gamer growing up, I hadn't realised how big a deal Chrono Trigger was at the time of its release. I knew that it was a major event, but reading about the game's history now, I see that it was something of a GTA6 of its time in terms of hype and anticipation. Well, maybe not quite so when it comes to wider cultural recognition, but within the contemporary gamer culture at least.

    Like @ali writes in the introduction, the game brought together top talent from two major JRPG franchises, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. What I hadn't understood until now is that those franchises belonged to two different companies: Square and Enix. It's a bit like if Bioware and Bethesda had made a game together after Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim. In other words, mind blowing.

    This seems to have been reflected in the game's price. In the US, Chrono Trigger reportedly retailed for around 80 USD (see e.g. here, here and here). I found this interesting, as there is currently so much talk about $80 games. But this was back in 1995. Adjusted to inflation, the price would be around 170 USD today! I suppose there is more to relative cost and value than straightforward inflation adjustment can tell us, but still, the game certainly wasn't cheap. In contrast, regular new SNES games in the US appeared to cost around $40-60 at the time, or something like $85-130 in today's money.

    It wasn't expensive just in the US, though. In Japan, the MSRP price appears to have been 11,400 JPY. Adjusted to inflation, that would be around 13,400 JPY today. In contrast, the Switch 2 release of Mario Kart World retails for around 8,000 JPY at the moment.

    Despite the high price of entry, the game ended up selling 2.5 million units, making it the 17th best selling game for SNES, or the 6th best selling game that wasn't bundled with the console.

    A decade after combining their forces for Chrono Trigger, Square and Enix merged to become Square Enix in 2003. In addition to continuing to work with both companies' original franchises, Square Enix has also owned IPs like Tomb Raider, Hitman and Deus Ex, as well as having worked as the Japanese publisher for western companies like Activision and Ubisoft.

    Meanwhile, Chrono Trigger's lead designer Hironobu Sakaguchi, lead artist Akira Toriyama and composer Nobuo Uematsu joined forces again for the 2006 JRPG game Blue Dragon. The game was the first major JRPG exclusive for the Xbox 360 and it was marketed as a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger. I remember when the game came out but only now understand the hype around it. Has anyone here played it? Any thoughts?

    As I was researching the history of the game and leafing through old gaming magazines looking for Chrono Trigger articles, I realised that when it comes to past games that don't belong to a well known franchise, it is often easy to look at them and think of them as charming, little known gems. But when put into a historical context, most of the best known games were actually the biggest things of their time. And I guess, in the case of Chrono Trigger, of any time.

    8 votes