Quick Questions XIII: Answers Return

i remember the anime hewing pretty close to the game story, i think it would be a decent substitute

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I sorta felt like the anime doubled down on some of the problematic aspects of the plot/characterizations, at least of what I saw. But I was also more sensitive to those things by that time so maybe I just noticed it more.

depends how much you liked thief 3. no rope arrows but they thought it was a good idea to bring back of all things a half-assed hub area out of 2004 that’s a bunch of narrow corridors and loading screen that you got to go through between every level. I did like the forced escape sequences even though those are supposed to be big no-no’s.

I’ve returned to Megaten curiosity in the past few days, possibly because it’s the five-year anniversary of SMT IV and Strange Journey Redux released in English last week. Although I may never get around to it, I’ve always meant to play Strange Journey (either version) and both IV and IV: Apocalypse, so while I’ve both accidentally and intentionally spoiled large swathes of the story for SJ and IV, I’ve avoided learning every tidbit and have remained largely ignorant of Apocalypse save a few large details (like the focus on polytheism).

But I have two questions about the series I was hoping to have answered…

1. Is there a Hero/Heroine situation in IV: Apocalypse, and if so, what can be said about it without explicitly spoiling the game?

From my understanding, Strange Journey doesn’t have a direct Hero/Heroine equivalent, although you could probably essay a bit about how the game mirrors certain aspects of the evolution of the ‘companions’ in Nocturne. But I believe Isabeau plays a more traditional (if not actually interesting) role as a Heroine in IV, besides acting as an alignment avatar, and there’s also a female character with a less prominent presence who is fleshed out in side quests? Mainly, I’m looking for a summary of the major female characters in Apocalypse, particularly how they relate to the Hero.

2. Has there been, like, any concrete news about SMTV in the last, like, half a year?

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besides an announcement that development had started ~3 months back i don’t believe so

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But, I mean, like, of any game,

Thi4f is on the low end of that mid-aughts wave of AAA late 90’s genre revivals. Better than the OpFor disaster but definitely not as good as say Human Revolution to say nothing of an actually good game like Dishonored. I found it worth playing for free when I had a lot of leisure time. I do like how everything is animated even though that’s clearly the most annoying thing about it.

I mean here’s a whole playlist on why it’s bad and I can’t disagree with any of it.

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what are the best emulators for ps1 era and before (that’s not retroarch…it doesn’t run well on this dinky compy i’m setting up)

mednafen + snes9x

Something like that, yes. It’s not a strong element over most of the game, a few things just subtly hint at the possibility.

Playing into the true (neutral) path brings a big choice, right before the last dungeon. That massive, exhausting, ultra-up-the-ante-will-it-ever-end-maybe-5-10-hours madness. One of those choices leads to picking something like a “favorite partner” from the main party/cast. Regardless of gender, race, type of being what have you. This has a notable effect on the last leg of the game and your ending.

It’s hard to say how this does or doesn’t relate to the classic tropes and alignments or outcomes in SMT, without spoiling things. Apocalypse comes off a lot more animu then original IV, but ends up having a lot more in common with Nocturne by the end, and goes hard in the themes.

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EDIT: Accidentally deleted post trying to edit it??? Luckily I copied it

NES - Nestopia, I think Mesen is the accuracy emulator of choice these days though?
PCE - Mednafen, never tried running that outside of RetroArch though so if that gives you trouble then MAME has pretty good support. Completely stand-alone though there is Ootake but I don’t think that one is actively developed still
8-16-bit SEGA - Kega Fusion, sometimes has issues with modern Windows though in which case MAME again has alright support
SNES - Snes9x
Game Boy - BGB
GBA - mGBA
N64 - Project64 or Mupen64Plus? Not too sure here

http://nonmame.retrogames.com/

isn’t retroarch just running mednafen anyway, so performance issues with retroarch would be the same with mednafen anyway?

edit: nvm, seems just a problem with retroarch in general? does the retroarch frontend really suck that much cpu/memory on its own?

On my old laptop I was unable to run RA due to the integrated GPU being unable to render the the GUI. Never had much luck with alternative libretro frontends but that was a while ago and development seemed to be at least be coming along well back then.

you can run retroarch from the command line

the latest version also has a WIMP interface

This isn’t videogame related, but can anyone confirm whether Person of Interest is worth watching? I’ve heard it really goes wild with surprisingly deep AI-related sci-fi in later seasons, so I’m intrigued by that. But after watching the first couple episodes of season one, damn… It really started off crappy!

so you listen to Waypoint Radio huh?

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Person of Interest is worth watching, I think, but it has a considerable amount of filler. But I always watch and sometimes enjoy filler. The show definitely improves after the rough beginning. You won’t get the AI hit for a while and it will come stop-start-stop-etc after that, with the intensity ramping up each time, but I think the pacing on the show is overall pretty good, especially when some more subplots are thrown in. Some of episodes in the last couple seasons are real fun.

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I’ll agree with @creep that PoI is worth watching, provided:

  1. There are 103 total episodes and probably 50% of those are sort of one-off story-of-the-week episodes that do not advance the overarching plot except for possibly a few minutes at the end of the episode, and

  2. The first season doesn’t really get any better than the first couple of episodes. The show started off as one of a number of tech-based CSI ripoffs and didn’t really grow into something else until season 2. You might be better off investing those 20+ hours into something else depending on your level of distaste.

Having said that I really enjoyed watching it as it aired and the AI stuff is real fun (though not particularly thought-provoking) so YMMV.

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This sounds like Fringe almost and I wound up hooked on that show

(Partly because my gf and I had a headcanon where Joshua Jackson’s character is basically just Pacey who went to college and joined The Skulls and then became a grifter/FBI agent).

How are the Dragon’s Crown servers right now?