Phantasy Star Online was fantastic. It had some connection to the original games, but many new ideas and systems. The game was originally developed without plans to make it a Phantasy Star game and that was bolted on midway through development, which could account for why the plot was somewhat lacking. Overall though, it was like most Phantasy Star games - There's the Dark Force/Profound Evil, it's possessing people and animals and corrupting things, and you have to stop it. Usually they've explained the discrepancies by setting various games in the past. I think ultimately you're supposed to just not care and accept that ok, it's a PS game, of course you're fighting the Dark Falz.
Phantasy Star Online 2 was perhaps even better. It is a huge game, and was around in Japan for years, receiving many large updates, without a US release. Eventually Microsoft brought it to the US because they wanted to be involved with the successor, Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis. It was released with a rapid fire schedule where they compressed 9 years of updates into 2 years. Now, it's unfortunately not fully playable, and receiving no more new content, but is still mostly available. NGS has been doing... okay. The success of that game is mixed. It's decent though and is still receiving new content.
I used to sometimes do consignment with artistic products I made, and 80% of the time I ended up being jerked around by the store. Even stores that kept good records and paid for a while would, after a few years, end up with inventory left that they never returned or paid for. Sometimes the stores would close and disappear with the inventory. Other times they’d avoid me. Sometimes they’d insist they paid for everything already, and have done such a poor job of documenting what payments were for that it was difficult to tell. Some people just straight up ran their stores like Ponzi schemes - paying off old consignment with sales from new vendors. As an individual artist, I became very wary of consignment as it’s essentially an unsecured loan. Even worse was that some people who faded away and kept inventory were friends and good business partners, and it’s not like I would sue them for $400.
People sometimes do drastic things when they experience large gambling losses. They might embezzle, rob, scam, be unable to pay rent or debts. It has a significant effect on people who are not directly involved in gambling.
Incidentally, there are remakes of the first two for PS2, released under the Sega AGES line of discount games. Unfortunately, only in Japanese at the time I played, though translation patches are now available. They’re called Phantasy Star Generation 1 and 2. There is also a release of a compilation of the original games for PS2.
"Gluten free pasta" is not an adequate description. It's defining a food product by what it is not made out of. I assume they mean chickpea, or one of the kinds that's a blend with quinoa, because corn or brown rice pasta is actually much more resilient than gluten pasta. You can cook the rice pasta far overtime and it does not fall apart. Chickpea pasta disintegrates, though. Anyway, not to distract from the real topic.
Seems like they want a MacBook for people with Pixel phones. Okay. I assume it will be an ARM based system running some Android variant, if you can seamlessly launch Android apps on it. "Designed for Gemini Intelligence" is somewhat repellant - look at how poorly MS has done pushing Copilot on people. Overall I'd need way more info to know if this is a device I'd be interested in at all, but since I have a MacBook and iPhone, I don't think I'm the target market. Perhaps their ideal target market, but it seems like this would be best for people who are already knee deep in the Google ecosystem.
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