I Painted 03-aaliyah From Armored Core 4 And For Answer

it's very interesting that people talk about the dehumanization of pilots in armored core 6 but no one really talks about the dehumanization of AI and Coral which i think are also extremely dense and extremely thematically critical

I think my dream career would be lying under the reactor of a spaceship and rapidly splicing cables with my teeth while we're narrowly escaping a pirate's harpoon by juicing the engine so hard we rip the launcher out of the other ship's frame but I don't think that exists yet so I have to settle for esoteric wizard languages that make light and sound. also there would be a greasy girl there with me who's the ship's munitions expert and she teaches me more about the guns on the ship and I convince her to stick her hand into the shield generator. she's mostly there for tumblr notes but we're in love regardless

In the Pokemon fandom, every once in a while you stumble upon a ‘Pokeballs are $200′ joke. In reference to how Pokeballs cost 200 of the in-game currency:

What a lot of fans, especially more casual ones, don’t seem to realize is that the currency in the Pokemon games it based on the Japanese yen. The symbol for the currency in the games even resembles the yen symbol:

In fact, according to Bulbapedia, the ‘Poke dollar’ symbol was specifically created for the English translations of the games, and the original Japanese versions use the yen symbol.

Now, for perspective, although the exact exchange rate naturally varies, a US dollar is equivalent to about 120 Japanese yen. So, 200 yen is about $1.67. 

A Pokeball in the Pokemon games actually cost less then two bucks. 

There’s a REASON we see so many young kids training Pokemon, especially early in the games. The cost of investing into a Pokeball to try catching their own Pokemon easily falls into the range of a typical kid’s allowance. A Potion for healing after battles is 300 (or about $2.50), but since Pokemon Centers offer their healing services for free, that’s a moot point.

Youngsters in the early game only give within a range from 50-150 of the currency, which is about equivalent to $0.40-$1.25. The first Gym Leader in Hoenn Region, Roxanne, give 1,680 in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire, equivalent to about $14. Which is about right for the equivalent of a middle or high school honors student. A later Gym Leader, Winona, gives 4,200, or about $35. The Champion, Steven, gives 11600, or $96.67.

The winnings from enemy Trainers varies, but Ace Trainers seem to give out about 1500 or $14 on average, give or take. Swimmers (especially common later in ORAS), award a range from 400-800, or $3.33-$6.67.

Vitamins (such as Calcium, Iron, and HP UP), cost 9,800 or $81.67 each. An Ultra Ball cost 1,200, or $10. A Paralyze Heal costs the same as a Pokeball, while an Awakening is half that. A Revive is 1,500, or $12.50.

What’s the point of doing this? Well, for one, to get a better sense of the in-game economics, which can be hard to grasp if one doesn’t realize the in-game ‘Poke dollars’ are based on the Japanese yen. And a look at said economics reveals some interesting details.

First, it shows basic Pokemon training and raising is well within the affordability of a ten-year old, or older. Which makes sense as Pokemon is aimed at younger kids, and the develops would want them to have the sense that going on a Pokemon journey is something they could do if they somehow ended up in the Pokemon world.

On the other hand, it also shows there’s really not that much money to be made in Pokemon raising and training, unless you battle frequently and regularly against higher-level opponents regularly and and win. Which is…very much in line with how professional sports work in real-life. Pokemon battling gets compared to a sporting event a lot for a reason. The initial 3-D games were even called Pokemon *Stadium.* Parallels are frequently drawn between the Pokemon League tournaments and the Olympics in the anime. The low money output is probably also why we often see Gym Leaders and the like working other jobs.

Just something interesting I decided to look into. I’m a Pokemon fan first, before any other fandom, and always will be. It’s shocking that I haven’t written any meta on it yet.

Hope you enjoyed!

Things that happen within the first few hours of AC6:

1. You get shot with a huge-ass laser mid-atmosphere entry. You barely survive this, landing several miles away from your intended landing zone.  Welcome to Rubicon 3.

2. You have a mech built with bargain bin parts, barely held together with hope and spite. It has a energy sword though, so that’s nice.

3. Not even two seconds after your, very rough, landing, you get a call from your “Handler”. He is ostensibly in charge of your well-being. This begins and ends with him sending you off on missions he’s fairly certain you’ll survive and charges you for the damage you get to your mech, the bullets you use, and he’s also cut out a piece of your brain to put in augmentations that will make you a slightly better mech pilot. In the top Most Horrible People On This Planet contest, he wouldn’t make it to the top 10.

4. You make your way through a derelict hunk of junk that’s threatening to collapse on top of you. Not even two minutes into this journey, you’re getting shot at with missiles. 

5. You finally reach your intended destination, a burning husk of a city filled with scavengers and low lives who will shoot you on sight. You are here to grave rob.

6. The reason you are grave robbing is connected to the fact you got shot in orbit, you are here illegibly, and you need to find a license from any fresh corpse so you can steal the identity on it and be able to do mercenary work.

7. You go through four corpses before you find one with a license that can pass muster.

8. Mid corpse robbing a gunship sent by The Space Police spots you and you have to shot it down so it can’t kill you or, even worse, stop you from stealing the identity you just found. 

9. As soon as you get registered in the Mercenary Rolodex, which takes less then a second of an A.I taking a look and saying “alright checks out”, you have two missions. One of them has you killing a bunch of resistance fighters from the planet’s native population on behalf of a weapons company that really wants to do business here. 10. The next mission has you going to a base owned by that very same company and blowing up everything you can find there. This does not anger that company one bit, if anything it just convinces them you are a very thorough worker. 11. Very shortly after that, you are tasked with destroying a prototype mech by another company before it can get into mass production. That mech is being piloted by what can only be described as an Anime Protag who is in the worst possible franchise for his type of character. You can murder him in less then two minutes if you know what you’re doing. You can hear him desperately fight for his life the entire time. 12. After that, before you even get to clean the blood and oil and broken dreams off your robot, you get a call from a merc group leader saying that he’s seen you murder that guy real good, a guy who was auditioning to join his group, and likes the cut of your jib. He gives you the callsign he was gonna give Anime Protag before you blew him the fuck up. He laughs and tells you to be careful since it’s an unlucky number. This is the least morally repugnant thing you’ll do all game.   

13. A while after that, you go into a power plant and destroy the generator, it promptly blasts you in the face with the red radioactive Super Fuel that toasted this planet a few years back.

14. You survive, somehow, and you get a disembodied voice of some girl in your ear. You tell your handler about this and he just shrugs it off with “oh yeah that’s probably a symptom of the lobotomy, don’t worry about it”. The voice is probably the most moral person on this fire blasted hell scape of a planet.

As someone who's played AC since my childhood, I wanted to like AC6 so much. When it was announced, I was right there with the rest of the community hyping it up, all the way up until its release. I went through all 3 endings in about 4 days (i.e. before the balance patch).

The game did a lot right. The story was great, and the characters were a lot more developed than previous entries (even the one-offs had a lot of personality put into their brief appearances). I also rather like what was done with the generators—lots of different stats to consider in regards to how your energy bar handles and refills, as opposed to "pick the one with the highest output" (the strategy in previous titles).

But looking back on my playthrough, I can't think of a single moment where the gameplay felt satisfying. Basic missions against MTs were all but trivial, leading into boss fights that were depressingly frustrating. I never got enjoyment from beating a boss (maybe the Smart Cleaner? that one only took 2 attempts), only a general feeling of "fucking finally". The stagger mechanic and weapon design came together to really limit playstyle options—I landed on dual Zimmermans about halfway through my first playthrough (without having heard the community's opinion, mind), which carried me all the way until NG+, where I switched to a different build that ended up using the stun-needle cannon (also without having heard the community opinion—looking at numbers alone showed it to be the clear winner). Realizing in hindsight that I had essentially cheesed my way through the entire game (and still found myself incredibly frustrated) didn't do much to improve my feelings about the playthrough.

After the balance patch, I expressed this opinion in the Armored Core Discord—if nothing else, the tracking on Balteus' flame-sword was ridiculous and needed to be nerfed. The response I got essentially boiled down to telling me, directly, that I wasn't good enough to be allowed to enjoy the game. After that, I left the AC community, and I have very little desire to play AC6 again.

(As an aside, I am disappointed in the nerf to Balteus' missiles, but not for reasons of difficulty. As you point out, the missiles weren't what made the fight exceedingly difficult. The nerf was unnecessary, cutting perhaps one of the most dramatic and iconic boss attacks in the entire game. Nerf the tracking or damage if you must, but removing missiles from the pattern entirely?)

Firstly, this post isn't aimed at people who don't rly have an opinion about BALTEUS nerf, or is disappointed that it isn't as hard but it won't affect their opinion of the game in general. If you are these people, it's not aimed at you I promise

Possibly petty and unpopular but I'm mid annoyed by people (mostly in social media and comments so maybe I shouldn't pay attention to them anyway 😅) who claim Balteus is super easy now and how Fromsoft "ruined a good game because gaming journalists, now *casuals* wouldn't get filtered out like it was intended, I want immediate rollback, gonna uninstall" and base their claim at them defeating it easily with chapter1 gears and OS tunes off

1. Yeah, you downgraded your AC, but your game knowledge didn't. You played multiple playthrough of ac6, your gameplay knowledge is miles above than at the point where you faced it first, if you want to claim you as a player learnt nothing while playing ~NG++ of ac6 and your muscle memory didn't adapt at all, congrats, your gamer learning ability is abysmal

2. I am pretty sure fromsoft didn't do this because of a few gaming journalists who complain that it's too hard lmao, if they actually give into whatever western fringe reviewers say we'd had easy mode in ER (easy mode is another discourse in video gaming that's its own can of worms esp. in Fromsoft games, I don't want to deride the convo so I won't go into it) Hardcore gamers may be a bit too absorbed in their clique of fellow aficionados, they don't realize that there are a lot of casuals who got stuck at Balteus, or, more importantly, didn't even try to purchase the game because they saw a streamer struggling or heard the general gamer gossips that Balteus is some Great Filter, maybe the gamedevs want more people to try their games?

Because I assure you, for people who didn't play any FS games at all, or maybe just played ER, it'd not be easy. If you think only high skilled players are allowed to enjoy this game...well, I disagree.

Maybe WE want more people to play this game because this game offers a lot more experience than that mindset? This is a mecha genre game that doesn't get such outputs as actions of other fantastical settings.

3. The perceived difficulty level suddenly dropping after Balteus and not really escalating into the realm of filter-like until you reach CEL (because let's face it Sea Spider wasn't as much bemoaned as BALTEUS) suggests that maybe release patch BALTEUS was a bit harder than their intention. Fromsoft producer's tweet about the patch specifically says they intended to modulate the difficulty level in early to mid game.

4. This is a specific gripe to people who act dramatically that less missile barrage means the boss is giganerfed: if you're so ignorant of the boss mechanics to think missiles make Baltie hard how did u even got past it

It was similar when Radahn in ER was nerfed too, lol, Fromsoft in recent years gave us pretty enjoyable games, but the maturity level of some people in the fandom is disappointing even for a video game fandom

They are dating

FACTS:

Madeline Celeste can air dash

Jetstream Sam can double jump

REASONS:

Trans people can air dash

Brazilians can double jump

THEREFORE:

Doom Eternal proves that Doomguy is both Brazilian and Trans.

Although maybe not Brazilian, because the double jump ability is from rocket boots.

But the dash pickup (the one that unlocks the dash) is just HRT.

Prepaints by Morota

Niko and pancakes...

no i havent seen that critically acclaimed movie with significant relevance to culture. no yeah, still working through bad stuff from other decades