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Started work as a temporary administrator around 3 1/2 weeks ago, and although I've been hearing rumblings about it for the past week or so I've had it confirmed today that they want to take me on as a permanent contract and give me a promotion into a different team that they'll be starting in the new year as a data analyst.

I was really lucky today and managed to buy a SNES Classic (without paying scalpers). The Menu is super charming and if you afk Mario takes over and starts randomly loading games. Star Fox runs bad, which is cool, because emulators run it good and it runs (I assume) how it would on the OG hardware. Chill Penguin is a wimp. I am bad at Donkey Kong. F-Zero starts out easy but then the sand zone blows you up. And I haven't started yet, but am excited to play Earthbound and SMRPG on something that's not a keyboard. Also Final Fantasy 3 (6) is on there, dunno anything about it! But it's supposed to be good! There's also this neat replay feature that saves the last forty seconds or so of gameplay. So you can either load a savestate or pick up just before you jumped into those spikes. I know you can just emulate all these (and a bunch are even on virtual console), but there's just something fun about having a bite sized SNES packed with retro goodies.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197995326228/inventory/#440_2_4955709858

Doom 2016 is fun.

In more positive video game related things, I got around to play DOOM 2016 this week after missing its release. Absolutely stellar experience, easily one of my new favourite games.

I don't buy into this one sodding bit. It's not about being able to produce content and "support", it's just a way for them to make extra cash off of people instead of putting out actual content that people would be willing to pay for. Consumers have shown publishers it's much easier and simpler to just create a micro-transaction or lootbox centered system than it is to create content that gives people a tangible reason to give them their money that isn't "You'll get this thing now instead of in an indeterminate number of hours!" Not only are they getting your $40-$100 - depending on the publisher and what fancy version you buy - they're also getting a few extra dollars here and there from some players, and making double, triple and much more off of others - the so-called "whales". With the amount of money they're drowning in from shit like this, of course they can squeeze out an extra map or two every so often. They could instead spend time to create something that actually adds more to the game to also draw in new buyers. Instead, we're saddled with AAA pricing with an extra monetization scheme in which consumers throw money at publishers to not play the game in some cases, and in others, to unlock content that is otherwise inaccessible for no good reason, and incentivizes the creation of new content just to lock away in loot boxes and/or force the player to spend multiple hours - or even days - to obtain a single item. Overwatch event skins, anyone? Blizzard skates by on rather thin ice because everything in Overwatch's lootboxes are cosmetic and there's credits to outright buy cosmetics, but they're still on very thin ice. Heroes of the Storm is pushing a more aggressive attitude with lootboxes because the game is F2P, but it used to be that all cosmetic items - save a small few that could be bought with gold, which was also used to unlock Heroes - were cash only until Heroes 2.0 was released and they added a bunch of unnecessary cosmetics to pad out the introduction of lootboxes to the game. Hell, in the upcoming big overhaul of Heroes of the Storm, there's going to be "Gem only" cosmetics - with Gems being the game's premium currency - meaning you cannot buy those items with the secondary currency - Shards - that was introduced in Heroes 2.0 even though the sole purpose of Shards is to unlock cosmetics, in a game that has hundreds of cosmetic items. Now, as a F2P game, HotS gets away with more simply because there is no entrance fee to it, but pay-to-play games don't get any excuses for lootboxes or micro-transactions. Especially when games decide to double down on a leveling system plus lootboxes/micro-transactions. The game industry was doing just fine without micro-transactions and lootboxes a decade ago, aside from the advancements in technology and game development, and corporate culture evolving, not enough has changed since then to suddenly necessitate the ham-fisted milking of consumers' wallets.

Lest we forget the best TF2 video:

Same tbh