gale

“I distinctly remember situations in elementary school," she said, "where I would be surrounded by friends who were laughing about horses and tamagotchis and Rose Art, and I would have moments where I would get pried out of my body. I went through the motions of smiling and talking but I didn't feel like I was actually there. Like I was lost somewhere in the wrong place, although where the ‘right place’ was supposed to be was unclear. It was strange and confusing. I assumed it was normal and never told anyone.”

Oh. Is that what that was? I thought my depression just happened to start one day in high school, but maybe it was always kind of there. Thanks for giving me a new perspective on my life, Jennifer.

@nme said:

As empathy-inducing games go, I felt ambivalent about Depression Quest. Parts of it hit very close to home, while others felt like a charicature of a depressed person. I suppose that makes sense from both a story telling perspective and a design constraint, but it took me out of the experience a bit.

So, uh. The thing is, there's pretty much nothing that happens in Depression Quest that wouldn't be completely ordinary in the life of a depressed person. You might've felt like some parts were overplayed or excessive or unrealistic, but I promise that they were crushingly true-to-life all the same, and real depression can honestly be just as overplayed and excessive and unrealistic. Mental illness doesn't make a habit of being reasonable.

@Devildoll: Well, since I'm having to get new everything anyway, I figured I may as well save up a little more and get something a bit tougher than what I'd previously planned for. I pretty much copied this list wholesale from a couple different recommended builds, so I'd hope it would be basically fine already, but I'd still be glad for anyone's input.

Motherboard: Gigabyte SKT-1155 Z77X-UP4

CPU: Intel 3rd Generation Core i5-3570K

GPU: Gigabyte NVIDIA GTX660 2GB DDR5 PCI-E

Disc drive: Asus DRW-24B5ST 24x

HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA III 6 Gbps

RAM: Corsair CML8GX3M2A1600C​9 LP Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 1600MHz CL9 DDR3

Cooling: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO (120mm)

Oh. Fair enough, then. Suppose this makes things simpler, since I can just start from scratch instead of worrying about compatibility and stuff. Thanks, I guess.

I've been using a kinda low-end computer for my PC gaming needs for the last few years, and it's served me fairly well. I've been playing most games on low or minimum settings, and I've been basically fine with it that way, but since I've got a bit under £500 (or around $800) to spend, I thought I should finally see if there was anything I could do to make things run a little smoother. The current specs are as follows, copied from my system information since I don't really know what's important and what's not:

Motherboard: Dell DXP061

Processor: Intel Core2 CPU, 6600 @ 2.40 GHz, 2394 Mhz, 2 Cores, 2 Logical Processors

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS

4GB RAM

My PSU apparently only puts out 375W, so I've already earmarked £70 to replace that with a 750W one. Which should be enough? Probably? Likewise, I'm already going to upgrade to at least 8GB of RAM, as well. So call it £400 to spend on whatever else. Replacing everything sounds like an expensive hassle, but I don't really know how much of this stuff can be salvaged, so who knows. I don't really need top-of-the-line equipment, but it'd be nice to have things run smoothly at mid-settings, at least. Any advice?

It's the Prepare to Die edition, pretty sure that's the only one you can get for the PC.

I've got a few things, nothing that would be worth Borderlands 2 on their own. I'd be willing to trade several, if you thought they were enough. Deus Ex: HR, The Witcher (the first one), Elder Scrolls three and four, Hitman: Blood Money, Zeno Clash, Dear Esther, both The Longest Journey games. Super Hexagon, too, but that's so cheap I'd throw it in for free, if you didn't already have a copy. Likewise, Portal 2, but practically everybody has a gift copy of that already.

For some reason, I have a voucher for Dark Souls, which is weird, because I thought I bought that for myself. I guess I could trade that, I wasn't desperate to play it right away. Less inclined to offer it in a package with other stuff, of course.

P3P is far and away my favourite version. The lack of cutscenes does suck, sure, but there were barely any of them in the game, and even fewer were the occasions where having low-poly puppets walking around actually mattered. The Answer is no big loss. What I really like about P3P is the female route, and that means a protagonist who isn't necessarily a heartless social vampire who manipulates everyone around him into liking him more, the ability to choose whether or not to have a romantic relationship with members of the opposite sex, the ability to form social links with your teammates e.g. the characters deeply involved in the main plot who are supposed to be like family to you, a Shinjiro who gets the chance to be an actual developed character instead of a gruff piece of cardboard with no emotional weight to his story arc beyond the effect it has on other characters, and no more forced participation in stupid pointless bullshit where your character humiliates himself for no reason. (No, Junpei, I don't want to fucking help you harass girls on the beach, I already have a girlfriend back home.)

Also, I didn't notice until I went back to FES to play The Answer, but fights in P3P move way quicker than in previous versions. All the character animations play faster. Makes those long dungeon crawls a lot more bearable. Also, the revamped fatigue system means you have a lot more freedom with your visits to Tartarus, putting more weight on SP management like in P4. Like the ally control, it's one of those things that some people probably prefer about the original, but the game is a lot more accessible as a result. And the fact that Academics no longer takes a billion points to progress is a nice bonus as well.

I can definitely see why people prefer FES, but it's just no contest for me.

Yeah, I find it sort of weird that people are making such a deal about the CEO saying something homophobic, when the much bigger problem of the company's profits being used to make large donations to anti-gay groups has been openly known for years. That's been a pretty good reason to refuse to eat there for a while, and I'm not sure why it matters that the CEO has personally confirmed that yes, he is indeed a dirtbag. Didn't we sorta know that already?

Wait, what? Akihiko's wearing a cape (which I'm beginning to suspect might be a torn-up sweatsuit top?) with a big knife and a canteen on his belt, but is still wearing padded gloves and big red boots. Did he go straight from punching bears in the woods to the tournament, or something? Mitsuru's outfit is kind of weird, but not quite as wildly incongruous as Akihiko's. I mean, the only thing separating Mitsuru's clothes from being an anime combat suit + sword is the fur stole, while almost every single item Akihiko's wearing is in conflict with something else. I mean, yeah, it completely makes sense that they're not in their school uniforms, but that still doesn't explain why his outfit is such a weird mish-mash of stuff.

@Video_Game_King: I'm a jerk, so I've watched a lot of anime, and yeah, I can confirm that those red shorts/underpants Emi wears used to be standard gym clothes for schoolgirls. I think that they've been largely replaced by slightly more conventional shorts, possibly due to the fact that most kinds of standardised clothing or equipment for schoolkids have been co-opted as fetish items by horrible perverts. They still show up a lot in anime or VNs as an aspect of the setting, or to appeal to horrible perverts.

Also, I had no idea that Hanako had a branch where she shuts down Hisao. I definitely need to go find that. I think I interpreted her reason for having sex with him differently than you did - it seemed less like she was trying to be seen as an equal, and more like she figured he'd be less likely to abandon her if she let him use her for sex, or something fucked up like that. I don't know, I should probably go sit through their meeting in the park again, see if I misunderstood something.

I'm a little reluctant about Rin's route - she's been my favourite character by far, and I wasn't looking forward to seeing all the ways in which Hisao can be a jerk to her. But if I'm already passed the worst of it, then I'm not quite as worried.