Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

The only game worth your time is Desert Island Escape, and that was added to New Leaf with the amiibo update, with the added bonus of not needing amiibo cards to play.

Overall the game is clunky and slow, lethargic. There’s not much to keep yourself interested unless you really like collecting costume changes for your figurines.

You would also need to buy said figurines and extra cards to play all the games.

If you can find the bundle with the cards and amiibos cheap enough, go for it. However, don’t expect it to be hours of fun. At this point it’s mostly just an amiibo starter kit.

@Anti-Matter It is basically a party game where you need some Amiibo to play. I'd discourage you unless you have someone to play it with you.

@Heavyarms55
I have some Animal Crossing Amiibos and i will play it Solo vs CPU.
I think i will wait for a while until Nintendo Direct 11 June 2019, to see if Animal Crossing Switch is different game than Amiibo Festival.

It will be different, you don’t need to wait to know that much.

@Anti-Matter If they released another Amiibo Festival, rather than a mainline Animal Crossing like New Leaf or City Folk, I think there would actually be riots. Or at least serious anger and even outrage.

I for one would be incredibly disappointed.

But I seriously doubt they would do that. Nintendo really seems to have paid more attention to fans in recent years, and the way they announced AC for Switch seemed to suggest a real Animal Crossing game.

@Tyranexx Well, if it's sites as in places, then they oughta still be there at a later point in time as well, don't they?
Or are we talking moving/pop-up events here?

@NEStalgia Thanks for all the info. I do have to tell you, that I'm not really anything remotely like a train buff or anything, so I'm not really up for a deep dive into all the material that you linked to, but I appreciate the effort nonetheless. The primary reason that I brought the topic up, is because, even though I may not be a train-enthusiast, I most certainly am somewhat of a speed freak, so obviously, high speed trains would also interest me, because of that.

As for that news item I was talking about earlier: turns out it was about the forever stuck in limbo high speed train line in California. As you may already know, there's a completely finished train station in San Francisco,
but it is not operational, and now it's slowly starting to fall apart. It may not be a mall, but it looked like the perfect setting for a zombie apocalypse...

Anyway, across several presidential reigns, millions of dollars have been pumped into it, and the current one refuses to dedicate more money to it, so the process has now been halted, and like previously mentioned, will more than likely forever stay in limbo. A shame, really, because the station looks pretty nice, as does the train itself, but now all it can do is travel to and fro at normal speed, which is of course not what the train, and the track, were built for. It was supposed to be a direct, high speed connection to LA, but now it's going nowhere.

I've never understood things like these, were projects are started under one government, allowed to progress until they're halfway done or nearly finished, and then the next president comes along, and freezes the budget that would/should be dedicated to finishing it. If you ask me, all these half-finished projects, which are now cluttering the landscape across the States, like some kind of neo-classical ruins, do far more damage than they would have done, if they'd just finished them. Might even be better to just tear them down completely, instead of allowing spooky, abandoned places like the San Francisco high speed train station to remain where they are, serving no purpose whatsoever...

@Morpheel You have to keep in mind that you're talking to a guy who plays 1-2 Switch against himself,
so contrary to all of us, he'll probably have a heck of a lot of fun with Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival...

@Anti-Matter - Save your money for the upcoming Switch game. As Thanos mentioned, you may be able to find some joy with this game, but it was basically an Amiibo scam in an Animal Crossing skin. One good mini game is tough to justify, even if you have some AC Amiibo, and you can get it cheap; you’ll probably drop it as soon as the real, mainline game releases on Switch. AC Switch will be my first game in the series. I’m looking forward to it. I really hope I can find some form of revenge on Isabelle for spamming Lloid at me in every Smash match. I want to fight her in real life.

@ThanosReXXX The unfortunate reality about "government funded" spending projects in the US is that they are never, and I repeat NEVER about actually building the infrastructure specified. That was never the goal, from the first draft, to the first administration budget approval, to the final precedential defending. They are all kickback programs. Every single one of them. Always "follow the money." Every time. Every single time, these programs can be traced to a particular politician and an a related industry/relative/contributor/friend of a friends wife's cousin's son's kindergarten teacher's nephews Greek shipping magnate grandfather who contributed influence and money to the politician's campaign and as a coincidence managed to help support a tremendous program to help all the people of his/her district/state by building a giant private shipping port for the particular type of cargo his company happens to ship. Every one of them is always an ill planned, high spending project with no reality, pie in the sky figures, and no real plan beyond absorbing the cash infusion, laundering it through partly building "something", and when it goes belly up inevitably, when the next set of politicians pulls the plug on the obvious useless and unfundable project plan, they can point fingers at the "other party" (whichever one it is that time) and meanwhile the brother's cousin's freinds all cash out on the unfortunate "politically inflicted" bankruptcy. It's also convenient to point at presidencies when presidents aren't supposed to be responsible for spending anything - Congress has the power of the purse. If the president is spending (or not spending) anything, it's because Congress isn't doing their job, (or is responsible for the kickbacks to begin with but likes to launder money through the executive branches at various levels for deniability and a single point to blame who's job is to take blame without any real consequence. )

Which is why nothing gets done, and what does get done is more damaging than helpful. Corrupt like Rome. If they ever propose a high speed rail line right from my front door to every destination I could ever want to go to up to and including downtown Tokyo, I'd be against it. Because I'd know there's no plan to actually build it, they'd just dig a really big hole for $12 billion, it would stagnate for 10 years, then become a drug and prostitute shelter before getting torn down in 25 years for another $8B (the demo company of course being connected to the politician that signs it.)

Not that the EU is any better...if not worse. Ironically the only reason anything gets done in Europe is strong "state's rights" that no longer exist here. The smaller geographies with strong sovereignty in their governments tends to be able to dodge the broader corruption better than, any random state here that has no true autonomy even though constitutionally they're supposed to, because the modern 20th century and beyond Federalist movement absorbed the states like a monolithic Holy Roman Empire reborn. CA gets the closest to being semi-autonomous in certain areas. Trouble is their local government is even more corrupt than the federal one, so it's squandered value.

It's not so much a case of "the US is more corrupt than Europe" so much as the way the dependency and check and balances work out, at present, there's more local escape from the corruption in Europe than here, though the EU is continuously working on finding ways to erode that as successfully as was done here, so it's a temporary benefit.

I like choo-choos. I was a conductor for Halloween when I was little. It was fun.

That's my essay about trains.

@HobbitGamer And then I wonder what's wrong with our medical system.......

I'm running low on coffee and it's killing me... 😫

@NEStalgia Well, luckily, I live in Western Europe. Wholesale corruption only happens in Eastern Europe by default...

But in all seriousness: that's a very gloomy outlook about your own country. From what I've understood from the news item yesterday, the station in San Francisco was completely finished, the only thing missing is the high speed connection to LA, which it was intended for. So, although the railroad tracks are missing, the building is completed, and the train is actually there as well. It's just a matter of completing the track to LA, which, compared to the money already invested, is peanuts, and the ROI that can be gained from getting people from San Francisco to LA in little over 2 hours, would make up for that last bit of investment needed, so it's really kinda stupid to not finish it, and leave a completely finished, and rather modern and luxurious looking building to probably serve as a hiding place for bums, squatters or worse.

In that case, even I wouldn't want to have such a place in my backyard...

@ThanosReXXX Oh, Western Europe has plenty of corruption. NED generally just seems to steer clear of it, somehow. France, Germany, UK (for a few more days ) , Italy, Spain...plenty of corruption to go around! Maybe they haven't reached our heights yet by having stronger local governments at smaller levels....but they strive for it daily! After all....we learned the trick from them to begin with!

But that's pretty typical. Build a station for a railroad that was never going to exist, connecting to a city for which the receiving station was never even planned. Who greenlights that? Someone paying someone's construction and/or land development company back, that's who. Buying a train set is a lot cheaper than running miles of track and the real estate and legal requirements that goes with it I do agree passenger rail would be profitable between those locations (it's profitable in the NEC, but so far that's the only profitable passenger railroad in the country, all the rest lose money.)

(Which isn't to say the railroad business isn't booming, the 4 freight companies are at the highest heights since the glory days of the PRR. They're even getting picky about what freight they take for max profitability again....they're closing the classification yards (the "humping yards") because they don't want to classify anymore. Too costly. Got less than a full train to ship? Get a truck. Rail doesn't want your tiny business. Freight is top tier. .com shopping is a big part of that. "Ground" across the US often means rail. UPS and Amazon alone could run a freight railroad. We have a massive, almost unimaginable rail infrastructure....it's just all freight, no passenger, and is privately owned by companies that (rightly) see no profit in passenger. If they thought they could charge $500 a ticket, the Broadway Express would be blasting through 5x a day once again.)

Look on the bright side. San Fran's rail station without any rails is still in better shape than the new airport upstate. The built a brand new airport...I forget which city in CA......and on opening day discovered one of the main support beams was cracked. Then closer inspection showed other beams may have been stressed or cracked. And it sounds like they're going to have to tear it down before it even opened. This is why we don't do infrastructure. Or it's why CA sucks. Pick two.

In another life, I was a depression era hobo just hopping trains, ducking yard bulls, and leaving my mark in grease paint wherever I went.

We should just use all those little trains that are in malls. The malls are closing, so they don’t need ‘em. Nothing bad could happen. Plus, it’s like recycling so it makes fresh air appear or something. Oh! And we can use the engine stages of nukes, and that’ll denuclearize things. Boomshakalaka, first world problems solved. I eat rice.

@HobbitGamer You do that. As you denuclearize the engines, ship the warheads to me. Once I've gathered enough, I'll solve all the world's problems in mere minutes!

@NEStalgia Well, by now, I've certainly had my fill of train talk. This is my stop, so I'm hopping off.
See you all in a more interesting topic.

P.S.

Which will also be one that will not concern any lame topics such as politics, corruption, how bad the state of the world is, and so on, and so on...

EYE SEA WATT YA DID THAR!

@NEStalgia ...I mean, I didn't say anything about actually removing the payload.

@ThanosReXXX
So....
Can we talk about My Little Pony here ? 🤣🤣

Or something like "boneless banana" ? 🤣🤣

@HobbitGamer Yup, I was free riding... Had to get off in time, before the conductor arrived and caught me without a ticket to nowhere-ville...

@Anti-Matter Nope. Only about games for real men. You know, games with jiggly boobs, lots of violence, guns, blood, chainsaws, fatalities and explosions...

Oh, and cars. Hyper-realistic cars too.

F*** My Little Pony. I'll cut 'em up and barbecue them. Probably won't even taste good...