Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@ThanosReXXX Interesting. I never thought about it that way. Tbh, it's been years since I've read anything on the 2012 subject. XD

I remember Y2K. My mother totally bought into that scare! She was stockpiling jugs of water, canned and dry boxed food in the basement for months! Meanwhile my father was planning a vacation to Florida. lol

We did end up eating all the food though.

As for the 2012 stuff, my friends and I got together for new years at the end of 2011 and watched the movie "2012" in celebration. That was cool. That movie is a fun kind of bad.

You will NEVER knew when is the end of day.
Regardless you are religious or not, from Science point of view, every solar system have their life span. Nothing is eternal, so don't be scared. Our Earth maybe will be blown away by SuperNova someday, and all the nearby will scaterred away into dust. Every solar system lifespan will be ended.

Speaking about prophecy about doomsday, in my logical thinking it was created by someone or something to scare us and we must believe in Religion X or Y or Z to get salvation. I thought it was like a Competition who can get the best salvation from each religions and each religions has their own pros and cons. I don't think the date of Doomsday can be set exactly like calculator. It just someone made and lied, just for the sake or gain attention or competitive tactics between religions.
Nobody Ever can predict the date of Doomsday and for me Nor even the God or any Supreme being made that ultimatum. I think it's insane to create an universe, colored with some drama by sins and griefs, add with sugar by salvations and then scrap out all made being when the creator is bored.

I find these "end of the world" things really funny. People get worked up about a "prophecy" that has no real credibility. (Kinda like video game rumours.)

@Matthew010
More ridiculous and tragic, some peoples chose to suicide in mass on the date they claimed as the doomsday , found themselves died, laid on the ground and their souls realized the next day was still exist and everything was normal. Their souls might be in rage to accept that foolishness about miscalculated doomsday date.

So, my parent's car is now dead and my folks are now looking for another one. Can my life any more complicated!?!?!?

Also, for those interested, Brave Camilla got revealed for FEH!

@ThanosReXXX Their calendar turned out to be garbage considering the Mayans are still here, and their society rebooted quite a long time before 2012....

@Link-Hero Couldn't agree more. Of course, the usual suspects came out of the woodwork, and from under their rocks: religious zealots, doomsday prophets, and a couple of preppers, obviously...

@NEStalgia The original tribes are no longer here, they have long since been mixed and intermingled with their Spanish conquerors and other people. And obviously, since they weren't adhering to their own way of living anymore, even those descendants ultimately found themselves to be outside of (pure) Mayan culture, and as such the calendar did not apply to them anymore either.

And do keep in mind: we can laugh and ridicule all we want about stuff like this, but these people and other ancient tribes were already completely and correctly measuring time, the movement of stars and planets, and so much more (edit: while we were still under church rule to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe and what not), so there will at the very least always be a kernel of truth in calendars like these, even though they are more religious than scientific in nature. And as previously mentioned, they should always be seen in the right context.

I just HAD to post this brilliant video that I came across today, concerning the validity of EA's continuous weird and rather hostile behavior towards Nintendo, and the idiotic, incoherent and always out of context ramblings of trash bag CEO Andrew Wilson. Someone should sic an adult, PG-rated Dennis the Menace on that particular idiot...

People humor these end of the world things because secretly, everybody wants the world to end.

Anyway, yes the Mayans are only here vestigially, their culture basically went extinct a really long time ago. It just kinda stopped being a thing at some point, I'm not sure if the Spanish conquerors even had a big role in that.

@ThanosReXXX Well, like a "true Scotsman" how do we define "original tribes?" Mayan tribes still exist, still live in their own culture. They don't own their political boundaries, and instead are part of the political/national boundaries set up by the Spanish, but they still have their own Mayan tribal culture as well. Is it the same culture as 800 years ago? No....but...then we're talking about expected "reboots", and sacrificial blood fountains were probably going to go out of style at some point anyway

It's always a catch 22 with ancient tribes when watching modernity. You can look at the remnants of the original tribes and and say "see they're all gone, they're not even living the same society", but that assumes they'd still be living a medieval life if not forced to do otherwise. In reality even were there no conquerors and humanity was all rainbows and unicorn poop, disease would have found them through trade, cultural changes would have changed them through technology, expansion, war, etc. The Mayans had half exterminated themselves in civil war by the time the Spanish got there anyway (the Spanish wouldn't have even made it near the shores otherwise...) and their culture was absolutely going to change, which was the point of their calendar anyway. Even if Mayan civilization would have been forever an empire within it's 8th century borders, it's not like they'd still be building pyramids. They'd be building air conditioned datacenters and game development studios like everyone else......arguably more "Western" than the current remaining Mayan tribes that live traditionally are actually doing.

Speaking about Mayan tribe....
When i was teen, i was a fan of Gali & its varieties from Monster Rancher 2 PS1.
Gali, a ghost monster with Sun mask and Mayan tribe design on his cloak has 12 different designs depend on the Monster's Sub.

Gali

Fanged Mask (Gali + Tiger)

@ThanosReXXX Never trust a Harvard boy who still plucks and colors his brows.....

Seriously though there's a half truth to what he says. I can understand a business decision that says, "Most of the market where Nintendo's customers overlap our market owns a second device that we already support, so we don't see a business opportunity to extend our market that will see a ROI for porting to another system, and converting sales from existing platforms to sales of an additional platform aren't financially beneficial." Normal, sane human businessmen could say something like that, and it would be true, and people would understand the data, and keep going.

But no, not EA's execs. They need to find some other odd spin to give it to make it sound like something more prophetic than a simple cost-benefit decision, and they want to somehow justify their badly made attempts at testing the market as something other than really botched attempts at testing the market. And they need to somehow explain themselves out of the fact that every one of their competitors doesn't seem to struggle with this the same way they do, despite them having more money and market power....

@NEStalgia
What do you think about EA's treatment toward Nintendo during Wii / NDS era ?
There were a lot of games from EA exclusively for Wii & NDS such as MySims series, Charm Girl Club, EA Playground, Sim Animals, etc.
But now there is almost no EA games exclusively for Nintendo.
EA looked Nintendo as their bad luck after Wii U failure.
Parasite symbiosism ???

@Anti-Matter Parasite. EA is always a parasite. They saw Wii & DS take off, they saw the huge casual market to tap on Wii and they took advantage of it. Which is fair, that's what business does.

That's what's so odd about their current position. They're refusing to even be parasites and try to milk Switch's success. For them they have a complex problem where their current business strategy is to consolodate EVERYTHING. They don't want to make new smaller products. They want to streamline their business into 5 or so business units that crank out reliable repeats designed as monetization machines and spend minimum on development with a minimal staff. Adding a "different" platform like Switch doesn't help them do that. They have PC, XB, PS4, 3 almost identical boxes to just copy and paste their product onto for minimal expense. And for that "different" audience they've put their minimal effort into mobile where that Wii/DS market has gone, and is willing to spend, spend, spend in mtx.

On top of that they decided to make all their games in their garbage Frostbite engine to avoid royalties and licensing costs, which means porting it to anything but a PC or PC-like device is nearly impossible.

They don't want to play inside anyone else's business model and learn out to make it benefit them. They want to use their power to shape the whole industry into THEIR business model, so you play by their rules or do without them. In their minds that gives them control over what platforms survive and how the gaming industry is configured. I think it infuriates them that Nintendo manages to thrive without their "approval", making it more difficult by creating an industry/consumer alternative to their model.

@NEStalgia
What do you think about The Sims franchises and Maxis Studio nowadays ?
Can Maxis Studios taken over by healthier publisher and we will see The Sims by different publisher ?

@Anti-Matter There is no Maxis. When EA buys a company they absorb it into EA. They keep the name on the division, but it's not really a company, just a team within the general EA. It can't be sold or spun off, unfortunately. They keep the name, but as soon as they disband a team, they either drop the name and merge personnel into other teams, or shut down the unit entirely. That's what happened to Bioware. They were split up then absorbed into a bigger unit. I think actually one of the people from Maxis was the executive on that unit, but then they consolidated further and put one of the main execs in charge of the whole thing.

Once something gets pulled into EA, it's gone forever.

Ea is toxic always been and whould always stay that way.
They are there for the casual market milking it ALL out

@Morpheel I'm pretty sure the Spanish actually did. Had they never been hunting for gold, in the process of which, pretty much the entire Mayan and Inca kingdoms were infused with European germs to which they had no natural defenses, so at the very least, you could say they expedited the vanishing of these cultures. And from what we've learned in our time, it is still possible for tribes to remain undetected for a REALLY long time. There's a small, isolated tribe living in the jungles of Brazil, that was only first discovered 4 or 5 years ago, regardless of all the modern technology we have, such as satellites and all that. They even killed the camera man who discovered them, and who tried to make contact with them.

Probably because they were afraid of his camera, and/or his vastly different appearance, all of which may very well have seemed like some white-skinned demon with a weapon, to them.

@NEStalgia We officially define original, or rather: pure tribes and their lineage, as not being polluted by other genes. If the indigenous tribes of Brazil and Africa, who live completely solitary, would enter our modern world, and intermingle with us, and besides coupling with people from other origins will also be subject to all the bad things of that modern society, such as (for them) completely unknown bacteria, materials and so on, then that's an absolute factor in being able to conclude that they aren't pure anymore, so there really is no discussion there.

The Mayans have adopted various aspects of the Peruvian and/or Latin American culture, have also incorporated food and clothing items, as well as the language, so no, they are NOT pure Mayans anymore. These original lineages have all but died out, only existing in diluted, genetic form, so only a part of the original markers in their DNA strands still exist.

As for the video: I don't think anyone in his or her right mind can disagree with it, because the points made in it, are all valid and true. Even from my point of view (the sales & marketing one), EA is making stupid, non-valid decisions, based on highly skewed figures and comparisons. First off, they only publish a handful of games on the Switch, and second, even when they DO publish a game on a Nintendo platform, then it's either heavily crippled or altered, such as the various Fifa's both on Wii U and the Switch, or simply too late or too expensive, compared to their efforts on Xbox and PlayStation.

No one in their right mind, and you don't even have to be a sales and marketing guy to understand this, was going to expect a single Mass Effect game, released on a console that was doing less than spectacular, to be selling great, especially at the price point it was sold at, when at the same damn time, the other two consoles were getting the Mass Effect trilogy for the same price or less.

I think that Need for Speed Most Wanted on Wii U and Unravel on Switch are two of the biggest exceptions (effort-wise), but both were released too late, and the former, as mentioned, on a console that wasn't doing so great, so all these factors combined already made for a self-fulfilling prophecy of all of it not being successful. So, hardly an example of business smarts on their part...

And the reasons that d-bag Wilson gave the other day, the ones also quoted in the video, are also largely based on that skewed, almost otherworldly view, almost like they have no clue what's actually happening outside of the EA bubble.

The thing is, like the guy in the video says, smart, business savvy companies go where the money is. EA also did that with the Wii, because there was money to be made, so regardless of the MASSIVE power difference between the three consoles back then, they STILL released their games on it, and even made some exclusive ones. And games that were actually good and fun to play as well.

But now, with a console much closer in power than the Wii was compared to its generational peers, and a console that is literally printing more money each month, they suddenly come out with their same old tired drivel, about people on a Nintendo platform not playing their games, and data showing them "the truth" about on which platforms people prefer to play their games...

Current EA reminds me of the kid that always wanted to play basketball with his worn, semi-deflated ball. If anyone ever wanted to use a different one, they got mad and went home.