For what it's worth, this was largely my own opinion, and on a personal level, I found 4 to be enjoyable, if vaguely bland, while Apocalypse was the first mainline SMT game whose story and characters I legitimately enjoyed and found engaging, even while I was insulting Asahi every time she opened her goddamn mouth. Yeah, the game falls victim to the whole "this entire mess would have never happened if the main characters weren't fucking idiots" syndrome, but at least I felt something while the plot was happening, which is more than I could say about SMT 1, 2, & 4 and their cardboard cutout characters with the depth of a sheet of paper. (Not to say that I didn't enjoy SMT 4's story at all, I found the world and overall plot engaging. But the character writing and dialogue is some of the weakest I've ever seen, and I've read bad fanfiction. I've written bad fanfiction.)

OK, so I actually know a fair bit about this series since I went through (a good chunk of) it semi-recently myself!

The mainline SMT games all take place in post-apocalyptic Japan, where your party is yourself, maybe a few other humans, and most importantly, demons that you recruit, level up, and combine together to make new, more powerful ones. Like someone else said, SMT is sort of like Pokemon, but instead of fighting with cute electric rats and furry bait, you fight alongside various mythological figures (...and furry bait). The SNES games are first-person, grid-based dungeon crawlers, but later games largely drop the grid-based aspect.

Anyway, I started out with Shin Megami Tensei 1 on the SNES. It was pretty darn enjoyable, though I used a walkthrough--if you play the SNES games, I strongly recommend doing this, because both games are basically one giant labyrinth with an overworld. A walkthrough is pretty much mandatory to navigate which demons are worth recruiting and merging together, and to find the various secrets and treasures scattered throughout the world. A nice thing about the first game is that the level scaling is well-paced; as long as you don't run away from battles and are smart about your recruitment and demon fusions, you should generally be able to keep up with the power level of your enemies.

As for SMT 2... well, it spikes the difficulty up much higher than the first game. to the point where I actually wound up giving up about 10-15 hours in, even with a walkthrough and using save states. I had reached a point where the enemies were outleveling my demons and killing them over and over, I couldn't easily afford to revive them, and I was having trouble recruiting new demons to merge with my existing party into more powerful ones--there were multiple instances where even when I used save states to explore the demon's entire recruitment dialogue tree, it either took my valuable items/money and ran away, or attacked me. Forced to choose between sitting and grinding for at least 5-10 hours, or moving on, I moved on.

SMT 3 on the PS2 is the first real "modern" shin megami tensei game, and it introduces the press turn mechanic that forms the core of the mainline SMT series from that point on. Press turns work by giving each side a number of actions they can take based on how many members are in the party--in other words, if you have 4 members active in the party, you have 4 actions. If you hit an enemy's elemental weakness, you're given bonus actions you can take (up to a max of 2x your base actions), and if you miss an enemy, or attack them with an element they nullify, reflect, or absorb, you lose turns. Crucially, this also applies to your opponents as well, making combat tense, tactical, and deep: your demon is the only one that uses ice magic, which the enemy is weak to, but your demon is weak to lightning and the enemy can use that element. Do you switch out this demon to cover your own weakness, or keep it in to better exploit the enemy's weakness? Remember, if the demon dies, you not only have to spend a turn summoning a replacement, but your baseline actions go from 4 to 3, so you're penalized twice.

Admittedly, I didn't play SMT 3 myself, because it has That One Fucking Spell called Beast Eye, which is something only opposing demons can use, and spends a single action to grant the AI two turns (or Dragon Eye, which grants four turns). This gives SMT 3 a reputation for being incredibly difficult, even by the standards of SMT, and frankly I had no appetite for that after having just given up on SMT 2 over difficulty. That said, everybody I speak to who has played SMT 3 says that it's one of the best RPGs on the PS2, however, so it's still highly recommended, and later games mercifully got rid of Beast/Dragon Eye.

SMT 4 is... odd. It starts out looking like a much more generic fantasy setting, but it most assuredly is not. It's good, but it also very clearly is straining against the limits of the system it's on. SMT 4 Apocalypse is also extremely good, and I would suggest playing SMT 4 just to play SMT 4 Apocalypse. I won't say too much about SMT 5 except to note that it's also good and I recommend it strongly.

There's also Persona. Where SMT is a post-apocalyptic dungeon crawler, Persona (at least from 3 onwards) focuses much more heavily on time management. You play as a Japanese high school student in Persona, so a lot of your activities are based around juggling a schedule: attending classes, going to after-school activities, working part-time jobs, spending time with your various party members to build relationships, and saving the world in between. Persona is also different in that instead of having mythological figures fight alongside you as distinct party members, they're instead Personas that act more like Stands from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure--they just give humans the ability to cast magic. Notably, the main character is typically the only one who can change their persona-- your companions all have their own persona, but they're stuck with the one they have, which conveniently gives them their own static elemental strengths/weaknesses and roles. The other big difference is that (up until Persona 5) the main dungeons were more roguelike, procedurally-generated designs, than the static designs of mainline SMT.

If you decide to play Persona, I'd start with Persona 3--either Reload (the recent remaster) or Persona 3 Portable (which has some extra content like that wasn't included with the remaster for some godforsaken reason). DO NOT start with Persona 5 like I did--to be blunt, it's way more polished than 3 or 4, and it'll be hard to go back and enjoy the previous games afterwards. You can also technically start with Persona 1 and 2, but they're waaay different than the later entries--they lack the time management/dating sim aspect entirely, and honestly there isn't a whole lot of reason to play them unless you wanna beat the shit out of Hitler for some reason.

I'm utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the "I have XX decades of experience" types come from. They're also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I'm talking to them it's fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they're at risk of losing all their data, and that's usually enough to get them to shut up.

But god, some of the tickets I've seen from other employees...

In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:

• Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT

• Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.

In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and "please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren't debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there's a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won't call you to handhold you through this, I'd literally just be reading the steps in the article" is pure suffering.

I see you read Piers Anthony too.

my company announced today that they were going to start a phased rollout where AI would provide first responses to tickets, with it initially being "reviewed" by humans with the eventual goal being it just sending responses unsupervised. The strength of my "OH HELL NO" derailed the entire meeting for a solid 15 minutes lmao

Yeah, IIRC a knight's suit of armor and weapons alone were worth more than most people in medieval times would ever earn in their entire lifetime. Knights traveling on horseback were the modern day equivalent of a celebrity rolling around town in a Ferrari

My thinking in regards to the humor is that it's very strongly late 90s/early 00s edge humor. A lot of the game's humor is based in cute, cartoony characters swearing, drinking, fucking (off-screen), and being maimed and blown up into gruesome chunks of low-poly meat. It's also very British--Rare is based in the UK, and it really shows through in this game, from the characters' accents, to the whole game's plot being kicked off by Conker getting lost while drunkely stumbling home from a pub that wouldn't be out of place in an English village.

If you're a fan of, or nostalgic for, the style of edgy shock humor animation from that period--things like classic South Park, Happy Tree Friends, (jfc how do I say this without getting automodded) R-worded Animal Babies, or Scoundrels (a British skit comedy show starring puppet animals), this game will be right up your alley. Even if you're not, I'd still say to give it a try--underneath the swearing, poop jokes, dated movie references, and low-fidelity gore, it's still a platformer by Rare while they were at the top of their game.

Theoretically it can happen. In practical terms, 99% of those cases are out of three things:

• A charade to get an angry customer to go away (pretending to fire an employee)

• The last straw in a series of incidents that add up to justify firing the employee (i.e. the employee has repeatedly made a mistake with no improvement over a long period of time)

• Misconduct egregious enough to warrant firing them on the spot (for example, the employee punches a customer, or shows up to a job site blackout drunk)

The remaining 1% of cases are truly shitty managers that are a nightmare to work for.

Wax and parchment paper have VERY similar branding in the US, to the point where it's easy to confuse the two

Works better than non-stick, and keeps the pan clean enough for immediate reuse, which is really nice e.g. if you're baking multiple batches of cookies for a holiday event

Not OP, but I think the point they're making is that LTT screwed up the video, and that the drama sparked from LTT's screwup gave Billet a lot of publicity they wouldn't have had otherwise.

Personally, I'd trade the publicity for my only working prototype and $2,000 GPU back and a video that didn't shit on me, but if you believe any publicity is good publicity...