The Batterfly Effect

This is well presented and thorough, I gotta say he does a fantastic job at actually showing the big differences that make it really clear once he gets into it. I expected a lot of the Sega hardware to come up but was surprised to also learn about the current gen version of Super Monkey Ball vs the original.

Eldritch grammar

Jian-Yang!

Extra points for The Simpsons reference in your title, 11/10 post.

How much you wanna make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains?

It’s happening again…

You’ve got red on you.

I can’t believe I never heard about this before. This is fascinating, thank you for sharing. I’m sure some movie producer is trying to get the rights to Ken Ono’s life story if someone hasn’t already!

It’s either quite the paradox or that bear’s info is out in the open.

In other words, it’s either a bear-a-dox or that bear got doxxed.

I know of the Genesis game but never played it (though I do own the newer titles in the series), but did some digging to see what I could find to answer your questions:

Am I imagining this games difficulty? I feel like I am making little progress and I’m always getting ganged up on. / Does this game require a lot of grinding or repeating tasks before moving on?

Everything I’m finding is saying yes to both, with the grinding resulting in the increased money, stats, contacts, equipment and practicing/refining your own strategy for completing runs. Luckily, there are multiple strategies for “quick” grinding, and certain equipment and stats that really help whether it be just straight up powerful stuff or specifically helps to deal with pesky foes like ghouls. Because there are different sections to the grinding with different strategies to doing it efficiently, I’ll leave the specifics out since they get a little spoiler-y in case you want to figure it out on your own. But, do let me know if you’d like me to reply with specific strategies that may be seen as too much of a walkthrough or too spoilery for some (they don’t seem like gigantic story spoilers or anything so if the grinding gets too tedious and you stop having fun, they might be worth knowing about).

Should I be killing these innocents I see on the street? I try to get shadow runs but they seemingly always involve killing ghouls, which bend me over and spank my samurai butt. I’ve put my morals on hold and have been tediously murdering the population for the little nuyen and items they have.

Luckily the Karma explanation section on the Shadowrun strategywiki actually explains this pretty well. I went through it and it looks like a straight up explanation without story spoilers so I feel comfortable just linking it here for you: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Shadowrun_(Sega_Genesis)/Karma#Karma

-is the samurai class the all-rounder character or should I just restart as a shaman or netrunner?

I found a really good explanation on the Shadowrun wiki: https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Shadowrun_(Sega)/Archetype. Thankfully this also gives a much needed explanation of the differences between classes without spoilers. It seems like this info is very important to know upfront depending on what your playstyle is like.

As far as the game itself, I did not play the genesis version but definitely looked into it after I got the Shadowrun trilogy that GOG games gave out for free a few years back. From what I found, the Sega Genesis version is superior to the SNES version in a few ways but a lot of people enjoyed both. I really like the style and concepts presented in the series and the newer Shadowrun trilogy seems to have taken all of that and improved on it, with each game getting better and better at giving the experience intended. I’d say it’s worth taking a look at if you enjoy the Genesis game, or if you really like the elements of the Genesis game but aren’t enjoying it so much, the newer series might be what you’re looking for.

Edit: Spelling, grammar and formatting.

Edit 2: Also, here is a link to a PDF of the original game manual for the Sega Genesis version, which helps navigate the UI and buttons, etc., just in case you need it since manuals were kind of a big deal back in the day!

The premiere episode where they try to survive on minimum wage is still one of the best day-to-day documentations of the struggle and that was almost 20 years ago, well before the price gouging of today. I wish it had as much impact as Supersize Me which actually succeeded at putting pressure on McDonald’s to make changes.

The more I think about this the more curious I am as to what’s on it. Nice work reaching out to the Smithsonian, sometimes you gotta take action to satiate curiosity.

Reminds me of Napoleon Dynamite’s pocket tots.

It’s never explicitly explained, with the most being the other characters saying that they don’t think he’s ever seen the movie Gattaca and doesn’t know what it’s about, and Rafi later confirming he had no idea it was a movie.

Since Rafi’s character is defined by being as uninformed, devoid of all decency, and chaotic as possible, I think that it completely fits though. Especially since most of his lines are improvised by Mantzoukas, who would be clever enough to use a similar-sounding movie title in place of an actual event for Rafi’s character. Adding to that, there is another scene in later seasons where Rafi is getting kicked out of a store and he says that they’ll have to call in the police and the FBI to get him out of there, again shouting “Gattaca” which definitely plays into your theory.

If anyone gets the chance to ask Jason Mantzoukas a question, this is the one to ask about! Until then, I think this just became my headcanon. GATTACA!

I don’t use it very often but I misuse the word “Gattaca” on purpose sometimes. In reality it’s the title of the 1997 film that’s named from the letters G,A,T, and C, referring to guanine, adenin, thymine and cytosine, the four nucleobases of DNA.

But on the TV show The League, the character Rafi (Jason Mantzoukas) screams it as his battle cry during paintball, completely oblivious to what it actually means or that it’s the title of a movie. I urge you all to misuse this word at some point as well – if you ever need to hype yourself up, try screaming “GATTACA!” as your battle cry!

Apparently they’re called “butt babies” according to James Gunn’s Peacemaker.

Yeah this was after his “training” when he went with this as the unhinged-person equivalent of a superhero costume. He’s smirking at the rally he’s at but also trying to blend in by smiling and clapping, even though his new look makes him completely stand out.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen it but it is a total classic that’s worth a rewatch if you don’t remember it!

I did some deep digging and found a few random works resembling the same alien so I think it’s just a common style that I’ve seen just enough to vaguely remember it!

And thanks, when I switched to Lemmy I was thinking about pun usernames and as soon as I thought of it I knew it was the one!

Turns out it’s just the alien equivalent of someone you think you know but “just has one of those faces.” I ended up finding a few different artists that did something similar and I must just have seen them enough to vaguely remember them!

There’s a stock illustration, and stock cartoon, and a coloring book, and an original gallery all from completely different people!