Adell

I think this was the peak "useless childhood technology". A huge memory card that you can insert on your controller, has a screen that displays mini-maps or animation while you play, and can be used to play mini-games when you're away from the console. The raddest shit a teenager mind could ever come up with, and naturally fated to failure.

Was going to do a rebug of this post from @Boyks but it was rapidly spiraling into hijack territory, so, here it is on its own.
(That last image is from Canada, by the way. The thumbnail cuts off where it explicitly says it's from Toys 'R' Us' Canada. I'm American and thus the Main Character of Earth, so Canadian prices do not exist to me otherwise.)

Something real weird has happened over the last two decades or so; this sort of fixed understanding of games having a standardized price, and that price going up in any way being a travesty. It's not something I'm not going to argue, as greedflation runs rampant and wages stagnate. What's interesting to me is something that Boyks brought up:
How much the idea of a dollar-to-time ratio for video game prices has taken hold.

The "dollar-to-time" ratio is something that I've seen for the best part of my online life, and also the idea of videogames' pricing not being readjusted. I won't go into a long post over this (yours is already quite informative) but I do want to point out one aspect that people often ignore

First is that we get paid in a hourly fashion. Even if you have weekly/bi-weekly/monthly salaries, its calculated by an hourly wage. When you're renting your life at hourly increments to survive, its not unusual that you would do the same calculations on your free time. Even if it doesn't make logical sense, someone that spends, say, 1 hour at work for $9 would feel "ripped off" by a 40 dollars game that lasts two hours.

And secondly, tied to that same salary idea, is that wages have also not been properly readjusted. Do people want games prices to be "fair" and be sold for how much they are actually worth? Good, then start with pushing to readjusting minimum wage first, because that's what decides how many people are actually going to be able to afford them. 60/70 dollars is already such an ask for people, and one of the reasons streaming/passes have become so popular, to be so myopic to not realize that the reason prices can't be readjusted is due to the purchasing power of the average consumer being so low is distressingly worrying.

I was really a fool to believe that because Dave is the protagonist of the game, he wouldn't be made fun of because of his weight. Nope, every character that you meet gotta remark how its unlikely that someone like him is so capable, that he looks weird, that he's unfit for the job, no matter how hard he works and how well he is at his job.

No fucking way that a "complete" Mythic skin in Overwatch costs more than an AAA game how did we even get here

Mythic Prisms are now being sold through Overwatch 2’s in-game store in three bundles:

• 10 Mythic Prisms - $9.99
• 50 Mythic Prisms - $39.99
• 100 Mythic Prisms - $79.99

A base-level mythic skin, without additional customization options, costs 50 Mythic Prisms, or $39.99. A fully-upgraded mythic skin costs 80 Mythic Prisms. That makes the total starting cost of a complete Mythic skin around $70, depending on which bundle players purchase.