HOUSEKEEPING'S PROFILE

In the libertarian wet dream where all education is privatized, yeah, the poor wouldn't find it financially viable (or necessary) to get an education, so most would resign their descendants to a life of poverty and stupidity. To the few that would want to rise above that, they would likely rely on homeschooling and community assistance, which I guess could happen, but without standards, the quality of education could swing pretty drastically; too, hoping for charity is a shitty position to be in.

Betsy DeVos isn't advocating for completely privatizing education, though. She's advocating for school choice, which is just allowing citizens to use the money that would have gone to public schools and put them towards private schools in the form of a voucher. This doesn't sound too bad on paper, but here are some of the problems with that:

-By students leaving public schools, those public schools will lose funding, meaning they'll have to do things like lay off teachers and cut programs in order to maintain operations.
-It's really hard to come up with a set of standards when you have private schools. Teaching evolution, for instance, is something many Christian schools won't do.
-Speaking of, wouldn't supplying federal funding to Christian and other religious schools violate separation of church and state?
-Since schools are now on the market place, "budget" schools could come on the market place that overstuff classrooms, cheap out on school lunches, and have worse quality education; people will buy into that kind of thing.
-Schools closing could cause some students to have to commute long distances in order to get a decent education.
-More people entering into Christian schools would deepen a divide between different sectors of society. What is "true" will become a more relative notion, most problematically towards objectively true things like evolution and the age of the planet.

It's just really shitty since what our schools need right now is MORE funding in order to raise pay and attract more highly skilled teachers, and instead it's going to be defunded even more.

Yeah, it's going to suck. I agree that I'm more worried about the Republicans at large than Trump himself, but the constant public posturing from him is going to wear on me. The environment and education are going to take some pretty big hits; not looking forward to that. Speaking of: did anyone watch the DeVos hearing? That lady is hopelessly inept and pampered; she should be a shitty middle manager somewhere that slows productivity and everyone hates.

I didn't watch much of the inauguration, but I caught a bit of it when I was eating lunch and saw a shot of a ratty looking guy in the audience that was wearing an American flag cape and yawning at Chuck Schumer's speech, so that brightened my day.

I didn't play any of the Phantasy Star games until a ways after their initial release, so my first impression was that most of them don't hold up super well (other than 4). That said, when you put them in historical context, their storytelling was kind of way ahead of the curve (minus 3).

-Phantasy Star 1 came out around the same time as Final Fantasy 1 (end of '87), but it actually had things like named characters and motivations, something Final Fantasy 1 didn't have at all and that series only pursued half-assedly until 4.
-Phantasy Star 2 took this way further, and it only came out at the end of '89. Final Fantasy 4 was still two years away, and while Phantasy Star 2's dialogue was probably about as ham-fisted, it was still trying to tackle more mature subject matter than Final Fantasy would until 6.
-Phantasy Star 3 is a garbage pile and should be forgotten.
-Phantasy Star 4 came out in Japan in '93, which was a year before Final Fantasy 6. At the time, it probably had the strongest storytelling out of any console jrpg up until that point.

They also had some pretty sweet art. I haven't seen a Master System game with better graphics than Phantasy Star, and, really, most nes games don't look as good. The music was killer across the whole franchise (except 3), too.

I think level design wise, though, they're all kind of crappy. They get better as the series progresses, but the first three Phantasy Star games just consist of mazes. Phantasy Star 3 also has the worst world map design in history. The world map is broken into 7 different domes that are connected by caves (aka small mazes) and temples (direct connections that can be accessed towards the end of the game). However, there are only three dungeon tilesets that I can remember, so everything looks really samey, and if you want to get to a specific dome, it's a real pain in the ass. Worse, just because you make it to the right dome doesn't mean that you're in the right position in that dome, and you might not be able to get to wherever it is you're going.

I'm going to stop now or I'm just going to rail on 3. I just played it last week and it's fresh in my mind.

@Craze: Yeah, I mean you should definitely not just copy a game without any kind of innovation, but if Undertale is our example of modern jrpgs done right, it wouldn't exist without a love affair of Earthbound and Shin Megami Tensei. That seems like a better argument to play a vast array of rpgs (both classic and modern) than to only stick to what's new. Also, yeah, pulling from different genres is a great idea and something that rpgs have done throughout their history. Also, double yeah, grew up watching my brother playing nes and got a snes some time in elementary school. I don't think that should be the only frame of reference, but if someone wants a formative understanding of jrpgs, then that's just where it happened and ignoring it because of personal distaste seems like a disservice.

@Cap_H: Playing bad rpgs is a good exercise, too. I went through Phantasy Star 3 recently since I'd never beaten it, and, man, it's got a lot of design problems. Just playing a game keeping player empathy in mind--i.e. you're not just you when you play, but you're THE PLAYER--teaches you a lot about game design. It makes you start thinking about the way games are pushing you psychologically.

Thanks for letting me know about that issue! I hunted down the bug; basically, you had a 1/12 chance of running into that. I've fixed it and updated the download; if you have it saved in there after running into the wolf more than four times, it should tell you to go back to the campsite after the next encounter. I'm sorry you had to go through that! Let me know how things go.