isyasad

About a year ago I got a high-speed (so-called "gaming") hard drive on sale for about 100 USD. It has 8TB, so I kinda stopped uninstalling games or worrying about file sizes.

I don't really play any games that have more than 80GB file size anyway, but I imagine at around 90-100 is when I'd start being reluctant to download.

As for what I prefer, I feel like smaller file sizes usually yield better games on average. If I find a game that has 100MB download, I'm already lookin like this: 😏
I'm pretty happy with anything up to 10GB. If the original Dark Souls (my favorite game) is 8GB, surely that's within an order of magnitude of the maximum file size a game can reasonably be, for me at least.

I think E/F-3/4
That way, you need to slide a tile before playing King's pawn (I assume this costs the turn), meaning at the start of the game, white has to choose to either go for a normal E4 opening or to functionally give up the first turn in order to get a tile available on E3 & E4.
I don't know how this would affect Queen's pawn openings.
I saw this comic yesterday and thought about it for a while though; I think the game would probably be likely to draw by repetition as you are capable of undoing your opponent's last slide, referenced by the alt text:

The draw-by-repetition rule does a good job of keeping players from sliding a tile back and forth repeatedly, but the tiles definitely introduce some weird en passant and castling edge cases.

It would be fun to try out though. You could also add some rules to balance if like "you can't slide a tile if a majority of pieces on it belong to the opponent" or something

I'm not saying you're wrong, but not being able to participate in name-based targeted consumerism is the worst reason I can possibly think of to argue against having a unique name.

Good anime but a TERRIBLE adaptation of the book.
It was interesting to make the boy (I forget his name) the main character, but every other creative liberty they take is baffling.

I'm not complaining about the Ghosts 'n Goblins series though, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is one of the best games ever

I did find it more difficult than DS1 but, as in my metaphor, in a more artificial way. I'm thinking of the nerfed rolling frames (before you level ADP), more difficult parry timing, far more multi-opponent bosses, and especially the way that dying will reduce your max health. Any of these on their own would be totally unremarkable, but all together it feels like there was much more explicit focus on adding things to make it more difficult (which I believe was also reflected in the marketing of the games).

I also think that the atmosphere and artstyle of DS1 was much more serious and unique, whereas DS2 has comparatively much more ghoulish cartoony vibes, which just made it feel incongruent. Eg: the undead are now green and less scrawny, making them seem more like generic goblins rather than how they were in DS1. I just feel like there was an overall shift in the focus to be less about the unique world and its story and more about a Ghosts 'n Goblins -esque rage game.

I don't think Dark Souls 2 is the most difficult in the series but I think it's the first one where the difficulty started to feel unfair and like it was missing the point.

Basically here's the vibes I get from each game:
DS1: A somber and holy journey
DS2: Ghosts 'n Goblins but 3D
DS3: Killing cool bosses is so cool
ER: All of the above

I agree with your critique of souls-likes, but there was something really special about the original Dark Souls that none of its successors really captured. This was before they decided that "ultra-hard" was a good selling point and the attack patterns were far more simple. The atmosphere and difficulty were still there, but they made sense and fit with the rest of the game and its ideas very cohesively.

Not sure if anybody will understand this, but it's like the difference between spicy food that's spicy because it has peppers and spicy food that's spicy because they added a bunch of artificial stuff. Spicier usually means tastier, because it has more of the flavorful peppers. But in the case of, for example, Dark Souls 2 or Elden Ring, it's like they just added a bunch of capsaicin (difficulty) without including any more flavors of the peppers. The difficulty is beyond the degree to which it was artistically meaningful in the original Dark Souls.

Taking their clearance items, something they are trying to get rid of anyway, would actually help them out.

If Alyx counts as Half-Life 3, surely Opposing Force was Half-Life 2, Blue Shift was Half-Life 3, and Alyx is like... Half-Life 7 or something.

Endless Eight

Sports anime about things that can only vaguely be considered sports.

Hibike! Euphonium, Initial D, March comes in like a lion are more obvious ones but band anime like K-On!, Bocchi the Rock!, and Nana also have a similar appeal.
These all have some kind of competition or performance involved, so they are structurally similar to sports anime with character drama and training/practice leading up to a big climax that caps off both the drama and the training.

Maybe this genre isn't so niche as these shows are all very popular, but I don't often see people consider them to be similar in any way.

Good pick. I would say Haruhi Suzumiya, Gamers!, B-Gata H-Kei, and The Tatami Galaxy also fit this description.