Chrono Trigger. It’s basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.
Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.
Ultima Underworld
It came out before Doom, had full isometric 3D environments including looking up and down, and contained immersive sim and RPG elements. All the ingredients of a modern first person action RPG… in 1992.
To avoid paying royalties, I imagine. Hollywood accounting is craaaaazy.
Measure of a Man was groundbreaking but feels pretty dated to watch. Back when it aired, the idea that sentient AIs should be treated as humans was far from the mainstream. Today, we’ve seen so many sympathetic robots in pop culture (including, of course, Data) that the situation is reversed: the arguments aired against Data in this episode seem shockingly bigoted.
Imagine if the plot contrived to make Riker get up in front of the court to argue for slavery – even if he’s clearly labelled as playing devil’s advocate, it feels beyond the pale.
Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.
Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.
To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.
By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.
The people in charge of TNG by that point were creatively bankrupt. It would have been a fiasco.
Also, the idea just doesn’t fit Star Trek. It isn’t a comic book franchise, where fan-pleasing callbacks and crossovers are baked into the formula. In Star Trek media, callbacks and crossovers have tended to be some of the worst stories.