A disappointing port is what Persona 4 Golden is in comparison to the original

A still from Silent Hill 3 (2003), directed by Kazuhide Nakazawa

Since I've been slowly playing Persona 4 for the third time, I'd like to briefly compare Persona 4 for the PlayStation 2 to Persona 4 Golden for the PlayStation Vita and PC. I got to experience playing Persona 4 for the first time by playing Persona 4 Golden on my PlayStation Vita several years ago. The Vita is the first handheld game console that I bought, and, since Persona 4 Golden is considered by many people to be the best video game on the Vita, I bought a physical copy of the game too. At that time, I hadn't played any other Persona game before and I didn't know anything about the Persona franchise. My experience of playing Persona 4 Golden was very good. I must admit that I managed to waste a lot of time at the beginning of the game because I wasn't familiar with the gameplay. There are usually important and useful things to do every day in the game, in the afternoon and in the evening, but I unknowingly wasted time by skipping activities in order to get to the next main story moment as quickly as possible. Therefore, Persona 4 is a video game that teaches players to effectively manage time. Since Persona 4 Golden is an "enhanced port" of the original PS2 game, and since there are no major gameplay or story changes in the port, Persona 4 Golden became one of my favorite video games. But not long after I finished playing Persona 4 Golden, I began to play the original game, since I own a Slim PlayStation 2, and completed it as soon as I could. Doing this changed my opinion of Persona 4 Golden and reaffirmed my belief that video game remakes and remasters are almost always worse than the originals. I'm not saying that Persona 4 Golden is a terrible video game, but I am saying that it's inferior to the original. Why do I think so? There are several reasons. First of all, the opening movie in Persona 4 Golden is worse than the opening movie in the original. For some reason, the developers decided to make everything in Persona 4 Golden brighter and more colorful. In addition, the new designs, like the ones in the opening movie, are worse than in the original. They're both drawn worse and are less fitting to the game. Persona 4 Golden was released four years after the original and perhaps the team that worked on creating Persona 4 Golden was different than the one that worked on the original. I wouldn't really say that Atlus began to slip by the time Persona 4 Golden began to be developed because Atlus released Persona 5 four years later, in 2016. Persona 5, like the original Persona 4, is a great video game. But I would say that the design choices began to get worse. As much as I like Persona 5, I don't consider it to be as good as Persona 4. It's possible, however, that Atlus began to really slip after releasing Persona 5. What I mean is that this company possibly can no longer create great and original games. If the next Persona game turns out to be disappointing or somewhat disappointing, like how Persona 3 Reload was disappointing, I think that it will be possible to say that Atlus is slipping, although one can say the same thing about the entire video game industry now and not just about this one company. Second of all, the added content in Persona 4 Golden makes the game worse and not better. Almost all of this added content makes the game longer, more tedious, and less interesting. It clashes with the original content too. For example, I don't want to spend more time on catching bugs, on fishing, or on sitting at a cafe. The rewards for these activities are minor at best in Persona 4 Golden. They take time and attention away from what's important. In the original game, the countryside town of Inaba seemed creepy, mysterious, and even menacing because the designs in the game weren't bright and colorful all the time. Bad things happen in Persona 4, and the story is a murder mystery. It often rains in Inaba. The TV world is an oppressive place where people can get killed. The original Persona 3 wasn't a bright and colorful game either. It's even darker than Persona 4 when it comes to the story and the game's main dungeon, Tartarus. Like Persona 4, it has excellent designs and artwork. But Persona 4 Golden adds things that make the setting and the story less important, less relevant, and less monumental. In the original game, I often noticed the backgrounds, which actually look interesting and rather beautiful. But in Persona 4 Golden, because of the changes in design and color, the backgrounds look somewhat bland, even if they look very similar to the original backgrounds. So, Persona 4 Golden is actually a downgrade because the design changes and the new content clash with the original content and the story, and they make the game cluttered, less significant, and less appealing. Persona 4 Golden is readily available for purchase, but the superior original can only be bought in used condition now and only for the PS2. The only reason why I'm playing Persona 4 Golden again is because I bought it on Steam for my PC a few years ago when it was on sale. Playing this game on a bigger screen than the one on the Vita made me notice the negative changes to the graphics even faster. Otherwise, I would have been playing Persona 4 for the PS2 again instead. It's amazing that many other great video games got released for the PS2 too. These games look, play, and sound epic because the people that created them were masterful in their field. I'm now slowly playing Silent Hill 3 (2003) again on my PS2, and to me this game is just another example of how great video games were for the sixth-generation of consoles. Nowadays, I try to use the internet as little as possible because so many websites feature pop-up ads and video ads. Well, even years ago, when I began to use the internet, and especially websites like YouTube, I knew that the authorities would sooner or later place the internet under tight control. This has been achieved thanks to copyright claims, censorship, restrictions, and perhaps even threats. Therefore, I've never put a lot of time into developing my YouTube channel, for example. YouTube is a useful website, but, the last time I checked, it was the same as it has been for a long time. There's a whole lot of propaganda and there are a bunch of reactionaries and conspiracy theorists yelling into the void, accomplishing nothing, and repeating establishment propaganda. It's really no wonder that the authorities in the USA are trying to ban TikTok, since it's the only popular website where "the Right" doesn't dominate. Although I've never made provocative or political channels, I must say that a number of my channels on YouTube and on other websites got taken down because of copyright claims and censorship. The managers of a few websites couldn't even tolerate me posting some history videos on their websites. But even back then I didn't think that what would finally discourage me from seriously using the internet would be advertisements. I didn't realize that ads would become so numerous and so annoying that they would make many websites intolerable. This is kind of funny. Anyway, there is a gamer who posts content on YouTube. He may be the most American gamer around because he always curses and calls anything that he doesn't like communism. But this reactionary gamer admittedly makes entertaining videos and he makes some good points. When it comes to the video game industry, he makes interesting observations from time to time. I didn't seriously think about the state of the video game industry until I watched some of his videos. He has obviously played many more video games than me, and he has obviously thought about the state of the video game industry a lot more than me. He considers the period from 1993 to 2011 to be the the golden age of gaming. He said, "Games were so f*cking good for so long. They were seen as f*cking toys until of course the normies picked them up. And now that the normies are in, they want to change everything and f*cking ruin it. That's all you f*ckers know how to do." He thinks that many disappointing AAA (high-budget) video games began to be released when the eighth generation of consoles came around and that few good AAA video games began to get made. Among these disappointing games, he mentioned Resident Evil 3 (2020), The Last of Us Part II (2020), Fallout 4 (2015), Watch Dogs (2014), Mortal Kombat 11 (2019), Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015), Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), Batman: Arkham Knight (2015), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016), Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017), Super Mario Odyssey (2017), Middle-earth: Shadow of War (2017), Destiny (2014), and Yooka-Laylee (2017). This sounds about right to me, although I don't agree with absolutely everything that he says. I haven't played many of the video games that got made since 2012, especially when it comes to the ones that got made for home consoles, although I have played Persona 4 Golden, which turned out to be a disappointment in comparison to the original. The video game industry today isn't dominated by only one company. Therefore, one can't lay the blame on a single culprit. However, what I have noticed is that the companies that made great video games in the 1990s and in the 2000s are no longer capable of making great video games. One example is Square Enix. Another example is Konami. Another example is Capcom. These and other companies try to follow trends. They make sequels, remakes, and remasters. Of course, one of the reasons why these companies engage in such practices is because it usually costs a lot of money to make AAA video games now. If you make an expensive video game, and it doesn't sell well, you will incur a big loss. Therefore, they try to play it safe. I know that the video games that got made before the PlayStation 4 was released usually had interesting and memorable stories and not only good gameplay. In short, they offered what Hollywood has been failing to deliver since the 1980s and the 1990s. Is this still the case? It seems that this isn't the case anymore. For example, I can claim that I played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) and God of War (2018), which are great games, but I must admit that I wasn't "blown away" by the stories of these games. By the way, I think that the story of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was inspired by the film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984). When it comes to places in Breath of the Wild where it's nice to listen to music and look at the scenery, one of my recent discoveries is the pond near Keh Namut Shrine. Therefore, it's clear to me now that the video game industry is in worse shape than I had thought, at least when it comes to creativity and originality. Some people have been complaining about the shortage of good AAA titles and console exclusives for the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X, but Nintendo isn't doing so well either when it comes to good console exclusives. Nintendo has admittedly released many good modern AAA titles on the Nintendo Switch, which aren't Switch exclusives, and it has released a number of excellent Wii U exclusives too. But Nintendo's Switch exclusives have been mostly disappointing. The Wii U may have been a commercial failure, but it had a number of excellent exclusives.

In 'Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization' (1964) by Adolf Leo Oppenheim, I have already come across plenty of interesting information, although so far I've read only 32% of the text. The society of Mesopotamia had a big influence on many of the societies that surrounded it and on the societies that came after it. The following is a quote from the chapter about economic facts. "In a letter from Ugarit we read in the awkward Akkadian characteristic of these texts one of those revealing sentences that shed more light on the economic life of the time than hundreds of monotonous and lengthy tablets: "Give (in the meantime) the 140 shekels which are still outstanding from your own money but do not charge interest between us - we are both gentlemen!" This curious and unique reference to a status situation mentioned for the purpose of influencing an economic relationship acquires meaning and significance when one connects it with a passage in Deuteronomy, 23:20 (and in Leviticus, 25:36-37), "Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury." We see that both the Ugarit letter and the passage from the Old Testament exhibit the same disinclination to use capital as a commodity. Among the Old Assyrian traders, however, the taking of interest and of compound interest is completely acceptable. Of course, they prefer to pay interest at the rate "one brother charges the other." It is well known that the biblical attitude toward what we translate as "usury" has had a far-reaching and fateful impact upon the economic history of the West. The prohibition of usury was taken over by the early Church and maintained in force with remarkable inflexibility through the entire medieval period in the face of all the pressure generated by slowly but profoundly changing economic conditions. Only the dislocation of the ideological background of the medieval civilization in Europe - the Reformation - was able to break the stranglehold of the traditional attitude of the Church upon the economic life of Europe. Throughout the long theological discussions in scholastic as well as in popular literature (up to the seventeenth century), "capitalistic" concepts of money were often linked with the name of Babylon, a name representing a city rich and materialistic, and eminently efficient social and economic organization." Similar information can be found in Paul Carus's 'The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil' (1899). "It goes without saying that the old biblical legends, far from losing their value by being proved to be much older, gain an additional value; they are now more interesting to us than ever. Formerly the biblical account of the creation was thought to be the very beginning of the religious evolution of man, but now we know that it is merely a milestone on the road. It is neither the beginning nor the end. It is simply the summary of a long history of anxious inquiry and speculation, which would have remained forgotten had we not discovered the Assyrian tablets bearing witness to the aspirations that preceded the composition of the Old Testament. But there is one thing which seems strange: the Chaldean belief in the immortality of the soul found no echo in the literature of the Jews. Did they refuse to incorporate it into the Hebrew world-conception because they disbelieved it; or did they merely ignore it because they were too realistic and would not allow themselves to be carried away by illusions even of the loftiest kind? The civilisation of Assyria and Babylon was more brilliant, more powerful, and more cosmopolitan than the civilisation of Israel. The most characteristic features of the Persian religion after the lifetime of Zoroaster consist in the teaching that a great crisis is near at hand, which will lead to the renovation of the world called frashokereti in the Avesta, and frashakart in Pahlavi. Saviours will come, born of the seed of Zoroaster, and in the end the great Saviour who will bring about the resurrection of the dead. He will be the "son of a virgin" and the "All-conquering." His name shall be the Victorious (verethrajan), Righteousness-incarnate (astvat-creta), and the Saviour (saoshyant). Then the living shall become immortal, yet their bodies will be transfigured so that they will cast no shadows, and the dead shall rise, "within their lifeless bodies incorporate life shall be restored." The Persian belief in the advent of a saviour who will make mankind immortal seems to reappear in an intenser form in the days of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, who preached that the kingdom of heaven is near at hand. St. Paul still believed that the second advent of Christ would take place during his own life-time. The dead who sleep in the Lord will be resurrected, and the bodies of those that are still in the flesh will be transfigured and become immortal. The influence of Zoroaster's religion upon Judaism and early Christianity cannot be doubted."