aMockTie

I just discovered the Rob Words YouTube channel recently and this is an excellent video of his.

I especially liked his breakdown of the history of the term eggcorn and how it differs from similar linguistic phenomena.

Oh absolutely. I wasn't trying to argue that they don't require a massive time investment, because they absolutely do. I was only arguing against the assertion that they require a large time investment because the devs didn't respect the player's time, at least in the context of the battle speed of FF8 that was mentioned by OP.

Older games like FF6, Chrono Trigger, etc. don't feel nearly as slow to me as FF8, Chrono Cross, etc. The former are 2D cartridge based games while the latter are 3D CD based games. All of them required pretty big time investments to complete, but battles don't feel slow on the cartridge games.

I don't think it's fair to say that they didn't respect your time. They were designed with specific priorities in mind on the limited hardware that was available at the time.

3D graphics were still considered the hot new thing at the time, and leaning into the spectacle was a selling point of the FF games (you could even argue that's still the case). Now consider that all of that spectacle needs to load in real time from a very slow CD drive, and it starts to make more sense why the animations take so long to complete. The devs are hiding the loading process with long and (by today's standards) very slow animations. It makes the games feel very slow, but I prefer that design choice over showing a generic loading screen or progress bar every few seconds in the middle of a battle.

See my other reply here for a breakdown of what it means to break userspace. One recent example was when Apple removed support for all 32-bit applications in macOS 10.15 Catalina. It's something they do quite regularly with the attitude that app developers can either update their apps, or their apps will simply not run on macOS going forward.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to force developers to update their apps in this way, but it does mean that macOS does not have backwards compatibility at nearly the same level as Windows or the Linux kernel. If you care about running older software (say as a business with a critical application that would be too expensive to replace/update, or to play an old game on your modern machine), macOS is likely a non-starter.

This is a fairly technical meme. Userspace is not the same as user preferences, and in this case refers to application compatibility. Applications written by third party developers (i.e. not the creators of the OS itself) are almost always in userspace and not kernelspace.

Windows and the Linux Kernel devs go to great lengths to ensure that they are backwards compatible, sometimes to a fault. For example, there are certain bugs that are left in place and not fixed because some applications have adapted to the bugs and now rely on that behavior. If the bugs were fixed, suddenly those apps would break and the developers of those apps would need to create an update. That's complicated or even impossible if the app developer has been out of business since the 90s/dies/is locked up in legal limbo/etc.

You can still run games and other software from the 90s on Windows 11, but there is software from the 2010s that won't run on the latest version of macOS because Apple doesn't give a fuck about maintaining backwards compatibility (breaking userspace).