Oh, you mean the company that sells game mats and T-shirts?

Factions. Have different similar groups of enemies/npcs (or potential allies) that are fighting with one another. Have your players throw you for a loop as they scheme and become double agents who end up murdering both factions.

On the other side of this, you have company’s that are in tangential fields looking to grab up a piece of that pie. Electricians, low voltage companies, fucking furniture companies (oh, we totally do audiovisual, that’s similar enough), the C-suite is trying to force their way into this new golden goose and expecting their staff to be able to handle this without training, time, or real hands on experience. And, no, a 2 day workshop from a manufacturer isn’t really “training”, at least not the only training needed…

Love gun?

Or free… If you waste an extra hour and change.

I tried to get a job at LCBO, but apparently “taste tester” isn’t an actual job there, but they were incredibly apologetic that it didn’t exist, and said they would call me if anything changed.

I can sing all the lyrics to Dicke Titten. Does that count?

Well, but you have an international airport close by, a major mall, rent’s in the mail, and you can always find a parking space. Women out number the men two to one and there’s parks and zoos and… Shhh.

Yeah Famous Dave seems to have lost a step since he sold his namesake…

If Tarkin was the right hand, would that make Vader the left hand? Ironic …

Also… I assume quite a few of their best and brightest were on the first death star. That was a large station…

I mean… Dave Anderson’s Old Southern BBQ is called southern… Won some awards.

To be fair, I have only had BBQ in Texas and Memphis, so grain of salt.

https://www.oldsouthernbbq.com/

Else you have black market st. Paul - wouldn’t call it “southern” when it’s -10 degrees and they are smoking up some pork, but damn good smoked BBQ.

https://www.blackmarketstp.com/

Minnesota State fair. Boiled peanuts were added in 2022.

Next?

Or Fallout NV, or the Witcher series (witcher 3 has 450.unique books), or kingdom come deliverance.

What’s ironic is that it’s the liberal-eating-local-buy-local-equality-socialist types that are are subsidizing their ability to live in that small rural town at all.

County State Aid roads, clean water infrastructure, education, business development grants, farm grants… All of that is paid for by big city taxes, which typically (not always… Looking at you Ft. Worth…) lean liberal. In my state one rural community received tax funding at a rate of 480% compare to what they paid in, where as the city center reviebes about 60% of the taxes they pay.

Farm-to-table? Anti-trust regulations? Farm subsidies? The USDA rural development? All paid for in large part by taxes, most of which come from city centers.

And yet exactly what you said - they want liberal big cities gone. They see them as a plight upon the land.

It’s crazy.

Yeah. Not a word. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenbillionaire

And that the Wikipedia article discussing it is in fact wrong as well…

Sorry, there isn’t a lot of contemporaneous discussion referencing microtransactions on an arcade game that came out in the mid-90s… Back then, we paid up and complained about it to your friends or the person who had their coin on the table.

Basically, the gist is during game play, at specific breaks, you could have the opportunity to buy things like characters, combat abilities, infinit resources, etc.

Here you can even watch someone play the game. Miracle of the internet age, you can just open up a browser, type in “double dragon 3 arcade gameplay” and watch someone play the game and live the experience of being 10 years old in the 90s vicariously through someone else.

Or you could even download the PC port, or play it in emulation on your device of choice so you can truly see if those nasty first-hand accounts are telling the truth and you don’t have to question whether those people posting were knowledgeable, astroturfing, etc.

I thought it was going to be hard to find, since this was an arcade game from my childhood… But here’s one article from Neogaf.

If you Google “Double dragon 3 arcade insert coins”, there are reddit articles, forums talking about this, and even the Wikipedia article talks about this being one of the first commercial games to have in-game micro transactions.

"The U.S. version also features item shops where players could use additional credits to purchase in-game items such as weapons, a

dditional moves and new playable characters in one of the earliest forms of microtransactions in a video game, although this system would end up being removed in the later-released Japanese version…"

Also, not defending Bethesda’s practice, but Horse armor also wasn’t their first microtransaction for oblivion…

They also had themes and stuff on the Xbox store, and literally told people that these types of things were going to be released.

To be fair - I didn’t buy oblivion, a friend of mine had it for Xbox, and I went and sailed the kazaa seas and downloaded the base game + all the DLCs without having to pay micro$oft’s ransom. Only pointing out that we knew well before horse armor that gamers will open their wallets for this.

Double dragon 3. You had to put coins into the arcade machine to literally buy items from an in-game store…

Also, second life came out before Oblivion.

There’s also a billionaire commune in South Dakota…

Vivos xPoint