That’s a start I guess, but the joy of their games is playing them on the phone.

Damn, how long has it been now? A decade? I’ve been playing this game almost as long as Minecraft. And just like Minecraft I feel a little guilty having only paid for it once. It’s worth twice whatever they’re charging.

This is one of the best pick-up/put-down time wasters. except it’s not a waste of time, it’s stays very fresh and engaging.

I really wish Mini Motorways wasn’t locked to Apple Arcade. Can you hear me, Dinosaur Polo? RELEASE MOTORWAYS AS A BUYABLE APP!

Wait, for years I’ve heard people refer to them as metroidvania games, in honor of those two games which defined that particular playstyle.

Is this something different?

If you steal enough Pokemon models, the Porygon curse carries over.

The other way to look at this is: Why do characters in a shooter need a listed date of birth?

Is there a secret dating sim rolled into it?

Do I have to answer this question?

Money.

Gold points are earned by buying select Switch games and hardware. You use it to buy stuff online related to the Switch. Nintendo wants to reset everyone’s progress for the Switch 2. If you want to use gold to buy Switch 2 stuff it has to be gold earned buying Switch 2 stuff.

Greedy? Yes. But then again, it’s a rewards program they don’t even have to offer in the first place.

That suits me, I just dumped everything I had into renewing my online subscription. Half off.

It feels like this is the only way Nintendo feels comfortable going from a currency system on the Switch to the exact same thing on the Switch 2. Nary the twain shall meet.

They just don’t want to be hounded by anyone about transferring gold from one system to the other.

Suicide Run - When the Mass Effect franchise peaked.

It should be illegal to apply for patents with the express purpose of suing someone else over what is now prior art.

We already have Luigi Health Claim Adjuster.

The Sims 2 has always been on the Mac App Store under Aspyr.

It still gets random updates to account for system-level changes.

Seriously.

Doesn’t one of the most powerful company on Earth give its employees excellent health insurance? Aren’t they invested in the wellbeing of a valuable employee?

…Come again?

Earth has a currency problem.

Back in his day, he was the king of Mario and he was the cool kid at school and all the girls sat with him at lunch.

“I’m old, and I’m not happy!” - Angry Old Man, SNL

Mario Odyssey seemed weird to me when I started playing. Not the controls or the difficulty curve, the look and feel. The juxtaposition of Mario and all the related Nintendo characters and objects with a super realistic depiction of an alternate Earth made me wonder where this idea came from.

But the more I’ve played it, the more natural it feels, as strange as that is. The controls are so precise and reliable. There are parts that frustrate me, but if I work at them I eventually overcome whatever obstacle it was. Now I find myself just thinking about it fondly and wanted to jump back in and redo parts I enjoyed.

It’s on the same level as Wonder for me. Wonder for being the best example of traditional and contemporary Mario, and Odyssey for throwing all the rules out the window and still feeling like a Mario game.

Maybe Abe Simpson should get a pro controller.

Then credit them, cowards.

I need context.

So many Japanese creatives, so many creatives everywhere, swear up and down they’re at the end and can’t continue on.

Guess what? They keep coming back. How many time has Hayao Miyazaki come back from retirement now?

The only thing that stops people like this is death.

Makes sense, when Sunshine was made the only other 3D Mario was 64, so it used the same formula on a larger and more elaborate scale.

But then something unexpected happened, they made bonus levels that were capsule worlds that looked a lot like classic Mario games. And players wanted more of that so the Galaxys were basically that, fleshed out into full games.

Odyssey is a natural progression of Galaxy’s formula. But 3D World is not a natural progression of Sunshine, its New Super Mario Bros. in 3D.

It would be nice to get more 64/Sunshine-type games.

What they need is another Super Mario 3D World, that isn’t a port from a previous system. Bowser’s Fury is a half game.

Odyssey is fantastic, but 3D World is a pitch-perfect three-dimensional adaptation of the original platformer.

I would say make the colors brighter, the size looks perfect to me.

Make DEVELOPERS pay a subscription and remind them they don’t actually own the content voice actors lease to them?

How diabolically just.

Please make the dudebros go crazy by hiring an unconventionally beautiful MMA fighter to play Aloy.

Is there a chance that Popeye movie might get released now?

That was beautiful.

Blue Shift is much shorter than Half-Life or Opposing Force, but it is a lot of fun to try to get out of Black Mesa alive without a power suit or excessive weaponry.

Still waiting for Mini Motorways to not be gatekept by Apple Arcade on iOS.

I’ve been playing Mini Metro for almost ten years now.

Does it make that same unsettling sound?

Loved Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Back when expansions were their own games.

“Remember, no pies.”

Always do 100 coins when collecting red coins, the levels change or open up more during that star. There’s only a couple of stages with just enough coins for a 100-coin star. Most have way more coins than needed.

The water in Mario 64 was a surreal experience for me. More contemplative than scary. I was disappointed by the artificial barriers and would day dream about what was beyond them. I drew fake maps in a notebook that showed how the castle connected to the rest of Mushroom Kingdom.

The only thing scary about the water was the first time I saw the eel because the size of it surprised me and the submarine level with the shark. Once, I dreamed that the first part of that level was dark and I had to avoid the shark without being able to see it.

A real “checks notes” moment.

“Boring conversation, anyway.”

There are unused assets in the original World of Warcraft that suggested a player housing system was being developed but never finished. The idea is as old as MMORPGs are.

The Anime/Manga/video game series dotHack, which is about a fake MMORPG, predates WoW by several years and has player housing for some of the characters.

What’s next, a dance studio?

I like to invoke the old magic of installing from a disc.

Everyone is very familiar how Konami ran Kojima out of the company and then ran Metal Gear into the ground.

They’re desperate to keep it solvent.

I hope they fail and Kojima gets to buy back his IP at pennies on the dollar.

“Okay, I found a great NAS made by another company.”

D-Link: “No, wait!”

The most amazing part was the claim that the in-game soundtrack was reencoded as lossless audio.

I looked at the new audio as a spectrograph and compared it to the original MP3s. Not only were they the same level of compression as the originals, they were the same exact graphs. The same files, renamed from .mp3 to .flac.

That’s some proper gaslighting!

Without Kojima, that’s simply not going to happen.