CoH’s control scheme requires both hands, so I can’t recommend it to OP. But I’ll also have to say that I have the opposite opinion, CoH was good for a casual playthrough but wasn’t something I could sink several hundred hours into like the original. The overworld made runs much longer and much more repetitive since a lot of it is always the same.

• Anything turn-based, especially mouse-driven titles. Slay the Spire, Chess, Riichi Mahjong, Balatro, etc.

• Puyo Puyo Champions has a one-handed preset in its controller options. Do note that if you want to play online, only Switch is active since that’s where Japan is, I can’t recommend the game on other platforms.

• Kirby Air Ride uses only one button + analog stick, and any button works, so you can use L. Would have to be left hand for the original, but the sequel coming out later this month has a detailed accessibility menu, which I bet will include right-handed settings.

• Crypt of the Necrodancer is designed to be playable with just four arrows, in case anyone wanted to play it on a DDR mat. Which also means you can play with arrow keys or WASD.

• Rhythm Doctor is actually just one button.

• Rhythm Heaven Fever uses only A and B. Rhythm Heaven DS uses only stylus. The rest of the series uses d-pad as well though, so those are less playable.

• Come to think of it, any DS game that only uses stylus.

Vampire Savior

Just a few days ago, at a local Vampire Savior tournament. Grand Finals ended with me sniping Q-Bee’s bubble super with a callout from B.B. Hood’s gun super. Wish I had a clip, but it wasn’t streamed or recorded.

Also had a few good laughs playing Skullgirls earlier that night at the same local, chaotic shit always happens in that game.

Romhacks:

• Link to the Past Randomizer - Generates a shuffled ROM with all chests and items swapped around, sending you on a wild goose chase through Hyrule trying to find everything required to beat Ganon. Has a LOT of settings to play around with.
• Link to the Past/Super Metroid Combo Randomizer - Like the above, but with both games combined into a single ROM using some elaborate witchcraft. Certain doors take you from one game to the other, and the item pools are shuffled together so you’ll have to go back and forth between Hyrule to find Metroid items and Zebes to find Zelda items. It’s a bit imbalanced by the fact that LttP is a much bigger game than SM with far more items and locations, but I recommend playing through it once for the sheer novelty.
• Celeste Mario’s Zap & Dash - A metroidvania running in SMB1’s engine. As the name suggests, it’s heavily inspired by Celeste and ports in mechanics from that game.

Standalone fangames:

• Panel Attack - Open source clone of Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Puzzle League/Puzzle Challenge/oh my god Nintendo please pick a name and stick with it featuring netplay and modding support.
• AM2R - Another Metroid 2 Remake. Do note that I’ve heard a big 2.0 update is supposed to be coming soon, so you may wish to wait for that.

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.

Depends on the game. If it’s a good fit, go ahead and add it, but if it’s not, it’s better for a game to focus on doing one thing well than two things poorly.

DRM-free games can be freely copied, nothing’s stopping you.

Pirates have to crack games that don’t have DRM-free versions available, games that aren’t on GOG.

We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns on hardware. IMO, anything that can’t run on Switch 2 probably deserves to be scaled back anyway.

Will never be anywhere close to what Newgrounds and Kongregate were at their peak.

Porting two existing titles is hardly what I would consider a new golden age.

Browser games peaked in the 00s-10s as the most accessible place to publish a simple indie project. It was simple and easy for beginner developers to just make something and put it out there, and for those that took off there was a decent pipeline to monetize a hit by licensing it to sites that would share a cut of ad revenue.

But now, mobile and Steam have replaced that as the go-to target for developers. They’ve gotten to a point where they’re just as accessible to develop for, and if you want to make a living off your work you’ll have a much better shot that way.

Plenty of great tools still exist for HTML5 development, if developers wanted to they could, and some do. Itch.io has a good amount of new browser games, they exist.

But there’s never going to be anything as big as Newgrounds or Kongregate. Those days are gone for good.

Nintendo doesn’t sell products that are branded as Switch but don’t actually play Switch games.

At one point MaxEnt had announced an Avatar fighting game, but then silently canceled it when everything imploded. So this appears to be a revival of that.

Over a month ago we were told that TFH’s IP had been sold to a new owner, and they’d have an announcement within a month. Announcement still hasn’t happened, but the publisher on Steam was silently changed to Gameplay Group International, along with Diesel Legacy’s.

FTL

Yeah, there’s definite value in having these boards to ask questions. It just… needs moderators to be more proactive in dealing with bad actors.

Don’t want to manage your own forum, then disable user posts entirely.

I don’t believe that’s an option. I know one indie dev that actually told me they wished they could just not have a Steam forum because they hate it.

Steam Forums are one of the worst hellholes I’ve seen on the modern internet, and Valve does nothing. Any game that gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd ends up having its board seiged until it’s unusable for any kind of actual discussion.

TIC-80 Is a different fantasy console, not compatible for Pico-8. There are open source Pico-8 emulators though, including a libretro core.

That’s an answer for you as a consumer, but the article is from the perspective of the industry. If no one ever bought new games, game development would not be sustainable.

There are three tiers of activity:

• Active enough that I can queue at any time of day and find opponents close to my skill level with good ping
• Active enough that I can queue at peak hours and find opponents
• Need to schedule games via Discord matchmaking

If I really love the game enough, I’ll put up with jumping through hoops to play it, but it does get frustrating when the games I like are a lot more convenient to play than the games I love.

The trailer was made entirely within the game’s very robust level editor. At the end it actually shows the level editor project.

Kirby Air Ride

The technical merits were why FF7 was so impactful as a cultural landmark of video game history.

Is Trails a good game? Sure.

Is FF7 the right comparison to invoke? Not even close.

The big thing about FF7 was that it came out during a critical transition period for the industry, and Squaresoft put the highest budget of any video game to date into making sure FF’s jump to 3D graphics was as explosive as possible. The game was heavily marketed on its technical merits, boasting about how everything this game does could only be possible on PS1. It’s full of setpiece moments that are literally just Squaresoft trying to show off their VFX budget (this is why summon cutscenes are so absurdly long). And it blew audiences away because no one had never seen anything like it before. FF7 was a revolution.

Trails certainly has good reason to be beloved by its niche fanbase, but by 2004, it really wasn’t doing anything super unique compared to its contemporaries from the same time period. It’s a polished game, but I can’t describe it as anything more than an evolution.

What part of this is comparable to FF7?

This comparison really feels strained. FF7 was the PS1’s biggest game, and by far. It was a revolution that shook the entire industry.

Trails is a cult classic that’s beloved by a niche fanbase, and I’m happy to see this kind of game get a shot at wider recognition here, but its impact was in no way even remotely comparable to FF7.

The original was part of a trilogy, this is a remake of that same first game in the trilogy.

Trump certainly isn’t helping, but it’s a number of factors put together. Moore’s Law is slowing, and one effect of that is that manufacturing existing tech isn’t getting cheaper either.

I still buy physical whenever possible. But I’ve also come to accept that I’m a dinosaur for doing so. PC ditched physical a very long time ago, mobile never knew it to begin with, it’s a matter of time before consoles drop it someday too. It’s inevitable.

I think a lot of people still see physical as the most secure form of preservation, that in 50 years when download servers are gone we’ll still have our discs. But in an era of patches, updates, and DLC, how often is that 1.0 on the disc actually going to be the version you want preserved in the future?

Asking myself that question sort of forced me to acknowledge that my preference for physical media may just be more sentimental than practical.

It’s not at all uncommon for games with an online component to have elements you need to play online to access. That’s been a part of Pokemon since the series first added online play. Hell, even before that, Pokemon was conceived from the beginning to be a social game, built around the Game Boy’s Link Cable if you want to see and do everything. It’s never been exclusively singleplayer.

All I’m saying is that if you count online play as though it was part of a game’s cost, you should be doing the same thing for games on other platforms too. You can’t selectively pretend it only counts here.

Why do you only single out Nintendo for something that Sony and Microsoft charge even more for?

It seems a little disingenuous to single them out this way, especially when the competitors you’re strangely silent on are more expensive.

Then you should be consistent and count the cost of PSN and XBL the same way.

I feel like we’ve long reached the point where the benefit of top-of-the-line hardware just isn’t worth it. IMO, Switch 2 ought to be enough to target, and any game that can’t fit on that can probably stand to be scaled back.

Then why comment at all?

I couldn’t believe they announced the Pokémon Legends DLC before the game is even out. “I know you haven’t given us your money yet, but… please can we have some more? 🥺”

Doesn’t every AAA do that these days?

Apparently they’re selling two versions. One is the full scale VB, and that’s clearly a collector’s item. The other is the VB-themed Labo VR.

Mother 3.

And if Nintendo thought Wario Land was so great then why did they stop making those games like 2 decades ago?

Because the last games didn’t sell so well, and because the staff that worked on them have other projects.

Just because a game didn’t get infinite sequels forever doesn’t mean no one can appreciate the originals. By that logic, Chrono Trigger must be one of the worst JRPGs of all time to you.

It’s a VB-themed redesign of the Labo VR kit. Should presumably be compatible with everything Labo VR supported (like, three titles I think?). Maybe the fact that they’re bringing it back means they might reuse it in the future?