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Cake day: Jun 28, 2024

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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.



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.




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.



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.



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.



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?



Love the art style. In-game actually looks better than the cutscenes.


I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for DS homebrew. Tons of fun things you can do with a flashcart.

3DS too, but although modding was a lot more widespread due to how easy it was, I feel like homebrew games were kinda lacking. Custom themes were great at least.



People have been calling albums ‘dead’ since radio, since MTV, since iTunes, and yet the vast majority of artists still release albums.


I did finish the original. But I remained annoyed with this mechanic the whole time.


Not having the mechanic to begin with would be better than a thing that merely makes it less bad, because even then there’s still an opportunity cost.


I do not like the idea of a mechanic that punishes me if I do choose to explore somewhere else in a genre that is supposed to be about exploration.


I haven’t played Silksong yet, in part because truthfully, Hollow Knight was alright but not my favorite Metroidvania. The one thing I really disliked about the original was the runbacks. I remember getting stuck on one platforming section, and I could easily get to the halfway point where I kept dying to retrieve my money, but then drop it again because there was no turning back from this halfway point, had to keep trying to finish it. I wanted to just explore a different part of the map and come back to this section later, but sunk cost fallacy forced me to keep bashing my skull against it.

Which then felt like this mechanic conflicted with the exploration I expect from a Metroidvania. That’s the real problem IMO.


In addition to what others have said about Moore’s Law slowing down, there’s also just the fact that console generations themselves are slower. The cheapest price cuts on old consoles were fire sale prices to clear out old stock when they were on their way out. Even though the PS5 has been on the market for about as long, it still feels like the generation is only beginning, we won’t be talking about PS6 for a long time yet.


Petal Crash.

Versus puzzles are my favorite genre, but they’re all dead and buried today. Panel de Pon isn’t coming back unless Intelligent Systems figures out how to put a dating sim in it. Dr. Mario and Puzzle Fighter both got turned into mobile gacha games, and then shut down. Puyo Puyo looked like it was set to make a comeback, but then Sega sold its soul to sell more Tetris.

Petal Crash is more or less the one good thing that has come out of the last decade or so. Sadly being such a small indie meant it never got much of a playerbase, some activity around launch but I haven’t been able to play it against a human opponent in a very long time.


Summary: Many games see noticeable improvements, but how much of an improvement will vary. Games that are bottlenecked by GPU or memory bandwidth benefit significantly, whereas CPU-bound titles only see small improvements. Arkham Knight, famously one of the Switch's worst ports, is now a playable 30fps. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is... playable but still not great, building as much as possible to stress test the hardware can drop to single digit framerates on Switch 1, that's now around \~20-22fps here. These are the two most demanding titles tested, which means that most everything else came out pretty good. The obvious caveat here is that games cannot exceed hardcoded targets. Games with uncapped framerates and dynamic resolution will be able to take advantage, but capped framerates and fixed resolutions must remain so.
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Every 100 years, the mysterious castle of Sudokuvania appears in the countryside. Legend has it that it contains the Secret of Sudoku. Gathering the last few given digits in the area, you solemnly approach the boxy fortress, determined to discover the secret and share it with your favorite people.
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