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.
There are three tiers of activity:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Nintendo doesn’t sell products that are branded as Switch but don’t actually play Switch games.