Glad to hear Tsunku’s back.

Wish they could’ve gone with someone who hasn’t been paying hush money to silence sexual assault allegations.

Ah, my mistake, sorry for liking my favorite game I guess.

Are they saying third-parties don’t even have devkits yet? That’s a bizarre way to do a launch plan.

I’d also add Mario 64’s use of a controllable third person camera - all the games @[email protected] mentioned are first person, and I don’t think movement in those types of games is at all comparable. The camera was the key point to making a 3D platformer even possible at all, and it immediately became vital to many other genres too.

I know that by today’s standards that camera is known for being rather antiquated, but it was revolutionary for its time. One detail I think deserves more credit is how they tried to anthropomorphize the camera as Lakitu to introduce it to players.

Most of the games I play are so niche that ‘matchmaking’ simply consists of whoever’s available. Or sometimes it even requires pinging people on Discord.

?

Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary. They took the best competitive puzzle game ever made and added a ton of goodies to make it the best package deal. 20 variant game modes, 24 character stories, a comprehensive set of tutorials, a devilish set of chain challenges, and a final challenge where you play against max level CPU while it’s allowed to cheat.

It’s a tragedy this game was never released in the west, and I can rant for hours about Sega has criminally neglected the series with the half-assed slop they put out now because they know that crossovers will sell better than the main series ever will.

Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary. They took the best competitive puzzle game ever made and added a ton of goodies to make it the best package deal. 20 variant game modes, 24 character stories, a comprehensive set of tutorials, a devilish set of chain challenges, and a final challenge where you play against max level CPU while it’s allowed to cheat.

It’s a tragedy this game was never released in the west, and I can rant for hours about Sega has criminally neglected the series with the half-assed slop they put out now because they know that crossovers will sell better than the main series ever will.

The character that leaves and rejoins the party is not permanently missable. It might be tricky to figure out how to get them back, but there’s no fail state.

You can and should do the first playthrough blind. Save the guide for NG+.

There is an optional party member that you can either recruit or fight based on which dialogue option you pick. You’ll know it when you see it though, so it’s easy to make the right choice.

There are 12 endings (13 in DS and subsequent rereleases). You can easily see all of them in just two playthroughs. Theoretically you could even do them all on the first playthrough, but it’s much easier to do in NG+.

The only caveat is that you have to see them in order, you can’t backtrack if you miss one, which is why I recommend starting with the final and true ending on your first playthrough, then do all the others on NG+. NG+ makes it pretty easy to speed through things as well, your second playthrough will be much shorter.

I respect the hell out of him for doing the best he could with very limited resources, difficult technical limitations, and an insane deadline. I just can’t recommend playing that version today over a better alternative.

There are a lot of JRPGs from this era that I love dearly but would have a hard time recommending to anyone who didn’t grow up on these kinds of games. Games that are slow, grindy, and mostly consist of clicking Attack every turn.

Chrono Trigger is the one exception I can recommend to anyone, and then say that if you liked this entry point then you can try some other JRPG classics.

Just note that the original SNES translation should be avoided, play a modern rerelease or a retranslation patch.

The original game (but not CoH) is cleverly designed to be entirely playable with just four inputs, all non-movement actions can be performed with two simultaneous inputs (jumps). So it’s entirely playable on a dance pad that way. I haven’t tried it myself, but I know it’s a thing you can do, and there’s footage out there of speedrunners doing dance pad runs.

Every headline from this site is like this. Utterly shameless.

• Cadence of Hyrule - The original Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of my all-time favorites. CoH doesn’t quite reach that incredibly high bar, but it’s still an excellent game in its own right.

• Metroid Dread - Hits all the highs of Super, but with greatly improved combat and bosses. So yes, I am calling this better than Super, you heard me.

• Puyo Puyo Champions - Technically, this is not exclusive. However, I am counting it as such because the online playerbase is dead on every other platform. If you want to play the greatest competitive puzzle game ever made, the Switch version of Champions is really the only option.

• Splatoon 3 - It’s Splatoon. It’s the newest one. It’s good.

Zelda also sells like hotcakes, and yet they still put effort into that one.

Seems like the author is just trying to argue that Steam’s spotty Mac support as of late is somehow a sign of the end times. That’s an issue you’ve gotta take up with Apple, because they’ve made the platform a nightmare to continue supporting.

I’d be all over an HD 2D remake as long as they keep it faithful, but I’m somewhat wary of anything else current day SE might do.

I’d say Opus Magnum is the best entry point for beginners, no programming knowledge needed.

Emulators that use a lot of the open source code the community they hate has created.

Do you have a source for this claim?

Canceled? Literally 1984.

F-Zero GX, hands down. Nothing else is even close.

It’s not like Square Enix doesn’t know how to make good turn-based games. They’ve been hitting it out of the park with their smaller budget projects like Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler. So I don’t know why they’ve rejected it for FF, imagine what they could do with a big budget title if they tried.

I joke about how halfway through development, someone at Square Enix must’ve realized that Bravely Default was actually a good game, and thus too good for the FF name. So instead they had to throw darts at an English dictionary to rebrand it.

I tried to like 12, but I found it painfully tedious. I couldn’t carefully ration my MP the way I wanted to with gambits, and I don’t want to automate the game anyway, I want to actually play it myself. But manual takeover just felt way worse than a normal turn-based system too, the way it grinds the pacing to a halt and takes forever made it apparent that the game isn’t designed to be played manually.

I’m just disappointed in the way Square Enix seems to think turn-based combat is anathema for some reason. The series has abandoned its roots, it just isn’t FF to me.

I play games that are so niche that ‘matchmaking’ consists of pinging people on Discord. I’ve played the same rivals often enough that I have a pretty good idea of who’s close to my level and where the skill gaps lie.

I can play a long FT20 set with someone and there will be many individual rounds that look completely one-sided, for both of us. But because it’s a long set and not just one-and-done, we can see how normal that really is when it keeps happening in both directions. That’s something that will always be a part of games, and there’s no magically flawless matchmaking algorithm that would prevent it.

I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Balatro does not contain loot boxes/gacha. In a world where so many modern AAA games are exploiting all kinds of shady dark patterns, Balatro took off by not doing any of that shit. It’s just a sincerely fun game, and it sounds like you’re literally just complaining that it’s too fun and that should somehow be policed.

How would you even go about classifying this? It sounds like you’re saying games aren’t allowed to be too fun.

They do specifically say Gen[erative] AI here.

It’s super cool that SMZ3 is a thing that even exists, but beyond the novelty of it I felt it was dragged down by the fact that ALttP is so much bigger than SM, to the point where it kinda drowns SM out.

I could be wrong, but I think that only happens if you repeatedly enter and exit the EMMI Zone, allowing it to wander around too much. Which is something you might get scared into doing on a first playthrough!

FWIW, that room is completely optional, only reward is a Power Bomb Tank. If you fall down there you do gotta get out, but if you can at least make your way up to the first platform you can bomb it to reveal a tunnel that lets you bail.

Been a while and I don’t remember the routing details at all, but I was surprised to find that they weren’t much of an obstacle at all for the speedrun. They’re designed to scare you on a first playthrough, but on subsequent replays you just go fast and they won’t catch you.

Dread. I wasn’t sure if it could live up to the high expectations set for it, but they hit it out of the park. Hits all the highs of Super and Zero Mission, then goes on to outdo those games in terms of combat and boss fights. Had a blast going back to speedrun it again and again.

I would argue that 2D platformer should be part of the definition.

I suppose I should’ve been clearer there, I really just meant the Koji Igarashi-era games, not Classicvania. As the other comment mentions, the term Metroidvania was actually originally coined to separate the two eras of Castlevania, before the genre exploded in popularity and it became repurposed.

while Castlevanias powerups focus almost entirely on combat.

Castlevania has always (edit: I mean since SotN) had a pretty heavy emphasis on movement abilities to access new areas. Looking at SotN, we have double jump, high jump, swimming, mist form, bat form, wolf form, as well as good ol’ keys to literally unlock the environment.

This is why I consider Metroid Fusion, Other M, and Dread to be among the weaker Metroid titles. All three have an obvious, forced always on hand-holding mechanic that you don’t find in other Metroid games.

I’ll give you Fusion and Other M, but I’m going to have to disagree on Dread here. The game does sort of guide you along an intended first playthrough route, but so does Super! It’s a delicate balance to give the player room for exploration while still ensuring they don’t get stuck not knowing where to go. That balancing act should not be seen as disqualifying, or else we’re throwing out the genre’s foundational text too. If anything, the biggest difference between Dread and Super here is that Dread actually has more developer-intended sequence breaks. If you play Super as intended without utilizing any speedrunning tech, you almost always follow the same route in the end.

Which means that’s an area where they could’ve tried to set themselves apart from Steam.

Splatoon. You could definitely come up with plenty of cool movement abilities to unlock. And in general I just want to see the IP explored in all kinds of directions. If the franchise had debuted a generation earlier, I keep imagining what kind of straight-to-handheld companion title it would’ve gotten.