But would @[email protected]’s statement also apply to go?

Maybe in just one specific genre, but other kinds of competitive games do exist. It’s worth noting that fighting games have never had even a single cheating scandal.

I think that’s a rather shallow way of looking at. Would you describe something like chess as ‘lazy’ then?

A good competitive game has to put a lot of thought and care into its design to make it so that two players trying to make each other miserable actually ends up coming out the other end as a fun experience.

I’d argue that if a game doesn’t have anything to nitpick at, it probably wasn’t doing anything bold enough for me to truly fall in love with either.

It’s a purely narrative game, the original version (this is now a remake of a remake in a new engine) was made in RPG Maker but without any RPG elements. Walk around, talk to NPCs, watch the story unfold.

The one big thing it has in common with Undertale is that the less you know going in, the better. If the art style and vibe is enough to get your attention, go ahead and give it a shot, go in blind.

Physical copies, yes. If it’s a game I absolutely know I’m definitely buying and I want it badly enough to spend full price and I want to play it on day 1, I’ll preorder to ensure it ships on day 1. Because if I actually ordered it on release day, it’d take a few more days to ship. Last game I preordered was Kirby Air Riders, and I’m very happy with that purchase.

As for Early Access, my criteria is to just evaluate the game in its current state - if it offers enough to be worth buying now, I’ll buy it now.

The person I replied said Nintendo wasn’t making their old games playable at all. You’re complaining about something else.

Panel Attack

Bit of an odd example to cite since both Golden Sun games are officially available on NSO.

Attending Combo Breaker is the highlight of my year every year. In 2025 I was able to fit Frosty Faustings into my travel budget too. Managed to place 17th in Mystery Bracket both times, and they were very wild bracket runs. I saw Gyakuten Puzzle Bancho and turned to my opponent to utter a sentence no one wants to hear in Mystery: “I’m sorry, I know how to play this game.” Also at CB I was able to make it out of pools in Under Night In-Birth II, and it was a hella stacked bracket so I’m pretty happy with that one.

Been focusing more on my mahjong career, attended Riichi Nomi Open and Philadelphia Riichi Open as my first two tournaments. Didn’t do so hot though. But of course, when I win it’s because I’m skilled, when I lose it was just bad luck.

New arcade opened up near me with modded Maimai, Wacca, and Chunithm cabinets. I told myself I’m never going back to Round 1 again, though R1 does have the new official international Maimai now so I guess that’s something. I also got back into Dance Dance Revolution a little, but I’m still not very good.

As for actual new releases, Deltarune is obvious. Kirby Air Riders is a sequel I waited 22 years for, and it was worth the wait. The original is one of my favorite games of all time and I’m blown away by how much higher they raised the bar. Online City Trial is everything childhood me ever dreamed of. And I have to shout out Rhythm Doctor finally exiting Early Access, the final chapter is a wonderful conclusion that gave me a lot of emotions.

Visual novels would be good if you’re looking for something low-energy.

One of the bonus levels in Rhythm Doctor is a Bits and Bops collab. There’s also an Unbeatable level, so it’s a funny coincidence to have all three games launch in the same week.

Boing.

I wouldn’t worry. Dread was extremely well received, and set up a big plot hook for a continuation.

Text that’s written in kana-only can actually be kinda difficult to read. Japanese is written without spaces between words, so kanji helps to distinguish where words actually begin and end. The language is also full of homophones, words that are pronounced the same but are written with different kanji to disambiguate them.

Free fonts exist, so you don’t even need to resort to AI.

Unicode has over 100,000 kanji, though the vast majority of these are esoteric kanji that are rarely used. You could trim it down to just the Joyo kanji list, consisting of 2,136 characters for everyday use.

I think you’re describing the Nintendo DS.

Kirby Air Riders definitely feels like it keeps that spirit alive. The game could’ve just been City Trial and I would’ve paid $70 just to play City Trial, but they packed everything else in there too because they could.

The Fiend’s Cauldron from Kid Icarus Uprising. At the start of a stage, you have to wager currency on how high of a difficulty you want to attempt, on a sliding scale from 0.0 to 9.0. Higher difficulties cost more to play, and if you fail, you lose your bet and the difficulty drops if you choose Continue. It’s an interesting system for how it forces you to check your ego and self-evaluate just how much you think you can handle.

TF2 was the original gacha game.

If I’m going to put 100+ hours into a game, there better be a setting to mute BGM, because no matter how good the OST is I will eventually tire of it and want to listen to something else.

Grinding evasion by dual wielding shields and attacking yourself is peak game design.

If you’d read the article, Valve says they’re working with anticheat devs to come up with a solution together. This can only happen with their cooperation, if Valve somehow could bypass it on their own that would represent a vulnerability that should and would get patched.

TBH, I kinda get the feeling that’s what most of the hype surrounding the Machine is. People hoping it sells well, but not necessarily people planning to buy one for themselves.

If devs want to support one, it’ll be no problem to support the other. But I doubt devs who already refused to support one will suddenly change their minds.

I wouldn’t expect the Machine to be any more popular than the Deck, which already wasn’t enough to convince holdouts. In fact I would bet the Machine will sell much less than the Deck, since that had a more unique niche carved out for it.

Points of no return and anything else that’s permanently missable. No, I am not doing a second playthrough of a 100 hour JRPG.

Portrait of Ruin

As someone who played later entries first and then went back to SotN, IMO it’s a bit rough around the edges in comparison. Still a fantastic game, but I think later games managed to improve on it.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. IMO this is where the series peaked, perfected the formula and delivered a game packed with several large maps and three sets of bonus characters to replay the game with.

• Puyo Puyo Champions - Extra selfish pick, in this scenario now people would have to play it and we’d have a healthy playerbase again. I’d finally get to fulfill my dream of large offline tournaments.
• Skullgirls - See above.
• Stepmania - I was tempted to say Wacca or Chunithm, but in this scenario Stepmania would be ideal for nearly infinite content, as well as offering both keyboard and pad playstyles in one game.
• Slay the Spire - My pick for casual second monitor content. I’m also assuming the modding scene is allowed to continue, in this scenario it’d suddenly have everyone making tons of new characters.
• Super Mario Maker 2 - Actually took me a bit to think of what the last game should be. Gotta be an endless game, but I didn’t want to duplicate genres by just adding another fighting game or puzzle game. Though if we’re allowing romhacks to count as part of the game, if new romhacks can continue to be made, substitute Super Mario World instead.

Legally speaking, you own the physical cartridge, but you only own a license to the software on the cartridge.

Practically speaking, no one will break into your house to control what you do with the cartridge.

Console manufacturers sell at a loss because they need to sell the console first before they can sell anything else. They can expect to make that money back on software the user could not have bought without the console.

Valve doesn’t need people to buy Steam Machines to get them to start using Steam. In fact, I suspect most units sold will be to users who are already invested in the ecosystem. Selling at a loss would just be a straight loss to them.

Two years ago, one of my favorite games made some very minor cosmetic tweaks, and that was enough to attract a horde of post-Gamergaters crying that this is the downfall of western civilization. Two years later, the board for that game is still under seige by trolls that have rendered it unusable for anyone who actually wants to talk about the game. Every now and then a Valve mod will lock one thread, and then the trolls just make another and it continues.

My impression of the original Steam Controller was that it was designed for games I don’t want to play on controller, at the expense of being terrible for games I do want to play on controller.

Steam Forums are one of the worst unmoderated hellholes on the internet. It pains me that Valve keeps letting this shit keep happening.

I will forever swear by the 8BitDo Pro 2

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.