NateTheHate is claiming it’s Ocarina of Time.

Simple, I can’t play Kirby Air Riders or Splatoon 3 on PC. And while I still prefer the form factor of Nintendo’s old smaller dedicated handhelds, I think the Switch (2) is still at least a little bit better at being a handheld than the much bulkier Steam Deck.

(Don’t say emulation, because even then I still can’t play online on official servers.)

First party games do, with the lone exception of Pokopia. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, the game they’re announcing this new pricing difference for, is a proper cartridge.

I’m not happy about it, but I think it’s kind of inevitable. It’s not a question of if, but when, and it’s not only going to be Nintendo.

In theory, if the technology worked very differently from the way it does now, I could envision a world in which AI NPCs could have potential. But knowing how LLMs actually work, knowing that a lot of the hype behind them is smoke and mirrors, I can’t see it being viable. And with the trajectory that the LLM bubble is going, I just don’t think it will ever reach a point where I’d trust it.

It’s a platform fighter.

If we say we don’t like and it looks hideous, what exactly are we wrong about? “Actually you really love it!” Fuck off, you can’t force us to like your slop no matter how much you try to shove it down our throats.

Attempting to rebrand the terminology to “mystery boxes” like that’s gonna make it better ultimately comes across as so much shadier.

Highly recommend Mega Knockdown. It perfectly encapsulates the best part of fighting games: getting into your opponent’s head by throwing rock four times in a row.

Games can be a lot harder to localize than any other piece of media since they’re nonlinear. In many cases the localization team is just handed a raw text dump with no context of what line is from what part of the game, or even what character is speaking. Then it becomes a scavenger hunt to play through the game and find each line, but in something like a long JRPG that kind of scavenger hunt can miss a lot. It’s not like how you can just read the book or watch the anime and fully cover everything.

But these days a lot of developers have started working closely with localization teams during development to help make their job easier. As they write the script, annotate it with detailed notes providing context and commentary, explanations of wordplay, cultural references, even advice directing the localizers on what you think they should do. And then stay in communication with the localization team, let them ask you questions as needed.

Good localization is hard, but I don’t agree with Horii saying a loss of flavor is inevitable. Not when done right.

Relevant to what? I’ve never had a reason to care.

All cards in StS2 do have their final art already. But we know there was a closed beta with a smaller group prior to this public EA release, so I dunno if they’re sitting on older beta art that maybe they’ll show us eventually.

I’m huffing copium, I know.

I considered including that one but I was getting too close to just linking every damn card. And it’s one that requires a lot of context to get the joke, I don’t know how many people reading this thread have played the original.

Some of my favorites: Disarm, Rampage, Double Tap, Immolate, Wraith Form, Boot Sequence, Self Repair, Meteor Strike, Protect, Fasting, Nirvana, Sands of Time, Study, Tantrum, Scrawl, Panic Button, Apparition

In Slay the Spire 1, clearing the True Ending with each character unlocks beta art for their card pool, and then clearing it with all characters unlocks beta art for all the colorless cards too. You can freely toggle each card individually, pick and choose your favorites. This was especially fun for Watcher, because during her development period they got the community involved to submit their own beta art.

I’m a little sad that StS2 doesn’t have this, but maybe that’s just because we don’t have the True Ending yet (and we do know that one is coming).

Co-op is the major new selling point. Beyond that, the core formula hasn’t changed too much, they’ve mostly just expanded on it with new characters, cards, enemies, etc.

But for anyone who’s put a lot of time into the original, I think you’ll really appreciate all the littler elements that really add up. They’ve had a lot of time to rethink some nitpicks with the original and learn some lessons from it.

For example, a lot of events in the first game were a binary choice of either taking something or taking nothing, in which case the event becomes an empty floor. Act 1 events in particular were often a trap. MegaCrit has talked about how StS2’s events are being designed so that simply doing nothing is never an option, and I really really really like this! Just exploring all the new events is great, I’m suddenly prioritizing ?s on my paths just to see them all.

Boss relics have been replaced by a new system called Ancients. Part of me is still not sure how I feel about this, part of me is kind of excited by the fact that I don’t know how to feel. The game feels very different without energy relics (mostly, there actually are a few but many runs will not see them), and that’s definitely something that makes for a new and different challenge to get used to.

There’s also a new mechanic where cards can receive Enchantments, either permanently or just for the duration of combat. You can come up with some very cool combos to experiment with using this system, and on the flipside the enemies that are able to negatively mess with your cards are super interesting to me.

When Slay the Spire 2 was announced, I was honestly skeptical of how they’d top the original. StS is the game that ruined all other roguelikes for me just for how damn polished it is.

I can confidently say StS2 has raised the bar. It’s actually the smaller details that have impressed me most, like the way doing nothing is never an option at events. And enchantments are such a cool mechanic, gears are spinning in my head looking for fun things I can do with them. Equally cool when enemies can negatively enchant my cards too, new kinds of combat challenges.

I still don’t know how I feel about Ancients, it’s weird not having energy relics anymore. But part of me kind of likes that this is weird and different, it is by far the biggest change that makes for a totally new meta to explore. I can already tell that mastering this game will be a journey.

As polished as Zero is, it is kinda just another Mega Man platformer. Some variations on the formula to set this subseries apart, but if you’ve played other subseries you know the core formula.

Whereas what made Battle Network so special is that it was a completely unique kind of game that was never seen before, and we still haven’t really seen anything like it since.

Partially owned still counts.

Same reason why Mario and Zelda aren’t on those platforms.

Games that get declared a target by the alt-right often do become full of it. Just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s not a serious problem.

Gamergate never ended, and the lack of moderation on Steam has made it a very attractive place for fascists to spread propaganda. It’s been a serious problem for a very long time and Valve just isn’t doing anything about it.

If you respond to tell me that you were never gonna buy it, you prove my point.

It’s just kind of tiring how every post about anything Nintendo does ever has the exactly same whining every time, especially when you’re not actually whining about FRLG here at all, you’re just whining to whine. You just want something to be mad at.

Well if you’re replying me just to tell me you were never going to buy it, you’re proving my point.

They were never gonna buy this game.

So you were never gonna buy it no matter what the price tag was.

Rerelease or not, is it that surprising that the thing that just launched has more people currently checking it out than the thing that launched three years ago? D4 had a higher peak at launch, and I would expect D2R to eventually drop off over time.

I feel like people who were never gonna buy it no matter what the price tag was just want something to be mad at.

Print and play, means everything you need is in a single PDF.

Looks like 4chan found this site. Now the question is whether they’ll kick the fascists out or let it become a nazi bar.

I played FF7 for the first time a few years ago and I was honestly expecting that it might not have aged super gracefully, that the transition to 3D probably came with a lot of growing pains that would be excused as a product of its time. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well it held up for me.

It definitely does still have some small growing pains, summons would’ve drove me insane without the Switch port’s fast forward, and every time it tries to wow the player with VFX I had to remind myself that this was cutting edge in 1997. But overall, the nitpicks I had weren’t much, it was a lot better than I expected.

I haven’t played Remake though, don’t plan to do so until it’s done.

If it continues to get bad enough, you can lock the forum down from new accounts so they can’t make alts.

The reason it got this bad was because they didn’t nip it in the bud sooner. If they had been more proactive from the start, there wouldn’t be 700+ threads.

At this point, just nuke them all and ban everyone who made a bigoted troll thread. It’s gonna be a game of whack-a-mole for a little while, but once you start handing out bans, the trolling will start die down.

Yup.

What do you want Steam to do?

Moderate, like every other half-decent platform does.

They’re not just trying to remove negative reviews for being negative though, this is about bad actors weaponizing the review system to push bigotry. That should not be platformed.

Steam has a serious problem with a lack of moderation, which has made it a very attractive platform for fascists. Gamergate never ended, and remember that began with Steve Bannon realizing he could exploit gamer outrage to push propaganda. They keep inventing new scandals to repeat their past success.

One of my favorite games had a very minor patch to revise some cringier elements from early in the game’s lifespan. Years later, the forum is still unusuable because it’s been colonized by right-wing weirdos with 0.3 hours on record who have dedicated their lives to crying about a game they never cared about pre-patch, because they saw it as an opportunity to push their propaganda.

I think this is something that should be handled at the platform level, Steam and consoles should just let you freely roll back to any version of the game. Keep every revision archived for preservation’s sake.

The SF2 situation wouldn’t happen in the same way today because those would all be DLCs or updates.

Yes, exactly. Not having to pay full price to buy the game all over again for these updates is way better for the consumer.

Do you know how many Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games we had in the 90s?

Yes, and I remember that Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior’s Dreams, and Street Fighter III: New Generation all sucked. Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Street Fighter Alpha 2/3, and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike were the good ones.

It was always expected that the first revision would have growing pains. Now we don’t have to pay full price for the polished and improved version. That’s way better than the old model.