Something I’ve seen far less reaction to than I expected? While the Switch 2 looks like it takes standard MicroSD cards, it DOESN’T. It takes the fairly obscure MicroSD Express standard! I can’t even BUY an SD Express card locally right now! It seems likely, at launch, that Nintendo’s branded cards will be the only ones people can get that will work with it!
The Switch 2 has 256GB of onboard storage, much more than the Switch, it is true. But it’s also backwards compatible with the Switch, and lets users bring their old digital library over with them. I have a 256GB card in my Switch, it’s nearly full, and it doesn’t have my whole library on it! If I got a Switch 2, I’d have it filled up on day 1!
And the MicroSD card issue won’t be obvious to most buyers. Parents will get their kids Switch 2s, and wonder why their old card won’t work with it. It’ll look to them like the Switch 2 or the card is broken, unless they implement a physical lock against incompatible cards, and I don’t know if SD cards even support those. Also, SD Express cards are more expensive than standard ones.
This could end up being a debacle almost on the scale of the price (which, as others have noted, isn’t even Nintendo’s fault entirely).
Wizardry inspired a lot of games, but the three games listed have greater influences elsewhere. (FF and DQ in particular are more like Ultima.) Sadly the games that were most inspired by Wizardry, sometimes called “blobbers,” have mostly died out: The classic Bard’s Tale games, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. Etrian Odyssey and the Japanese Wizardry games hold the torch but are pretty niche these days.
The demise of the original Wizardry series is one of the greatest injustices in the history of computer gaming, up there with the closing of the original Atari.
How about the flash games of Orisinal? They’re a bunch of extremely chill tiny games. With the death of internet Flash they’re much harder to play, but one can use Ruffle, which has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. (Homestar Runner can be viewed that way too.)
It was made by Game Refuge, who also developed Rampage for Midway! They went back into arcade gaming, and still have a website: http://gamerefuge.com/
Yes, Solar Jetman was terrific! An underrated highlight of the Pickford Bros’ output. It’s like Gravitar but much less frustrating.
It’s not well known, but Rare commissioned ports of it for home computers that were never released. The Commodore 64 version was found and can be downloaded from this page.
RAMPART. An Atari Games arcade game with strong strategy and puzzle elements. Very difficult in the arcade, and has like 12 home ports, including one as late as the PS3. A lot of Atari arcade games from that era aren’t talked much about these days, but with Rampart it feels especially egregious.
I could mention lots of games here. I love lots of overlooked games. I even like Athena, of all things, and I am fully aware of its many flaws.
I’ve heard of them, I might consider trying one someday, but the research and effort to set it up is an obstacle. Plus I don’t run Windows any more, and I don’t even know what Linux support for it is like.