“Nice scarf. Do zey make zem for girls?”

“Nice face. Do they… uh, shut up.”

GameFAQs

Puyo Puyo Champions - help me I’m relapsing

Riichi Mahjong - Been doing way too well in my IRL games all season. I think that means I’m due to lose this week. That’s called like Gambler’s Theorem or something, right?\

Blue Revolver: Double Action - This has been sitting in my Steam library and I saw it got a big update. Learning how to play a shmup is on my bucket list, but so far I cannot get any further than stage 4 on the lowest difficulty. Very fun though, and banger OST.

Also went down to Round 1 today, haven’t been in years. Played a few rounds of Wacca, Chunithm, Arcana Heart, and Chaos Code.

Steam Forums really are a hellhole that has allowed the worst toxicity to incubate and spread. They’ve got to crack down.

I think HL3’s meme status is the only reason a lot of gamers today do know it. If it had come out, it would’ve been forgotten.

This new edition concludes the Half-Life 2 development story, with never-before-seen concept art from Episode One and Episode Two, along with ideas and experiments for the third episode that never came to be.

Not that it should be a surprise to anyone, but is this the first time Valve has openly admitted that Episode 3 is officially cancelled?

There’s an entire genre of fantastic arcade/versus puzzle games not named Tetris. And that whole genre lies forgotten in ruins now. The one game that survived the longest was Puyo Puyo, but ironically, you can blame Tetris for killing that IP in the end.

I wish any developer luck in trying to do anything at all with this genre, give me something new and I will be first in line to buy ten copies. But I don’t think Pajitnov, or anyone else for that matter, will ever find even 1% of the success Tetris did. I just don’t think audiences still want this genre anymore, they just want Tetris and only Tetris.

This dumbass contacted Nintendo to taunt them about how he’s gonna stream leaked pirated copies. Hard to have sympathy for this idiot for poking the bear.

Puyo Puyo Champions - After the video essay I posted two weeks ago ended up doing so much better than I expected, 11k+ views and 600+ likes, I decided to try streaming some ranked for the first time in 2.5 years. I’m still cracked.

Riichi Mahjong - This really ought to be worth a lot more for how rare it is.

Persona 4 Golden - Finally coming back to this, where’d I leave off again?

Mobile very quickly turned into a race-to-the-bottom. When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out. So in order to get players in the door, you gotta make it f2p. And in order to maximize profits for a f2p game, you gotta employ all the worst dark patterns, because that’s what all your competitors are doing too.

And this has led to a feedback loop of consumer expectations. People understand that this is just what mobile is now, so people who want anything else have given up on mobile and are instead buying games on other platforms. Releasing a premium title on mobile is basically just trying to sell to the wrong audience.

Bring back versus puzzle games. Puyo Puyo is more or less the only surviving IP today, and even that is only barely on life support now that Sega has banished it to Apple Arcade exclusivity.

The whole damn genre lies in ruins now and I miss it so much. Someone, anyone, make a new game please.

Do they though? The biggest and most profitable games right now are all live services. Consumers are very much voting for live services.

Rivals has found its niche, but I don’t think even that is pulling in the kinds of numbers Warner expects for a AAA they sunk this much money into.

Some games I’m excited enough for to want to spend full price on release. Some games I’ll wait for a sale on. Just depends on the game.

What am I supposed to be looking at here?

Chess.

For most games, it’s not difficult to make AI that can absolutely destroy humans. But it turns out to be very difficult to make AI that feels like a fun and engaging challenge to a human. Hardest of all is making AI that realistically plays like a human does.

The slowdown problems you experienced may be relegated to the Switch version, because…it’s the Switch.

It’s a 2D puzzle game. It’s not doing anything the Switch shouldn’t be able to handle. Champions never had any problems. Even the Wii was perfectly capable of running 20th, and not much has actually changed since then.

Like, I know the Switch is not the beefiest system ever, but this is not a game that should need a PS5 Pro or whatever.

You may not like playing against bots, but you’d also hate playing against absolutely no one.

That’s the current state of every platform but Switch.

I’m well aware that crossplay isn’t trivial, but it’s too important to not be a priority. If you’re making a multiplayer game and you want it to have a playerbase, crossplay is vital to keep your game alive. A publisher the size of Sega has the resources to get it done.

I don’t know that some new game is going to solve the player acquisition problem without a new gimmick.

Does simply being content-complete count as a gimmick? It’s something we still haven’t seen yet in the west. I think 20th and Chronicle had a ton of great things to offer new players. Chronicle’s JRPG story mode might be the most innovative onboarding experience any puzzle game has ever seen.

Too bad the west never saw it.

This is a totally unsatisfying answer, but your only actual recourse, if you want to keep using steam, is to reach out to them and express your displeasure at their updated TOS and its implications.

Valve’s TOS hasn’t actually changed. The new law just requires them to more clearly disclose that a license is not ownership, but that was always the case.

Aside from live service games that are dependent on the devs’ servers, and anything that uses more intrusive DRM (note that while Steamworks DRM is a thing, quite a lot of games don’t use it anymore and ones that do are very easily cracked), they can’t actually take the bits off my computer.

DRM-free games are still considered a license too, at least as far as the law is concerned. Even physical games are. But I’m not worried about anything that can’t be enforced.

Good showcase, but feels a bit strange not to use an actual handheld game for the LCD comparisons.