I really miss the keyboard on my old Motorola Droid 2. Still wasn’t any good for gaming honestly, but it’s way better for typing than a touchscreen.

Gamecube doesn’t have enough RAM to preload everything at startup like that, you have to go through the menus and pick a game mode and map to load.

Surely if it needed that startup load anyway, then Sakurai wouldn’t be saying he turned the license down in order to get players in the game faster. I’m going to trust Sakurai’s word here!

Bear in mind that Kirby Air Ride came out in 2003, on a console that’s only meant to be hooked up to CRTs. How many users back then do you think would’ve had access to this feature in the first place? Or would still be playing this game if/when they upgrade later?

Yeah, the online being fake is appalling. Sega knew in advance that this game would be completely dead online, meaning no one’s playing it. They knew what would happen and they took this deal anyway.

While my 2021 essay did aim to be as thorough as I could in criticizing PPT itself, all of my criticism of the game is secondary to my greater criticism of how Sega handled the series afterward. I wonder if being too thorough may have caused that thesis to be lost in the woods, but I hope this video today hammers that point back home.

If Sega had followed up PPT1 with a full mainline game, using its commercial success as a jumping off point for the series to go onto bigger and better things, I wouldn’t be so frustrated today. But instead of doing that… we got Apple Arcade.

Place was good once, but you’re not missing anything now. Trying to recapture that magic just feels like Reddit is out of ideas and just desperately trying to remind people of the one good thing they ever did. It’s like Al Bundy still hyping up his high school football career because the rest of his life has been downhill since then.

I don’t often preorder, but when I do it’s because I know I won’t regret my purchase, and I know I want a physical copy to arrive on day 1. Of course I know there’s some risk, but if I felt a game really was that risky then I would wait, I just buy the ones I feel are safe bets.

I know what developers and series I like, and if one of my favorite games is getting a sequel I know I’m playing it. Even if the sequel isn’t quite as good as the prior game I liked, they’re never bad enough for me to not want to play them at all.

I suppose it helps that my tastes lie far enough outside the kinds of mainstream AAA games that are prone to totally botched launches that I’ve never been truly burned.

CrossCode is phenomenal. I love how they crammed it with tons of sidequests without ever getting bogged down in repetition, because most of those quests put brand new spins on the combat mechanics.

This one?

Boktai. A trilogy of GBA games about a vampire hunter who uses a solar gun to fry the undead. The cartridge has a UV sensor to detect actual sunlight to charge up the gun. It’s such a silly gimmick but it’s used really well.

Sadly the third game never got localized, and although a translation patch does exist it’s just not the same without the original hardware. There’s a fourth game on DS which did get localized, but they rebranded it as Lunar Knights, excised most references to the original trilogy, and even cut a good chunk of content. It also ends on a sequel hook that will never get resolved.

It’s sad to me that we’ll never see games this experimental ever again.

I just hope the Switch 2 will run all of Switch 1’s shoddy ports at a higher clock speed. Don’t do what N3DS did and downclock. I doubt titles that have been ported once will be re-ported, and devs will keep trying to port newer titles that Switch 2 still won’t handle.

I’ve poured over 1000 hours into Spire. It has consumed my life. Help me.

The vanilla game is amazing enough as is, but once you’ve mastered A20H with all four characters do check out the thriving mod scene. My favorites:

Characters:
The Packmaster - If you play just one mod character, make it this one. Absolutely top notch collab.
The Adventurer
The Thorton
The Shaman
The Bladedancer
The Aquatic
The Avocado
Robot Space Explorer

Gameplay/content addons:
Chimera Cards
Spire Locations
Reliquary
One Hundred Relics
Wandering Minibosses
Battle Towers

QoL/misc:
Minty Spire
Bestiary
Googly Eyes

Hope it can also support kbin.