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.

What’s a foot long and slippery? A slipper.

What’s red and smells like blue paint? Red paint.

Why did the blind man fall in the well? He couldn’t see that well.

A man goes to the doctor and says “I think I have hearing problems.” “Can you describe the symptoms?” “Sure! Homer’s fat and Marge has blue hair.”

Did you hear about the huge sale at the Lego store? People were lined up for blocks.

I sat down for dinner at a restaurant, and the waiter asked me, “Do you want to hear today’s special?” I said, “Yes please.” “No problem sir. Today is special.”

I’d tell you a time travel joke, but you didn’t get it.

I used to work at a toy factory making plastic Draculas. There were only two of us, so I had to make every second Count.

What I want to know is if Switch 2 will be able to run Switch 1 games at a higher clock speed, or if it’ll just do what N3DS did. My fear is that every game that ought to be running on Switch 2 already got ported to Switch 1 poorly, and won’t get re-ported.

Lie down, try not to cry, cry a lot.

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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.

Fighting games and Riichi Mahjong.

There’s usually a local event for at least one of the games I play every month or so. I travel out to Combo Breaker every year for the big major as well.

For Riichi Mahjong, the local club here meets every week. Haven’t had the chance to attend a big tournament yet, but I’m hoping I can fit one into my travel budget at some point.

What am I supposed to be looking at here?

Currently a Galaxy S9+. Battery life isn’t the best anymore, and I’m running low on internal storage, but it’s still serving me well. I’m not even sure what I’d upgrade to, I really need the SD slot that almost nothing new has anymore.

Best was my old Motorola Droid 2, I miss slide-out keyboards so damn badly.

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.

An improvement.

PSN Plus is $80/year, XBox Live is $60/year. And both of those are for the lowest tier.

$20/year for Nintendo Switch Online. That’s $20 more than it should be, but at least it’s not nearly as expensive as the other consoles.

No. I don’t trust another corporate-owned platform, and I don’t trust the way they pay lip service to federation while still making everything dependent on one central server they control.

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.