missingno

I have a channel that I barely use once in a blue moon, and I watch players who are good at my favorite games so I can study from them, as well as following tournaments.

I'm not expecting to beat Daigo Umehara any time soon. I'm just aiming to beat the next guy in front of me. And the next. And the next. No matter what my skill level, there's always a challenge. That doesn't mean I have to be the very best, quite the opposite.

You'll find more close-knit communities in smaller games. I play a lot of fighting games, and the FGC moves heaven and earth to keep the one thing alive that very few other games are doing: locals. Go to locals and meet people!

I guess I just don't get the tribalism here. Both are cool in different ways.

Singleplayer games offer a more curated experience. A story and a set of hand-crafted challenges. But that generally means finishing one and moving onto the next, rather than really sinking my teeth in it.

Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There's always a better opponent. And I've made a lot of good friends through these communities.

I play games that are so niche that the 'matchmaking' consists of pinging people on Discord. Because we don't have proper matchmaking, we struggle to retain new players because they come in, get pulverized into the dust, and give up.

The point of matchmaking is that even a more casual beginner can find opponents at their level, without having to grind a ton to catch up with those of us who have been playing for years.

It was a great game that I enjoyed start to end, but ending on a "this will only make sense when the 3rd game releases in X years!" note leaves a really sour taste in my mouth.

Well, one problem with ZTD is that it completely ignored the teaser in VLR's epilogue. Actively contradicted it even.

I don't think the teaser made VLR feel incomplete though, since it was also completely disconnected from VLR's otherwise self-contained story.

Ryujinx was released as open source under the MIT license. They can't retroactively rescind that license.

They already made Chrono Trigger 2, but I won't blame you for forgetting it.

Patient gaming is a budgeting technique, not a strict law you must always adhere to.

I separate upcoming releases into two categories: games I'm so excited for that I would gladly pay full price at launch, and games I'm willing to wait on. Which games go in which category depend entirely on you and your budget.

Requiring new releases to provide this information going forward makes sense. But I expect a lot of older titles have no one actively paying attention to go get this paperwork filled out, and will get blocked as a result. This law should've just applied to everything new released after the law takes effect, grandfathering in legacy content.

What about them? They're all garbage.

The biggest thing I miss from yesteryear is all the low budget straight-to-handheld spinoffs. No clear place for those to exist now that dedicated handhelds are dead, and no room for quirky little side projects when publishers are putting all their resources into just a few AAAA megagames.