Instead of chiptune inspired music, how about music that inspired chiptune ? Yellow Magic Orchestra had an important impact (namely) on '80s/'90s era video game music. Here’s Rydeen (1979).

What a horrible decision all around.

• Generates e-waste as controllers are bricked for no reason.
• Kills costly custom built accessibility controllers. No consideration for marginalized users whatsoever.
• Retroactively screws all customers over.
• Goes as far as breaking peripheral compatibility with a discontinued console.

Is it to kill cheating devices used on competitive titles? Is it a money grab? It probably won’t achieve either. From a customer protection standpoint I’m wondering if this position can be attacked legally.

Nevertheless it reminds me that other time when Spencer was daydreaming about buying Nintendo and it feels like Microsoft is being a little unhinged as of late.

When my kid was younger he had a “garbage games on tablet” phase as well. As others have said, paid games are the way to go (Play Pass sounds cool). Looking for indie games for Android, or PC games ported to Android gives some good results. Stardew Valley’s an obvious one. I haven’t played Ordia, but it looks gorgeous.

What worked really well for us was to teach him about some dark patterns in simple terms and spot them with him in the freemiums he was playing. “Fear of Missing Out” events/notifications and “Progression Paywalls” are typical ones. It made him realize the game wasn’t built to give him a good time as much as to frustrate him into endlessly spending real money in exchange for some phony currency. In the end he was happy to switch to saner games. It’s a good opportunity to work on their critical judgment basically.

Wrong question, in my humble opinion. A bubble is speculative at its core. It’s about traders, the stock market, investors, speculators and shit placing much more value on a thing than what it’s worth. The distance with reality grows massive, until everybody wakes up and “pop!” all that sweet sweet wealth (or savings, for the peasants) vanished into thin air. Think housing market or beanie babies.

The question here is if indie game dev can remain sustainable. It’s like restaurants: the more there are, the harder it gets. The risk is not nearly as sudden and explosive as a bubble though. If there are too many, some shops close, others shrink.

Furthermore, the tools and knowledge required for gamedev keep getting more readily available. It’s an art too, so there will always be someone somewhere with the overwhelming drive to do it, profitability be damned.

Oof. This is corporate lingo for “we’ll pull a number out of our ass and charge the dev accordingly”. “Proprietary data model” makes it clear they intend to remain conveniently (for them) opaque about it.

OK hear me out: Minecraft in survival. For real. Nothing jump scares like a creeper going “psshht” in your back, telegraphing that you’re about to die in a destructive explosion. As you walk a narrow path over a chasm of lava in the Nether, the wail of the Ghast might make you fall out of sheer panic before it even shoots at you. The Warden is a special kind of scary too, as it’s nearly unkillable and will detect you by the noise you make. It sounds kind of silly but there’s plenty of players making the remark that Minecraft survival is basically horror.

And it’s all in a child friendly, non gory, voxel style.

Nah mate. I took a minute to search “objective opinion” and I’d suggest you do the same. It may look sort of oxymoronic but it’s definitely a time-honored expression. Opinions may be based on facts and analysis. An expert’s judgement is one valid definition for “opinion”.

Never played Roblox myself, but my son had a big phase and still plays from time to time. Back then we’d get him Roblox figurines once in a while. They can be disassembled/mixed and they come with codes for virtual items as well.

It’s unfortunate that Ubisoft Quebec will not be able to try and shake things up with an unusual setting and a more challenging game play. From what’s described in the article, it sounded like a welcome iteration over the open-world formula.

Since you named Octopath Travellers 2, I’ll recommend Cosmic Star Heroine. It’s an old school turn-based indie JRPG that’s charming, fun and short. As a matter of fact all games by Zeboyd fit that description.

oh no

I do sometimes have this fleeting fantasy of getting a CRT TV, plugging back my NES and having some sweet nostalgia gaming. Then I remember that at the mere sight of those brutally rectangular controllers my hands start cramping and that I have no space to spare this.

Borrowed Metroid Dread at the library. I love the game, but I’m having a real tough time. It’s a little too hard for me, but I’m still hoping to finish it.

E-Shop is very feature poor compared to Steam. I use Deku Deals to get notified when something I want goes on sale. They offer a pricing history as well to gauge how often a title has price cuts.

Was discussed last week: https://beehaw.org/post/1040876

What made AC Origins superior to AC Odessey for me was the scenario. Origins pulled me right into the protagonist’s emotions and motivations. Whereas in Odessey I never really got why I was supposed to massacre masses of Athenians, then Spartans, then Athenians, then some more Spartans…

Yes you are right, many relevant titles are at risk and they need to be specifically curated and brought to attention.

Their definition of “classic” is rather contrived in my opinion. “Classic” means both old and influential. They ditched the influential part. From their in-depth article:

It’s hard to define exactly what a “classic game” is, but for the sake of this study, we looked at all games released before 2010, which is roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off.

Our random list of 1,500 games was taken from MobyGames, a huge community-run database of video games.

I can’t feel sorry for the slow disappearance of some Wii Shovelware from 15 years ago. Time is ruthless to all mediocre media.

Word of warning: systematically classifying video games is HARD. It’s a bit like classifying any form of creative media: music, cinema, visual arts, etc. It’s hit-or-miss. RPG forums routinely fall into that rut and the infamous corollary: [insert game here] is (or is not) an RPG.

If you’re dead set on this endeavour, I’d suggest identifying main features and tagging games with a number of them. Try and pick required ones if possible. Or don’t, because gate keeping sucks. If you know how to code, this is sort of the Composition over inheritance mindset.

I have long given up on guessing Nintendo’s next move. One thing I’d bet on is they’ll shake things up sooner or later. Zelda isn’t stuck in this precise genre forever. It’s always been in their DNA to surprise us.