I do wonder how much of an uptick in sales the first two games will receive once the third is done.

Did you read the article?

This doesn't just cover microtransactions. In fact, the new law is harsher on fake gambling than it is on real gambling - loot boxes get classified as M, but a poker minigame is an automatic R18.

Patent infringement is a curious angle. Do we know what specific patent(s) they're claiming here?

Oh, did you think the headline meant they were shutting S3 down? Servers will remain up for the foreseeable future, and they'll even still run seasonal Splatfest and Big Run events. They're just done with content updates.

My ultimate dream would be to someday get SteamOS running on a DS-sized form factor. Doesn't need to be beefy, just needs to fit in my pocket and run my favorite 2D indie games.

I bought a Steam Deck just to support the most important thing that ever happened to Linux gaming, but mine has actually just been gathering dust. It's far too big to really be a handheld, doesn't fit in my pocket, and does not fill the role that Nintendo's handhelds served for me. The main thing I do end up using it for is taking Deck + dock to FGC events for a portable setup.

Last year I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus, a little emulator handheld, as an impulse buy because it was on sale super cheap. I ended up putting far more time into it than I ever did with the Deck.

Maybe the best library of all time, my DS collection is massive.

The one thing that's sad though is how many classics are unlikely to ever see a rerelease. Games that were designed around the hardware just won't be the same on any other platform.

Two years of content seems plenty reasonable. Especially when they said from the start that it would be two years. Games don't need infinite updates forever and ever and ever. Especially when it's not a live service being sustained by microtransactions.

You didn’t answer my question, by the way.

Huh, surprised they'd actually release the original Cosmo Gang over Pac-Attack. I actually didn't know there was a SFC version, I thought all the home ports were Pac-Attack.

I would be entirely fine with Flappy Bird passing into the public domain, but this isn't even that. They actually own it now.

Splatoon 1 had one year of content updates. Splatoon 2 had two. And they told us from the start that Splatoon 3 was also going to have two years.

How long do you expect them to keep going for?

Did you even read the article?

This is not the same Flappy Bird. The original game already has been preserved, the APK is floating around if you know where to look.

This new game is an outright scam using stolen IP to trick users into thinking this is the original.

Sell the website to who? Aquaman?

Normally these kind of announcements come with some kind of explanation. The lack of one reflects very poorly on Mozilla and leads me to assume the worst.

So real gambling is M, fake gambling is R18+. Makes sense.

FWIW, all three Boktai games do have patches if you can't play on original hardware.

It's an iterative series, each game building on the predecessor's mechanics, so there's not any one major twist. But there are a lot of little things that add up. The new movement techniques are great, Salmon Run has been significantly expanded, and just in general the QoL is night and day.

Also, the fact that Ink Armor, Sting Ray, and Main Power Up are not in the game might be the true biggest step forward. S3's meta is in a pretty good spot now.

Large parts? It's been a while since I played Octo Canyon, but I'm pretty sure the only thing that reappeared from Valley was the Octostomp boss, but it's a different fight anyway so not really.

It'll never happen, but I'd honestly prefer for S4 to move on from Splatfests and do something else entirely. They've run out of ideas, a lot of the themes feel like filler just to keep it going out of obligation. At this point I just see Splatfests as a weekend where they take away Ranked and make everyone play the worst game mode.

How many years do you expect them to keep pumping out content for the same game? They've gotta wrap it up somewhere. Two years is plenty.

Back in my day, games were released and we played them for what they were.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Haven't had a whole lot of time to practice, but I'm working on charge partitioning. Managed to get double ball a few times in a match.

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - After getting demoted to Expert I went on an even worse losing streak for a bit, but I seem to be clawing my way back now. It's just sample size, or so I keep telling myself.

Splatoon 3 - Grand Festival was rad. Not the Turf War part, Turf still sucks, but it was the second best concert I saw all week.

• Boktai series: These games were so near and dear to my childhood, especially 2. Really though you want the Solar Sensor hardware for the full experience, but I love these games too much not to plug them anyway. Emulating them is worth it over not playing them at all. And for the third game, you'd have to pick between original hardware or the translation patch anyway.
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow - It's Castlevania. Also play Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance, but Aria is by far the best of the GBA installments.
• Golden Sun 1/2: These games were way ahead of their time for how they designed a combat system that encourages you to use all of your tools and not just click basic Attack as if you gotta hoard your MP for a rainy day. Fantastic puzzles too.
• Mother 3: Surely you have already heard of this game and do not need me to tell you to go play it. Have you not played it by now? Why not? Well, okay, if you haven't played Earthbound first, go do so, then play this.
• Rhythm Tengoku: A wonderful game about pressing the A button. Sometimes you press the d-pad too. Translation patch.
• Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1/2: If you've ever played the classic 2D Tales games, these are excellent spiritual successors to those. There's a third game that's JP-only, translation patch is being worked on but it's been stuck in development hell for years...

S2 was 2017, S3 was 2022. Five year gap is pretty reasonable for sequels.

S4 likely won't happen until after the next Animal Crossing, since it's the same team working on both IPs.

They really made sure to reference the number 3 in every possible place except the kit system.

F-Zero GX - As far as pure racing goes, GX is perfection.

Kirby Air Ride - The actual racing mode is... mid, honestly. But City Trial? One of the most interesting and unique game modes ever conceived. Sad this game never got any kind of successor.

I like X so X can't be bad

I didn't say that. What I said was "these are not the same thing, and drawing a false equivalence between them muddies the message."

Partitioning is an advanced technique that takes advantage of leniency in charge input detection to do things you otherwise couldn't. Exists in a few different games, 3rd Strike Urien is probably the best known example for heavily relying on it.

TFH is legit, one of the best fighting games I've ever played. Mechanically the closest comparison I'd give might be to call it a more grounded BlazBlue, just without a trillion system mechanics. It's also one of very few Switch ports to have full crossplay, something even ArcSys apparently can't figure out.

Team Future.

Depends on how much of a threat they are. Some random loser on /pol/ who will never leave their basement in order to harm anyone is probably not worth punching. But someone like Richard Spencer, who has a lot of reach and influence as a big name, I'll gleefully watch that one clip over and over with popcorn at the ready.

I suppose the more difficult question to ask is where to draw the line in between.

It's not. These are not the same thing. No one has bankrupted themselves playing Balatro.

Gacha is the line in the sand I'm willing to draw. Don't put randomness in the price tag.

Well what do you want the solution to be? I think it's easy to say that games should be transparent about what you're paying for, my stance is that gacha should be outright illegal because of that. But I don't think it makes sense to go after any and all kinds of randomness in games.

They're different issues. The fact that people can and do financially ruin themselves over gacha is a lot more serious, and trying to conflate that with something like Balatro ultimately muddies the message.

I think gacha is a predatory business model that should be illegal, and yes that includes Genshin. But no it does not include Balatro, because Balatro isn't gacha.

While there certainly are problems with other games, at least every game you mentioned is fully transparent about the price tag. Balatro doesn’t exploit whales by concealing how much it'll cost to get anything.

I should be able to be a diehard fan of niche fandoms and hobbies without being told "no, stop enjoying things". What exactly do you expect people who like things to do, just not have communities for the things they like?

Porter Robinson - Nurture

Just saw him live last night, absolutely incredible concert.

Anything popular enough that you can easily google any issues you need to troubleshoot. Beyond that it truly doesn't matter.

There are two kinds of right-wing politicians. Grifters who will say and do anything for personal gain, and suckers who have come to believe it. Vance is just a grifter, make no mistake. And maybe at one point Trump built his empire through grift - he was a Republican in 1987, Independence Party in 1999, a Democrat in 2001, Republican again in 2009. But at this point Trump's narcissism has led him to fall for his own grift, he does believe it.

You can actually tell with Trump that the one issue he doesn't really care about at all but has to pander to his base with is abortion. And when you see how he flounders when asked about Roe v Wade, that gives you a baseline to compare to all the other shit that comes out of his mouth that he's dead serious about.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Haven't had a whole lot of time to practice, but I'm working on charge partitioning. Managed to get double ball a few times in a match.

Them's Fightin' Herds - Hopped on commentary for Glue Cup 2v2 this week. Need to make more time to actually start playing again.

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - After getting demoted to Expert I went on an even worse losing streak for a bit, but I seem to be clawing my way back now. It's just sample size, or so I keep telling myself.

Splatoon 3 - Oh boy, I gotta play Turf War all weekend. Yaaaaay.

Yes.

If devs have to actively maintain software to support new versions, I would argue that is not better than how consoles handle backwards compatibility. Especially since games tend to be tend to be treated as finished products that devs stop updating once they move on to their next project.