There’s an entire genre of fantastic arcade/versus puzzle games not named Tetris. And that whole genre lies forgotten in ruins now. The one game that survived the longest was Puyo Puyo, but ironically, you can blame Tetris for killing that IP in the end.

I wish any developer luck in trying to do anything at all with this genre, give me something new and I will be first in line to buy ten copies. But I don’t think Pajitnov, or anyone else for that matter, will ever find even 1% of the success Tetris did. I just don’t think audiences still want this genre anymore, they just want Tetris and only Tetris.

This dumbass contacted Nintendo to taunt them about how he’s gonna stream leaked pirated copies. Hard to have sympathy for this idiot for poking the bear.

Mobile very quickly turned into a race-to-the-bottom. When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out. So in order to get players in the door, you gotta make it f2p. And in order to maximize profits for a f2p game, you gotta employ all the worst dark patterns, because that’s what all your competitors are doing too.

And this has led to a feedback loop of consumer expectations. People understand that this is just what mobile is now, so people who want anything else have given up on mobile and are instead buying games on other platforms. Releasing a premium title on mobile is basically just trying to sell to the wrong audience.

Puyo Puyo Champions - After the video essay I posted two weeks ago ended up doing so much better than I expected, 11k+ views and 600+ likes, I decided to try streaming some ranked for the first time in 2.5 years. I’m still cracked.

Riichi Mahjong - This really ought to be worth a lot more for how rare it is.

Persona 4 Golden - Finally coming back to this, where’d I leave off again?

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.

Skullgirls, Vampire Savior - 2nd in SG, 1st in VSav at locals. This happened in grand finals

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Didn’t do too hot in netplay biweekly. Gordeau matchup takes years off my lifespan.

Riichi Mahjong - skill

Splatoon 3 - Splatfestin’

Also finally published the big secret video essay I’d been working on. It’s about Puyo Puyo.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

In a vacuum, the app itself is a nice value add for your NSO subscription. I like that they have both single-length and extended versions of each track, so you can loop them seamlessly without an intro/outro. Loopable OSTs can be hard to find sometimes, when I was trying to decide what BGM to use for a li’l video essay I recently put out I had to narrow it down to something I could find an extended version of.

But what’s annoying is that this is the only official way to listen to Nintendo music. It’s either this, unofficial rips on Youtube (and I would not be surprised if these start getting taken down), or the seven seas.

I just wanna buy an album and listen to it offline, DRM-free. I want to be able to shuffle these tracks in with the rest of my music library.

But that’s been a problem since before the new app, so I can’t really blame the app for this, can I?

What am I supposed to be looking at here?

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.

Under Night In-Birth II: [Sys:Celes] - 1-2 at locals. Bracket was stacked, I was going to lose to both of those players either way, but I feel like I choked a lot harder than I should’ve.

Super Mario Party Jamboree - Just for shits and giggles, local attempted to run a bracket for this. Started an hour and a half behind schedule, and apparently this game is even slower than previous Mario Parties already were. Took several hours to finish two games and make top 6, lose the tiebreak to not make finals, and get to go home as my consolation prize. Those two games were pretty wild though, stole game 1 through Chance Time and for game 2 we all held onto Boo Bells for the entire game, loaded guns pointed at each other waiting to see who will fire the first shot.

Skullgirls, Vampire Savior - Tonight’s locals are gonna be a Halloween themed bracket, so I’m getting back on my SG grind and derusting a bit for VSav.

Riichi Mahjong - Walked a friend through some basic lessons via Clubhouse Games. Don’t know how much of it they fully understood just yet though.

Also finally finished that big secret project I’ve had in the works, planning to publish something this weekend~

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.

Physical whenever possible. I don’t trust Nintendo’s DRM.

BlueSky has money. We don’t.

People are going from one corporate-controlled social media platform to another corporate-controlled social media platform. You and I both know that’s the problem, but to the average user, they’re going to go to whatever has a large corporation spending a lot of money to tell them that their platform is the next big thing.

BlueSky has the one thing Fedi doesn’t: a large advertising budget. Hate to say it, but we have lost.

Yeah, I stopped buying from the VC when the Wii U asked me to pay to “upgrade” my games.

This is an excellent article that covers how and why the VC died.

People say they want it back, but most titles never sold all that well back then.

I’ve been holding onto a pet conspiracy theory that BW2 was a last-minute change from Gray, loose ends and plot holes felt too rushed. Curious if the leaked source code will corroborate this.