Glide

Fascinating. As much shit as I talk, I did discover a lot of good games via those discs. The Blades of Exile franchise, for example, really stands out as a series of underrated early windows RPGs.

Balatro, Loop Hero, all three of the noteworthy Mihoyo games, Sword of Convallaria - I'm going to get flak for including gacha games, but these ones are surprisingly well designed and written games, despite predatory monetization practices - Stardew Valley, Dead Cells, Vampire Survivors...

I think we're kidding ourselves if we ignore that Among Us was a genuinely good game, despite being notorious brainrot zoomer bait.

I'm not sure why we shifted the goal post to mobile games, but the point stands.

Edit: I had to come back because I remembered how much I enjoyed Monster Hunter Stories on mobile, and the mobile version is actually the most complete version.

Hades 2, Silksong, and the FFTactics remake, all of which came out in the last like 3 weeks.

I'd genuinely call the first two 10/10s, and the only thing stopping me saying that about all three is FFTactics' commitment to staying true to the original, as they kept some features, qualities and even bugs moving forward that are jank in the modern era, but keep the game feeling more authentic.

Ah, I see you have never picked up a "1000 best games for Windows" CD.

There are a lot of low quality games to complain about. There are also a lot of high quality, new games to experience. 10 years from now, the low quality games will be forgotten, while the high quality games will be looked back on, fondly. Posts will be made comparing the "high effort, high quality games from 10 years ago" to the modern slop, and the cycle will repeat..

I don't think this is about enthusiasts buying less games, though. We're not talking about the average number of purchases the consumer makes. This is more evidence that there are a lot more casual players out there, who will make their 0-2 large game purchases a year and play their games over a long time. The college guy who literally only buys a couple sports games that they play online with a friend. The burnt out parent that can only make time for their 2 open world adventure games all year. I know a few people in my life who own a Switch, Mario Kart and Animal Crossing, and that will be literally the only two games they load all year. And this is to say nothing of people who strictly play F2P tirles, which apparently are 33% of players.

"US game players purchase 1-2 games a year on average" is not the same thing as "the bottom 60% of purchasers only purchase 1-2 games a year." This is evidence that, one, the medium is reaching a much more widespread market and, two, the casual market is often more engaged with F2P titles.

I think if we looked at enthusiasts and hobbiests, there would still be a decline in purchases. I don't think this is evidence that games have become too expensive for most.

But this doesn't confirm my bias'.

...in that order?

Metal Hellsinger was one of the more inspired experiences I've played in the past several years. Really sad to see a studio making genuinely quality games have to shutter.

Seconded for Dark Cloud 2 specifically. Game is incredibly good.

Funnily enough, I'm on a stock Pixel 6. I flashed custom firmware onto my Pixel 2XL back in the day, and the gain wasn't super worth it. My phone before that, some Motorola brand, I flashed custom firmware onto and it helped a lot with features I wanted and bloatware removal. But, let be real, save being in the Google ecosphere, the Pixel is as stripped down baseline as a phone gets. And since my job is all-in on the Google apps, I have to be in that space anyway. At some stage, it just doesn't feel like there's much of a point.

You either die a villain or live long enough to see yourself become a hero.

...wait a second.

God, this timeline is fucking weird.

As a combat/character building driven player, you need to hit character level 2-4 for core abilities/synergies to start coming online before combt gets interesting, imo. If you're a story driven player and you're not already into it 2-3 hours in, you won't get into it at all.