This game spent nearly a decade in development to end up like this.

• Celeste Mario’s Zap & Dash (NES): SMB1 turned into a Metroidvania with Celeste mechanics ported in. I think what impresses me the most is that they got 4-directional scrolling into this engine.
• Super Metroid and A Link to the Past Crossover Randomizer (SNES): It’s an absolutely incredible technical feat that this even works. SM and ALttP smashed together into a single ROM, with a few doors that take you from one game to the other, then the item pools are shuffled together so you have to go back and forth to find one game’s items in the other. Unfortunately because ALttP is a much bigger game with a lot more items it kinda overshadows SM, you may not find this to be as replayable as the standalone randos. But I recommend trying it once because it’s just so cool the first time.

Matrix exists as a federated Discord-like. Though the problem I have with it is that it is a Discord-like, with the same problems of not being indexed by search engines. I don’t think these types of platforms are where most online communities should be. Not to say there’s no use case for a private group chat, but I hate that in a lot of communities Discord is being used for the wrong reasons.

The alternative for most Discord servers should be forums. Actually, I think Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin can work great as a modern federated forum, one that solves some of the friction of old-school forums by only needing users to have one Fedi account they can use everywhere.

I’m expecting that if/when Discord does fall, people will just go to another corporate-owned platform that hasn’t enshittified yet… but inevitably will. And the cycle will repeat.

This is what we’re seeing with BlueSky. Sure, BlueSky pays lip service to federation in order to convince users they’re totally different, but in reality they’ve set it up so that nearly everything goes through their master server and they hold control. I don’t trust BlueSky any further than I can throw it, but ActivityPub is clearly losing the battle here.

Trying to convince people to come to Fedi is like trying to convince them to switch to Linux. They’re not gonna do it and they will get mad at me if I don’t shut the fuck up.

Discord is the last mainstream social media platform I still use, and god do I hate it. I hate the impact it’s had on online communities, moving everything underground to a place that isn’t indexed by search engines.

Unfortunately, I’m kind of stuck with it, I can’t disconnect from those communities that have chosen to tie themselves to this platform. If I did I really would be a hermit living in a cave.

When buying a console, the only question that matters is what games you want to play on it.

Xbox One X is the last generation model, so it won’t run newer Xbox Series exclusives. The line between console generations is quite blurry these days, the Series line has been out for over five years and some games still get cross-generation releases, but even then you should be aware that cross-gen titles may be poorly optimized for older hardware.

If you’re only looking to play games from the Xbox One era (2013-2020), those should all run great on the One X and you can save a lot of money by deliberately staying a generation behind. See !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works

But if you want to play anything newer, if you want to be future-proof going forward. Series X is the high-end current generation model for current generation games.

I’m beginning to suspect this thread is just you having a personal grudge and vagueposting about it.

You’re looking for actual Roguelikes then. That’s what the genre originally was before it got bastardized.

I sincerely wish these kinds of grinding games would keep the good name of Rogue out of their mouths. No, it’s not -lite, it’s the exact opposite of Rogue!

Assuming you don’t live in Japan, Red/Blue actually is slightly more recent than OP led you to think. JP Red/Green was 1996, but international Red/Blue was 1998. Assuming you don’t live in Japan, you get two years of youth back.

Tetris: The Grand Master is the only good Tetris. Honestly sad that they had a good thing going and TTC decided to throw it out in favor of Guideline.

Kirby Air Riders. I waited 22 years for this sequel and it delivered. I’m actually blown away by how much Sakurai has managed to evolve on the concept.

Quite a lot of modern anime. My list of all-time favorites has become dominated by shows from just the last few years. Apocalypse Hotel, Apothecary Diaries, Bocchi the Rock!, CITY: The Animation, Dungeon Meshi, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Takopi’s Original Sin.

For Chrono Trigger, definitely don’t play the original SNES localization. No disrespect to Ted Woolsey, he was one man working on an unreasonably tight deadline and hard technical limitations, but the retranslation is much better.

Farfetch’d

If you want a few recommendations that I think are particularly great for their combat mechanics:

• Etrian Odyssey - Regular encounters are no slouch, FOEs are a terror, status effects hella matter, and you always have to carefully gauge how far you can push before it’s time to retreat back to town. IMO, 4 is the peak.
• Bravely Default - The ability to bank your turns or take an advance on future turns adds a really cool layer to combat. As a spiritual successor to FF5, the job system gives you lots of fun toys to play with and encourages you to constantly change up your builds.
• Tales of series - These games are partially inspired by fighting games, and if you squint hard enough you can see those influences in the early titles before it started to go off in more of its own direction. I think Vesperia is the most polished, though I actually want to suggest starting with Symphonia for the story/characters, because otherwise you’ll find it a hard game to go back to since it doesn’t have the Free Run mechanic from later games. The trick is that you won’t miss it if you play Symphonia first.
• CrossCode - Closest thing I can try to compare this to would be Secret of Mana, if that game was faster and significantly more technical.
• The World Ends With You - If you can, play the original DS version to fully enjoy how it was built around the hardware. If you can’t, the Switch version is still worth playing, and does have some cool added content to compensate for some of the sacrifices made to adapt it to a single screen.

I’ve got a handful of JRPGs sitting on my backlog, that I never make time for because I’m just grinding another round of the same few forever games.

There are a lot of bots on Steam. If I get a random friend request from someone I don’t recognize who has only F2P games in their account, or just no playtime in anything that I play, I ignore it.

But if it’s someone you’ve been playing with, that’s a human. A bot would’ve just gone straight to the scam as soon as you accept their friend request.

I’m guessing they’re probably talking about Discord, which is what most people use for voice chat these days (and other social media-y stuff). It’s not a virus or anything, but it is another proprietary corporate-owned social media platform, which I’m sure a lot of us here on Fedi might have opinions about.

AFAIK none of those games actually do have explicit content in them, they’re just named that way in the hopes of tricking suckers into buying them.

All evidence points to CERO. They won’t throw CERO under the bus by saying it outright, but it’s pretty clear.

The Switch 2 version of Dispatch is a universal binary for all regions, meaning it has to comply with all regions’ guidelines. The JP PS5 version that just launched has the same censorship, the only difference is that PS5 has a separate international version.

And we know that separate versions is an option on Switch 2, Cyberpunk 2077 has a censored JP version, but for whatever reason AdHoc chose to have one universal version here.

Ultimately I think it just reflects very poorly on AdHoc that none of this was disclosed prior to release, allowing this shitstorm of finger-pointing to happen.