The internet is how I found groups for my most niche interests. I already know that some of my favorite games do not have any kind of local scene near me, but at least I can still play online. Some of these games I have to travel out to tournaments to play in-person once or twice a year, and I know those events wouldn’t exist without first building up an online community to organize from.

Vampire Savior

HW1 didn’t include anyone from A Link to the Past, Oracle of Ages/Seasons, Four Swords, Minish Cap, Phantom Hourglass, or Spirit Tracks. So those would be a good place to start.

Qanon

Honestly disappointed they’re limiting it to BotW and TotK, again. I really liked HW1 as a celebration of the entire Zelda franchise, and wish a sequel expanded on that to represent an even wider variety of picks throughout the series, especially games that weren’t represented in HW1.

Aika from Skies of Arcadia

One Piece actually does have those things.

But I’m still not gonna sit through 1000 episodes for it.

As a journalist she did it to see what would happen. And then wrote an article about what happened. This is definitely worth talking about even if she did click the box, the box isn’t really the point here.

Just a few days ago, at a local Vampire Savior tournament. Grand Finals ended with me sniping Q-Bee’s bubble super with a callout from B.B. Hood’s gun super. Wish I had a clip, but it wasn’t streamed or recorded.

Also had a few good laughs playing Skullgirls earlier that night at the same local, chaotic shit always happens in that game.

Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I’m gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.

Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It’s never been remotely balanced, and I don’t believe it ever could be.

Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?

If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there’s a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don’t get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.

Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn’t.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn’t do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it’s still Ken Fighter.

Word of caution, do NOT read the original manga. It’s kind of infamous for the incredibly controversial direction the story goes in the second half, which the anime thankfully omits.

A Link to the Past/Super Metroid combo randomizer. Both games smooshed into a single ROM, with certain doors taking you from one to the other. Item pools are then shuffled together, sending you on a big scavenger hunt to find Metroid items in Hyrule so that you can explore Zebes to find Zelda items so that you can explore Hyrule.

Unfortunately it’s somewhat lopsided due to how much bigger ALttP is than SM, but the technical novelty of it is amazing and worth a playthrough.

Conservatives have been labeling anything and everything they don’t like as “porn”. A queer romance novel is “porn”. Two male characters kissing on television is “porn”. Drag queen story time is “porn”. The picture book Heather Has Two Mommies is “porn”. And the thing they’re really most afraid of, educational resources for LGBTQ youth are “porn”.

So by declaring porn illegal, they now have a pretext to go after everything they call “porn”. Their goal isn’t to remove all porn from the internet, it’s to make it harder for people who need those educational resources to access them. It’s not about porn, it’s about “porn”.

Kinda surprised to hear he didn’t already have one.

Do you think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he’s created?

- Spy Kids 2

Terry Bogard

Yes. Even putting aside what enshittification has done to the userbase in recent years, Reddit has always skewed Democrat, Fediverse skews leftist.

Not everyone wants to spend all their energy debating nazis. It’s not going to change the nazi’s mind.

Phobia, in this context, means strong aversion to. But I think the fact that you tried to play semantics answered the question well enough.

What do you mean when you say people on this platform “pretend science isn’t real”? The fact that you can’t give a straight answer seems rather telling…

First game is one of my all time favorites, and I’m blown away by how much more they’ve packed into this sequel.