Well put. Even if we assumed Facebook had the best of intentions - which they damn well don’t - it needs to be pointed out that other servers get defederated for far, far, far less than what they allow to happen on their platforms. Their moderation is abhorrent, which makes it outright unsafe to federate with them.

Well you should care, because Facebook is doing real harm to those people.

Even if we assumed Facebook had the best of intentions - but if you truly believe that I have a bridge to sell you - here’s another perspective to consider:

Poorly moderated servers regularly get defederated for far, far, far less than what goes on on Facebook’s platforms. Facebook not only platforms bigotry, they pretty much support and endorse it.

No, the PS3 version was also 60. Symphonia was the one that got downgraded on PS2 and subsequent ports were based on that.

Can someone explain to me why this game ran at 60fps on the goddamn Wii and yet is downgraded to 30 on Switch?

If Namco can’t get these ports right, just give me any of the classic 2D games we never got in the west. Surely they can’t mess those up.

I just won a five-man local bracket for Under Night In-Birth II last weekend. I play a lot of Riichi Mahjong at the local club as well, but haven’t been able to make it out to a proper tournament yet.

I also play Skullgirls and Them’s Fightin’ Herds online, and have been to a few tournaments in the past, but they don’t have local scenes around here anymore. One trip a year traveling out to Combo Breaker is the extent of my offline play for those games.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - I WON A FIVE MAN BRACKET WOOOOO! Also played some Skullgirls casuals for a little while after the bracket ended.

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - Ever since Balatro blew up, people have been joking about when we’re gonna see the mahjong roguelike next. Then four different ones went into development. Then Mahjong Soul surprised dropped a fifth one as a limited time event, and it might be the most promising of all of them. Then I broke the hell out of it.

Splatoon 3 - Team practice. Don’t have any cool clips to share rn, maybe next week.

There are some old English-language resources available on the wiki. But I’ve never quite liked the way we try to teach the game by just showing pictures of an idealized chain built in a frictionless vacuum, it’s a very “draw the rest of the owl” approach. Nor do I know what a better approach looks like for a game this abstract.

At one point I was working on a video where I’d build a chain step-by-step and overexplain my thought process on each piece. But that sits on a large mountain of unfinished projects and ideas. I’m retired from the game now because, well, I can’t continue justifying my competitive energy towards a game that just has no future as long as its publisher hates it, so it’s never going to get finished.

If you want functional online, the Switch version of Puyo Puyo Champions is the only title worth bothering with. Specifically Switch, other platforms are ghost towns.

If you want singleplayer content, 15th Anniversary, 20th Anniversary, and Chronicle are all peak. None of these games were released outside of Japan and they’re older titles you’ll have to emulate, hence all my salt about the state of things today, but at least they do have fantranslation patches.

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2

I wrote that essay back in 2021, and three years later time proved all of it correct. This game straight up killed the series.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - I WON A FIVE MAN BRACKET WOOOOO Also played some Skullgirls casuals for a little while after the bracket ended.

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - Ever since Balatro blew up, people have been joking about when we’re gonna see the mahjong roguelike next. Then four different ones went into development. Then Mahjong Soul surprised dropped a fifth one as a limited time event, and it might be the most promising of all of them. Then I broke the hell out of it.

Splatoon 3 - Team practice. Don’t have any cool clips to share rn, maybe next week.

Finding local groups dedicated to a hobby is great. I play a lot of Riichi Mahjong online, but it took me an embarassingly long time to realize “Hey I should see if there’s a local club around here to play offline.” There is, and now I have an excuse to leave the house for weekly meetups, and I’ve met some great friends here.

I also play fighting games, but I’ve mostly played more niche titles that never had an active local scene where I live, so I was limited to occasionally traveling out to play 1-2 tournaments a year. This year I finally picked up a game that is active around here, so I’m finally going to FGC locals again.

How many "one final chance"s has he had?

Don’t. There’s no reason to care about the anniversary of someone creating an account on a website. “Cake day” as a concept was one the most insufferable reddit-isms, and will remain so no matter what else you call it.

• Boktai series: Hideo Kojima’s most unusual work, and I mean that in the best way. 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. It’s good. Also check out Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance, but AoS was by far the best of the GBA entries.
• 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.
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: If you’ve played any of the other Mario RPGs, this one’s great too. Has a 3DS remake but I haven’t played that version so I can’t tell you how it compares.
• Metroid: Zero Mission: The original Metroid has aged rather poorly if you ask me, but this remake does a perfect job modernizing it into one of the best games in the series. Fusion is good too, but some fans have opinions on that one.
• 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…
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: Zelda.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Made top 8 at locals. Then played a long casual set with the guy who eliminated me from bracket, came out of it feeling like I understand the Carmine matchup better now.

Kitsune Tails - Got to act 2 and I’m just replaying the same levels with a character who has a bunch of strong movement abilities. New levels designed for this character would’ve been great, but why am I replaying the same ones but now way easier?

Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers - My opinions on this game keep going back and forth. I’ve found the strats to win more consistently by just relying on disrupting the opponent’s deck, but doing so feels a little too linear. I saw there’s a big balance update in beta now, so I guess I’ll have to see how the changes feel.

Splatoon 3 - lol, lmao

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - Came up with a new strategy at club this week where I just draw good tiles over and over.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Made top 8 at locals. Then played a long casual set with the guy who eliminated me from bracket, came out of it feeling like I understand the Carmine matchup better now.

Kitsune Tails - Got to act 2 and I’m just replaying the same levels with a character who has a bunch of strong movement abilities. New levels designed for this character would’ve been great, but why am I replaying the same ones but now way easier?

Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers - My opinions on this game keep going back and forth. I’ve found the strats to win more consistently by just relying on disrupting the opponent’s deck, but doing so feels a little too linear. I saw there’s a big balance update in beta now, so I guess I’ll have to see how the changes feel.

Splatoon 3 - lol, lmao

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - Came up with a new strategy at club this week where I just draw good tiles over and over.

Kitsune Tails - Cute little platformer, but maybe a little too on the nose in just how much it copies from SMB3. I think they didn’t need to put Kuribo’s Shoe in there.

Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers - Liked the demo a lot, but my opinions keep going back and forth on the full version. At first it felt like there just isn’t enough player agency to consistently get out of the early game or deal with everything the endgame throws at you, but then I started to work out the winning strat by just repeatedly forcing the opponent to bust. Doing that all the time is a little linear though, and the gap between broken cards and worthless cards is a lot.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Did alright in this week’s bracket. Hyde still terrifies me.

Splatoon 3 - lol, lmao

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - the usual

Any particular reason you would want SteamOS on a desktop over any other distro? It’s pretty much designed for console use, I would not recommend it elsewhere.

Favorite:

• Nintendo DSi - The DS just had such an incredible library, with tons of unique titles you could never experience elsewhere. Though the sad thing about how unique it was is that… you can’t properly experience a lot of these titles elsewhere. Emulation just isn’t the same. While it came out very late and wasn’t worth upgrading to if you already owned an earlier model, the DSi was a very nice and sleek evolution on the hardware. Much more softmod-friendly too.
• Miyoo Mini Plus - Bought this last year on sale as an impulse buy. Ended up liking it so much I wish I’d bought a more expensive model with analog sticks. My ultimate dream is to someday get something that runs SteamOS in this form factor.
• My custom built fightstick - Put this together last year to replace my old Hori RAP4. Really happy with how it turned out! Love the GP2040-CE, I used to have to go through an adapter to use the HRAP4 on Switch and I can feel the difference not having that added latency anymore.

Hard for me to name least favorites, because I haven’t owned a system I actively disliked, and I don’t wanna just say CD-i or N-Gage or whatever. But I guess I’ll list ones that I have mixed feelings on:

• Wii - The Wii had a few great games. It also had a lot of duds. The saddest thing about it is how many games had to shoehorn waggle gimmicks in, and how few of them actually did it well.
• Steam Deck - As a Linux nerd that wants to see the platform grow, I love that the Steam Deck exists. It’s arguably the most important thing that has happened to Linux gaming. It just isn’t for me at all. It’s too big to be a handheld, I grew up on a Game Boy Color and I still love curling up with handhelds in bed, but this doesn’t feel cozy to play with at all. I do occasionally use it + dock as a portable setup I can take to FGC events, or when I have guests I’ll sometimes hook it up to the TV for Jackbox, but it mostly gathers dust the rest of the time.
• Switch - Great library, and the hybrid form clearly worked out for Nintendo just because they don’t have to divide their output between two platforms. But like the Deck, it’s not what I want in a handheld, mine doesn’t leave the dock. It’s also rather frustrating how many bad ports the system got, I wish developers would simply stop trying to port games it clearly can’t handle - especially when there are plenty of older titles in their back catalog that I’m sure could have good ports but get overlooked. And don’t get me started on JoyCons!