I still feel safer being trans in Massachusetts than on terf island. UK is fucked too.

Definitely not AI. Definitely not the kind of thing we’re probably going to keep seeing a lot of, to the point that it would be justified to make a community around it.

Street Fighter did have a bit of a weird naming thing where we were all like “when is one of these going to be called 3?”, but those are all different games on different cartridges. Same with MK3 versus Ultimate MK3. Like, yeah, they’ve got a lot of the same bones but they didn’t release one broken, update it for 10 years and then never release anything else.

The SF2 situation wouldn’t happen in the same way today because those would all be DLCs or updates. Or like, paid alternate skins and new characters.

Do you know how many Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games we had in the 90s?

Before the current era of endless updates, games had to be ready to go when they shipped. If it was broken, they’d delay and fix the worst issues. Early iterations of a series tended to be a little more feature-light than later iterations, but that’s how you ended up with multiple installments per decade.

Compare this with the modern model where it’s half expected that games will be broken on release and it’s all but unheard of to get a sequel within a few years.

Having lived in both environments, the old system had way better results. Without it we wouldn’t have some of the well developed genres we do today.

Imagine if instead of making piles of DLC and remasters Bethesda had just started working on Elder Scrolls VI right after Skyrim. We’d probably be on like VIII by now. Instead they went from horse armor to rereleasing everything they’ve ever made, with a shitty MMO in between.

Updates suck. Gaming was better when they didn’t exist.

Honestly I think this is where the industry is falling flat. Games used to be a thing where they’d put one out and once it was out that was it. They didn’t spend the next 10 years adding features, that’s what a new game was for.

I don’t think a world where a company like Square releases dozens of great games in a decade can coexist with the model of continuing to add features to a game that’s already out. Personally, I’d rather see the evolution of an idea across several iterations than a constant replacement of parts.

It used to be if you liked a game you could see what led to it by playing earlier games in the series. Now those games seldom exist and instead you have the most recent version of one game and no access to any previous version.

The idea of buying characters is itself wild. Games as a service has really screwed up player expectations.

This is legit. I remember playing Soul Calibur 3 I think on PS2 pretty regularly with a couple of friends. One of them owned the game and would stomp us until I asked to borrow it for a while so the other two of us could get good. A few weeks later I was doing bomb and air grab loops with Taki and we were pretty evenly matched, while other friends who would play occasionally were pretty easy to beat. There was no big competitive online play, we got better by figuring out how to counter each other because we had similar amounts of experience with the game.

I’m not sure how you replicate that experience with randos.

It’s much easier to build momentum around a franchise when you release 7 games in 10 years than 2 games in 7 years.

You can watch several seasons if you’re willing to play them at the same time. Or if it’s Lower Decks.

Honestly, that kind of makes sense given the era the NES came out in. There was a fair amount of unplayable shovelware for the Atari, so having some oversight was probably good marketing at the time.

The practice of going after emulators and trying to establish exclusive rights to game mechanics that they didn’t actually invent is a bit further.

O Log, you are big!
O Log, you are heavy!
O Log, you are wood!

Let all the people know this of our Log!
It is better than bad! Yes I say! Better!
It is good!

From Blammo.

It’s crazy to watch a company burn a lifetime of good will in just a few years of chasing copyright litigation.

Great album. I’m going to have to listen to some Television today.

Toad!

It also isn’t going to come by just abandoning a platform and no longer interacting with the communities on it. Torpedoing my ability to communicate with my friends doesn’t make them all change platforms.

Does it improve video and audio quality?

I like the thorns. We should bring them back. I’m not sure where to put them in qwerty though.

Makes sense. Can’t have blood flowing to the brain. That might result in independent thought, maybe even questioning management.

Given the Team Sneed logo being a fat orange pepe clone in a red trucker hat and the existence of previous games by the same person with names like “Cuck Simulator”, it definitely seems like the intent is racist.

On a side note, it’s crazy that the same people who love to shout about there only being two genders will also classify men into 100 distinct categories related to gender expression and sexuality. It’s almost like they can’t count.