My ultimate dream would be to someday get SteamOS running on a DS-sized form factor. Doesn’t need to be beefy, just needs to fit in my pocket and run my favorite 2D indie games.

I bought a Steam Deck just to support the most important thing that ever happened to Linux gaming, but mine has actually just been gathering dust. It’s far too big to really be a handheld, doesn’t fit in my pocket, and does not fill the role that Nintendo’s handhelds served for me. The main thing I do end up using it for is taking Deck + dock to FGC events for a portable setup.

Last year I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus, a little emulator handheld, as an impulse buy because it was on sale super cheap. I ended up putting far more time into it than I ever did with the Deck.

Maybe the best library of all time, my DS collection is massive.

The one thing that’s sad though is how many classics are unlikely to ever see a rerelease. Games that were designed around the hardware just won’t be the same on any other platform.

FWIW, all three Boktai games do have patches if you can’t play on original hardware.

• Boktai series: 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. Also play Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance, but Aria is by far the best of the GBA installments.
• 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.
• 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…

I should be able to be a diehard fan of niche fandoms and hobbies without being told “no, stop enjoying things”. What exactly do you expect people who like things to do, just not have communities for the things they like?

There are two kinds of right-wing politicians. Grifters who will say and do anything for personal gain, and suckers who have come to believe it. Vance is just a grifter, make no mistake. And maybe at one point Trump built his empire through grift - he was a Republican in 1987, Independence Party in 1999, a Democrat in 2001, Republican again in 2009. But at this point Trump’s narcissism has led him to fall for his own grift, he does believe it.

You can actually tell with Trump that the one issue he doesn’t really care about at all but has to pander to his base with is abortion. And when you see how he flounders when asked about Roe v Wade, that gives you a baseline to compare to all the other shit that comes out of his mouth that he’s dead serious about.

When I point out that it’s bad for Afghanistan to “go broke”

Except that isn’t what OP actually said. Now who’s having a rich disagreement with people in their head?

This thread started with vilifying the Taliban, you responded with “oh you want people to starve?” Obviously, this is not a direct response to what they actually said.

All anyone said was that the Taliban is bad, and you’re very weirdly up in arms about that.

This is an example of non-Euclidean geometry. In this non-Euclidean space, it is a triangle.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Goofy clip of the week

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike - Friend came to visit from out of town, played some casual 3S for a little while. Also managed to rope him into trying out Waku Waku 7 and Twinkle Star Sprites as I wanted to show off some fun hidden gems in my collection.

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - Remember when I said I was done grinding this game mode and wouldn’t do another run?

Splatoon 3 - Haven’t touched Salmon Run since the last Big Run and I’m clearly rusty. Put up a 173, which is gold, but I know that gold target isn’t actually much, especially on this map. Still can’t kill a damn Triumvirate, which is what I really wanted.

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.

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.

god is a goat, and if you take it to the right place, it will make you a baby god

The baby god event was never officially released, so this actually didn’t canonically happen.

a 10 year old destroys the yakuza (and then another 10 year old destroys its remnants a few years later)

Red is stated to be 11 in the RGBY instruction booklet. People often get this mixed up because Ash Ketchum is 10, but they are not the same person. Gold’s age is never stated.

a random guy with a bad accent in a brown trenchcoat is the sole police officer seen in the series. no i mean literally, there ARE NO OTHER POLICE it’s just him, he keeps showing up. All the others you might think were police are just security guards.

Officer/Policeman/Police Officer is a recurring NPC trainer class throughout the series, first seen in gen II.

• 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.

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!