The term antihero gets misused a lot, but villain protagonist is absolutely not correct either. An antihero does not have to be the protagonist, and a protagonist who is a villain is still a villain, not an antihero.

I don’t understand streaming music as a concept. My collection of individual tracks stands at about 1,700 (clocking in at 190 hours – that is 22 hours more than a week), and there are several full albums atop that.

Streaming is very useful for people who don’t have such a curated collection already. Especially younger generations who didn’t grow up on physical media.

you don’t want to choose what you listen to

You can though? You can always pull up a specific artist, album, or track. You can even curate your own collection of favorites on these services, and shuffle from there.

But for a lot of users, there’s added value in discovery algorithms that’ll find new music for you. It is radio with extra steps, but those extra steps of telling the system what music you like and dislike do result in much better results than radio stations that weren’t tailored to your exact tastes. Before you built up your collection, how did you use to discover new music back in the day? I’m guessing probably from the radio, this is that for the current generation.

The slow death of being able to own things is sad. But unlimited access to nearly all music, with discovery tools, is a pretty dang tempting deal. The average user doesn’t really care about whether not they ‘own’ their music, just the practicality of being able to listen to music.

Consider that music piracy is way way way down compared to how rampant it was in the 2000s, because people are really happy with streaming now. There’s an old saying that piracy is a service problem, and after unsuccessfully trying to fight it head-on for so long, the industry won in the end by simply offering a better service.

Back from Too Many Games last weekend. Bit different from the FGC majors I typically attend, but it was right in my backyard so I had no reason not to check it out.

We had a five man Melty Blood Type Lumina bracket. Haven’t touched the game in years, I proooobably should’ve booted up the game at least once to familiarize myself with it, but I managed to fake my way to second with 214B and 236C. Once I was down 0-2 in grand finals, I went Neco Arc just to entertain the crowd.

Splatoon 3, the random pickup I formed ended up getting completely washed. Ow.

Dr. Mario, had a very good run. Format was weird though, round robin bo1 pools that are purely to determine seeding, everyone moves onto the bo5 single elim bracket regardless. They could’ve just done double elim the whole way through and it would’ve been faster (and I wouldn’t have had to miss out on Third Strike…). 3-3 in the round robin, 1-1 in bracket, very close matches, perfectly balanced as all things should be.

Between all of that I was mostly on the rhythm game cabinets grinding Chunithm, Wacca and Maimai. Then I went to Round 1 later this week to get another fix, but I had to lament the fact that Chunithm is offline and missing half the songs, Wacca is still out of order, and they don’t even have Maimai here. :(

Also managed to pick up a CIB copy of Super Puyo Puyo Tsu in fantastic condition for $20. Absolute steal, can’t believe they were practically giving that away.

Charging works fine.

Serious question, were any of you using third-party docks on Switch 1? Is this really something that’s a big deal to you guys?

8, 1, 6, 7, 4, 2, 3, 5

The first time you try Linux, you will have to take a little time to learn something that is new and unfamiliar to you. But this was true of the first time you tried Windows too.

The point is that it really isn’t hard to learn, and today it absolutely is easier than ever.

With gachapon, you always “win,” there is no chance that your money is spent and you get nothing in return.

Although you’re technically getting something, typically the common items are nearly worthless, and may as well be nothing. You only “win” when you actually get the ultra rare 5* SSR Jackpot waifu.

that you downloaded the actual game from local corner stores (like 7/11)

No, games were broadcast via satellite modem - hence the name.

The live radio dramas were only part of a few special event titles, but there was a lot more on the service, including standard downloads of both retail games and Satellaview exclusives.

I do. But to me, step one of filtering out Sturgeon’s Law is looking in the right place - platforms that are not overflowing with so much poison that I already know I’m unlikely to ever find what I want.

If they want to share that creativity, share it on a platform where the people who would most appreciate it will actually play it.

So what, you just buy games at random and hope maybe you landed on something good? Without anything that would make for an informed purchase? Sounds like a horribly inefficient way of running headfirst into Sturgeon’s Law.

Mobile is so thoroughly dominated by gacha that any game that tries to have an ethical business model has almost no hope of succeeding on the platform, no hope of competing with the endless sea of gacha.

And I’m sure you’re about to cherry-pick like two counterexamples, but I know you know that those exceptions are so scarce that I have every reason to decide that it simply isn’t worth my time to go out of my way looking for them.

Word of mouth is certainly a large part of it, yes. People talk about successful games. One way or another, the games I like make it onto my radar when I see buzz about them.

But what are the most successful games on mobile? What are the games mobile gamers talk about? Gacha. It’s all gacha. Whatever else is out there, nobody’s talking about it and I’m never going to see it. Nor do I have any reason to go searching through a toxic cesspit in the hopes that maybe I’ll eventually find something, when it is far easier to look elsewhere, on platforms that haven’t been thoroughly corrupted by the race to the bottom.

But again, the real takeaway I want to stress is that the market has been this way for long enough that both gamers and developers know the well is poisoned, and it will never be unpoisoned. The fact that mobile has become dominated by gacha has reinforced itself - everyone not interested in gacha has left the platform, and mobile developers will keep selling more gacha because that’s what the remaining audience wants. They even know that the average mobile gamer won’t spend money on a more ethical business model.

I know that developers know that I know that this is what mobile is. The way I see it, mobile itself has become a red flag. If a game is trying to be more than gacha trash, well why don’t the developers have the sense to put it on other platforms where non-gacha gamers are? If not, they’re shooting themselves in the foot and I have no pity.

At least Action 52 never tried to financially ruin gambling addicts.

We all know that decent games exist, somewhere. But the amount of effort it would take to wade through all the shovelware and gacha to try to find an even halfway passable game on Google Play simply isn’t worth my time.

And with the mobile market being what it is, it arguably isn’t worth it for developers to try and sell any serious game as mobile-first, because it’s so difficult for those types of games to succeed when mobile gamers want gacha and those that don’t simply aren’t playing on mobile. If it’s truly worth my time, it should be ported to other platforms.

I’m judging each platform’s library individually. Though if you do want to look at it that way, I would still say DS + GBA > 3DS + DS.

Also, tbh, I never liked DS-on-3DS due to the screen resolution being such an awkward factor. Scaled looks awful, letterboxed is too tiny.

I’d say the DS was the best handheld of all time, and GBA was close behind it. 3DS had its share of bangers, but if you compare its library to the DS it’s not even close.

3DS was the era where we started to see the conflict between handhelds being a place for experimental low budget titles, versus the need for larger budgets on better hardware. This also just made it more difficult to juggle supporting handheld and console platforms at the same time. And halfway through the system’s lifespan, mobile gaming exploded in popularity, which really ate into the system’s marketshare. There’s a very observable trend in how third party support kept dropping over time.

Y’all know that Sony and Microsoft do this too, right? I just feel like there’s a bit of a double standard here.

I’m just at a point where so few new releases excite me anymore. The mainstream AAA industry has moved far away from my tastes, and when it comes to the niche stuff I like most, I’ve already got my favorite forever games so it’s actually hard for something new to tear me away from grinding those.