Due to Long Covid I can only lay in bed and most games are too intense for me. So I actually do watch let’s plays.
I really like Welonz. She has a really nice mix of indies and big titles, regularly tries out a great variety of games. She is very thorough and while she might not find all the secrets she will go out of her way to show alternate endings and stuff. And she has an interesting voice, so rumor has it that she is actually a ten year old boy.
While I have no problems with let’s plays, I still feel like they’re kinda subjective. No commentary playthroughs are on the opposite end of the spectrum but I feel really really bored watching them and I can’t say the same for let’s plays.
Yeah, I have far fewer games and have played a lower percent of the ones I have. There are just so many bundles that have one or two games I do want and I just add the rest to my library.
Perhaps this is a weird part to single out, but it surprised me
I mainly played on the 3DS from when I was 6 until I was 15, so I don’t have as much experience with other consoles.
[…] The 3DS was simply Nintendo’s best era, and I don’t think we’ll see anything like that again given the current direction of their latest consoles…
Curious if others agree. I would’ve thought that it would be the SNES era, but that’s probably betraying my age more than anything.
Great article! On par with gaming publications, and actually probably better than most Nintendo Power articles I remember from back in the day. Great job!!
I’m in my 30’s and I think I agree with this. The amount of bangers for the 3ds is insane, and the virtual console lineups on both the 3ds and wii u were unmatched any time before or after. Even today, the 3ds is the best console to buy used and hack. You have QR-code access to ALL titles, including virtual console titles. It’s a Nintendo emulation powerhouse. Technically you can do all of that on the switch, but it’s much harder to do, much harder to get content, and not nearly as many things are compatible.
I actually never had one while it was “recent” (I skipped from the ds to the switch) but I’ve since bought a refurbished one and loaded custom firmware (very simple compared to other consoles) and played some of the top rated games and a few niche ones. I fell in love, and I use it for emulation of other Nintendo consoles up to N64 and all handheld consoles. I’m even working on a full living pokedex using only a 3ds and a switch, which is completely legit using Pokémon bank and Pokémon home and the virtual console, all official Nintendo software.
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.
I’d argue that the backwards compatibility between the 3ds and ds makes the 3ds just as good as the DS if you’re counting ds games. Though if we’re talking how good the games are of each generation instead of how useful and fun each console is with all available means of play, it might be a different story.
He actively misrepresented the campaign and spread misinformation about its goals. I don’t know if he genuinely didn’t understand or if he was too embarrassed to admit to a mistake but he did a lot of damage to the momentum and perception of the whole thing.
It sucks these big creators only now pick up the mantle but it’s better than nothing. There’s still some time left.
I haven’t really been following it or him (I don’t really even know much, other than the gist of not wanting games to disappear when devs decide it’s too expensive to keep the servers). What did he do? Because normally he gives pretty good takes.
He wildly misunderstood/misrepresented the initiative two videos in a row (and continues to ten months later), and he continually discredits the entire initiative because of contrived edge cases.
My dislike of the initiative stems entirely from the wording to keep all games in a “Functional Playable State” after sunsetting which is not possible for all games and could limit what kinds of games people make in the future.
The idea that creativity would be hampered because games would have to remain playable when the company shuts down servers one day is ridiculous. Can you imagine if we talked like this about anything else? “We can’t force every phone to use the same USB-C charging port because it would be too technically infeasible to do so and hamper creativity.” “We can’t outlaw CFCs because they’re useful chemicals and it would be technically infeasible for some products to be made without chlorofluorocarbons (the things that fucked up the ozone layer).” “My dislike of the initiative stems entirely from the wording to ‘make cars limit their emissions’ which is not possible for all cars and could limit what kinds of cars companies make in the future.” Ridiculous.
It’s absurd that I’m not exaggerating when I say his opposition to Stop Killing Games entirely boils down to “I think companies should be allowed to take games away because it would be really hard for them to leave some games playable when they’re done supporting them 🥺”
I used to passively like Thor, but when I watched those two videos he made last year about SKG I lost all of my respect for him.
I don’t know if he genuinely didn’t understand or if he was too embarrassed to admit to a mistake
Worse, he actively lied. In his edited video about the petition he actively misrepresents the initiative, then goes on to edit out the the part of Ross’ video that would have contradicted his misrepresentation.
This is not an innocent or negligent mistake on Thor’s part, it’s an active attempt at burial.
Even worse, he is a narcissistic lying piece of shit with high ego. He would never admit a slight mistake, and thinks of himself as all-knowing. Think ChatGPT - confidently lying all the time, but always doubling down.
No, it did not, and concurrent players is a very bad metric to use for something like this. They sold north of 3.5M copies. At $40 each, that’s about $100M. Even looking at concurrent players, right now, at 98k players, it’s the 14th most played game on Steam, so with the information you did use, as a paid game and not free to play, it would be hard to say that it flopped.
Typically, that’s how you’d measure a flop. Seeing as you only need two other people to play, this game isn’t dead as long as there are 3 people who want to play and a server running to facilitate them.
You see, that’s your problem. Companies don’t make games for any other reason than money. Since there are no microtransactions or subscriptions available, they quite frankly don’t care if you ever play the game after you’ve purchased it.
They moved a lot of units already and considering it’s only a side game with reused assets, they made a profit. Therefore, the game by all means is a success for them, even if nobody would play anymore.
Concurrent players also shouldn’t influcene future sales by much, since you only need 3 people at a time
I never understood why my wife has so many shoes but some of them are in the closet and will never be worn. Then I looked at my steam library and it clicked…
Shining Force is a classic. Basically Seva’s answer to Fire Emblem.
Wargroove is pretty good too. Kind of like Advance Wars, but in a more medieval fantasy setting. From an indie dev with pixel art. My only real complaint is one I have with all modern “retro pixel art” style games: the “pixels” can move by much smaller increments than themselves. I wish games that used that style would align everything, including animation, to the fake pixels. It looks kind of busy and messy imo. It doesn’t bother me enough to ruin Wargroove though.
Banner Saga was pretty good. It’s a combination of tactical RPG with mostly text-based choose-your-own-adventure style elements between battles. Still haven’t played the 3rd one, but I enjoyed the first 2.
Loved Shining Force since I watched my brother and his friend play all night after renting it from Blockbuster in the early 90s! I’ve played 1 and 2 a few times over the years and always had fun.
I rented Superman 64 as a kid, never knowing it was a universally hated game. We had fun with the weird multiplayer mode where you fly around in weird pod things. I remember flying through the rings too. The whole game makes zero sense in hindsight.
The game became that shitshow because Warner Bros execs got pissed that a “no-name” yuropeean company got the rights to make a licensed Superman game (because they were the only company that bothered to bid), so they did a lot of time-wasting requests to the developers.
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