Honestly, it’s been a very long time since I last used start/windows menu as a… menu I guess. I don’t think I’ve tried to explore it since early XP. Back then I’d even try to organise it a bit by categories and such.
Now I have way too many games to make it readable, with a lot of these not currently installed but available. The only way I’m using the windows menu is with the search bar.
Having a dedicated game library (with everything in it) makes sense to me.
I’ve kind of drifted away from Steam around the Greenlight/Direct debacle, when it quickly went from too tightly curated to an unexplorable paradise for thousands of fake games. Steam is not the inescapable monopoly this weird editorial makes it to be.
Nowadays, I need a good reason to buy on Steam, like decent workshop integration. And even then, I don’t even have to buy on Steam to have that. I bought Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress DRM-free from Ludeon’s site and itch.io and that included Steam key activations too.
Centralised library may have been an argument once, but it has not been for a long time. Stuff like Playnite obfuscates all that launcher explosion crap.
Long-time casual player of the 8 and 16-bit Compile games (mostly through emulation), I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen a SEGA-developped Puyo for any platform in retail before Puyo Puyo Tetris. Seems like they barely existed at all where I live.
So I’m not sure Puyo Puyo Tetris is to blame for the state of the game, at least it made a lot of people aware that the game exists. Though I can’t say I’m a big fan of its aesthetics or writing…
Nowadays whenever I want to play some quick Puyo I just play Tsu on switch online SNES.
“OMG, those nerds have had 20 full seconds to talk? WRAP IT UP”
(for those who don’t know Game Awards really did this. The few acceptance speeches that were there were very short, and winners were all told to “WRAP IT UP” via teleprompter and cut with music. 11 minutes of them talking in total, for a 3-hour-long show)
“Since using letters seems to be the trend in the industry, we figured that adding a couple of i’s to indie was a fair way to describe this new format. Also, triple-i just sounds cool”
They’re a bit late on the trend though, according to Microsoft and Ubisoft it’s all about Quadruple A now.
For a long time I thought I didn’t like Tetris very much. Tetris 99, Tetris Effect and Puyo Puyo Tetris made me reconsider that. Turns out I just needed a push, and now I occasionally spend hours on the stuff, gladly.
I think excluding rhythm games, Tetris must be one of the only game that gets me into “the zone”.
The only reason gamebryo modding is “easy” is because the community has been working on tools for it for decades.
It uses weird proprietary formats nobody else is using and full of stupid quirks. Back when Morrowind released, officially all Bethesda provided along the construction set was their plugin for a thousand-dollar licenced product to make nif models. Nowadays they don’t even do that anymore because they know people have been making their own free tools for Blender etc.
As for the modding structure itself, other games support a plugin hierarchy like they do. Rimworld in particular, and it runs on Unity.
One of the 6 characters in Xenoblade 3’s main cast is black. He’s quite interesting too, this game has pretty good character writing IMO. They’re not the usual stereotypical JRPG character types.
Once during a long train trip I beat the Metroid Prime three times in a row in Metroid Prime Pinball, and at that point I told myself “OK, this game will never end, drain all remaining balls and do something else”.