It'll never happen, but I'd honestly prefer for S4 to move on from Splatfests and do something else entirely. They've run out of ideas, a lot of the themes feel like filler just to keep it going out of obligation. At this point I just see Splatfests as a weekend where they take away Ranked and make everyone play the worst game mode.
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...
F-Zero GX - As far as pure racing goes, GX is perfection.
Kirby Air Ride - The actual racing mode is... mid, honestly. But City Trial? One of the most interesting and unique game modes ever conceived. Sad this game never got any kind of successor.
The ESRB didn't require any developers to abandon their business model though. It was created so that the industry could continue doing what it was doing.
Well what do you want the solution to be? I think it's easy to say that games should be transparent about what you're paying for, my stance is that gacha should be outright illegal because of that. But I don't think it makes sense to go after any and all kinds of randomness in games.
They're different issues. The fact that people can and do financially ruin themselves over gacha is a lot more serious, and trying to conflate that with something like Balatro ultimately muddies the message.
I think gacha is a predatory business model that should be illegal, and yes that includes Genshin. But no it does not include Balatro, because Balatro isn't gacha.
While there certainly are problems with other games, at least every game you mentioned is fully transparent about the price tag. Balatro doesn’t exploit whales by concealing how much it'll cost to get anything.
If devs have to actively maintain software to support new versions, I would argue that is not better than how consoles handle backwards compatibility. Especially since games tend to be tend to be treated as finished products that devs stop updating once they move on to their next project.
compare that to game consoles where the last gen could be cut off from new games at any given time, and next gen is a crapshoot whether the manufacturer will support backwards compatibility.
But that isn't the case anymore, and I expect it never will be again. This generation's transition period has been so heavily reliant on backwards compatibility. Hell, plenty of titles still just launch on PS4 since PS5 can run it anyway.
The only exception has been the Switch, and that's because it was necessary just this once to break away for a new architecture. I can almost guarantee Switch 2 will be an evolution of Switch 1.
At this point the big three are locked into their current architecture. They need backwards compatibility, if a new console ever tries to break from that it will flop as a result.