Fighters Megamix is a classic. I love the weird old games with big rosters and a cheerful vibe. I don’t think any other game lets you pit a Daytona car against a giant mascot sculpture.
Smash Remix is a mod for Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo 64. Very easy to emulate on basically any device you can plug into your TV. It’s all the fun of Smash Bros with all the weirdness, jank, and accessible hype combos of Smash 64.
If your device can handle it, the port of Sonic The Fighters for PS3 is also very cute and fun. It also has an active netplay community.
Some of that is on GNOME. I had to swap back to KDE after a couple years on GNOME due to lack of VR compatibility. GNOME is good for newbies and productivity, but completely unusable for gaming.
Would be nice if there were some kind of open source, cross-platform, low-level graphics API, maybe overseen by some kind of pan-industry group (or “consortium” if you’re feeling fancy). Just spitballing but you could call it “Cape” or “Hephaestos” or something.
Would be great too if there were one or two open-source, MIT- or dual-licensed game engines that target this API. Maybe even some runtimes so you could target PC and the big three console platforms.
Wasn’t the whole thing with Redfall that it was Bethesda mismanagement? I’m not going to put that on the Redfall team. Does make me completely disinterested in buying any Bethesda games that aren’t mainline TES though.
Yoshi-P is a very talented speaker, I’ll give him that. But you have to look at what he’s actually saying. There’s a very pretty preamble about “I’m sad that society, is this way, so my hands are tied…” which is a technique known as impersonation. Whether or not Yoshi-P himself is a transphobe, I guess I can’t say, but the entire speech itself is just straight up transphobia. He then provides a single sad vignette as if to say that can somehow be generalised across all of society, and not just a particular minority view. The ultimate thrust of things is that the small amount of transphobes in the audience are more important than making trans people feel comfortable or welcome.
After I stopped playing XIV, it got much more obvious in context. If I contrast the freedom of presentation in PSO2, which lets you have control over how masculine or feminine your bone structure is, what sex characteristics your character has, and whether you have a masculine or feminine face and to what extent. Beyond that, there’s also a diverse wardrobe for both “Type 1” and “Type 2” in the game’s parlance (which in itself is super cool) to facilitate how you want to present, even if you don’t want to change your body type.
In FFXIV, I was largely stuck using mods to make sure the clothes I wanted were possible. When the game started official porting previously male clothes to female models, they did so with the caveat that your character absolutely must have prominent breasts. Similarly, going in the opposite direction, all the previously-female gear was really revealing and I think meant to be more funny than serious. Bad luck if you wanted to present femme and not just dress up in obvious drag. This might be better now though, I haven’t played in a year and a half.
re: NFTs
I can’t find where he’s spoken against NFTs in general. “NFTs won’t be in FFXIV” is not a general statement of opposition to them. The most I’ve seen is “making a fun game around cryptocurrency would be difficult”, but no actual firm statement of opposition. If Square Enix is as democratic as they say they are, and given Yoshida is on the board of directors, I don’t think the Square Enix push to NFTs is just unilaterally Matsuda.
I think of it like this: my own personal boycotts do nothing individually, but I am doing a very small something by refusing to be a bridge to grossly evil companies into my communities, and raising the ethical concerns with egregiously bad corporate cultures and business models. And for my own personal comfort, I just can’t engage with products that fill me with disgust due to the taint of who will ultimately profit from my purchase.
On that, when my personal attachment to a creator, studio, or individual game supercedes my disgust or frustration with a publisher’s business models or revenue streams, I try and keep that in the conversation. I play a lot of Warframe, which has some mildly manipulative monetisation like algorithmic discounts and crippleware elements; and PSO2 which is published by a corporation with a large gambling revenue stream, and the game itself has gambling elements in it, albeit surprisingly low on the evil anti-player scale.
And that’s the thing, sometimes I love something enough that I can’t bear to part with it. I find Yoshi-P’s transphobia and support of NFTs to be sufficiently revolting that I can’t play FFXIV anymore, nor will I ever buy anything or even positively talk about anything associated with him ever again; but I’m still subscribed to FFXI. I still plan to buy new mainline Dragon Quest games despite the fact that Square-Enix treats its customers with absolute contempt and has committed to a path of ecological violence against the Pacific.
That said, I think it is a good mental exercise to get in the habit of thinking about who you’re giving your patronage to. Do they have good working conditions? Where do they make their money? Are the leaders shitheads? These things become part of a disposition, and you become part of a cultural conversation, one that’s clearly starting to engage more and more people. Start talking about good developers and especially workers’ coops like KO_OP (handily named) and Motion Twin; or studios with excellent working conditions like Supergiant, Hello Games, or Monolith Soft.
That said, this is all still part of the infamously ineffectual practice of lifestylism. At the end of the day I believe it’s about cultivating a particular set of values and trying to broach them to as many people as possible, and learning to effectively and respectfully communicate them. If you ever do get in the industry or can support people in the industry, that’s when you can actually do something material.
From a design perspective, I think you could safely pick anything from V to XII and say it’s the best one, honestly. VI and Chrono Trigger really stand out as the most refined in terms of game design and systems from that particular era.
Without spoiling anything, the episodic storytelling style is taken to its limit in the game’s “part II”, and it allows for some really clever writing. VI is one of those games that kept me thinking long after I finished it.
Anti-Idle: The Game is one of my all-time favourites. It’s got a ton of sub-games and some really interesting resource flows between them. And as per the title you can idle or not, but there are rewards for active play.
If you can get past the UI, I recommend at least trying FFXI. The stories are so good, the XIV writers spent half of SHB and EW adapting them. Kato did the scenario for the vanilla game and the first expansion, Rise of the Zilart, and his world building brilliance is at its best there. The world is so real and immersive, and there are all kinds of connections between world events and characters both big and small.