StS1 let you unlock all the beta art as a toggle after finishing the True Ending. I guarantee you this will be back once StS2 gets its True Ending.

CrossCode is my favorite RPG of all time, and that’s a high bar. Excited for what comes next, but I dunno if I wanna start on a story-driven RPG in Early Access and then by the time it’s done I’ll have forgotten the first half of the story. I don’t mind Early Access for games that aren’t story-driven, but I think I’ll just wait until this one’s complete.

All I really care about is native Linux support. Nearly every major engine can support Linux these days and if the dev provided a build I should hope it works. But I know some engines are better/more consistent at it. If it’s something like Godot or Ren’Py I can pretty much expect the port to be perfect.

NateTheHate is claiming it’s Ocarina of Time.

Simple, I can’t play Kirby Air Riders or Splatoon 3 on PC. And while I still prefer the form factor of Nintendo’s old smaller dedicated handhelds, I think the Switch (2) is still at least a little bit better at being a handheld than the much bulkier Steam Deck.

(Don’t say emulation, because even then I still can’t play online on official servers.)

Can BlueSky really be called decentralized when 99% of it is bluesky.social?

First party games do, with the lone exception of Pokopia. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, the game they’re announcing this new pricing difference for, is a proper cartridge.

I’m not happy about it, but I think it’s kind of inevitable. It’s not a question of if, but when, and it’s not only going to be Nintendo.

In theory, if the technology worked very differently from the way it does now, I could envision a world in which AI NPCs could have potential. But knowing how LLMs actually work, knowing that a lot of the hype behind them is smoke and mirrors, I can’t see it being viable. And with the trajectory that the LLM bubble is going, I just don’t think it will ever reach a point where I’d trust it.

They’re gonna tell you this is the only way to be sure that routers don’t contain a backdoor. They’re gonna tell themselves this is the only way to be sure that routers do contain a backdoor.

It is theatrics. They know they’ve already got literally the entire userbase on their server, so none of this actually matters.

When Bluesky inevitably enshittifies, they take the whole network down with them.

BlueSky pays lip service to federation, but they’ve set it up so that they’ve got effective control of 99% of the network. It’s a sham to convince people they’re different from every other corporate-owned social media platform, but it really isn’t.

It’s a platform fighter.

If we say we don’t like and it looks hideous, what exactly are we wrong about? “Actually you really love it!” Fuck off, you can’t force us to like your slop no matter how much you try to shove it down our throats.

Attempting to rebrand the terminology to “mystery boxes” like that’s gonna make it better ultimately comes across as so much shadier.

Highly recommend Mega Knockdown. It perfectly encapsulates the best part of fighting games: getting into your opponent’s head by throwing rock four times in a row.

Games can be a lot harder to localize than any other piece of media since they’re nonlinear. In many cases the localization team is just handed a raw text dump with no context of what line is from what part of the game, or even what character is speaking. Then it becomes a scavenger hunt to play through the game and find each line, but in something like a long JRPG that kind of scavenger hunt can miss a lot. It’s not like how you can just read the book or watch the anime and fully cover everything.

But these days a lot of developers have started working closely with localization teams during development to help make their job easier. As they write the script, annotate it with detailed notes providing context and commentary, explanations of wordplay, cultural references, even advice directing the localizers on what you think they should do. And then stay in communication with the localization team, let them ask you questions as needed.

Good localization is hard, but I don’t agree with Horii saying a loss of flavor is inevitable. Not when done right.

All cards in StS2 do have their final art already. But we know there was a closed beta with a smaller group prior to this public EA release, so I dunno if they’re sitting on older beta art that maybe they’ll show us eventually.

I’m huffing copium, I know.

I considered including that one but I was getting too close to just linking every damn card. And it’s one that requires a lot of context to get the joke, I don’t know how many people reading this thread have played the original.

Some of my favorites: Disarm, Rampage, Double Tap, Immolate, Wraith Form, Boot Sequence, Self Repair, Meteor Strike, Protect, Fasting, Nirvana, Sands of Time, Study, Tantrum, Scrawl, Panic Button, Apparition