but the shouty man on TV told me tariffs were good!

Highlight of the Direct by far.

No, because games haven’t been “destroyed”.

Any of the classic era Tales games. Destiny DC/2 both finally got fantranslations, but Namco keeps teasing that they want to bring over the games the west never got. Eventually. Someday. Maybe. Hopefully by the time I finish the rest of my JRPG backlog.

Re: Super Metroid, it’s a short enough game that even if a remake does happen, I’d say it’s worth playing the original now and then playing the remake too whenever one happens. Though I’m also hard-pressed to see what a remake could bring to the table honestly, it’s pretty much perfect as-is. Not like 1 and 2 which have aged horribly and needed a complete overhaul. I think I’d be concerned if they tried to mess with it.

Thinking about it more though, perhaps they do have something big enough to justify a separate Switch 1 Direct a week before the Switch 2 Direct. The question is, what could it be, what’s the biggest thing they wouldn’t save for Switch 2?

• Last we heard, Prime 4 is still a Switch 1 game, though it really ought to be cross-gen at this point. I’m sure it’ll be in either tomorrow’s Direct or next week’s. The fact that there is a Direct tomorrow means I’m leaning towards this being the heavy hitter that justifies having a Switch 1 Direct. If it’s not though, we could see Prime 2/3 tomorrow and 4 next week.

• Galaxy 2 seems like an obvious pick, people have been wondering where it is ever since it wasn’t in 3D All Stars. It’s too much of a safe pick to be the headliner though.

• I’m hoping we see some cult classic brought back, something that will get a few people really really excited. F-Zero GX immediately comes to mind. But also, after they teased us with 99, we need a new F-Zero more than we need a remaster.
  Mother 3 would break the internet, if it were to ever happen this would be the time to do it, but we all know it’s never happening. Mother 3 is purely a meme.
  But off the top of my head I can’t think of what other cult hits would be a big deal right now.

• Thinking in terms of what studios we haven’t heard from in a while, HAL and Intelligent Systems. There’s surely something Kirby and something Fire Emblem in the works, and those could be late Switch titles rather than Switch 2 titles.

• Third parties, I’m gonna stake my bet that we’ll see Chrono Trigger. SE recently teased that they have multiple projects in the works, and CT remains conspicuously absent from Switch still. It’s also not something they’d need to save for Switch 2. So tomorrow is the most logical time to reveal it.

• Silksong isn’t real. It’s a collective fever dream we all hallucinated. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Don’t expect anything too big, they’ll save the heavy hitters for Switch 2. Ports and remasters are the typical filler for the end of a console’s lifespan.

Is that something I should be apologizing for?

Tenacious D is not dead. Jack Black has confirmed that they will be back someday, they’re just taking a break.

It’s one thing to make those kinds of jokes here on Lemmy where the audience is almost all leftists who will cheer. But for a celebrity with a platform, you have to be aware that saying things like that will get them in trouble. It was honestly a shitty no-win situation all around and I don’t blame Jack Black for needing to distance himself for a bit. At least the band is not dead, this will blow over in due time and they’ll come back when it’s died down.

The movie was okayish at best, but at least Jack Black was the best part of it.

Also, anything with Jack Black is slop? Even School of Rock? Tenacious D? Weird: The Al Yankovic Story?

Is there SGB functionality for DK 94? Would be a huge downgrade not to have that.

Have you talked to her and told her those kinds of “jokes” make you uncomfortable? If you have and she pushes back, then I think it’s fair to question if you can be friends with someone who continues acting disrepectful even when asked not to.

But if you haven’t brought it up, maybe it’s possible she just needs someone to call her out and snap her out of it. Give her a chance to see if she can grow and change.

They said gen 4 and GBA. 2D platforms that’ll run on a cheap emulator handheld.

GBA:

• Boktai trilogy: Hideo Kojima’s greatest masterpiece. First game’s alright, second game is where it comes into its own. Note that you want the Solar Sensor hardware for the full experience, but 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…

Romhacks:

• Celeste Mario’s Zap & Dash (NES): SMB1 turned into a Metroidvania with Celeste mechanics ported in. I think what impresses me the most is that they got 4-directional scrolling into this engine.
• Super Metroid and A Link to the Past Crossover Randomizer (SNES): It’s an absolutely incredible technical feat that this even works. SM and ALttP smashed together into a single ROM, with a few doors that take you from one game to the other, then the item pools are shuffled together so you have to go back and forth to find one game’s items in the other. Unfortunately because ALttP is a much bigger game with a lot more items it kinda overshadows SM, you may not find this to be as replayable as the standalone randos. But I recommend trying it once because it’s just so cool the first time.

Arcade:

• The King of Fighters 2002: KOF fans will tell you either 98 or 02 were the absolute pinnacle. I side with 02 because it has Kula in it. Also note that 98 and 02 both have updated rereleases with an extended roster and rebalancing, but those are Windows-only.
• Puyo Puyo Tsu: 20th Anniversary is the peak of the series, but if you’re on hardware that can’t run DS or Wii, arcade Tsu is fine. AI is a lot weaker though, and the story mode just forces five colors and high gravity on later stages to compensate.
• Puzzle Bobble 1/3: You’ve probably played some flash game clone of this. IMO I think 1 was best for its simplicity, I’m not as fond of the garbage patterns introduced in later titles in an effort to give characters some asymmetry. But PB1 does not have AI opponents, singleplayer is only the stage clear mode, so if you don’t have a human to play with try PB3 for the next best thing.
• Tetris: The Grand Master 1/2/3: The only good Tetris, do not @ me. Start with TGM2’s Novice Mode, then once you can clear that go back to TGM1.
• Twinkle Star Sprites: A versus shmup with a very unique format. Chaining enemies on your screen sends attacks to your opponent’s screen. Hard to really explain, just give this a spin and feel it out for yourself. There are a lot of moving parts, screenwatching is vital, and feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game’s depth.
• Vampire Savior: Aka Darkstalkers 3. This game is fast as hell and it’s a blast. Like with any classic fighter, good luck keeping up with FightCade folks who really know what they’re doing, but I love it casually.
• Waku Waku 7: This game’s mechanics are honestly borderline kusoge, you can’t even cancel normals into specials. But I love the design and atmosphere so much. Tesse is really fun to play even in spite of the system mechanics.

NES:

• Fire 'n Ice: A very rad little puzzle game.
• Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!: Just an absolute blast. I won’t bother listing them seperately but also check out Super and Wii. Super’s kinda the black sheep of the series, but it’s still a good game, just not as good. Wii is an absolutely top-notch successor and I’m sad it didn’t get any more sequels after that. The two arcade predecessors are honestly forgettable.

SNES:

• Chrono Trigger: I am hesitant to recommend most JRPGs from this era if you did not grow up on them, because many of them haven’t aged so gracefully. Chrono Trigger is the exception, this game is a fine wine. You may want to check out one of the rereleases though, or at least a retranslation patch, because the original translation was made on a rushed deadline and bound by heavy technical limitations.
• Earthbound: A bit more of a slow burn in comparison to CT, but this game is carried by incredible writing. It’s also required reading before playing Mother 3 next. You can skip Mother 1 though.
• Kirby Super Star: Definitely the peak of the series, giving every copy power an entire moveset is a blast. Has an updated rerelease on DS with added extras, I do highly recommend this version, but DS can be awkward to emulate so SNES is fine.
• Panel de Pon: Gamecube version is best, but if you can’t run Gamecube then Super Famicom is good too. GBC is also worth checking out, in order to adapt it to the small screen the story mode has health bars instead of true CPU opponents, which makes it play rather differently.
• Wario’s Woods: The NES version is more well known since it was the system’s last first-party title, and for whatever reason it’s the only version Nintendo ever rereleases. But the SNES version is a notable upgrade, biggest thing it has is AI to play versus mode against. Versus mode is wild as hell, so if you’ve never seen it please check out the SNES version.

GBC:

• Game & Watch Gallery 2: Holds a special place in my heart as the first game I ever owned. Has the best lineup out of all the collections, with 3 and 4 you can kinda tell they had used up all the heavy hitters.
• Mario Tennis: An incredible tennis RPG. And Mario doesn’t even show up until the postgame as a bonus boss, which I find hilarious. Has connectivity with the N64 version if you can get that running, lets you transfer your RPG mode character and unlock more content on both titles.

Anarchy means “without hierarchy”. Classes are a hierarchy, so by definition it wouldn’t be anarchy if you don’t dissolve class.

Ah, completely forgot ORAS!

Combined the worst parts of gen III with the worst parts of gen VI (that is to say, the engine).

• RGBY - You had to be there. By today’s standards, these games are incredibly dated, to a point where it’s hard to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up on them why they were so magical. Despite feeling aged now, they honestly were ahead of their time in several ways, and there’s a reason these games took off and became such a massive cultural phenomenon that dominated the late 90s.

• GSC - In comparison, it’s honestly surprising to me how well GSC still holds up after all these years. The sequel carries forward the magic of the first games, while polishing and improving the formula in every way. Being able to revisit Kanto for the postgame was the coolest thing ever, and it’s sad that we’ll never see anything like this again.

• RSE - I will forever be a Hoenn hater. Coming off the heels of GSC, these games were just a massive step back in many ways. One region and 202 Pokemon. Weirdly unbalanced with the excessive amount of Water-types, and tedious amount of Surfing. Began the trend of Legendaries becoming more and more god-like, and forced in the story. Not a fan of the art style or trumpet-heavy OST either. Only good thing this game brought to the table was Abilities.
  One thing I don’t think a lot of people today remember is that this was Dexit before Dexit. When RS first launched, you only had 202 Pokemon in the Hoenn Dex, a step back from GSC’s 251, and the missing 184 species were not mentioned or referenced at all. At the time, I thought that they had been retconned out! Eventually, linking to later gen III games would unlock the National Pokedex, but at launch no one knew that was going to be a thing. And it was still fairly wack how many games they spread it out over, gen III as a whole was a mess.

• FRLG - RGBY minus the soul. It may be more modernized, but it just doesn’t hit the same. I know this is very much a “you had to be there” take.

• Colosseum - Painfully slow. Never finished it. Never played XD either.

• DPPt - These games were just… bland. There’s not much I can actively hate on as much as RSE beyond just how slow they were, but there’s also not much that stands out either. I don’t have much to say.

• HGSS - IT’S PEAK. Does a much better job than FRLG of feeling faithful yet modern. And the sheer amount of bonus content they added in was incredible. By far the best game in the series, nothing else is even close.

• BW - Gen V really had a hell of a vibe to it, this era felt like Game Freak really wanted to experiment and it paid off. I give this game a lot of credit for being the first and only entry to have a good plot. However I do feel that the gimmick of new species only wasn’t so great, dragged down by the fact that half the Unova Dex is blatant copies of existing Gen I mons. Why bother doing that?

• BW2 - However, this game’s story was so bad that I stand by my conspiracy theory of it being a last-minute rewrite from a planned Gray. I wonder what that would’ve looked like. Other than that though, everything else about BW2 was quite strong.

• XY - The jump to 3D was rough, but could’ve been a lot worse. These games honestly feel like an unfinished beta to me, there’s a really good game in here somewhere but it’s dragged down by performance woes and very very little content. With more time in the oven, I think Z could’ve been one of the best games in the series, but they never gave this game the Director’s Cut it needed.

• SM - Since XY’s framerate was so troublesome, let’s make it worse by adding more models onscreen! Also, let’s drop XY’s best feature, the Player Search System, in favor of doing almost nothing on the bottom screen! People really liked Megas, so let’s replace those with attacks that just do big damage and call it a day! And let’s really go way overboard with the cutscenes, tons of long tedious cutscenes! Most of all it was the framerate that really pissed me off. This was actually the first time I bothered finishing the Regional Dex, but I was too fed up with the framerate that I decided I would wait until the next generation on new hardware to try for National…

And so that ended up being the last game I played. Skipped USUM because I didn’t want to deal with this engine any longer, and then SS… Seeing how they’d just been cutting more and more corners with each game, I simply saw Dexit as the last straw. Maybe I’d have been willing to accept it if they’d actually been bringing new things to the table to compensate, but they don’t. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the Pokemon that I know and love, the Pokemon that I grew up on, the Pokemon that I named my account after, is dead to me.

I’d say HGSS is much more polished, and the formula hasn’t changed much since anyway. Only major mechanic differences in XY would be Fairy-type and reusable TMs.

IMO, XY is pretty rough around the edges, felt a bit unfinished. There’s a good foundation in there, with more time in the oven Z potentially could’ve been one of the best games in the series…

I’d say HeartGold/SoulSilver were the absolute peak, and the best entry point. Faithful to the spirit of the originals while feeling sufficiently modernized, and they went above and beyond with how much bonus content they packed into it.

Because there’s a lot of shit to complain about, and it feels like things are getting steadily worse. Especially today when I’m watching the rise of fascism in real time, when I’m watching friends and family be persecuted by a push to make bigotry into law, and when it all feels like there’s nothing I can do about any of this because I’m just some guy.

Yes, I know that children are starving in Africa. No, pointing that out does not make me feel better.