It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows, they would just have to hire a few more people to do it.

You literally did say support.

I am aware that some corporate infrastructure is hopelessly tangled up in legacy systems. But we are talking about consumer support here, which I know you know is very different.

That’s not what I asked. You said you wanted Valve to hire people to support Windows 98. What company still supports Windows 98 like that?

Can you name any other company that supports Windows 98 in 2025?

I don’t understand streaming music as a concept. My collection of individual tracks stands at about 1,700 (clocking in at 190 hours – that is 22 hours more than a week), and there are several full albums atop that.

Streaming is very useful for people who don’t have such a curated collection already. Especially younger generations who didn’t grow up on physical media.

you don’t want to choose what you listen to

You can though? You can always pull up a specific artist, album, or track. You can even curate your own collection of favorites on these services, and shuffle from there.

But for a lot of users, there’s added value in discovery algorithms that’ll find new music for you. It is radio with extra steps, but those extra steps of telling the system what music you like and dislike do result in much better results than radio stations that weren’t tailored to your exact tastes. Before you built up your collection, how did you use to discover new music back in the day? I’m guessing probably from the radio, this is that for the current generation.

The slow death of being able to own things is sad. But unlimited access to nearly all music, with discovery tools, is a pretty dang tempting deal. The average user doesn’t really care about whether not they ‘own’ their music, just the practicality of being able to listen to music.

Consider that music piracy is way way way down compared to how rampant it was in the 2000s, because people are really happy with streaming now. There’s an old saying that piracy is a service problem, and after unsuccessfully trying to fight it head-on for so long, the industry won in the end by simply offering a better service.

I’m just at a point where so few new releases excite me anymore. The mainstream AAA industry has moved far away from my tastes, and when it comes to the niche stuff I like most, I’ve already got my favorite forever games so it’s actually hard for something new to tear me away from grinding those.

They’re not charging for performance upgrades. The only paid DLC packs are the ones that are, well, actual DLC. What makes that more “disgusting” than any other DLC?

free Switch 2 upgrades

Come on, it’s right there in the headline.

Hoping to see more third-party devs update their games. It’s ironic that the worst ports are the ones that benefit the most. Games that were just thrown onto the Switch 1 with no effort to reach acceptable performance suddenly perform well now. As long as the framerate wasn’t capped, it might just hit 60 on Switch 2.

But games that were downgraded to properly fit onto the system can’t revert those downgrades. Capped framerates remain so, those games need patches to uncap them.

Some of the games I most want to play on Switch 2 are ones that remain stuck at 30fps still…

Loved the first four games, but I skipped 5 after hearing nothing but bad things. Glad to hear this is a return to form.

Is one of those ideas Boktai 5?

What do people expect out of a desktop SteamOS that they can’t already get from any other distro?

Fighting games. I’ve been grinding Skullgirls for over 10 years now, without a single skinner box in sight.

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.

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.

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.