Don’t forget Splatoon 2.

The only Switch 2 game I even have right now is Deltarune. But I know I’m buying Kirby Air Riders, and I figured it’d be best to make sure I get the console right away in case tariffs fuck anything up by then.

I hate that Discord has taken over most communities and put them in a place unindexed by search engines. I hate it so much.

But this is where users all go in Current Year, and I don’t blame game developers for following the crowd. Especially for smaller multiplayer games, if you want to sustain an active community you’ve gotta have that #matchmaking channel for players to organize.

Also, tbh, Steam Forums ain’t great either. At least they’re searchable, but that’s all that can be said about them. In my experience they’ve often devolved into the most toxic hellholes due to Valve’s lack of moderation. Also not ideal for anything multiplatform, that only covers Steam users.

The other alternative is reddit, but, well, I’m here because I refuse to ever go back to reddit, so, y’know.

I haven’t gotten all the way down to 2 yet, but at the rate I’m going, I could see it. I’ve settled into mostly grinding the same few forever games while the mainstream industry moves further and further away from my tastes.

What kind of games are you looking to play, and what form factor do you want?

I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus on sale two years ago and ended up liking it so much I wish I’d bought a more expensive model with analog sticks. There are quite a lot of devices like it on the market, if you want something small for retro emulation look into all the different options.

Meanwhile, my Steam Deck largely gathers dust because it’s just too bulky to feel like a replacement for the handheld-sized handhelds I grew up on. Switch (2) is good for running Switch games, and it’s at least a bit smaller and lighter than the Deck, but mine rarely leaves the dock.

• Dr. Mario 64
• Kirby Air Ride (w/ Hack Pack mod)
• Land Maker
• Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (and Wii)
• Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary
• Panel de Pon (Gamecube and GBC)
• Rhythm Heaven series
• Twinkle Star Sprites
• any JRPG, just pick something you haven’t played yet

The market is so saturated that lots of good games have a hard time even getting noticed. Just making a good game doesn’t automatically mean success.

There are definitely a lot of consumers who will gladly pay $20 for Silksong because of the hype and pedigree surrounding it, but would never take a chance spending that much on a game that hasn’t had that kind of hype train surrounding it. Which does make sense, without the hype train you don’t know if a more obscure indie may or may not be worth the $20. But then that tells us that it’s the hype train that matters here, not just whether or not the game is good.

They’re never gonna run demanding AAA titles, but Steam is full of simpler 2D and classic games they could handle. You could play Balatro or Stardew Valley on a Chromebook.

Looks cute.

I’m choosing to interpret this as a sign that they are aware of the controversy and are open to considering alternatives. If they’re asking for feedback, that means there’s a chance they’ll act on it.

The part I find strange about all this is that apparently Switch 2 titles just can’t use smaller ROM sizes, and that’s why certain third parties don’t want to pay increased manufacturing costs to put smaller titles on larger cartridges. But… why are they apparently not able to use smaller carts?

We’re seeing cross-gen releases where the Switch 1 version is on the cart and the Switch 2 version is not. They’ve even got dual-mode carts for games that contain the Switch 1 base game and Switch 2 upgrade DLC. These smaller carts exist and the Switch 2 can read them. So I’m puzzled as to why they can’t use these same carts for Switch 2 games.

maybe the real friendslop was the friends we made along the way

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…