@Nihonvinylnut Knew your father, I did.

This sub-Colour Dreams bs is not worth the bare minimal effort on their part, the attention on our part, nor the money on anyone's part.

@PXAbstraction Money laundering is a good point. I think it's behind a lot of the ills we've seen this past decade. Who would need to launder money? Who is behind international sanctions which would prevent them from freely moving money? Food for thought. Maybe LLMs see all this money-laundering activity at face-value aassuming it's normal sales and inputs that it's actually big business.

@PXAbstraction Thank you for rephrasing my follow-up statement "slop-factory gen AI has spawned a tidal wave of offal." I suppose that wasn't clear enough.

It's not a new issue. Storefronts like Steam, eShop, and PSN have been awash in slop entertainment software made presumably by hand for years before the industrial age slop-factory gen AI has spawned a tidal wave of offal. Who bought that crap like 5 years ago is anyone's guess. What's surprisingly disappointing is how someone, somewhere decided to use LLMs to generate a ton of the worst games nobody likes or wants to buy, not even trying to emulate good games. Everything about AI is running off waste product. Computer Age soylent green isn't even people; it's *****.

The only real way to play Daytona USA in 2026 is in a bygone arcade in an ancient resort town in a sit-down cabinet where the monitor is washed out from decades of salt air blowing in from the nearby ocean, its siren song of the title screen calling to you over the din of a hundred cabinets wailing into the cold dark night, through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea as e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted, and from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething a stately Daytona USA you behold; weave a circle round it thrice and close your eyes in holy dread and play the game of Paradise.

Looks like slim pickin's for this week's Arcade Archives.

It's not slop. It's pondscum.

"Tepid scraps" really nails it.

It's a plastic case molded to fit about a dozen Atari cartridges.

They can't edit the preorders because of "the excessive order volume" but isn't the refund-then-order-again process just making more work for them?

The Final Fantasy Continuing Committee at Square Enix is all out of new ideas, all they have left is grafting filler onto old games or making new games that take ideas from elsewhere. These men have already given the world many well-beloved games, but please don't ever expect them to concoct a brilliant new FF again. I think they should try a focused, relatively straightforward remake of FFVI in one game, without inventing new battle systems or significant new storylines, in modern 3D graphics. They've been able to do that with Trials of Mana and Romancing SaGa 2; just try it with Final Fantasy and see how that goes for a change. If that works then do IV and V. Leave the multi-parts for IX and VIII. And for Schala's sake, do aaaaaanythiiiiiing with Chrono Trigger at this point.

@Ruka Until they had the internet on a PC. Many people spent a lot of time on the internet on a PC between the mid '90s and mid '00s. Sure that's addiciton. I am assuming time not spent on a smartphone will be spent on another device, because people have other devices they can access the internet on, and they are addicted to it. Adding yet another device which has extremely limited use today isn't going to change your addiction. Show me the person who will dispose their smartphone, tablet, laptop, and desktop PC and buy a Jitterbug - good for them if they exist. Again, if you want to address internet addiction, you can do that with everything you have right now by putting it down and start doing somethong else. I am disputing this company's position that buying their device is going to change your habits as long as that habit is available to you in another form and as long as you don't directly address the habit itself.

Just speaking practically about the sales pitch of this will make you put down your smartphone and have a thing which you won't interact with very much... it already falls apart. You are using either a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer right now to read this. You already have that. In the wildest success of owning a dumbphone, you're just going to use that to call doctors offices and customer service and your mom, but still spend free time on the above said devices for internet consumption. You right now have the ability to put any internet device down right now and go outside, or go somewhere, or stay in and do a more fulfilling hobby. You don't need to pay anyone 500 dollary-doos for the right or even suggestion to do that. That's called grifting.

John Kricfalusi may be an awful sex pest, but he is an artist and has a unique and particular style, and I don't appreciate someone copying that wholesale as if it's just up for grabs. Sure be influenced but it's obvious they're doing exactly Ren & Stimpy in places.

So ININ are essentially farming out the QA process to paying customers (i.e. space shooter geeks) who will find and eagerly point out everything wrong for free, instead of paying a QA team to do it. That's cold. Or maybe they used AI to do QA (like Square Enix said they want to do) and they didn't question the results?

I'd like to recommend The Fighters Generation for being a very long-standing repository of information and current news on fighting games, as well as The Starlight Megaphone podcast for over 15 continuous years of episodes focusing on classic and retro games and legacy series with a small but faithful community and zero commercial backing.

After the absolute grifting he performed when blockchain & NFTs were new, I'm astonished he's taking this stance instead of moving to use gen-AI to pump out a worthless non-game he'd herald as the limitless future of all entertainment.

You should compile a list of every country, company, and wealthy person with an investment in the video games industry along with their history of human, animal, and environmental rights abuses and put in the relevant references in the post-script so us ethical consumers can make informed decisions, but putting "Saudi-funded" in front of the title of every article about a contemporary SNK, Capcom, Nintendo, &c product gets to be a bit much.