Taka_Sakagami

I've only played the NES titles and the first Torneko game so far, but DQIII was so staggeringly better than everything else, I'm still kinda stunned by it.
I'm excited to play DQV next year, since it seems a lot of the DQIII fans put it in their top 2. It's been sitting on my desk, taunting me all year.

"He gushed that for years he had never been able to make his own fantasy language that wasn't simply just a retranslated runic Arabic script."

I didn't think I'd say this about one of the pioneers of Digital DnD, but does he lack imagination? Making a unique language is easy so long as you set aside the time to slowly craft it. It takes a modicum of care, but if I can manage it in my spare time, surely he could figure it out for his work?

@gmar For what it's worth, Faxanadu isn't a port of Xanadu. They're very different games despite aesthetic similarities.

I could understand lumping expansion pack sales into the Xanadu figures, but mixing in Faxanadu would be very disingenuous... It's possible though.

There's a secondary source for domestic PC software sales in Japan that is formatted quite nicely. It's mostly all eroge, of course, but the biggest sellers are generally businessman-level stuff.
The time period of it is focused on the late '90s, so it's a decade after Xanadu, but it should give a good idea of how well games were selling on PC back then. Generally, games had low sales but consistent audience numbers, so while the market was incredibly healthy, the numbers were nowhere close to hitting a million.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070819115323/http://www.alles.or.jp/~syaran/marimo/doukou.htm

On the greater topic, I think a famous quote summarises my feelings on this: "Even if it's incorrect, we need to believe in history." So much of the world is anecdotal. I have stories in my head that I believe to be true, about the grand fall of a niche MMO I used to play. It's all entirely undocumented, and most people who were present for it no longer remember it, but it's history to me—warped and hazy as it is, I think it's still important.

I wasn't alive for Shinobi's golden days, so I'm not very familiar with the games, but if my Famicom isn't holding onto an RPG cart, it's because there's an arcade platformer in it.

I don't think it's a genre that competes with much nowadays.
These games are often short, so it feels like you can reach the horizon. I describe them as "hour-long games that take 30-hours to beat."
They get into the gameplay immediately. You can start or stop playing at any moment without any friction, which is great for satisfying a sudden itch.
They're largely about learning a pattern, so your growing familiarity with the game feels rewarding; that level you couldn't survive a minute in before is now a total cakewalk.

It's not like every arcade platformer is perfect, of course. I don't like the Druaga-isms that some games show; that design sense is better for optional content than the main loop imo. I also struggle to enjoy games with unfair punishments like invisible traps or sudden enemy spawns (looking at you, Mega Man).
Oh, and I've never cared about high scores...

Even so, I still think arcade game design has lots of potential, and a lot of games tap into that potential.

I've seen some discussion of this online, and I think some context is being lost to a lot of people. Ask the guy in charge of the VII Remake if he'll do the same for other FF games, obviously he's going to assume you mean doing something on the same scale, especially given that small-scale remakes for the 2D titles came out relatively recently. Yoshi-P is speaking against the idea of applying the VII Remake treatment to the other entries because it's not practical.

That being said, I don't understand why anyone would want a remake of a game they already like. I'd rather they remake their worse games or make something new.

The zippers are a nice touch. The loud sound they'll make when you go to grab your fancy new Commodore™ flip phone from your fully custom Commodore™ holster will really grab people's attention.

@liquidblue Maybe it's just because my only exposure to this device is from these Time Extension articles, but I don't know where "digital minimalism" is even coming from; outside of your comments, I've only seen "digital detox" be used for it.

What is the Commodore brand right now? This is a phone marketed with the phrase "social media and browser blocked at system level", from a company that hypes up their PC with the words "No tracking. No ads. No toxic social media."

Considering that the company's reveal was about how (iirc) technology didn't go the way we hoped it would, and that we could step into some wacky alternate timeline where humanity took a different path, I don't think it's crazy that some may assume it's not just anti-social media; it's anti-AI.
The brand was established as being against what modern technology is, and a lot of the conversation about modern technology is dominated by AI. So if some people believe that AI is toxic tech, and Commodore is a digital detox brand, then... those people are going to believe the brand should be against AI.

I don't blame anyone for assuming that Commodore wouldn't be a pro-AI company. That's a very fair assumption, I think.

@liquidblue This isn't "digital minimalism", though; it's "digital detox"—removing that which people see as toxic. I interpret that as an escape from things such as social media, algorithms, manipulative licenses, dark pattern subscription schemes, and of course, AI. The brainrot stuff, basically.

Sit random Commodore staff members in front of a camera and have them talk about the thing they're making; it'd both cost less and perform better than any of this AI stuff.
They could be pushing themselves as a small startup made up of fans and legacy figures, but instead, they're the "digital detox" AI company.

I really wish they'd make a defacto version of their handhelds rather than putting out reshells over and over. The base versions of the 8-Bit Pocket have really crummy 4:3 screens, while the HD versions have slightly less crummy 16:9 screens, even though there are plenty of high-quality 4:3 screens in production that are around the same size.

I can understand wanting to keep the base models cheap, but the IPS versions get a big price hike for a screen that doesn't even make sense. I'd've probably impulse-bought one over the years if the flaws weren't so obvious.

I think it was HolyMero who said something along the lines of "it's all we've got, so you'll have to make do" in regards to the 16-Bit models, but I'd expect better of the 8-Bit line; lots of people make Famiclones!

I could complain, but... props to them for doing something. I know giving customers choice can, in some scenarios, increase overall production costs; even so, the value of choice is high to techy folk.

"anyone claiming the specs aren’t good enough for the price is drawing on something deeper — a cultural conditioning to desire the newest, fastest, latest, and greatest."

This is a pretty wild statement. I think it's fairer to say that, to a lot of people, $500 is too expensive for a luxury good, yet excusable for a daily-use necessity.

Though the bespoke parts and reduced functionality certainly make this device unique, they also result in making it expensive and gimmicky. It's beyond what's needed.

I should be the target audience for this, as flip phones are my jam, but the absurd price and "no browser, no email, patent pending" messaging makes it hard to understand the appeal of.
I don't think I'll ever get used to how uncanny Peri's advertising style is.