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Cake day: June 28th, 2024

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    • Puyo Puyo Champions - Extra selfish pick, in this scenario now people would have to play it and we’d have a healthy playerbase again. I’d finally get to fulfill my dream of large offline tournaments.
    • Skullgirls - See above.
    • Stepmania - I was tempted to say Wacca or Chunithm, but in this scenario Stepmania would be ideal for nearly infinite content, as well as offering both keyboard and pad playstyles in one game.
    • Slay the Spire - My pick for casual second monitor content. I’m also assuming the modding scene is allowed to continue, in this scenario it’d suddenly have everyone making tons of new characters.
    • Super Mario Maker 2 - Actually took me a bit to think of what the last game should be. Gotta be an endless game, but I didn’t want to duplicate genres by just adding another fighting game or puzzle game. Though if we’re allowing romhacks to count as part of the game, if new romhacks can continue to be made, substitute Super Mario World instead.

  • Languags don’t get designed in a lab by a creator who comes up a consistent set of rules. Languages constantly shift and change as the people who speak them do. Languages borrow loanwords from each other, then proceed to mangle them. Slang arises, becomes part of the lexicon, becomes passe. Regional dialects drift apart but then mingle again.

    And at no point does logic ever enter into the equation. Change just happens haphazardly.

    There’s a pair of concepts in Linguistics referred to as prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivism refers to trying to declare a set of rules for how language should be. If your teacher ever told you that ‘ain’t’ isn’t a real word, that’s prescriptivism, and it’s bunk. Descriptivism is just a best effort to describe how speakers of a language actually use it. If English speakers regularly say ‘ain’t’, then it’s an English word. The fun thing about descriptivism is that there will always be holes and inconsistencies, because not all English speakers are necessarily speaking the same way.

    Compare the English we speak today from Ye Olde Englishe. Many words are now spelled or pronounced differently from how they used to be. Many old words have been replaced by completely different ones. Syntax has changed quite a bit. And if you go far back enough, English used to be written with a different set of characters from the Latin alphabet we use now. But this all happened so gradually you can’t establish any clear dividing line to separate these languages, there’s no date on which you could say everything prior was Old English and everything after is Modern English. And if you look towards the future, 100, 1000, 10000 years from now, English won’t be the same as it is now either.





  • Console manufacturers sell at a loss because they need to sell the console first before they can sell anything else. They can expect to make that money back on software the user could not have bought without the console.

    Valve doesn’t need people to buy Steam Machines to get them to start using Steam. In fact, I suspect most units sold will be to users who are already invested in the ecosystem. Selling at a loss would just be a straight loss to them.


  • Two years ago, one of my favorite games made some very minor cosmetic tweaks, and that was enough to attract a horde of post-Gamergaters crying that this is the downfall of western civilization. Two years later, the board for that game is still under seige by trolls that have rendered it unusable for anyone who actually wants to talk about the game. Every now and then a Valve mod will lock one thread, and then the trolls just make another and it continues.











    • Anything turn-based, especially mouse-driven titles. Slay the Spire, Chess, Riichi Mahjong, Balatro, etc.

    • Puyo Puyo Champions has a one-handed preset in its controller options. Do note that if you want to play online, only Switch is active since that’s where Japan is, I can’t recommend the game on other platforms.

    • Kirby Air Ride uses only one button + analog stick, and any button works, so you can use L. Would have to be left hand for the original, but the sequel coming out later this month has a detailed accessibility menu, which I bet will include right-handed settings.

    • Crypt of the Necrodancer is designed to be playable with just four arrows, in case anyone wanted to play it on a DDR mat. Which also means you can play with arrow keys or WASD.

    • Rhythm Doctor is actually just one button.

    • Rhythm Heaven Fever uses only A and B. Rhythm Heaven DS uses only stylus. The rest of the series uses d-pad as well though, so those are less playable.

    • Come to think of it, any DS game that only uses stylus.


  • Assuming this is for a team game, predator-prey relationships create interesting dynamics where teammates have to protect each other from their counters, while also aiming to create situations where they can isolate a countered opponent to press the advantage.

    In a 1v1 game though, you do want panel 2. It would be very bad if Street Fighter was decided by playing rock-paper-scissors on the character select screen.