tuckerm

This wasn't my very first game, but was definitely an early one I played. I beat the remake recently and it was exactly the way I remembered it.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and I played a couple levels as recently as a few weeks ago.

23andMe was always a product with a very small upside and absolutely massive downside. Best case scenario, it's a neat little thing to learn about yourself. Worst case scenario, it's a massive opportunity for discrimination and blackmail.

Completely unrelated: for some reason, on kbin, the thumbnail for this article is the thumbnail for this youtube video, and that is a cooler thing than 23andMe by far.

The way I played it, Sonic Adventure was a virtual pet raising game with a 3D platformer minigame in there for something else to do on the side.

I read that as "surrendered to the authorities" and I thought WOW there must have been some Billy Mitchell developments that I was not aware of.

The left one looks great. Usually we don't think of computer peripherals as gaining a patina, but it kind of works here. Good call on buying a spare, though!

That's a really good point. Sometimes the fun you can have with the game's "multi player" community isn't in the game itself.

Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the best example I can think of. (And I don't have it, and it is really tempting for the reason you just gave.) I actually overheard two people talking about it at a coffee shop today, and three people talking about it on the train a couple weeks ago. I can't think of any other game that has been like this.

This also highlights a huge advantage that popular fighting games have: the constant arrival of new players. You don't want to be the only person who picked up the game that week.

Thankfully, there are multiple really popular fighting games out right now (at least, really popular compared to how the genre was doing a few years ago), which is great.

For me, the only reason to jump on a game early is if it's necessary for there to be a thriving multiplayer community to enjoy the game. That's something you would miss out on by waiting for a sale. That early stage, where everyone is still figuring out how the game works and finding new strategies, can be fun. But I rarely play multiplayer games now, so I just skip that and I don't mind.

If it's a singleplayer game, there's no reason to jump on it early -- and certainly not to enjoy it as a technical spectacle. It'll look just as good five years from now.

I remember replaying the original Half-Life in 2008 for its ten year anniversary, and thinking, "This is still fun, but the graphics are almost distractingly outdated." But when I replayed the original Mass Effect from 2007 just a couple years ago -- which was more than ten years old then -- I thought it looked just fine.

nooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Microsoft's initial departure from Microsoft-brand peripherals meant it would only focus on more expensive, higher-end designs worthy of Surface branding.

They're saying this like we didn't all just read an article about the official Xbox Toaster yesterday...

I remember a lot of people saying it was very good, and being surprised by that fact since it got very little promotion.