A number of Tactics Ogre fans will tell you that the PSP version, whether vanilla or with the One Vision mod, is superior to the recent Reborn PC release. Each version has its pluses and minuses, so it’s largely a matter of taste. The port itself was fine on release, despite the recent trend of SQEX PC ports that were messy on release but were fixed later (like Chrono Trigger and Cross).

I still play the Intellivision’s Treasure of Tarmin on my phone from time to time. People would probably call it a first-person roguelike or something today. Amazing how a little randomness can give even a 1983 game so much replay value.

For actual hardware, I doubt I’ll ever play anything especially retro/vintage now. I’m spoiled by today’s gamepad ergonomics (I’d never play much Treasure of Tarmin on an Intellivision pad, woof). However, I do sometimes think about setting up some sort of hardware to play on a CRT with a wireless gamepad.

Oof, I can’t agree with this at all. Departure is one of my favorite tracks from the whole era, and the ending song was also excellent. I felt the soundtrack did a lot of heavy lifting to carry the game’s somber tone.

Notable though that Miyoko Kobayashi was on “Departure,” not Hikichi. Hikichi only had a few tracks on the game.

Funny thing is, out of all the disc “cleaners” we sold while I was at Gamestop, we got very few complaints about it. Make the discs look like they went through hell but the product worked.

It’s hard to top the inkjet printers I’ve owned. I still can’t believe 30 years later home printer tech is not only unimproved but worse between lower quality production and squeezing people on ink costs.

At this point, AliExpress is my #1 choice for anything a) made overseas anyways and b) that I don’t need right away. It’s usually parts or trinkets; for example, the last thing I bought was a kit to supplement my mahjong playing set.

In this case though, this feels overpriced for a used/refurbished model. If you were going to take on this much perceived risk, I’m surprised you didn’t go with one $150 or less on eBay or a local exchange like Facebook Marketplace or something.

I got a good feeling!

Mostly newsworthy because Matsuno said last year there were no plans for it. The bigger news for me is Schreier saying down-thread that Naoki Yoshida’s team is on the project. I was concerned Asano’s might be, and I don’t want him anywhere near this.

I’d be deliriously happy with the Tactics Ogre Reborn treatment. A similarly arranged, orchestrated soundtrack is my #1 ask; I think this is still Sakimoto and Iwata’s best work, and the PSX audio doesn’t do the compositions justice. Additional animated cutscenes and additional dungeons/sidequests are probably not happening, but like in Reborn, high-quality voice overs and something small to mix up the gameplay or tweak the difficulty would be nice.

A lot of people succumbed to fear after 1992, especially the types like Ken Williams that were newly rich.

There’s a excellent, recent OJ Simpson documentary called Made in America that does a dive into 1990’s Los Angeles police culture and the riots. Highly recommended.

Lenore from the Castlevania Netflix series.

Tons of consent issues for sure, but she’s gorgeous and smart as hell.

I got my copy in a trade with my younger cousin. I don’t even remember what I gave up, one of the later Mega Man games, I think. Still feels like I got the better deal.

The original Dragon Quest was my first JRPG, but it was Destiny of an Emperor that got me into the genre, I think. Cool early example of a turn-based battle system.

This feels like a perfect example of the era, love it.

Video games weren’t great about credits in general back then. A little while ago I was trying to find who did a music track from Mega Man and only figured it out because there was an interview about it with the guy.

If we define the end of the Cold War as the collapse of the Soviet Union, that was over 30 years now. Considering other potential flashpoints (e.g., India and Pakistan), I’d say it’s more nuclear deterrence in general. No one wants to be the first to get into sustained conventional, symmetrical warfare with nukes on both sides.

We also seem to be seeing a shift in soft power. Now that raw footage of conflict is readily recorded and broadly accessible, regimes aren’t able to control messaging like they used to be. Still need public support to wage war, and it’s that much harder to obtain when people can see the faces of the people you’re killing.

Honkai Star Rail just passed the one-year mark and I’m massively impressed with it. I don’t often play games on mobile and this is only the second gacha I’ve put significant time into (the first being Final Fantasy Record Keeper). I honestly didn’t know my four year old, not-flagship phone could run something like this. I guess there’s a reason Hoyo has enough money to buy a small country.

The battle system is crazy good. Turn based without rounds is my favorite RPG battle system, and this might be the best version of it I’ve seen. The presentation’s great. The story and the writing is a little weird.

I wish it didn’t throw a million currencies and play modes at me, but I guess that’s the genre (or just F2P in general these days). Looking forward to when I can sort all that stuff out in my head so I’m not wasting time on it when I get a chance to open it.

Having grown up on Sierra adventure games, I still have a part of my brain thinking about saving and loading in bad situations from time to time.

This headline would have blown my mind years ago.

I think I need to check Nebuchadnezzar out.

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is still my favorite in this genre by a mile. Dripping with cultural flavor, and there was really something about monument building in all of the games in this series.

Last time I dipped into Oxygen Not Included, the rocket program was enough to get me to push past self-sustenance. Unfortunately in the end, getting the details of the program right just annoyed me. I don’t know if it’s me or if the game’s just not set up well to handle large-scale construction. Building fuel production ended up being more fun than actually building the rocket silos.

One regime’s political-dissident-by-speech is another’s dissident-by-drug-addiction. America’s “War on Drugs” was purely political disenfranchisement along racial lines, and it’s a major reason why the US continues to have higher incarceration rates than the USSR had in many of the years the Gulag system was operational.

By the way, prison rape jokes have long been a part of those late night comedy shows, to give you an idea of just how ingrained the American prison culture is.

Local multiplayer–especially couch co-op–is a lost art. I definitely miss it.