missingno

Vampire Savior

As a journalist she did it to see what would happen. And then wrote an article about what happened. This is definitely worth talking about even if she did click the box, the box isn't really the point here.

Just a few days ago, at a local Vampire Savior tournament. Grand Finals ended with me sniping Q-Bee's bubble super with a callout from B.B. Hood's gun super. Wish I had a clip, but it wasn't streamed or recorded.

Also had a few good laughs playing Skullgirls earlier that night at the same local, chaotic shit always happens in that game.

Romhacks:

• Link to the Past Randomizer - Generates a shuffled ROM with all chests and items swapped around, sending you on a wild goose chase through Hyrule trying to find everything required to beat Ganon. Has a LOT of settings to play around with.
• Link to the Past/Super Metroid Combo Randomizer - Like the above, but with both games combined into a single ROM using some elaborate witchcraft. Certain doors take you from one game to the other, and the item pools are shuffled together so you'll have to go back and forth between Hyrule to find Metroid items and Zebes to find Zelda items. It's a bit imbalanced by the fact that LttP is a much bigger game than SM with far more items and locations, but I recommend playing through it once for the sheer novelty.
• Celeste Mario's Zap & Dash - A metroidvania running in SMB1's engine. As the name suggests, it's heavily inspired by Celeste and ports in mechanics from that game.

Standalone fangames:

• Panel Attack - Open source clone of Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Puzzle League/Puzzle Challenge/oh my god Nintendo please pick a name and stick with it featuring netplay and modding support.
• AM2R - Another Metroid 2 Remake. Do note that I've heard a big 2.0 update is supposed to be coming soon, so you may wish to wait for that.

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding.

Depends on the game. If it's a good fit, go ahead and add it, but if it's not, it's better for a game to focus on doing one thing well than two things poorly.

DRM-free games can be freely copied, nothing's stopping you.

Pirates have to crack games that don't have DRM-free versions available, games that aren't on GOG.

We've reached the point of diminishing returns on hardware. IMO, anything that can't run on Switch 2 probably deserves to be scaled back anyway.

Will never be anywhere close to what Newgrounds and Kongregate were at their peak.

Porting two existing titles is hardly what I would consider a new golden age.

Browser games peaked in the 00s-10s as the most accessible place to publish a simple indie project. It was simple and easy for beginner developers to just make something and put it out there, and for those that took off there was a decent pipeline to monetize a hit by licensing it to sites that would share a cut of ad revenue.

But now, mobile and Steam have replaced that as the go-to target for developers. They've gotten to a point where they're just as accessible to develop for, and if you want to make a living off your work you'll have a much better shot that way.

Plenty of great tools still exist for HTML5 development, if developers wanted to they could, and some do. Itch.io has a good amount of new browser games, they exist.

But there's never going to be anything as big as Newgrounds or Kongregate. Those days are gone for good.

Nintendo doesn't sell products that are branded as Switch but don't actually play Switch games.

At one point MaxEnt had announced an Avatar fighting game, but then silently canceled it when everything imploded. So this appears to be a revival of that.

Over a month ago we were told that TFH's IP had been sold to a new owner, and they'd have an announcement within a month. Announcement still hasn't happened, but the publisher on Steam was silently changed to Gameplay Group International, along with Diesel Legacy's.