I'm not expecting to beat Daigo Umehara any time soon. I'm just aiming to beat the next guy in front of me. And the next. And the next. No matter what my skill level, there's always a challenge. That doesn't mean I have to be the very best, quite the opposite.
missingno
You'll find more close-knit communities in smaller games. I play a lot of fighting games, and the FGC moves heaven and earth to keep the one thing alive that very few other games are doing: locals. Go to locals and meet people!
I guess I just don't get the tribalism here. Both are cool in different ways.
Singleplayer games offer a more curated experience. A story and a set of hand-crafted challenges. But that generally means finishing one and moving onto the next, rather than really sinking my teeth in it.
Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There's always a better opponent. And I've made a lot of good friends through these communities.
I play games that are so niche that the 'matchmaking' consists of pinging people on Discord. Because we don't have proper matchmaking, we struggle to retain new players because they come in, get pulverized into the dust, and give up.
The point of matchmaking is that even a more casual beginner can find opponents at their level, without having to grind a ton to catch up with those of us who have been playing for years.
Requiring new releases to provide this information going forward makes sense. But I expect a lot of older titles have no one actively paying attention to go get this paperwork filled out, and will get blocked as a result. This law should've just applied to everything new released after the law takes effect, grandfathering in legacy content.
What about them? They're all garbage.
The biggest thing I miss from yesteryear is all the low budget straight-to-handheld spinoffs. No clear place for those to exist now that dedicated handhelds are dead, and no room for quirky little side projects when publishers are putting all their resources into just a few AAAA megagames.
Yeah, was a little odd how much it really did sound like a literal ad at the end.
I do wonder how much of an uptick in sales the first two games will receive once the third is done.
Did you read the article?
This doesn't just cover microtransactions. In fact, the new law is harsher on fake gambling than it is on real gambling - loot boxes get classified as M, but a poker minigame is an automatic R18.
I'm not seeing a link. Missingno.'s sprite is just the graphics decompression routine attempting to parse data from elsewhere in the ROM due to a wrong pointer, this obviously can't be concept art for that sprite. The idea that they might've considered making it canon in later generations is far too unlikely as well, we know they hated that this glitch got found and never ever ever would've wanted to acknowledge it.
The article's conjecture is just "it's blocky and it has writing on it, and if you squint really hard, you could pretend writing is like glitchy pixels." Too much of a stretch.