It’s an iterative series, each game building on the predecessor’s mechanics, so there’s not any one major twist. But there are a lot of little things that add up. The new movement techniques are great, Salmon Run has been significantly expanded, and just in general the QoL is night and day.

Also, the fact that Ink Armor, Sting Ray, and Main Power Up are not in the game might be the true biggest step forward. S3’s meta is in a pretty good spot now.

Large parts? It’s been a while since I played Octo Canyon, but I’m pretty sure the only thing that reappeared from Valley was the Octostomp boss, but it’s a different fight anyway so not really.

It’ll never happen, but I’d honestly prefer for S4 to move on from Splatfests and do something else entirely. They’ve run out of ideas, a lot of the themes feel like filler just to keep it going out of obligation. At this point I just see Splatfests as a weekend where they take away Ranked and make everyone play the worst game mode.

How many years do you expect them to keep pumping out content for the same game? They’ve gotta wrap it up somewhere. Two years is plenty.

Back in my day, games were released and we played them for what they were.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Haven’t had a whole lot of time to practice, but I’m working on charge partitioning. Managed to get double ball a few times in a match.

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - After getting demoted to Expert I went on an even worse losing streak for a bit, but I seem to be clawing my way back now. It’s just sample size, or so I keep telling myself.

Splatoon 3 - Grand Festival was rad. Not the Turf War part, Turf still sucks, but it was the second best concert I saw all week.

• Boktai series: These games were so near and dear to my childhood, especially 2. Really though you want the Solar Sensor hardware for the full experience, but I love these games too much not to plug them anyway. Emulating them is worth it over not playing them at all. And for the third game, you’d have to pick between original hardware or the translation patch anyway.
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow - It’s Castlevania. Also play Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance, but Aria is by far the best of the GBA installments.
• Golden Sun 1/2: These games were way ahead of their time for how they designed a combat system that encourages you to use all of your tools and not just click basic Attack as if you gotta hoard your MP for a rainy day. Fantastic puzzles too.
• Mother 3: Surely you have already heard of this game and do not need me to tell you to go play it. Have you not played it by now? Why not? Well, okay, if you haven’t played Earthbound first, go do so, then play this.
• Rhythm Tengoku: A wonderful game about pressing the A button. Sometimes you press the d-pad too. Translation patch.
• Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1/2: If you’ve ever played the classic 2D Tales games, these are excellent spiritual successors to those. There’s a third game that’s JP-only, translation patch is being worked on but it’s been stuck in development hell for years…

S2 was 2017, S3 was 2022. Five year gap is pretty reasonable for sequels.

S4 likely won’t happen until after the next Animal Crossing, since it’s the same team working on both IPs.

They really made sure to reference the number 3 in every possible place except the kit system.

F-Zero GX - As far as pure racing goes, GX is perfection.

Kirby Air Ride - The actual racing mode is… mid, honestly. But City Trial? One of the most interesting and unique game modes ever conceived. Sad this game never got any kind of successor.

I like X so X can’t be bad

I didn’t say that. What I said was “these are not the same thing, and drawing a false equivalence between them muddies the message.”

Partitioning is an advanced technique that takes advantage of leniency in charge input detection to do things you otherwise couldn’t. Exists in a few different games, 3rd Strike Urien is probably the best known example for heavily relying on it.

TFH is legit, one of the best fighting games I’ve ever played. Mechanically the closest comparison I’d give might be to call it a more grounded BlazBlue, just without a trillion system mechanics. It’s also one of very few Switch ports to have full crossplay, something even ArcSys apparently can’t figure out.

Team Future.

Depends on how much of a threat they are. Some random loser on /pol/ who will never leave their basement in order to harm anyone is probably not worth punching. But someone like Richard Spencer, who has a lot of reach and influence as a big name, I’ll gleefully watch that one clip over and over with popcorn at the ready.

I suppose the more difficult question to ask is where to draw the line in between.

It’s not. These are not the same thing. No one has bankrupted themselves playing Balatro.

Gacha is the line in the sand I’m willing to draw. Don’t put randomness in the price tag.

Well what do you want the solution to be? I think it’s easy to say that games should be transparent about what you’re paying for, my stance is that gacha should be outright illegal because of that. But I don’t think it makes sense to go after any and all kinds of randomness in games.

They’re different issues. The fact that people can and do financially ruin themselves over gacha is a lot more serious, and trying to conflate that with something like Balatro ultimately muddies the message.

I think gacha is a predatory business model that should be illegal, and yes that includes Genshin. But no it does not include Balatro, because Balatro isn’t gacha.

While there certainly are problems with other games, at least every game you mentioned is fully transparent about the price tag. Balatro doesn’t exploit whales by concealing how much it’ll cost to get anything.

I should be able to be a diehard fan of niche fandoms and hobbies without being told “no, stop enjoying things”. What exactly do you expect people who like things to do, just not have communities for the things they like?

Porter Robinson - Nurture

Just saw him live last night, absolutely incredible concert.

Anything popular enough that you can easily google any issues you need to troubleshoot. Beyond that it truly doesn’t matter.