Yes, it’s a light remaster of the 2005 release. Seems to be part of a larger effort on Falcom’s part to get their older games more accessible on newer hardware. Players have needed a PC to have access to their catalog.

This isn’t an anthology like most games in this genre (or video games in general). It’s a continuous narrative, like a long-running novel or TV series. Newcomers could get on board with this one, since it’s introducing a new cast and location, but they’ll have to go back at some point. Otherwise, they should start at the beginning (Trails in the Sky). Even if newcomers start with this one, they are going to be lost in Daybreak 2.

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.

That was Matsuda. He was replaced last year.

I suppose this is newsworthy because Kiryu’s biggest splash so far has been saying they were cutting back on smaller projects.

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.

Wish Capcom had learned from this, too. Monster Hunter World’s multiplayer restrictions were so backwards, and now they are bringing them back for Wilds, ugh.

Lenore from the Castlevania Netflix series.

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

That there are divisions and prejudice within the community. It’s better for everyone involved to put on a united front, but unfortunately people get put down and marginalized even in supposedly queer-friendly spaces all the time. In my own circles, it happens a lot with bisexual men and non-binary/gender non-conforming persons in particular.

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.

Much of this isn’t unique to PC gaming. And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we’ve recently crawled out of it, thankfully.

What bugs me the most right now (and doesn’t quite get addressed in this article) is low performance standards. Everyone’s pushing 4K and ray tracing, which makes it hard out here for us framerate nerds. It’s starting to feel like every major release that comes out is Crysis, something for my hardware to grow into. Only with blurry anti-aliasing/supersampling techniques now.

One new, big positive I’m not seeing talked about much is a growing variety of Japanese publishers are taking PC seriously now, and that hasn’t happened in over thirty years. I’m including Sony in this, even with their recent missteps in the space, and Square Enix’s recently announced restructuring suggests simultaneous PC releases in the future for their games. That will inject some competition in PC gaming, although be aware that Japan has its own share of publishers that release broken ports.

Which includes the pricing model. Some regions even saw a price increase.

A lot of corps threw out the whole concept of a demand curve over the pandemic.

So what’s the top alternative? I’ve had quality issues with the last two Acer monitors I bought 😭

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.

Finishing up Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. I wish it were polished, but it’s still thoroughly scratching the Suikoden itch.

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.

It’s not just that. 2023 was a very good year for gaming, right? A lot of the heavy hitters last year were from long-running series. Look and see how many of those series had either their genesis or consensus fan favorite entries in that time period.

Not only that, Steam, Unreal Engine, e-sports, the mainstreaming of game mods, and even AAA development itself all trace back to innovations from that time. Historically, it’s a massively important time period for video games.