The only annoyance I had with the stages in SA2 was that it felt like the Dark story had too many Eggman stages and not enough Shadow stages, or at least the Eggman stages were too long and the Shadow stages were too short, where the Hero story felt more balanced.

Exactly. This has much more to do with pirating games, especially before release, than any emulator crackdown. He’s the poster child of every reason Nintendo has used to go after anyone not using legit hardware. And frankly, I think more people than many are comfortable admitting are like this guy: they use emulators primarily for piracy. I’m not 100% totally against emulation, but that’s where we need to point companies like Nintendo who are hyper-aggressive with their IPs to the real target: illegal ROM sharing sites and other avenues of game piracy, instead of the emulators. People who are emulating just for backup/preservation of games, as many claim they are (and I don’t have a problem with), shouldn’t really have an objection to the real pirates going down.

‘Yum’ could work too.

Be careful with the Tor features, they allow you to open some onion sites but don’t supply the extra anonymity/security of the actual Tor browser.

Well, play with fire enough and you’ll get burned. No sympathy from me.

They already did this with the classic Sonic games (Sonic Origins) and removed them from any new Steam copies of the Genesis/Mega Drive Classics collection. I doubt they’re working on all the games in their library, but it may be enough of them that they just decided to pull the whole collection rather than leave it so gutted out. Sucks, but yeah, that’s the way it goes. That said, Shining Force remaster please? That would be awesome.

That’s the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Classics collection. I have it myself (bought several years ago). It’s just an official emulator/GUI wrapper (styled like a bedroom with a CRT) that comes with the games. If you have the collection you can find all the ROMs in the collection’s folder and play them with whatever emulator you want. If Steam ever threatens to take them away I strongly recommend backing that folder up somewhere.

To be fair, they’re both Japanese companies, but yeah, Japan’s patent/trademark/copyright laws, or at least the way they’re enforced, make America’s look like China’s. It’s a big part of how Nintendo can be the copyright bullies they are: they’ll do this, file suit in Japan, and steamroll anyone who dares oppose them in court. Because both companies in this case are Japanese, though, all the Japan vs foreigner stuff doesn’t really apply here.

And as a foreigner who lived in Japan in the past, I will say there’s some truth to the above, but it’s a bit exaggerated. Due to that homogeneity, 90+ percent of any racism anyone might experience there is due to stereotypes, not hostility or hatred. It’s still wrong, but more due to ignorance. That is, unless you’re Chinese or Korean. Japan, China and Korea HATE each other (each one hates the other two) for many historical reasons, and while the hostility isn’t as overt nowadays, it still simmers just under the surface. The US is basically forcing Japan and South Korea to play nice and be “allies” so that China and North Korea don’t run them both over. Otherwise, they would all be at each other’s throats.

Fun fact: at least in the Catholic Church, “cult” is a neutral word that basically means “popular following”. In the Church, it’s mostly used to refer to particular devotions or holy people that catch on in local communities and spread to a wider area, which the Church may look into for official " approval" for anyone to participate in or promote worldwide, or as a beginning sign that a holy person may become a saint. Even if the Church doesn’t officially canonize a person a saint, they may still say the person has a “cult” in a particular area.

EDIT: meant to post in reply to the OP, not the above comment, sorry about that.

So the first two seem to deal with throwing a capture item at a creature (wild pokemon) and/or releasing a character’s own creature to fight it (essentially first seen in Legends Arceus, tossing a ball at a pokemon to aggro it and then fighting it with your pokemon). The third one is, as others have said, Mount transitions (at least in pokemon, also first seen in Legends Arceus if you only count ride pokemon; if vehicles are included I believe the first would be Sword/Shield). Though if vehicles are included Nintendo would have a hard time fighting that one. Vehicle transformation, especially in racing games, has been around forever.

The posted text could be translation. Kinda reads like it.

Good luck arguing it here. I wonder how many here are 16 or younger, or close enough to that age where they grew up with the technology constantly in their face and couldn’t POSSIBLY imagine having lived without it.

As with many things, such as the dreaded Tiger electronic games in the ‘90s, it will likely be popular among parents as a safer alternative to smartphones for kids’ communication, but the kids themselves will hate it and long to own an actual smartphone. Not that I’m saying it’s a bad idea in general since it has the advantages of being safer and encouraging less screentime, but it’s probably destined to fail out the gate.

Everybody knows the new console is coming and some are saying it’s already being manufactured. They could just announce it already. The Switch is a great console, but it’s no secret it’s basically at EOL and after 7 years on the market it’s sold about as many new units as it’s going to.

Origins tends to be the “forgotten” title in the Arkham series since it wasn’t developed by the same studio and doesn’t feature many of the iconic characters/villains of the others (just Penguin, Deathstroke, Riddler and Joker), but IMO it’s still a very good game that can be held up with the others in the series and can introduce players to a variety of other members of Batman’s rogues gallery they may have not heard of before.

I just started it myself as my “spooky” game to play on Halloween. Even though I played the remakes of the other two, I especially got Ace Attorney vibes off the beginning of this one. I do enjoy the Famicom Detective Club games, but they have that really annoying quirk of needing to select the same option over and over, sometimes consecutively, to get through a whole dialogue.

Ah, yes, that infamous barrel. Claims many a hedgehog’s life due to timing out. I did actually manage once or twice as a kid to get under it through fast and clever jumping, until I only learned in adulthood that you’re supposed to move the D-pad up and down to control it. Really doesn’t help that the game doesn’t show you before how to control a barrel like that, and that stage can push players to the edge of danger timewise with or without that barrel.

I know a lot of people here are/will be mad at Musk simply for personal political disagreement, but even just putting that aside, I’ve never liked the idea of self-driving cars. There’s just too much that can go wrong too easily, and in a 1-ton piece of metal and glass moving at speeds up to near 100 mph, you need to be able to have the control enough to respond within a few seconds if the unexpected happens, like a deer jumping in the middle of the road. Computers don’t, and may never, have the benefit of contextual awareness to make the right decision as often as a human would in those situations. I’m not going to cheer for the downfall of Musk or Tesla as a whole, but they do severely need to reconsider this idea or else there will be a lot of people hurt and/or killed and a lot of liability on them when it happens. That’s a lot of risk to take on for a smaller auto maker like them, just thinking in business terms.

Competitive Pokémon tends to go back and forth between times of “stall” (turtling) and hyper-offense (aggression) dominating the metagame, depending on which strategies and team builds players will find. Whenever one becomes dominant, fans of the other will constantly hound tournament runners to change tiering or ban certain pokemon to change it.

As for a “fun” game to go hyper-aggressive with zero HP, max damage, I’ve seen some YouTubers attempt “Danger Mario” runs in the first two Paper Mario games, maximizing FP and BP and never taking HP when leveling, keeping Mario in the “danger” zone where lots of evasion or damage badges will stay activated. They then rely on those badges, items and partner abilities to avoid taking damage.

Well, no shit, that’s what the rule is SUPPOSED to do! No more impossible-to-cancel subscriptions, please.