Patient gaming is a budgeting technique, not a strict law you must always adhere to.

I separate upcoming releases into two categories: games I’m so excited for that I would gladly pay full price at launch, and games I’m willing to wait on. Which games go in which category depend entirely on you and your budget.

While it definitely felt to me like turn-based RPGs were looked down on for a time, particularly when Final Fantasy abandoned its roots, I’d say the pendulum has been swinging back in the other direction for quite some time now.

Persona 5 was a smash hit, Fire Emblem is doing quite well, Dragon Quest is still going. Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler were solid mid-budget titles carrying on FF’s roots where actual FF won’t. Mario & Luigi is getting a revival. Over in the indie space, Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes have done well. And then you have tons and tons and tons of classics that have been getting remasters or even full remakes lately.

Oh yeah, and then there’s a li’l game called Undertale that seems to have been fairly well received.

Anything popular enough that you can easily google anything you need to troubleshoot. Beyond that, doesn’t really matter which one.

Let’s go back to the start of this comment thread:

I love how this continues to crank out articles with 0 information and everyone speculating what it might be about.

Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo are dickheads, but you can clearly see how everyone greedily clicks on these articles considering how often they get rehashed.

That’s the argument: these articles add nothing to the discussion. And you responding to that with “but can you prove Nintendo is right?” isn’t the point and also isn’t adding anything to the discussion.

I am not talking about legal understanding of Japanese patent law.

But that’s what the case is about.

I would argue it’s not a bullshit article as I have yet to hear a single example of what legitimate (in the real sense, not related to Japanese patent law) case Nintendo has.

Well then the fact that we still don’t know what the case is really about is exactly why these articles are useless. No information in there.

Any word on if/when there’ll be a native Linux port?

If what’s supposed to be the core gameplay feels like an unwanted interruption, I don’t think the random enounters themselves are the problem. I think the reason random encounters get a bad rap is because some games don’t make basic fights feel engaging enough. But when done right, they should be the fun part!

Patent infringement is a curious angle. Do we know what specific patent(s) they’re claiming here?

Oh, did you think the headline meant they were shutting S3 down? Servers will remain up for the foreseeable future, and they’ll even still run seasonal Splatfest and Big Run events. They’re just done with content updates.

Two years of content seems plenty reasonable. Especially when they said from the start that it would be two years. Games don’t need infinite updates forever and ever and ever. Especially when it’s not a live service being sustained by microtransactions.

You didn’t answer my question, by the way.

Splatoon 1 had one year of content updates. Splatoon 2 had two. And they told us from the start that Splatoon 3 was also going to have two years.

How long do you expect them to keep going for?

Sell the website to who? Aquaman?

Normally these kind of announcements come with some kind of explanation. The lack of one reflects very poorly on Mozilla and leads me to assume the worst.

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.

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.