Kevin, I’m terribly glad to see another of your Peanuts articles. They’ve consistently been enjoyable and insightful - I’d never considered Marcy as deeply as you did, and I’d forgotten a lot of Peppermint Patty’s less surface characteristics. Hope you’ve got more in the pipeline!

It’s convenient, cheap, and authentic. Those are the biggest selling points. I’ve played many of these games on emulators over the years, but there’s something nice about having them all on a little box that uses proper SNES controllers. This makes it way easier to play, say, Super Mario World with friends or my…

This is a fair point, and maybe the bottom 16 would be ranked a bit differently if I had played different games growing up, but the top 5 are masterpieces no matter when you play them.

I’d much rather we have 5 more episodes of Rick and Morty this year than just one.

Jason, I’ve been reading your book, and it’s clear that a big part of game development involves deception. I’m sure developers consider it a necessary evil since they are constantly trying to get funding for their current and future projects, but they put no small amount of effort into spectacular (but unrealistic)…

Yes. But I’m also proud of how much we’ve evolved over the years.

I dunno about universally better. It’s definitely better for typing on smartphones, but the constant fingerprints all over my screen make me wish we’d found a better way. It’s definitely inferior for gaming.

He got invited out to play it? Welp, guess it’s time for me to make a youtube account called RaymanSmashBro... and then I wait.

The problem with this is that unlike a meal, where you make an item to be consumed at a specific time and place by a specific person or group of people, video games (especially internationally released online games like Splatoon) are enjoyed by many people, in many places, who have many different availabilities…

I’m not so much bothered by the salmon run thing as I am at how some of the design choices that carried over from the previous game are just outright bad.

Especially from Nintendo

Basically, “because that’s how it is in Japan!”

Which can explain a LOT of game-related decisions.

Which is almost wholly the third party market’s fault at this point. Nintendo has made development much easier by finally going with a modern chipset, sales are clearly there in terms of hardware, early developers have gotten great sales due to capitalizing on the hype, and there are a lot of people who are willing…

Comparing them is not pointless. As a matter of fact, it’s the exact opposite of pointless. It’s the living proof that, if you want to sell consoles, you need software.

Stephen has wanted to do this for a while, and getting requests from readers like you helped too! So thanks!

Who's that?