Frankly, the whole list suffers from a modernity bias. No list of best shark games is complete without the Intellivision classic Shark! Shark!

Don’t be so disingenuous. Nobody expected Valve to anticipate “all of the novel and interesting ways developers will skirt the boundaries of what’s appropriate.” This kind of garbage was rife on Steam well before they made their announcement: all they had to do was have a basic understanding of the content that they…

Do you propose that Valve write down a list of everything that is not permitted, and that they be required to stick to this list, even if it turns out that there’s something they hadn’t considered before?

No: as I said right at the beginning, I agree. I was just trying to expand on what you said. Sorry for the confusion, though!

I don’t see any reason why privacy wouldn’t be an excuse. Anyone can be skeptical, for any reason, and that skepticism is 100% justified based on the personal history and experiences of the skeptic. Nobody is under any obligation to me on account of my skepticism, though. It’s up to them to choose to what extent, if…

Given the... uniqueness of her situation, and just how out-of-control I know certain online interactions can get, that’s one of the most believable claims in the article, IMO. Having a manager as a kind of personal firewall between myself and random strangers online strikes me as very basic good practice, especially…

I agree. Beyond that, though, I don’t have a problem with the skepticism of the article, per se. I understand the somewhat sordid history of streamers claiming disability on Twitch, and I think skepticism is an unfortunate-but-reasonable response.

I don’t know that I agree with that. Agreeing to one level of access doesn’t mean I’m agreeing to all levels of access. Offering to give you $5 doesn’t mean that I’m cool with you giving you my bank account number and PIN. Agreeing to go on a date with you doesn’t mean I consent to sleep with you. The same principle…

Well, even if the game engine isn’t to fault or anything like that. I would love to see Bethesda try to refine the movement of characters and impact of the melee attacks and such for the future games, instead of having those seemingly samey things they have had for ages now.

The problem with the “base” is far more likely to be a systemic issue with how Bethesda develops games. Maybe they don’t have enough devs, maybe they suffer from scope creep, or maybe it’s just an organizational culture thing. It’s relatively unlikely that it’s down to the technical limitations of the engine. And I’d…

I’m not talking about cosmetic mods like skins, but mods that improve how the thing works. That can certainly include visuals, like optimizing textures, removing pop-in, reducing lag from shadows, and so on. But sometimes they are invisible fixes that just make the games run better.

Only if they’re not native Windows games. They use DOSBox for most older DOS games, ScummVM for some others, and I believe they’ve used UAE for certain Amiga titles. But there aren’t any retail-quality Windows emulators for Windows, and I’ve not seen them do anything fancy with virtual machines (which would pose all…

Telltale had a real problem with this. I bought their Sam and Max games the moment they showed up on Steam, and they simply stopped working for me when I upgraded to Windows 10. That’s unfortunate, but I can sort of understand it. It happens with older games, whatever. Except, the exact same games from GOG.com worked…

I love Max, but his brand of humor really only works with Sam by his side. At minimum, he needs a straight man, and none of the other players here are really suitable for that role.

They didn’t do anything more fancy with Final Fantasy VII, though. The Steam version is similarly just the old PC port with a couple of (fairly rudimentary) patches to update the sound and graphics and make it run slightly better on modern hardware. And the mobile and PS4 ports of both it and Final Fantasy IX are…

None of the series is. You don’t see it quite as often as you used to, but I used to get really irritated by the cohort of people who seemed to think that not having knights and castles meant a story wasn’t fantasy. Yeah, Final Fantasy VIII takes place in a modern-esque world. It also features sorceresses, soooo....…

It’s been as “remastered” as both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy IX, which is to say it’s been dusted off without any significant improvements so Square Enix can sell it for a few extra bucks on modern systems. The only difference is that VII and IX also got mobile and PS4 releases, while VIII remains stuck on…

The hatred towards The After Years always struck me as weirdly performative, and I say that as someone who doesn’t actually like the thing. It’s solidly outside of my interests, since I didn’t care for the original Final Fantasy IV, either (far too on rails for me, from a gameplay perspective). Was TAY as good as its…

You know, as an old timer with the franchise (been playing since 1990) who considers Final Fantasy VIII his favorite, I can’t disagree about how terrible that twist was. I was complaining about it even back on release. I guess the biggest difference between us is that I don’t really expect a Final Fantasy game to have…

As others have said, it has historically outsold Final Fantasy IX, both in its original PS1 and Steam releases, but Final Fantasy IX is apparently profitable enough to be ported everywhere. And, unlike Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, which were both very slightly cleaned up versions of 1990s PC releases, Fina…