ampersandrew

That ranked mode is on its way, too, and I'm excited.

This sounds more like they cancelled a prototype that wasn't coming together and they're starting over, not just throwing the game out to cut costs.

The earliest this project could have started was 2018, after they made Dragon Ball FighterZ. Before that, ArcSys was on no one's radar. The code that Tokon is definitely, without a shadow of a doubt built on debuted in Strive in beta form approximately 1 year ago, meaning that the project was probably not in ArcSys' hands until after Strive launched, in 2021, at the absolute earliest. Sony had limited partnership arrangements with ArcSys at this point already, with PlayStation themed color palettes for characters in the game. But 2021 is also still likely to be too early, because Dragon Ball was still getting considerable attention, and GranBlue had just launched fresh into a world where it needed to be reworked for rollback immediately, because the market demanded it, eventually resulting in GranBlue Fantasy Versus Rising. So my best bet is that it started development in 2022.

I'm sure Marvel Tokon started as a fork of the code from Strive, but ArcSys has always been a multi project studio.

It's not locked to the Xbox ecosystem; it's a Windows PC with a better UI for a controller to navigate. And I really don't see this being any more locked down than Asus' previous Ally stuff.

This is in line with the other Windows handhelds' pricing, which are still doing half as well as the Steam Deck despite having to run an interface as awful as desktop Windows.

That Tainted Grail game that just came out this year is supposedly the indie Elder Scrolls. Maybe you'd argue that's AA, but that's still a symptom of how our standards have shifted. Games like Resident Evil are also abundant these days; not so much like Resident Evil 4 in particular, but RE4 was an experiment that split the difference between old Resident Evil and modern third person shooters.

Reminds me of this post on Bluesky. These ads were wild at the time, too; even some that predate this era. There was Fear Effect, which was basically marketed entirely on the back of the game featuring lesbians when that was taboo. There was Rayman standing at the urinals with a guy in 9-5 business attire presumably staring at Rayman's dick. The Neo Geo "You need a pair of these" steel balls "to play one of these" ad. Plus the shockingly racist European white PSP ad; that was a billboard, not a magazine ad, but it had "video game magazine ad energy", in this case with "(negative)" at the end of it.

Mostly the former. You got a better variety of courses rather than Paradise reusing a lot of the same pieces of something that distinctly looked like only one city, and a menu was just a quicker way to get in and out of the part of the game you wanted to play.

The indie and AA scene have finally started catching up to those tastes of mine that AAA left behind in the racing genre, for what it's worth. What are you looking for?

Paradise didn't do it for a lot of us, and we're still waiting for a good successor to Takedown and Revenge.

I have done twin-stick shooters like Streets of Rogue and Enter the Gungeon, and I found it to only control better than a second stick.