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I recently purchased this really fun Game Boy refurb called “Pastel Boy” from Vapor95 which is a reseller for Gamerchanger Mods. They took a case from MizuCat (which was limited to 50), some upgrades and voila: you get a new Game Boy. I haven’t received it yet but it got me hankering for more: I realized this wasn’t a Game Boy Color. This was, by all accounts, a wonderful decoration for my house and nifty toy but it wasn’t really useful. I needed something where I could bring my massive library that I have amassed of portable games around with me and the Zelda Game & Watch is really useful, but it only has Zelda. I don’t want just PSP either, I want GBA! Luckily that’s where retro handhelds come in. Steam Deck / ROG Ally These devices are now more aesthetic or price based – $150 or less to…

We’re proud to announce that Gaming Tier List has launched with new branding and a brand-new logo to refresh the site’s branding and our commitment to the best news and guides for video games. In our previous logo, the colors followed the rainbow which placed red first. The best tier out there, S+, is not red. It is followed with orange, yellow, green then teal which is completely out of order. The name Gaming Tier List is shadowed and can be kind of hard to read. The logo’s age shows artifacting when pulled up on the latest mobile devices. That’s when we’ve engaged creative talent and launched our latest logo. Understanding Our Brand We’re a forward-thinking organization and our logo should highlight our diversity. We’ve kept the rainbow of colors, but properly aligned them to really define what a tier list is. Additionally, the horizontal boxes are now vertical with…

It seems that G/O Media, owner of Kotaku, has made the transition to AI content. This in turn has alienated the editorial staff who have taken to social media along with their union. The use of AI generative text is currently extremely controversial, with Gaming Tier List parent owner Yurika Corporation banning its use on all properties. There’s a lot of reasons for that, which we’ll get into, but first let’s get the information from the source. Relevant Tweet What Is G/O Media Doing and What Does AI Mean? We need to be really fair here for a moment and explain what the business, G/O Media, is saying instead of focusing on the hype. What they’re arguing is that they’ve begun using generative text to create articles that are reviewed and fact checked by an editor. The editor then approves the post to go live, assuming that it has been…

Everything from Final Fantasy XVI to Path of Exile are having their conventions return to their regular cadence. During 2020-2022 it was rather rough for travel and events. Now, in 2023, it seems that more and more games are returning to their yearly fan meet-ups. That’s awesome! To celebrate, this year’s Final Fantasy FXIV Fan Festival is rather awesome: You get a small tote, some nice pins and a stress ball of grapes. This joke is not only rather neato but it also is a return to the things that make the video game community awesome. For some context, some grapes in FFXIV had bugged out and were rendering in their low-polygonal version. A lot of games will derender an asset the further you are from it since you can’t see the fidelity. In this instance, the game wasn’t properly rendering the grapes. It’s neat that games are returning back…

Gaming is the most social activity online. The only other more social activity is FaceTime, due to its liminal space intrusion into your life when someone calls. Social activity requires platforms that allow users to connect. The entire basis of the Internet is to send and receive from other users in other locations. Twitter has recently rate limited users on a temporary basis, which has greatly slowed the flow of information between communities. There’s a crisis unfolding on the Internet’s most social town square. Twitter’s pathway to monetization continues to be rocky. Decision after decision has left users a gasp at what to do when their normal that had been consistent for so long rapidly changes day after day. The long and short of the current crisis is that new users, regular users and paid users all have different amounts of posts they can view per day. The limit seems…

LavaFlame, the developer behind IdleOn, released a controversial update in which players would need to spend between $200 to $500 for a companion that gave unbelievable advantages. For roughly three weeks the developer remained silent as users critical of the update were banned. Today an update for the game was released in which the developer explained his logic in the following post: A note to those wondering where I’ve been and are eager to get back to more content: as you hopefully understand, I felt it was best for me to stick to my main mission as a creator — working and delivering on actual content for people to enjoy. Put simply, what I’ve always cared about most is that A: my game is fun, and B: a whole lot of people play and enjoy it. For A, the game itself hasn’t changed, no new or old content restricted; my…

On June 17th Legends of IdleOn received the companion update which brought the new companion shop. The companion shop has a gacha like system where you pay real world cash and receive a random pet, with one of the pets being “Doot” which grants a considerable advantage that allows you to have all of your divinities from World 5 as active. This is a very strong bonus in the game. Some Quick Math If we assume the average cost of a single Doot is: Taking into account basic probability and the geometric distribution, with a .28% original drop rate and after 5,660 gems reaching tier 3 and having a x3 drop rate, we figure it would be about 176.05 chests to get a Doot. Gambling in an Idle MMO So that’s a lot of money for a big advantage in an idle game and quite weird that such a strong…

Hi-Rez Studios is removing the mantel of being a game studio and undergoing a transformative business process, to say the least. The community is biting its nails about what this means for the games they love dearly, but the people who are being put in charge know what they’re doing. Let’s break down the announcement and I’ll share some of my expert thoughts on the recent changes. The announcement was posted to LinkedIn. Hi-Rez Studios to Become Hi-Rez Ventures This is just a means of branding themselves away from developing games and being a multi-channel organization that supports games and funds the development of games as well. The branding around “Hi-Rez” as the prominent owner of any particular game will likely disappear in the near future as “Hi-Rez” becomes a “parent company.” The subsidiaries have already existed as modulars within Hi-Rez, but this reorganizes them into clearly defined self-contained entities.…

Today while I work on the YuriCorp Community Minecraft server, I am reminded of the origins of online multiplayer games: MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). MUDs were text-based online games, often accessed using Telnet, that allowed multiple users to play together. MUDs were the genesis of the MMOs we play today and early attempts at adding a graphics layer were the very first series of MMOs. That includes The Realm Online. The major downside of early MUDs was that they were entirely text-based. In the 1990s, with slow dial-up internet connections, text was really the only viable option. However, the evolution to graphical MUDs happened quickly. One of the first major graphical MUDs was The Realm Online, released in 1996 by Sierra On-Line The Realm Online was quickly relegated to forgotten memories as Ultima Online (1997) released and was a completely superior experience while EverQuest launched in (1999) making The Realm Online…

Star Citizen is a game that still kindly asks you for your money for some reason unbeknownst to anyone. Chris Roberts himself at this point likely is included in that list, although we’re past half a billion in funding now and Star Marine still is dead. I wrote in early 2016 that Star Marine was canceled which was, looking at the last decade, quite right. It languishes today not as a separate FPS game but a broken buggy module within Star Citizen with three maps and no players and soon to disappear altogether as a separate mode. Much like someone who is trying to convince you that their AI product, coded by ChatGPT is going to be the one, Star Citizen continues to languish as a cult around a product made of dreams and sunk cost fallacy. At this point even just removing Star Marine would probably be good for…