It’s interesting because everyone has their definitive version of Tetris.
For me, it was the arcade coin-op made by Atari Games.
I have a friend, though, who swears by Tetris Plus for the original PlayStation. That was the first Tetris she ever played.
Here, this exhaustively explains wall kicks and how they affect basic play in Tetris:
This is my original work, but here’s some further links if you’re curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_(Spectrum_HoloByte)
https://www.mobygames.com/game/1630/tetris
https://www.livescience.com/56481-strange-history-of-tetris.html
https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/tetris-fun-cold-war
Nope, they are abandonware. You either buy the physical disks or sail the seven seas.
Both Thexder and Sorcerian were distributed by Sierra.
Thexder, in particular, was quite popular—got a Western-only sequel called Thexder 95 that was a showcase for Windows 95:
It’s still playable on modern Windows.
As for Japanese games, they’re largely hit or miss on DOS. If it’s a Capcom or Konami game—it’s probably terrible. SEGA is good.
I think the game that really humiliated Capcom was the DOS port of Street Fighter II. In the early 90s, a bunch of Koreans made their own unofficial port and it shamed the official port.
This might explain why Super Street Fighter II for DOS was so much better.
I’ve played many games from the era. There were quite a few DOS games that had much smoother scrolling even if there wasn’t specialized hardware for it. Thexder, made in 1988, is a good example of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwHKg2aUB0I
The truth is, a good many Japanese games that were converted to DOS just weren’t very good.
There were exceptions, though. SEGA games tended to be excellent. And I have to say that anything by Nihon Falcom was amazing – to this day, Sorcerian is a standout on DOS.
That happened to me more than once—though not with this game.
Really want to find GBA Tribal Edition in the wild—if it actually exists.
Actually, those rear buttons are unique. They are not the same triggers and buttons. They are highly useful in FPS games for functions like crouch.
The em dash? I always use it—love it—you’ll have to take it from cold, dead hands.
Yep, the key is to use mouse instead of joystick-mouse.
I admire the cut of your jib.
You’re not wrong that the market has changed.
I often tell people that the biggest innovations in PC gaming are not graphics but form factors and inputs.
That’s more of a killer feature for Linux in general.
And I can’t undersell how big of a deal that is. When Windows 10 dies, I’m switching my desktop to Linux simply because Proton makes me want to use Linux.
And yet, when I look at my library, only half of new games released within the past five years support X-input. They are still exclusively keyboard-and-mouse.
Granted, that’s way more than what was available 10 years ago, but it’s still a problem.
Or it would be if the Steam Deck didn’t make it trivially easy to adapt keyboard-and-mouse controls to a controller. Which happened because of the innovation first introduced with the Steam Controller.
It’s now at the point where keyboard-and-mouse is optional—just a preference if you want to use it.
Okay, but I didn’t want to buy a new console. Instead, I wanted to use my PC as a console replacement.
But also, there’s a surprising amount of games that never got a console release. For example, Blood and Septerra Core—never arrived on any console. I own those games, and the Steam controller let me play them on my TV very easily.
Hey, the Steam controller is good for one other kind of game I play quite often: Diablo-style hack-'n-slash RPGs that are mouse-driven.
That’s the key. If you’re wanting to play something like Street Fighter VI, the Steam controller probably won’t fly.
But because I wanted to play Dungeon Siege on my TV, it works far better than a traditional controller ever could.
For the Steam controller to work for you, you have to come in with the mentality of it replacing a keyboard-and-mouse.
I feel a right stick is more useful for games deliberately designed as twin stick shooters. Geometry Wars is a good example of this. Using a trackpad for aiming is fine, but that doesn’t really feel like an arcade experience.
That woman’s name? Helen of Troy.