Got myself a Switch and started playing Cult of the Lamb and Jack Jeanne! Cult of the Lamb is incredibly fun, and I’ve just started the second dungeon~

Yes, More TWEWY love!! I’m kind of sad that’s the franchise seems to get overlooked a lot

The DS series was the peak handheld generation for me. I like that the console’s design encouraged creative game mechanics, and it has some of my favourite games of all time. I have a DS Lite, a 3DS and a new 3DS, though I think the original DS line had the better game library compared to the 3DS. The camera and 3D effect were rather gimmicky and didn’t add much value for me.

I think the game that best encapsulates what I love about the DS is The World Ends With You, a JRPG set in modern Tokyo that used both screens at once in its action combat system - to control two different characters. The character on the bottom screen would have you use touch gestures to trigger attacks, while you needed to do button combos to control the character on the top. It was insanely fun!

Other games I liked from the early DS era are Hotel Dusk, a detective game that is played in “vertical mode” so you hold the console like a book - and Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, the original Japanese version of Elite Beat Angels, a rhythm game.

I also played all romance/otome games that were available in English for the DS, my favourite was Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side.

The DS figured out touch-based interactions way better than smartphones which are like the main touch-based “handheld” nowadays. That is because you could dedicate the entire touchscreen to gameplay input, since you still had the top screen to show relevant game information. Smartphones on the other hand need to utilize the entire screen both for input and displaying stuff, which just doesn’t work as well imo.

Yeah, the biggest problem with this approach is different moderation philosophies. You would have to set up a vetted set of approved non-problematic instances. I’ve read several accounts of people who tried out fedi and left soon after, and nothing sours the newcomer experience more than unknowingly joining an instance with a toxic community/moderators

What timconspicuous said. Make sure your instance hasn’t blocked bluesky as well

My perspective as someone who is mainly active in the anime/gaming fandom and gamedev space:

• Easier onboarding overall since you don’t have to bother with choosing an instance and all that
• despite starting out with less features than mastodon (no gifs, they are only getting video in the next update wth), the UI is overall more user-friendly and similar to Twitter’s
• Customizable feeds you can easily subscribe to in-app so you instantly have some content on your timeline (+ it’s easy to be found in these feeds without having to research the specific tags to use)
• Discoverability (through features and community efforts) is so much better. As someone who mainly follows artists, the last few days my TL was full of people doing artshares via quote-repost chains or sharing “starter packs” with lists of people to follow
• I have seen exactly one artshare post on mastodon so far (the japanese side seems to have it figured out a bit better, though. I regularly see tag-based artshares going around)
• meanwhile, to achieve a similar experience on mastodon I had to manually build myself different feeds in phanpy in which I’m following ~30 tags I have painfully collected to find the posts I’m interested in
• quote-retweets don’t exist yet but I kind of see the benefit now
• the stackable moderation also helps a lot

Overall, I think the main problems on Mastodon’s side are difficult onboarding and lack of actual community-building efforts. Also, the community just seems to be less welcoming for creators in general imo