I had no idea what I was doing as a kid, and figuring out through trial and error which combinations and placements of units would cause them to do cool combo attacks was maddening.

I didn’t play the original Tactics Ogre, but I played a bit of the recent remake. It’s very much like FF Tactics, where you move individual units around on a grid, take turns, and adjust the direction they’re facing, etc.

Ogre Battle 64 is more like a full battle map with free, simultaneous movement. You traverse the battle map as sort of an overworld (?), then it switches to the autobattle combat interface when units run into each other.

They have some similarities, but I personally enjoy the Ogre Battle 64 approach more.

Not sure, but this appears to be the creator’s youtube page about it:

https://youtu.be/dSBNs3TeINc

That’s so much. It seems to be getting a small spike in attention these days with some recent games inspired by it (like Unicorn Overlord, or a popular indie game called Symphony of War).

It’s an incredible game, but it feels like very few people were aware of it (at least in the US). The closest AAA game to it now would be Unicorn Overlord, if you’ve seen that.

You build squads of units and customize who’s in each party and which tile they stand on, then send them out to a battle map where you can direct them. When they run into enemies, it auto-battles sort of like Fire Emblem.

The Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive) had expansions that were meant to improve the capability of the system and extend its lifespan, but ultimately they weren’t super popular because it didn’t make sense to make games for such a small subset of Sega’s market share.

This is the 32x add-on that allowed for 32bit processing, and someone has just stacked a bunch of them on top of each other to be funny.

(Pictured here is the base system in the center, with the 32x add-on on top and the CD player below)

Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable

Discord is going public soon, so start the timer…

I need this.

And it happened again!

It’s the social media equivalent of supporting a bunch of Mom and Pop shops (or opening your own!) vs some hyper-sanitized, corporate monstrosity like Wal-Mart.

but it shipped, didn’t it! Looking at you pippin.

This is the kind of story I was hoping to hear in this thread.

Did you enjoy it at the time, or was there a sense of it not being a great console? I know that we were much more forgiving of janky games back then, so it’s hard to look at it fairly from 2025.

You mean Alexander?

Hell, chess is huge right now, and it’s over 1500 years old.

It should! It’s allowed me to play so many games that are hard to find or expensive these days.

Part of it seems to stem from people’s excitement to infodump about how federated social media works.

That’s relevant and interesting to learn about, but the average person just needs to hear “make and account here and start browsing memes” first.

I don’t know the story, but that’s the genuine cartridge art they used for the first Mega Man in the US. It’s just terrible and looks nothing like the game.

I assume it’s more like a life’s purpose.

I’ve had a successful Ironman run on Commander difficulty in XCOM 2 (WOTC), but Legendary Ironman continues to elude me. I usually get back into it once or twice each year and try again. Maybe one of these days!