About ten years ago, Sony promised they'd change how we play games. With the launch of the Playstation Vita, they showed us a world in which one could start playing a game at home on your big powerful console, and then you could take it with you in the form of cross-play, where your saves synced via the cloud and you could play the Vita version right where you dropped off. And of course, for games that didn't have a Vita version, there was always the option of streaming your games.

Of course, we know how well that worked out. There were maybe 5 games where you could buy both versions of the game at once, and the majority of the games that supported cross-play required you to buy the same game twice. Streaming is still what everyone's pushing today, but in many places (coughAmericacough) there isn't a good enough connection to stream games with a good experience - especially if it's got twitchy gameplay.

Time has passed and many companies have began to offer a service model for games - subscribe to a program, and you get free access to games. And many of these services have some sort of cross-play component to them, where you get access to multiple platforms, or even with streaming versions, but they all have their downsides.

But it turns out that one company offers a gaming service that actually does offer each of their games in native versions across computers, consoles, and phones, has cross-play support, and doesn't have any of the downsides of streaming, and it's from a company that most people don't associate with gaming - especially when it comes to computer games. I'm speaking, of course, about Apple Arcade.

Sure, it all only works on Apple hardware, and the console part is a bit of a stretch (who actually owns an Apple TV?), but it works remarkably well. And unlike a number of other systems I have tried, it works seamlessly - you can save your game on your mac, launch your game on your iPhone, and instantly be playing your game. And the higher-end games with nice 3D graphics actually do look remarkably better on the big screen.

Of course, the selection of games is much different than any other games service, but I find myself surprised at how many games I legitimately want to play. Sure, there are a lot of 'iPhone' style casual games - right now they just released a bunch of previously released iPhone games cleaned up and stripped of monetization schemes - but I view that as a positive thing - sometimes you just want something simple to pass time with that doesn't need to take space in your brain. But at the same time there are also bigger and more aspiring titles available. There's a new action game from PLATINUMGAMES with an Okami-like artstyle, a brand new RPG from Mistwalker built on top of dioramas, and complex adventure games like Beyond a Steel Sky.

Apple arcade, is, however, missing one notable meta-genre from it's library - Triple-A games. And honestly, I kind of love it for that. The majority of the games companies represented are independent, and that means that many of them are going to be able to offer me new types of gameplay or narratives that you won't get from the big guys. What other service is going to offer experiences like Assemble With Care? And from an ethical point of view, I'd rather reward independent creators who are pushing out these high-quality pieces of work than giant companies who are famous for exploiting their workers.

While Apple Arcade obviously won't be a good choice for everyone since it's limited to Apple hardware, and if you're already in Apple's ecosystem, you probably already know about it (they're surprisingly aggressive at marketing their free trial - which is actually what got me to write this in the first place). I had originally written them off as all casual games, but with the last big release of games it's got some pretty fantastic releases. It's worth trying if you've only got an iPhone, but it's more than worth it if you've got a recent Mac or Apple TV.

I upgraded to Apple One because it was only $3 more a month for TV and Arcade split between my family plan members. So why not?

Looking for recommendations of what's fun to play in the Arcade. I'll take anything, but if you're looking for what I like the last games I really enjoyed playing were: Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Disco Elysium, Persona 5 Royal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. As you can tell, I really don't play mobile games much.

Thank in advance.

For those who do not know it, Tempest is a classic arcade vector-based game, and I urge you to check it out. It is highly addictive and nowadays should fall well within the fast-paced retro fashion.

The problem is that for quite some years, I had nothing to scratch that itch. The last proper Tempest-like game that I played was Typhoon 2001 on Linux, which was a free/gratis clone of Tempest 2000.

Now it seems that in 2018 Tempest 4000 came out, but only for PC (a.k.a. Windows), PlayStation 4 and XBox One. As a Linux and Nintendo Switch gamer, that doesn’t help me one bit.

There are two FOSS versions: Arashi, which works only on old Macs, and Arashi-js, which is a JavaScript re-implementation of the former. Unfortunately, none of the two seem to work on my laptop.

So, here I am, itching for that Tempest fix, yet without a clue how to get something on either Switch on Linux (apart from perhaps Typhoon if it still works). Any suggestions would be more then welcome.

From the old-school Beatmania and Dance Dance Revolution, to the widely popular Guitar Hero and Rock Band, to more recent additions like Crypt of the NecroDancer, and Thumper, I've been a fan of rhythm games for years. Hopefully a lot of you out there feel the same way, and we can share and discuss our favorite games in this post.

I think it might be a good idea to keep top level posts about single games (or game series / similar games, i.e. Dance Dance Revolution, Pump It Up, and In The Groove can all be one topic, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band can be one topic, etc.), so they can be discussed in that thread specifically to try and keep the discussion organized. This post should work until there's enough of us to make a ~games.rhythm sub-tilde.

I'll make a couple topic posts below to get things started, but feel free to add your own for any games you want to discuss as well. If you do make a top level post, please provide a brief description of the game for those unfamiliar with it.

Edit: I updated my post to read ~games.rhythm above, as I originally posted in ~hobbies. Deimos has now moved it to where it should have been. Cheers!