Just buy keys at resellers :)

No, in honesty, use single-use virtual credit cards.

I usually try and pick up a console a few years after its done. Its usually cheap and the nostalgia wave hasn’t hit yet. At that point its probably been hacked and the store shut down so I feel no qualms aquiring games however I see fit. Though there seems little reason to do so after the 360 and PS3 since most games play on pc too now.

That’s what I do too, but there’s a sweet spot. I got a bunch of New 3DS XL for the family just before the eshop closed, and I paid €80-100 for each of them. That made sense to me. But paying €300+ doesn’t make sense to me.

DS and 3DS are hard to replicate well on a single screen device. So i get those, but there are newer handheld emulators with dual screens. Nintendo also keeps shutting down 3DS emulators so progress is slow. Vita emulation is still in its infancy.

DS/3DS emulation works well enough with a phone and a portrait mode controller attachment. That way you get the stacked screen layout and it’s handheld too. And the screen is way better too, which is especially noticeable if you compare it to running DS games on the 3DS.

Sorry, that was a bit of a misunderstanding. A MISTer makes sense to me. I was talking about newer original retro consoles. Something like a DS/3DS, PSP, Wii, Wii U, PS3. These things are now often more expensive in mediocre second-hand condition than they were new back when they were new, and that’s what I don’t really understand.

The single stick was a huge limitation. A really good example for that is Zelda Skyward Sword. By the time that game came out 3rd person 3D had been around for three console generations and more than a decade already, so there was more than enough time to figure out how to do this.

Yet the camera was still one of the biggest obstacles in the game. It happened so often to me that the camera got stuck in some stupid angle and I had to use their clunky manual camera aim option to see what I needed to see.

BotW’s dual-stick camera on the other hand had close to no issues at all. Having a full stick dedicated to just controlling the camera really solves the problem.

PC, which is in many ways the gold standard platform for 1st and 3rd person games, has a very similar solution with the 2-axis mouse control being reserved for camera control.

Automatic cameras are always worse than manual ones, because guessing what the player wants to look at just works worse than allowing the player to control it directly.

Tbh, AI isn’t even the biggest issue here. The decline happened much earlier and like in pretty much any industry it happened when the MBAs took over top-level management.