ARPG + MORPG hybrid with looter shooter characteristics.

It doesn’t really fit anywhere cleanly, though.

Terms can definitely be confusing. Diablo is definitely a hack-n’-slash, but it’s very different from the likes of Golden Axe and God of War.

The ARPGs you’re probably referring to, I call them Diablo-likes to distinguish them from all the other action RPGs.

RNG = random number generator. In gaming, this just means random chance. Whenever loot drops, critical hits land, enemies spawn, or dice rolls decide outcomes, that’s RNG at work.

Eurojank is a term for European-developed games (usually from Central or Eastern Europe) that are ambitious, creative, and full of unique ideas… but also full of technical rough edges.

There’s a lot of subgenres I wanted to include, but I felt this document was already too long. Here’s more of them:

• DBRPG = Deck-building RPG
• SurRPG = Survival RPG
• RLRPG = Rogue-like RPG
• SLRPG = Souls-like RPG

I don’t know why I overlooked GRPGs since Germany has some pretty important ones. You mentioned Gothic, but there’s also both the Sacred series and ELEX series.

I’d say that while both GRPGs and PRPGs are releated to each other, there’s some big differences that go beyond nationality. I’d say GRPGs are more like a muddy Renaissance faire going on while PRPGs have more of a storybook style.

EDIT: In the interest of thoroughness, I added even more subgenre acronyms.

Tetris Plus is quite neat because, not only is there PlayStation and arcade versions, it was released for Game Boy too.

I regularly play it on my cabinet—it’s got a great PvP mode.

They’re gone. No mascots. No background worlds. Just the “elemental” machine skins.

Tetris Worlds had eye monsters because THQ wanted a console-friendly mascot game.

Tetris Elements has industrial pipes because ValuSoft (THQ’s budget imprint) wanted a cheap, self-contained PC release that didn’t require any cross-project asset wrangling.

Use vJoy + Universal Control Remapper (UCR), or reWASD, to mirror the controller input to all emulator instances.

This means pressing A once sends “A” to all 8 games.

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.