alt Hacker NewsI agree! For many games (especially the ones running on old devices), xorshifts are pretty good! Not all applications need cryptographically safe generators! And sometimes it's ok to trade complexity for speed!
But I agree that if you're building something new aimed for modern devices, Marsaglia's xorshift128 wouldn't be my first choice! But I'd definitely want it in my RNG library for backward compatibility!
If you are interested in performant retro PRNGs, you can find a link to mine in my profile, if I am not mistaken. The counter is based on xorshift. As of the time of release it passed all tests that could be passed with only a 2^32-1 period.
On Z80 it was only about as fast as RC4 which is also a good option in terms of performance and quality but whereas RC4 has a huge state, this one only has a 32bit state, the rest staying in ROM.