Stick drift isn’t when the sticks fail to recenter (which is what this would help with).
Stick drift is when the electrical contacts inside the stick change over time and as a result the electrical signal changes over time. A perfectly centered stick might have the same signal as slightly off to the side. (Which this wouldn’t help with)
The physical mechanism that causes stick drift exists in all controllers that use resistance of electrical signals instead of something like hall effect sensors. If you have metal sliding over metal, it’s going to degrade over time. It’s very possible the early controllers had stick drift, it just wasn’t noticeable because it was so bad that every early console just had horribly large dead zones. Only the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast used hall effect joysticks back then and that never caught on. So I guarantee that with enough time, a Dual Shock controller would also develop stick drift.
And sometimes things like this are just a thing that happen when you miniaturize electronics. An xbox controller does a LOT more than an atari 2600 controller did, in less space. Cramming more stuff into less space means everything has to be tinier. and when you have abrasive metals rubbing against each other, and the metal is thinner, it’s going to wear out faster. They’ve flown too close to the sun in some cases and they wear out WAY too fast. Which is a widespread problem but not so widespread that there are no working controller. Clearly what they are doing still works.
This isn’t nearly as much of planned obsolescence as you would think. They just release a new generation of console and make it not backwards compatible with older controllers for that. This is just that as things get more complex, they become more fragile. I would much rather play Elden Ring on an xbox controller that might get stick drift than an atari 2600 joystick.
Games were definitely buggy and I honestly think people forget how much better the quality is nowadays.
I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice. If you only have one game to play then of course you’re going to replay it to death. If I have a steam library of 1000 games then I’m much less likely to.
A lot of this is just nostalgia for the past and the environment as opposed to games being any better.
I mean technical wise, games are better now and could easily be patched, but I think that’s why games had better gameplay in the past to make up for the lack of gamer accessibility to patching.
You’re saying that because games couldn’t be patched, they had better gameplay? That makes no sense at all.
Lots of games had crap gameplay. There are more junk vintage games than good ones. The gameplay was simple because it had to be. The consoles didn’t have the power to do more. Chips were expensive. So they had to invent simple gameplay that could fit in 4k of ROM. If dirt simple gameplay is your thing, great. The Atari joystick had one stinking button for crying out loud.
You think Space Invaders has better gameplay than Sky Force Reloaded? Or Strider has better gameplay than Hollow Knight? You’re insane.
E.T. for the 2600 had gameplay so bad it crashed the entire video game industry.
Double Dragon on NES had a jump that was impossible to make forcing the company to make a new cart and give refunds.
I might be misremembering what game it was. I was just a kid when I learned about it. I can’t seem to find anything about it other than an impossible jump in the PC port of TMNT.
It’s a nostalgia thing - I don’t remember the games where I got stuck on the first level and could never finish the game (which happened). Or were just boring so I quit after a half hour.
I do remember donkey Kong country, super Mario bros, sonic Etc. Which all worked well and were fun.
Yeah quality has improved massively, maybe not the initial release but 90% of games i recently played were regarded as buggy messes on release. After years of updates they mostly work.
I’m unfamiliar with that game. Was World Games buggy or just bad? The quality the OP referred to was bugs, not gameplay.
Even the worst AAA game today has better game play than anything from 30 years ago. It’s the nature of extreme complexity that allowing players freedom makes complete debugging impossible.
Actually, OP very explicitly said to ignore bugs and was only talking about gameplay. Which is why they talk about extreme replayability being the requirement on old games.
I just realized you were talking about who i responded to, not OP. But still, they weren’t only talking about bugginess.
The basic mechanics of a game (eg. Mario) better be fun, and those first couple of levels better be fun, because that’s what you’ll be doing a lot. It’s similar to how the swinging in Spider-Man better be fun because you’ll be doing it a lot. But the it also has more complex fighting, side content, and a story. You can mess up a lot more while there’s still enough to keep it entertaining.
But people don’t remember the majority of games that were not very good. World Games was just a game that came to mind on the NES as being not very fun, but more importantly forgotten.
Hehe. World Games was an Olympic event type of game for the NES and other systems back in the late 80’s.
It was actually a well reviewed and enjoyed game, so I’m not sure why he decided to use it as an example when there were so many other actually bad games back then. It also caused a “spoof” game to be made on the NES called “Caveman games”, which did a similar game style, but set in caveman times with caveman events. I preferred caveman games as a kid, and still do. Racing against a friend on who can rub sticks together and blow on the smoke to make fire first is still a blast. So is beating the other guy with a caveman club. Good times.
World Games was so good they made a spoof sequel of sorts called caveman games. A lot of people remember world games, it was a well received game. You had so many actually forgettable garbage games to choose from…
I have never heard anyone talk about that game, ever. But I remembered hating it as a kid. But social media wasn’t a thing back then. So I don’t know if it was talked about elsewhere.
If that was a well received game, I guess it speaks volumes about the rest of the NES library.
It’s because it wasn’t really a young kids game. It was aimed at a bit older of a crowd. They made a later version of it called caveman games that was geared more towards kids and it was a lot of fun, with mostly the same game mechanics.
What games were buggy for you? I’ve been replaying a lot of older games I used to play from my childhood (SNES to Xbox 360/PS3/Wii era) and not coming up with a lot of bugs except from emulation.
They weren’t as buggy. People making excuses classify exploits as bugs ignoring that modern games have more bugs and exploits.
I played Atari 2600 games like space invaders, adventure, and pitfall for thousands of hours without ever running into a bug. The only game with an exploit was Combat where you could put your tank muzzle into a corner and make it loop across the map. But both players could do it.
I’ve grown up with a PS1 and a handful of pc games, and I don’t remember any of them being any more bugged than modern gaming. The only exception being Digimon World 1, a notoriously buggy game (but to be fair, half of those bugs were introduced by the inept translation’s team).
I know people nowadays know and use a bunch of glitches for speedruns and challenge runs (out-of-bounds glitches being the norm for such runs), but rarely, if ever, those glitches could be accessed by playing through the game normally, to the point that I don’t remember finding any game breaking bug in any of the games I played in my infancy (barring the aforementioned Digimon World).
A couple years back I found my old Gameboy advanced. I tried to play Kirby on it and I was taken back by how much it sucked. The screen was way smaller than I remember it being and there was no backlight which meant I had to play the game in a well lit room. I don’t think I could ever go back to those days.
Nah, in the 80s we had hundreds probably thousands of games for the commodore 64 and later the amiga 500, all of them pirated. The piracy scene was huge, and often the games were free as we just copied them from friends
I think it’s because people only remember the good games and not the stinkers.
I played a lot of shit games I can’t recall because I played for 30 minutes max. There was one game I never passed the first level as I couldn’t figure out what to do, I think something to do with jelly beans and a blob. How is that good gameplay lol?
But of course myself and others can tell you about the games we played for hours like Super Mario Bros which didn’t really have bugs and were good.
A boy and his blob! That was a great game! But it did not hold your hand at all, you had to figure out what every different jerky bean did to your blob. It was a good enough game that there was a modern remake I think it’s on Nintendo virtual console.
But yeah, that was a legitimately hard game for a kid. And with nothing, it wasn’t buggy, the gameplay was just different from anything else people were familiar with and it didn’t explain itself.
The difference is back in the day the great games were the highly advertised “big ones” and the “stinkers” usually fell flat. Now you have a mountain of AAA stinkers and have to go scavenging for indie gems.
Not sure that’s right - before the internet I had no clue what was supposedly good or not. I’d rent games from blockbuster and just try them one by one. Lots of shitty games and I had no idea that Mario or sonic or anything was meant to be good.
Now it’s a lot easier just based on metacritic or steam reviews to figure out if something is good or not.
Well yes, maybe going that far back it was kind of a shot in the dark, but the late ‘90 to early ‘10 period was a time where you had internet (or at least tv/magazines) to know which games were “popular”, most of those were actually well done, and you’d rarely have an AAA title launch as a bugridden mess.
Reviews are also a hit-or-miss because they’re highly subjective. The Steam review system sucks as well, being only positive/negative and with troll reviews always at the top.
I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice.
Absolutely. I enjoyed and played a lot out of King of Dragon Pass back in the day. Yesterday I sat down to finally play its spiritual successor Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. From what I remember from KoDP it plays exactly the same (at least during the first hour). Yet I couldn’t force myself to keep playing it. Same way nowadays I can’t seem to get hooked with genres I used to play a ton as a kid: RTS games like Age of Empires II and Warcraft 3, life sims like The Sims, point & click graphic adventures like Monkey Island, traditional roguelikes, city builders, etc. Other genres I try to get back into and I do manage to play a ton of hours of but I’m never able to finish like when I was young (e.g. JRPGs)
When I try to play many of those games I tend to feel kinda impatient and wanting to use my limited time to play something else that I feel I might enjoy better. A good modern 4X game with lots of mod support like Stellaris or Civ6 instead of RTS games which have always felt a bit clunky to me. Short narrative games like Citizen Sleeper or Roadwarden instead of longer ones I’m not able to finish. Any addictive modern roguelite, especially if it features mechanics I particularly like (like deckbuilding and turn-based combat). If I ever feel interested to play a life sim or a city builder nowadays it has to feature more RPG elements and/or iterative elements and/or deckbuilding and a very compelling setting to me. And so on.
It feels like many of the newer genres (or the updated versions of old genres) are just more polished and fine-tuned than genres that used to be popular in the 90s and the 2000s. They just feel better to play. And to be fair in some cases they might be engineered to be more addicting, too. Like, I did finish Thimbleweed Park some years ago but I feel like nowadays no one is going to play witty point & click graphic adventure games with obscure puzzles if they can play a nice-looking adventure game filled with gacha waifus.
This is every game for the people that skip dialog and cutscenes.
Now do a recap of a TV show, except skip all the parts where they aren’t shooting a gun or stuff isn’t exploding. I don’t get that TV show, nothing had any context and there was no motivation or lessons to learn, stuff just randomly exploded from being shot at.
Get some money out of the “game” and then just disappear.
Is this even possible with the way steam handles the payment of developers? If I remember correctly you get the money not directly and steam also freezes a certain part for refunds.
The few people at the top of the studio paid themselves a juicy salary from investors’ money for 5 years, then released a Unity asset pack they bought for a few hundred bucks as finished end product.
The amount of people who don’t understand how this is a scam is sad. It’s not about the pocket change from steam sales (which they may get or may not at all), it’s about living for a few years on investor money and doing nothing (or working your own business). And they did release a game at the end, so the investors cannot easily sue them for fraud, as they can just put their hands up and say they tried, it just didn’t work out.
Yep. I loved Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, and was excielted to hear they made a sequel. Then I learned it’s an EGS exclusive. They can go get bent, not buying from them anymore
If you refuse to buy after it hits steam, then you’re just 1 of several billion who didn’t buy the game.
No, you have it backwards. If people buy the game when it goes on Steam, that tells the developer they can double dip buy going Epic exclusive then releasing at full price on Steam a year later with no repurcussions.
The only way to make the publisher learn to not go Epic exclusive is to not buy those games at all, even after they are brought onto other marketplaces
Can I discourage rolling your own password manager (like using a text doc or spreadsheet) and instead recommend what you hopefully meant, self-hosting your own password manager?
The only annoying part about the modern world is that you want to have that keepass file synchronized between devices, at which point you either go down the path of something like Synchthing (not mainstream user friendly) or you just end up asking yourself “fine, what cloud service do I trust to not go looking at my files?”
I always synced my database manually either directly over usb, or wifi (KDE Connect). I have to admit that it’s not really user friendly, but once I got used to it, it’s no problem at all.
And uploading it to any cloud service should be fine as long as it’s encrypted with a strong password. But that kind of defeats the point of an offline password-manager in my opinion.
Good advice only for tech-savvy and people who are interested in self-hosting. There’s so many things that can go wrong like improper backups and accidental networking problems.
Well, you can. But you have to be PERSONALLY hacked. At which point you’re at a level of risk equal to “will my house burn and my notebook full of passwords get lost?”
And here’s a reminder that trusting centralized service with high security access control is usually a bad idea.
I stay away from LastPass for the same reasons I stay away from TeamViewer. Security through obscurity on top of decoupling my security interests from others means other people being attacked is much less likely to cause me harm at the same time
Offline password managers like KeepassXC are a thing, plus self hosted remote storage like Nextcloud means you’re not worried about any third party interference
I use Pleasant Password Manager, which is keepass compatible. Big fan of offline cache with online sync for access anywhere with an internet connection on top of my phone offline
And at least for LastPass no passwords were compromised. Saying they “were hacked” and leaving the extent of the hack out implies something worse IMO, it’s misleading. The safes themselves are E2E encrypted so they also don’t have your password.
That said, my vote is to Bitwarden as it’s open source and allows self hosting if you think you’re a more reliable admin than they are. Open plus more choice is always better.
This is true, but they have your encrypted vault, and all the technical data to make unlimited informed attempts at cracking it. If you used LastPass, you definitely need to be changing passwords for your critical services at a minimum.
Just this month a link was made between $35 million in crypto being stolen and the 150 victims being LastPass users.
In 2022 Lastpass was compromised through a developer’s laptop and had customer data like emails, names, addresses, partial credit cards, website urls, and most importantly vaults stolen last year, and given they’re closed source, have no independent audits, and don’t release white papers, we have no idea how good their encryption schemes actually are nor if they have any obvious vulnerabilities.
In 2021, users were warned their master passwords were compromised.
In 2020 they had an issue with the browser extension not using the Windows Data Protection API and just saving the master password to a local file.
What will 2024 bring for LastPass? They were hacked, and there’s no reason to think they won’t see more breaches of confidential customer information and even passwords in the future. This is a repeated pattern, and I’d better trust a post-it-note on my monitor for security than LastPass at this point.
The only problem with their SSH agent is, if you store let’s say 6 keys and the server is set to accept a maximum of 5 keys before booting you, and the correct key happens to be key number 6, you can end up being IP banned.
This happened to me on my own server :P
That being said, my experience was using the very first GA release of their SSH Agent, so it’s possible the problem has been sorted by now.
Firefox is extremely easy to get your password from behind the *** if it autofills. Requires physical access, but literally takes seconds. Right click the field, inspect and change the field type from password to text.
On mobile I’m assuming. I personally don’t know a way to bypass the fingerprint locks. And if you’re also having Firefox create random difficult passwords, its significantly better than reusing the same one. So you’re probably a much harder target than the majority of people. I’d have to double check but I think even on desktop if you have a master password for Firefox and don’t just have logins auto filled you’re probably good there too.
Any true 2D game, because the console was designed for 2D games. The SuperFX chip used for Star Fox was also used for Yoshi’s Island, which did maintain 60Hz.
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