There are still companies that make physical copies, but typically it’s in limited quantities and sadly I’ve found that most of them (especially one of the big ones, LRG) can be pretty scummy. I think the only two I’ve found that are worth buying stuff from are iam8bit and fangamer.
Meh, give it another 10yrs and Wii games will be selling at the original prices. Rip game/vintage computer collecting. You were a fun and inexpensive hobby until the rich assholes got to it.
I was curious enough that I looked into it a bit and it sounds like the difference is negligible at this point because they added keyboard binds for partial presses in response to analog keyboards(?). Again, I haven’t played TM2 or anything after, last game I played was TMUF/TMNF, so I haven’t tried using them myself, however when I was looking to see what the kb/controller/wheel split was I found a lot of people saying that there isn’t a strong reason to use one over the other anymore due to the new binds.
Edit: it actually makes me kinda happy to talk about this. I loved the games as a teenager, but they were too niche and I never had anyone to talk to about them.
Edit 2: damn, I remember finding the OG game at Fry’s and thinking it looked like the coolest game ever and getting confused when no one else thought it was sick as fuck (everyone was into Halo and CoD, and tbf, I was into them too; but I had patrician tastes that spanned multiple genres, not like the casuals I grew up around u.u)
Huh, I was under the impression that high level players used keyboards and that gamepads were unusual. I was almost certain I’d read that keyboards were considered better because they were full-on/full-off instead of analog; the logic being that it let you respond faster. Where an analog stick would have some ramp-up time when you switch directions, a keyboard would register a full press the moment the key is pressed far enough to complete the circuit. Meanwhile, the physics of Nations were made with keyboards in mind, so analog controls wouldn’t offer that much of an improvement.
At least, I was sure that’s what I’d read.
Edit: that may have been before TrackMania 2, I’m not even sure if Nations supports analog controls. I haven’t played any of the games after Nations/United.
TrackMania – I recommend Nations Forever if you’re starting out; it’s free and Nations was the “meta” environment (different environments have different physics) for a long time, so there’s a fuckton of custom content for it.
As for what it is: it’s like the racing genre’s Quake equivalent. It’s also like super hot wheels. And it’s like Mario Maker. You make all kinds of crazy tracks with it, like Mario Maker. The tracks feature all kinds of wall rides, half-pipes, jumps, loops, and so on, with nothing more than inertia holding you to the track; like hot wheels. And finally, like Quake (and Mario Maker), the high-level players are bat shit insane.
This is the game where you get people who can hit a jump at just the right angle so they thread the needle through a series of holes barely larger than the car while travelling at speeds well above 300mph (welcome to TrackMania, I don’t think there’s a speed cap). They also do it using keyboards. Seriously. High-level TrackMania players use keyboards, not gamepads or, god forbid, racing wheels.
All of that said, no pressure because you’re mainly racing yourself, even in multiplayer. You’re trying to get the best time on a track, and multiplayer is basically the same, except your time is being compared with everyone else’s. There isn’t even any vehicle collision (strangely, there’s an option for it, but it doesn’t seem to do anything).
Do old build-engine shooters like Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, etc count?
Sapienza, Italy in Hitman has outfits for red and green plumbers.
Sam and Max has references to all kinds of things.
Hypnospace Outlaw has a ton of references to pre-y2k pop culture.
Power Wash simulator has a number of official crossovers with IPs like SpongeBob, Warhammer, Laura Croft, Final Fantasy VII, etc. (oh shit I just checked and there’s a Shrek one coming out soon).
Maybe the most significant issue is that, for some reason, the Seekers of the Storm update has tied Risk of Rain 2’s physics systems to its frame rate. When asked about it on Discord, Gearbox developer GBX-Preston said FPS-related issues, “and all the ramifications on balance/physics/attack speed/movement/etc. were not intentional. This is in our top handful of issues we’re investigating.” As a stopgap, he said players experiencing issues should lock the game at 60 fps.
Jesus Christ what a wild story. Is it possible that Craven simply wanted to do good, but “as a white, abled man” wasn’t opening doors so they felt they had to pretend to be someone else? From what it sounds like, a lot of what they and their “”“partners”“” did was legitimately helpful. The thing that leaves me confused is that they probably could have fleeced people for significantly more money but didn’t. They didn’t have to put the amount of effort into it as they did. Is it possible they were trying to do the right thing but were going about it the wrong way?
As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”
Me! What do you have against bearded, manly ladies? They’re awesome!
It is kinda lazy to have “full masculine” and “full feminine” as your only choices while pretending they aren’t just “male” or “female”, but at the same time, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Today the options might be “not-man” and “not-woman”, but the future might have “not-man”, “not-woman”, “man-woman” and “woman-man”!
Please stop putting RGB on everything? Can we return to the cool colored plastics for a bit and see what modern technology can do? I bet you could do some wild shit with modern plastics.
I’m wondering how long it is until someone pulls another Kaze and over-optimizes an old console game until it runs in 1080p@60fps on original hardware or something.
(Kaze Emanuar is a ROM hacker with a deep understanding of Super Mario 64. A couple years ago he released a video showing how he spent a ton of time optimizing the game, resulting in a game that runs on original hardware at 60fps instead of 20fps. Afaik he hasn’t released the vanilla code yet, but I’ve heard he’s used it in some of his other rom hacks and it’s apparently extremely obvious because they run significantly faster than hacks that use the default, unoptimized ROM)
Team Fortress 2? That was the game Overwatch was kinda imitating, so might be worth trying it out if you haven’t. Just keep in mind that you might have to avoid matchmaking and manually browse for servers. TF2 was having a bot problem, I dunno if valve ever fixed it.
Space Cadet was one of Maxis’ Full-Tilt Pinball tables. Afaik it’s not in the public domain, Microsoft licensed it from Maxis. However, I’m not sure EA would actually enforce the copyright unless someone was making a lot of money off it.