dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork, 2 days ago

'Member when Kyle’s Mom freaked the fuck out and tried to ban Pokémon Red and Blue because they “depicted gambling” in the game corner, which had no links to the outside world and could not be fed with real money in any capacity, was completely contained within the monochrome screen on your Gameboy, and could be save scummed anyway? Pepperidge Farm 'members.

My, how far the bullshit has come.

Anyway, 16 is sure a funny way to spell 18. Why the hell is the age requirement 16 when you can’t buy a lottery ticket until you’re 18 and in most places you can’t enter a casino until you’re 21? It’s the same thing.

Lootboxes is gambling. So are gacha pulls, and doubly so for both of the above when they can be fueled with real world money. People who are not adults should not be enabled to gamble.

dual_sport_dork, 2 days ago

A God of War live service game? Who the fuck signed off on that? I’m glad the article was able to zero in on the blistering stupidity of such a thing.

dual_sport_dork, 8 days ago

Dead Cells?

Emphasis, perhaps, on the “lite” part of Roguelite. But it does have that Roguelike run structure where the levels and the items you find therein are randomized. But with side scrolling platforming gameplay with a very distinct set of fast double-jump-dodge-roll-parry-combo mechanics that I think can best be summed up as ninja gameplay. And you will get killed… a lot. There is a permanent progression system of a sort in the form of unlocking more weapons and items (and later, to re lock items you don’t like), but your core stats remain the same. This is one of those games where the real progression is on your own personal quest to git gud.

I think it’s pretty unique in that it has no dud weapons or items whatsoever. Everything – literally everything – has the potential to be viable and can be absolutely deadly when wielded in the right hands. Even the joke items.

It also has not one, but two weapons which involve beating the shit out of your enemies with frying pans. What’s not to love?

There is indeed a Switch version.

dual_sport_dork, 30 days ago

Dead Cells: The leading cause of gamepad breakages among PC players. 9 out of 10 ninjas agree.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

Wow, I can’t believe I get to dredge up this ancient photo again:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6bbf8996-3bcc-45b0-b2a7-429c2e20c06b.jpeg

(Obviously this is satire. I furthermore still haven’t quite made peace with the fact that every single item on Daniel Rutter’s web site can now be considered “retro.”)

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

…Says the chick who has made a total of $3,950 worth of microtransactions in “Fashion Gacha Glowup Idol Makeover Dressup Saga Deluxe 3.”

“But that’s different!”

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

A friend of mine bought an Aliexpress grade Chinese stereo for his car and I swear it makes the exact same cursor movement noise every time you press one of its buttons.

We’re still deeply amused by this and he’s had it for years.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

“Incoming Memo: Stand by to receive memo?”

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

I don’t think you’re alone in this. I’m kind of becoming the same way, and I figure it’s because as you become older you become wiser, specifically wiser to the way that so many modern games are bullshit now.

Nowadays it seems like almost everything is just a cynical cash grab. And with a lifetime of experience, you know how to spot that bullshit. Oh look, it has always online components. And an in game store. And season content. And gatcha mechanics. And grind. Not only just regular old grind, you know, where you need to level up and be at least be this tall to beat the beef gate (which always has the tantalizing possibility of being able circumvent it by cheesing it or being very clever). No, it’s just grind with no mechanical justification. You must fill the bar before you’re allowed to access this content. Would you like to make a microtransaction to fill the bar faster?

Fuck that, and count me out.

The current fascination is on delivering games as a “service,” and that just rubs me the wrong way. Everything is transient, nothing is permanent, and everyone is making a desperate grab for recurring revenue over creating a compelling experience or indeed anything anyone would ever want to go back to and play again. It’s all just crap designed to feed into people’s sunk cost brains, and it feels like damn near every major title wants to be your full time job.

I have even started eschewing Nintendo titles and some modern indie stuff specifically because they display a complete and utter disrespect for not only the player’s intelligence, but also their time.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

Yeah, well, they promised Windows 10 would be the “last Windows,” too. We know how their track record goes on that.

I’ve had a very successful lifelong policy of never giving Microsoft any money for anything ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper gnawing on the keyboard of my first 286, and it’s served me pretty damn well so far.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

And nerds absolutely will find each other and bond over whatever their thing is. The world is full of stories like this one. People who met their spouses in World of Warcraft, and so on and so forth.

But boy, am ever I glad us M:tG nerds had much more subtle ways to signal our dorkitude. At least I think we did.

Hmm…

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

This would play just fine in a snap-in (like a Discman) or tray loading CD player. It might give slot loaders some trouble but it looks like it still describes most of a 120mm circle so it would probably work fine in those as well.

For audio playback. At 1x speed.

The real problem with these novelty shaped disks is when you stick them in a fast PC CD-ROM drive, they’re usually badly unbalanced and when your drive dutifully tries to spin them at 8,000, 15,000, or 20,000 RPM when it indexes the disk or when someone tries to copy it – not outside the realm of possibility for a commodity 40x drive – the disk will warp and vibrate like crazy and in some cases eventually crack and then outright explode inside the drive.

I once had to disassemble somebody’s drive and tweezer out the sparkly bits of a Ranma 1/2 CD that I discovered, when rearranging the pieces back together on the workbench like a jigsaw puzzle, was one of these damn novelty disks that was shaped like Ranma-chan’s head. The largest fragment left over was smaller than a dime, and surprisingly the drive still worked after I unjammed it and got all of the glitter out of it ultimately using compressed air.

These were uncommon, but not unheard of. For instance, Metallica also infamously released this fucking thing:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cb4a2ca3-1823-40e9-ae24-59d024033660.jpeg

…Which actually was balanced, but only until your garden variety careless owner snapped the very tip off of one of the points.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

The 80mm minis were envisioned as “CD Singles,” and they actually were defined as part of the official CD standard. Therefore most CD players and drives including slot loaders actually were and are designed to work with them without incident. Typical tray loaders have a smaller indent below the main one to accept the smaller disks, and pretty much all horizontally oriented slot loaders will take them as well.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

Data is indeed read from the inner ring outwards, as anyone with a CD burner in the late ‘90’s and 2000’s is very familiar with.

For audio and video playback, the disk is spun faster at the beginning and progressively more slowly towards the outer edge, a process known as Constant Angular Velocity playback, because more linear distance is covered at the same RPM the larger your circle gets, i.e. the closer you are to the edge. This is no problem for audio playback at “1x” speed because this tops out at a paltry 500 RPM or so.

For data reads, however, most drives use Constant Linear Velocity and spin the disk at the same speed all the time. That means your data throughput is higher at the edges of the disk. The prevalence of 2x, 4x, 16x, 24x, 40x, 52x, etc. PC CD (and DVD, etc.) also means that those drives will spin a disk way faster than a regular CD player will which can definitely cause a problem with irregularly shaped disks like the one in OP’ photo. They would also inevitably only achieve their rated whatever-x speed when reading at the very edge of a full disk. (You mean the marketing department was deliberately misleading??? Say it ain’t so!)

Those little business card disks were nonstandard but would work in most tray loading drives, and held a whopping 30 megs.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.

Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

Neat, but.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c785b08a-5a3d-4570-9fc4-85c971a046c5.png

Even HL: Alyx left us with just as much of a cliffhanger as the end of HL2 Episode 2…

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

My account is so old I have (or had, before they normalized the format) a four digit steam ID. I “owned” Half Life 2 for like four months before it released thanks to getting a code free in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro back in the day. For a short and glorious flash of time in the summer of 2004, I was guaranteed a copy of the most hotly anticipated game ever, even though nobody could play it yet, and also owned an example of the fastest video card on the planet. Damned if I didn’t mow a fuckton of lawns and reinstall Windows and Outlook an a horde of septuagenarians’ computers to afford that card.

And no, they do not stop asking about your age.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

Gee, for the same money… a digital brontosaurus for Orc Game that you need to pay a recurring subscription to actually use, can be taken away from you at any time, or one day the servers may simply be turned off erasing not only your “investments” but also your years of “work.” Or, I don’t know, a CIVIVI Hyperpulse with a groovy pattern welded blade that also happens to be a physical object you can actually hold in your hands and keep forever. Just to pick something out of a hat.

What a tough choice!

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

CIVIVI knives are generally pretty legit. Trust me, I can go much more mall ninja if you like.

This leaps to mind.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5d22ed5a-8262-42dd-ac3b-443ead989e49.jpeg

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

The cartridge connector is not proprietary. It’s just a commodity off the shelf card edge socket.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Katamari Damacy

Which typically culminates in rolling up everyone on Earth by the time you get to the final stage, no less. If that’s not a group hug, I don’t know what is.

Edit: I’m also going to second the Psychonauts recommendation, especially the second game. Despite the gameplay itself inevitably lending itself to the protagonist performing every little bit of work by himself, there are strong themes of teamwork all throughout the game’s story and the excellence of its final sequence cannot be understated:

Ding dong.

Whale-O-Gram.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Shitpost level reply: Any of the Gradius games.

One of the power ups you can buy is literally to dispense friends (options) which follow you around and shoot alongside you. You can crank out as many as you want, at least within reason. And in some of the Parodius games they are literally little dudes. Or depending on your character, little octopi, cats, or penguins.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software.

Worse, this thing from Sony was on music CD’s and not even games.

The Sony Rootkit debacle is one of the reasons that I still will not do business with Sony in any of its guises, for any reason, no matter the price. And believe me, I have a long memory.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Don’t conflate a mastered CD with an aluminum data layer with a recordable CD-R or CD-RW, which use organic dyes that have a significantly shorter lifespan.

A properly manufactured CD can last 200+ years if it’s stored in a dry environment free of UV exposure and high levels of moisture.

Even a quality CD-R can’t really be expected to retain all of its data integrity for much more than 10 years.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Obviously no one’s seen it happen first hand. It’s a projection based on what’s known about the materials and how they’re made. Burned CD-R’s have definitely been out in the real world for people to learn how short their lifespans can be, though.

Nobody could “prove,” for instance, that the Voyager 1 could stay operational in deep space for 47+ years when it was launched in 1977, but the engineers could still predict and they launched it anyway, and it did. I don’t think your argument really holds water.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Well, as others have noted I think “cozy” is probably a loaded term in this context. However, I will throw these recommendations into the ring also: The first couple of Serious Sam games, and also Painkiller. Both of them are firmly in the “murdering tons of dudes” genre, and are significantly less tactical than the likes of Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Battlefield.

That is to say, not at all.

There is none of that sucking your thumb to regenerate health, popping out from the chest-high walls inexplicably strewn everywhere taking potshots with your gun like a hillbilly jack-in-the-box. Rather, their gameplay loop involves herding and managing a massive horde of enemies, prioritizing your targets, and keeping yourself moving. Like a sheep dog with a chaingun.

People try to call the original Doom games a horde shooter. They really aren’t. These two, however, definitely are.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

I will also add to this that there is absolutely no reason to buy the “new” re-release of Doom and Doom 2 that’s out on Steam now except to rip the IWADS out of it to put in a source port – any other source port – rather than the garbage it comes with. And only do so if you want the new Legacy of Rust episodes. Everything else is, er, readily available online. And has been for decades.

The new NEX based engine these run on now is maddeningly inferior to basically every open source Doom engine port currently available. In addition to not supporting vertical mouse look at all, “for authenticity,” (but by default it slaps a crosshair on your screen, which the original didn’t have…) it also looks like garbage on modern displays and crashes constantly which is something that baffles me. Running Doom ought to be a solved problem by now in 2024, but this fucker crashes on me more now than it did on my 486 back in 1994. It’s buggier than a trailer park mattress in a swamp.

I recommend GZDoom, personally. You can add Brutal Doom to make the gameplay experience significantly more bombastic as well, if that sort of thing appeals to you.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

The new port is not perfectly fine if it randomly crashes to desktop all the time.

Oh, and I also forgot to mention that several of the achievements are still bugged and don’t pop, which has been a known issue since release and still hasn’t been fixed. So yeah. Bethesda is gonna do Bethesda stuff.

You can still have a “vanilla” experience using other source ports. That’s what, e.g. Chocolate Doom is for. Except it may stay running on your PC for more than eleven consecutive minutes at a time. So if that’s what turns your crank, go for it. You’re right – not everything needs to be GZDoom and Brutal. But other options definitely exist, and I recommend any of them over what was shoveled out officially. You can even have a pretty durn vanilla experience in GZDoom if you want to, while still retaining much broader support for mods than the official release. Me personally, I can’t do mouse control with no vertical look. It made me seasick in the 90’s, and it still does now. That’s a deal breaker. I was a keyboard-only player in the DOS era.

I will also add that if you are going to play the new Sigil expansions or Legacy of Rust, they’re virtually impossible on Ultra Violence and Nightmare without mouselook. These maps were clearly designed with a modern source port including mouse aim in mind, and this was apparently shitcanned later in development for some unfathomable reason. Like, why even leave the crosshair there, then?

spoilerLike, the shoot-the-switch secret on Legacy of Rust MAP10? Forget it. Yeah, you can hit it like 3% of the time if you ride the elevator up and down and pick at it with the pistol until you get it. I’m quite certain it was intended to be shot from either of the windows left and right of the elevator, the leftmost one lining up with it perfectly, and the elevator thing is only just in case someone is playing in some kind of purist mode.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

In that vein, maybe Power Washing Simulator?

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

I would wager someone with an MBA got their knickers in a twist about “PC being the most pirated platform,” did that thing like in cartoons where the dollar signs in their eyes turn into cents signs instead, and decided to just 86 the whole thing because they were deathly afraid that a couple hundred people who never in a million years would have paid for it in the first place would download it off of Kazaa or whatever was popular back then instead of giving Rockstar any money.

Just a guess.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Bethesda was obviously already toast to anyone paying attention when Fallout '76 came out. They certainly haven’t improved since.

…And I can’t believe that these are the motherfuckers who own the rights to Doom now.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

• Rather, a program superficially imitating the first level of Doom is able to run on a simulator of a quantum computer.

Not to diminish this accomplishment, but based on the level geometry on display there this is obviously a bespoke but very basic 3D-ish engine, extremely simplified, built from the ground up to do this and is not an actual source port of Doom before anybody gets too excited.

While it’s amusing I don’t think it really serves to illustrate too well the actual exciting parts of what quantum computing is actually theoretically capable of. Regular old boring Turing-compatible binary computers are already perfectly capable of running Doom already. ^[citation^ ^needed]^

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

A revocable license for a virtual “product” whereupon they absolutely do not give you back your real world dollars if they terminate said license.

There’s no power imbalance in this transaction at all, no siree.

Anyway, I’m all for making backups of things. So you de-licensed me. Big whoop. I still have the file and I can still play it, and nobody can physically stop me.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

If all else fails, try fire.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

The annoying thing is, the problem with this from a design perspective was well known and there were already some efforts to improve upon matters as early as the SNES era. Both Chrono Trigger and Earthbound leap to mind. It’s just that following this, most developers forgot to learn a lesson from these for another decade or two.

In Earthbound, all non-story, non-boss encounters are visible on the overworld and you can either:

• Avoid them entirely with some foresight and skill
• Get a backstab advantage if you manage to maneuver yourself behind the enemy, or
• Instantly win the battle if your level significantly exceeds that of the enemy
• Battles can be auto-fought with the computer controlling your party if you are e.g. trying to eat a sandwich at the same time or something

In Chrono Trigger, most trivial encounters can be avoided, with some scripted exceptions that always initiate when you cross a certain area presumably to prevent players from completely avoiding all combat entirely and subsequently getting their asses stomped by the bosses. Chrono Trigger’s overworld map also features no random encounters whatsoever. You can wander the world freely and will only encounter monsters if you actually enter a location.

I harp on this a lot, but only because it’s true. Despite its faults, some of which it definitely has, Chrono Trigger had some incredible design innovations and was easily the high water mark for JRPG design not only for its time, but even compared to subsequent games for a long time – maybe even still to this day.

• Many trash mob encounters can simply be avoided if you can’t be bothered or are low on resources
• Those that can’t can usually be wiped in a single move if the enemy is far beneath you via double/triple techs
• Encounters happen on the screen you’re already on, so you don’t get disoriented after the battle ends
• Positioning on the battlefield matters for techs, making fights more interesting than the usual you line up on one side/they line up on the other side method…
• …However, positioning on the battlefield absolutely does not matter for single magic spells or melee attacks, meaning you never get completely screwed by how the chessboard is laid out
• You can walk diagonally (seriously, the inability in even much later games to do this bugs me to no end – Pokémon, I’m lookin’ at you)
• If a non-story-critical NPC is yammering at you and you can’t be bothered, you can just walk away even when the text box is still open
• Not only can you rearrange your party however you want including not putting the protagonist at the head of the conga line (and even being able to remove him fully, after a certain plot event), but which combination of party members you have actually matters for techs and not just a perpetual case of, “I need one tank, one caster, and one healer” like prior/later games
• The entire concept of the New Game+ is called what it is and works how it does because of how Chrono Trigger did it
• You can fight the final boss pretty much any time as soon as you learn about him, and if you get your ass whooped trying that’s on you

Etc.

Apparently the Chrono Trigger devs originally planned to give the player even more freedom but several additional concepts such as being able to freely position your fighters on the field were cut due to time constraints and not being able to figure out a sufficiently elegant way to do it on the SNES hardware and controller.

dual_sport_dork, 4 months ago

There are retro revival consoles that aren’t deliberately made to looks like the original incarnations. I think the issue here was that the consoles being sold were deliberate counterfeits of otherwise valuable original retro machines.

For instance, litigious as they are Nintendo has either been unable or unwilling to snuff out things like the RetroN machines which play original Nintendo and SNES cartridges (and Genesis, and some others) but don’t claim to be a Nintendo machine or look like one in any way.

That said, I personally would totally buy a fake OG JDM Super Famicom just to have on the shelf, or even a shell just that looks like one.

dual_sport_dork, 4 months ago

Somewhere off the bottom, shaped like a deck of playing cards.

dual_sport_dork, 4 months ago

That, and Gabe’s hotdog stand has spent decades building customer trust by generally acting decently towards its customers, right after it invented the concept of the hotdog stand.

Making the core of your business model revolve around whining about your competitors doesn’t work so great when your main competitor is already significantly better than you are.

dual_sport_dork, 4 months ago

Portal 2?

It’s not very long, but it has an entire co-op campaign that’s completely inaccessible without a 2nd player.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

1. You can file the paperwork to attempt to sue anyone for anything. It doesn’t mean it will be accepted by the court, or that the judge will not summon you there specifically to laugh in your face, declare your suit frivolous, throw you out, and refuse to validate your parking.
2. If Jabroni thinks he’s having it rough with Elden Ring, he ought to go back and try out the first couple of King’s Field games…

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

Spiritfarer has an excellent soundtrack, which is utterly wasted on such a mediocre game.

As an added bonus, some of the tracks on the OST are longer than you’ll ever experience in game because they cut them short for some reason.

dual_sport_dork, 5 months ago

Is that… Spoony?

dual_sport_dork, 6 months ago

Motherfuckers are going to drop a green grass, blue sky, blue water Earthlike just like that, huh?

When this update ships, I’d better be receiving some coordinates.

dual_sport_dork, 6 months ago

Such as…?

dual_sport_dork, 7 months ago

It was right up there with Full House: Tournament Fighter.

dual_sport_dork, 7 months ago

You should read up on the Amico and in particular watch Pat The NES Punk’s various videos on it. The entire debacle is hilarious.

The Amico is/was basically an investor scam. Yes, it did eventually turn into an actual product (which is crap) but it was never intended to be a serious contender to anything. The intent was for Tommy Tallarico to get his face published everywhere and pocket/embezzle a significant amount of investor and Indiegogo money.

The system itself is basically an out-of-date smartphone chipset running a cut down version of Android. Most of its games, as you would expect, are basically mobile trash. Other than emulated Intellivision titles, anyway. And mobile trash you have to pay up front for a console with bullshit controls to even play it on.