dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork, wczoraj (edited wczoraj)

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, wczoraj

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, 2 dni temu

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, 2 dni temu

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, 2 dni temu

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, 4 dni temu

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, 4 dni temu

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, 4 dni temu

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, 4 dni temu

In that vein, maybe Power Washing Simulator?

dual_sport_dork, 4 dni temu

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, 11 dni temu

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, 13 dni temu

• 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, 17 dni temu

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, 21 dni temu

If all else fails, try fire.

dual_sport_dork, 22 dni temu

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, 29 dni temu

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, miesiąc temu

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

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

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, miesiąc temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

Is that… Spoony?

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

Such as…?

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

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

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

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.

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

I agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for “the system,” but in reality they’re only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It’s not that the N64 has a top ten, it’s that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.

I’m sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef’s Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that’s the thing: It’s always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn’t know any better because that’s all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

'* Except Star Fox.

(And I guess Stunt Race FX, too.)

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/22a07bfd-206d-4b6a-ab10-be925ac1ea47.png

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

“BuT MeTa aNd TheIr MoNeY ArE GOOD FoR VR!!!”

I warned everyone. I warned everyone back in, like, 2016.

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

There are already third party/open source drivers being developed for WMR hardware, though. Like Monado.

It’s unlikely WMR headsets will be completely unusable after M$ drops support, but A) they will still work with existing systems, B) third party software will hopefully be okayish by then and C) it will almost certainly be possible to “pirate” the Microsoft WMR application(s) the same way it is already possible to manually re-add modules back into Windows that have been officially discontinued.

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

I still can’t fathom people are somehow okay with buying a device that is, by design and function, festooned with cameras and microphones from goddamn Facebook and waving it around inside their homes. Like, what?

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

Nothing, since they’ve already lied about the ongoing account integration requirements for their various VR products, like, three (?) major times so far. I don’t trust a damn thing they say about anything.

If Meta told me the sky was blue I’d be searching for independent verification.

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

For the cost of that Hammerhead it had better also come with an entire computer to play the damn game on.

At least in Elite: Dangerous the only cost for ships is your time and/or sanity.

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

What, like Minecraft, still possibly the most popular game on Earth? I mean, all you do in Minecraft is mine the a couple of minerals that are the same on every seed, and use them to make better tools to mine minerals faster, and grow the same crops so you don’t starve, and do it over and over again.

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

Yeah. I liked Odyssey for wandering around my carrier’s interior and really very little else. The combat is absolute dogshit, and that wouldn’t be half as bad if pretty much every on-foot mission type did not inevitably downright require pissing off some faction or another, which then forces you to get involved in combat. The gunplay is pants, and I can’t fathom why there are so few hitscan handheld weapons in a universe that’s all about laser beams and railguns and shit. And then when you’re done with the annoying combat you have a ton of bounties stacked up you have to deal with.

At least the mercenary missions let you just shoot people for the sake of shooting people. But if I wanted to bounce around in low-grav and shot guys with silly weapons I’d just play Borderlands.

That reminds me, I probably need to grind some cash to pay the upkeep on my damn carrier.

dual_sport_dork, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah. You ought to try Magic. We’ve had tons of time to practice the old everything-is-complicated-and-fucked dance; we’ve been doing it since 1993.

The one “saving” grace you can consider (except to your wallet) is that official competitive play allows cards from sets only up to a certain age from the present, with the most restrictive being “standard” which at the time of writing doesn’t allow any cards older than a set released in 2021. It’s not even that the metagame makes old decks nonviable – you’re literally forced to buy new cards when expansions come out if you even want to be allowed at the table.

“Modern” is a little less restrictive with the time span, but still restricted. Because otherwise, there would be no way to contain the pileup of legacy unstoppable strategies and broken combos, plus the combinatorial explosion of interactions between old mechanics and the seemingly mandatory 2-3 new ones added per expansion set.

So casual players (myself included) just play with whatever damn fool old cards we have with a gentleman’s agreement not to be assholes with the game-breaking combos because fuck it, crack is cheaper.

dual_sport_dork, 7 miesięcy temu

You forgot:

• Forced to create an account with a password of arbitrary complexity.
• Get sent a code to verify your email.
• Have to solve a captcha to put in the code.
• Captcha doesn’t work.
• "Your code is expired, please try again."
• Mandatory shitty launcher that defaults to running in the background all the time.
• “Severs offline, please try again later.”
• “You are logged in in too many locations.”
• "Exclusive: $31.99 $29.95 for DLC content that should have been in the base game! Flash Sale! Buy now!

dual_sport_dork, 7 miesięcy temu

ALttP and Chrono Trigger are some of the best designed, highly polished titles on the system, though. We have to remember that while everyone harps on FF4 and FF6, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, Mega Man X, A Link To the Past, Bahumut Lagoon, Donkey Kong Country, etc. as if they defined the quality of the SNES library, we’re looking back through nostalgia tinted goggles and those games in fact… didn’t. They were the exceptional outliers in, as ever, a wide field of mediocrity.

What I’m saying is, there are a lot of gonk-ass games on the SNES. A lot. We just selectively don’t remember them anymore because they were crap.

For every one of the gems above there were ten or twenty of the likes of Pugley’s Scavenger Hunt, Cliffhanger, Pit Fighter, Mario is Missing, Revolution X, Bebe’s Kids, Rise of the Robots, Captain Novolin, Double Dragon 5, Ren and Stimpy, Chester Cheetah… Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball… etc., etc. And that’s just the North American titles. There was some wonky niche shit released in Japan that could have just as well been on the original NES.

dual_sport_dork, 7 miesięcy temu

You’re telling me that the likes of Pit Fighter…

https://www.honestgamers.com/images/games/10/P/2550/1.jpg

…And Revolution X…

https://www.fullyretro.com/images/items/89112228-item-main-SNES-REVOLTNX-2.jpg

…Or Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt…

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/pugsleysnes03.gif

…Or Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball…

https://i0.wp.com/snesaday.com/wp-content/uploads/Bill-Laimbeers-Combat-Basketball-FI.png?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1

Deserve to be held up visually and remembered fondly next to the likes of Chrono Trigger? They really aged better than the best of the early PS1? Yeah. No. These games not only played like ass, they looked like ass, too. Even for their time. That’s my point. The ones that weren’t outright offensive were just plain old bland.

The operative word in pixel art is “art.” Just because something is 2D does not mean it automatically needs to be revered to the exclusion of earlier or later titles or visual styles. What we got out of these games visually is a direct result of what was put in by the designers, and in the majority of cases what was put in was not very much.

Mario Is Missing is an exceptional case because it manages to have worse spritework than Mario World, a game which it directly ripped off for its sprites. And any sprites did did not directly copy (minus a couple of pallete colors, for some reason) wound up looking like these chumps:

https://www.spriters-resource.com/resources/sheet_icons/76/79467.png?updated=1465253338

Edit: I forgot Captain Novolin. Really, how could I? I mean, this.

https://mutteredu.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/captain_novolin_snes_screenshot1.gif

Come on.

dual_sport_dork, 7 miesięcy temu

The total footprints of the two cases are virtually identical. The Switch game cases are taller but not as deep, and the DS cases are shorter and deeper. I believe the DS case is basically the same dimension as a cut-down DVD case. It’s the same depth, +/- a mm, with 65mm chopped off the top.

The NDS game case is 134x125mm, 167.5 square cm in total. The Switch game case is 105x170mm, 178.5 square cm in total. The Switch case is also thinner, 11mm vs 15mm. The amounts of plastic used in each is pretty similar.

dual_sport_dork, 8 miesięcy temu

You could enslave people in Fallout: New Vegas for profit as well. Nobody seemed to notice or give a shit.

(Yes, you could also go into the slaver’s compound all guns a-blazing and slaughter them all for the XP as well.)

dual_sport_dork, 9 miesięcy temu

Just using an SD card requires modding your Switch to run homebrew and, er, “backups,” right?

A properly constructed cartridge that can masquerade as a retail Switch cartridge would make owners who aren’t willing to modify their console very happy indeed. That’s how the various NDS/3DS carts work – just plug and play (literally).

dual_sport_dork, 11 miesięcy temu

“Said” being the operative word. Talk is just talk. I predict that if any union-forming attempt is made, Bowser’s opinion will change with frame perfect accuracy and this statement will be memory holed. (Although unionization of Nintendo employees is unlikely to happen in Japan anyway. If it does, it will more probably be within their American or European subsidiaries.)

We should remember that Nintendo is a privately held, for-profit company run by Japanese people. They have their own ethic, the company belongs to them, and profit comes first. They might make video games and franchises we like, but they are not good guys. There is tons of well documented past behavior on their part that illustrates this in many ways.

dual_sport_dork, rok temu (edited rok temu)

A large part of the progression in BOTW (and to a lesser extent, its sequel) is getting the means to permanently or at least easily deal with the various types of environmental challenges, to the point that the ones that were tough to surmount in the early game aren’t even really an inconvenience in the end.

These are, in no particular order:

• Areas that are cold.
• Areas that are hot.
• Areas that are on fire.
• Eventually finding stronger weapons that don’t break as fast.
• Getting better armor, and improving it, to make combat easier.
• Getting a horse to make traveling to new areas easier.
• Improving your maximum health and more importantly, max stamina so you can climb more stuff and glide longer distances.
• Getting a movement technique that allows you to yeet yourself to the top of objects.

FWIW, if you stick to the “intended” path on the Great Plateau (the starting area of the game, where you seem to be) the old man will explicitly tell you what to do to deal with the cold. There are actually multiple solutions for getting up there without freezing your nads off.

spoilerThe most straightforward one is to use one of the cooking pots, either the one at the old man’s cabin or the one outside of the cave where you first meet him, to cook up some spicy peppers and eat them. This gives you a time limited buff that makes you immune to the cold. You can also carry a lit torch, which keeps you warm as long as you’re holding it. You can also find the recipes for two special cold resistance dishes in the old man’s cabin if you read his diary on the table, and if you bring him both of these at the top of the mountain he’ll give you the Warm Doublet, a piece of armor that permanently protects you from cold. But anything you cook a spicy pepper into will give you a cold resistance buff.

dual_sport_dork, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Guessing your monitor has an IPS panel?

Persistent ghosting is always a factor on IPS displays, although your example looks a little pronounced than most. I have a Thinkpad with an IPS display and its ghosting is atrocious with specific color combinations: Dark greens and vibrant purples, if left static on the screen for a while. It should not be permanent, and causes no harm other than irritating you. I can get my screen to show slowly fading remnants of an image for upwards of 3 or 4 minutes, if I try hard enough. It gets more pronounced when the panel is hot.

I suspect this game happened to find the sweet (or sour) spot in the combination of foreground and background in the color gamut where image persistence is most noticeable on your particular panel. It should go away on its own after a few minutes, especially if you display something constantly changing with a wide luminosity variance (like a video) in that spot.

dual_sport_dork, rok temu

Or back to it was in ye olden days where every studio has its own proprietary game engine.