captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 21 dni temu

I think there’s two of those in a row. It’s on the island with the big boiler and Gehn’s study and such, there’s the door into the cavern(?) where you can find the frog trap thing, and you have to close those doors to find the corridor to the spinning orb, then you have to close the door you came in to find the little syncroscope in a side chamber in a wall to stop it.

captain_aggravated, 27 dni temu

I haven’t seen anyone not laugh at that joke.

captain_aggravated, 27 dni temu

And then years of watching Gen Zers go back and play Super Mario World on the SNES and then wonder aloud who “Princess Toadstool” is.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Just have to ask, what’s up with that outlet?

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Okay, from the picture it looked like the plate was missing or it had a landlord special paint job or something.

I’m designing a dining room cupboard/hutch and looking around the internet for pictures to draw from I started noticing details about them, like how I can give you a checklist of things that will be on them in pictures on the internet, and if there is an outlet visible in the shot it will somehow be negligently built/maintained.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64…and that is about it.

You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren’t. Like, “Here’s 25 MORE games that should have been on it.” and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn’t wangle the rights for.

Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora’s Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that’s basically it. You’d have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin’ USA, and you’d never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or…whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.

I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn’t, it’s because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don’t all have the same memories.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

I’m pretty sure I couldn’t with Sony because I don’t think I could name a single first-party game from Sony.

Microsoft is a tricky one because of how many studios they’ve bought, and I’m not sure how many platforms the PC counts as (at least three: DOS, the DOS-based Windows era and the Windows NT era.

I cannot for the Steam Deck because I’m not sure Valve has made a total of 25 games.

I’m not as familiar with Sega as I am Nintendo but they were and still are a developer in addition to the platform owner.

Atari is not impossible; it’s probably possible to come up with a list of 25 first party titles that were considered great that were published for the 2600 or for their 8-bit computers.

If I’m going to give it a go, I think I’d go for Nintendo on either the NES or SNES, though for the SNES I think I would have to ask if I’m allowed to count titles made by Rare and I bet someone would clap back if I included Super Mario All Stars.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Here’s the difference:

On the Super Nintendo, I can name 20 great, all-time classic games if restricted to first and second party titles, so made by Nintendo and Rare. If you open me up to 3rd party titles I can probably come up with 100 all time classics like Lufia or Desert Strike.

On the N64, I’m going to struggle to make it to 20 all-time classics if restricted to first and second party titles, and I might make it to 25 if you let me have the whole catalog. Of the remaining 350+ games made for the system, some of them were unfinished garbage like Superman 64, some of them were badly designed crap like Quest 64, and a lot of them were competent but not memorable things like Extreme-G or The New Tetris, competently made and legitimately fun games we played, finished, put away and forgot about forever.

Us N64 owners tend to have very similar memories of the platform. There aren’t many hidden gems to rediscover.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Bringing up the topic of nostalgia, I think there are two audiences to talk to here: Those who had those old systems at the time they were relevant and those who weren’t.

I mentioned the game Extreme-G. That was a personal favorite of mine. I occasionally set up an old CRT and my old N64 and during my nostalgia trip Extreme-G and Extreme-G 2 both spend some time running. Just hearing the British cyberpunk announcer chick say “mull tee pull miss aisle” makes 25 year old neurons fire. And I also fully acknowledge that it was an above average 8.1/10 game, that it’s basically Mario Kart hosed down with Axe body spray, the Forsaken brand of 90’s drum & bass cyberpunk is a bit passe these days, and despite the very fast graphics kids these days are going to look at it and go “…okay. Pretty low resolution, isn’t it?”

And from that perspective, I don’t think the N64 aged well at all. Even Ocarina of Time, hailed for over a decade as the greatest video game ever made…is aging like a potato. It kept for a long time but it’s starting to show wrinkles and is distressingly wet on the bottom.

On c/games@sh.itjust.works or however you do that on Lemmy I answered the question “Was Wizardry a good series?” with “Was. Yes.” Because Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was phenomenal…in 1981. You just couldn’t get computer entertainment like that in the Carter administration. Not sure how well it holds up 43 years on.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

I would also wonder how this would work with MMOs where the server side, both in processing power and in bandwidth, is not insignificant. I mean I suppose “are required to publish the code, no requirement that it’s feasible for others to run” but…yeah.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

I’m aware of good old fashioned multiplayer where an average Pentium 2 rig has enough grunt to host a multiplayer session and be one of the client machines, obviously games of that scale should be able to be run by enthusiasts. I’m talking about, what if something like WoW shuts down?

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Stardew Valley was released in 2016. My understanding is it took 10 years to make (Eric Barone worked at a movie theater, and when he wasn’t at work he was working on the game) and he’s been supporting and releasing new content for the game for 8 years now. The Wiki pages for the characters contain the artwork for the characters he’s drawn, and redrawn, and redrawn over the years.

He basically won the cozy farming genre, it’s time to move on, for his own health if nothing else.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

I think you can get there in TF2 when considering subclasses via weapons loadouts. Demoknight for instance is a completely different play style than normal pipe/sticky demoman.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

The water temple has the problem of being too self-similar, the main body of which being a three story tall donut shaped room with doors in the four cardinal directions, so it’s difficult to keep track of which series of unremarkable rooms are in which direction. The interface was kind of fucky because you had to change boots a lot in the menu, and can only use the hookshot for combat while walking underwater for some reason against those clam creatures that you have to be quite close to to get them to open, but farther away than that to hit.

There are a couple keys hidden in “why would there be a room there?” kind of places so it’s a pain without the compass.

The Dark Link miniboss setpiece is very cool, but the fight itself feels too bullshit. It doesn’t feel like meeting an equal in swordfighting skill and having to best him, it feels like “most normal attacks just straight up don’t work, cheese it with magic and/or the hammer.” Boss fight is kind of meh as well.

The core of the dungeon’s puzzle aka learn how to use the water to traverse this place started off as a cool idea but…Let’s face it Ocarina of Time is actually starting to age poorly and the Water Temple was the first blemish.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

So…I’ve lost count of how many Mission Impossible movies they made. At some point between 2014 and 2016 I think they made one, because for hundreds of youtube videos in a row I was shown an ad that had this irritating song that went “Ready or not, here I come” in a really nasally voice? Apparently advertising a Mission Impossible movie.

I have refused to watch any Mission Impossible movie, or any movie starring Tom Cruise made before or since, and to a degree the spy/action thriller/guy intensely running genre ever since. Because of how much they chose to irritate me about it.

If part of your strategy is to beat me into submission, I’m going to avoid your entire market segment forever.

Meanwhile a lot of my favorite games I never saw actual advertisements for, even if those ads existed. I learned about them from word of mouth, watching streamers/youtubers, or searching for “games like [game I enjoy]”

I categorically rule out a lot of big business practices because the era when “Hey you could make a fun game about flying an X-Wing” is over and the era of “Our business strategy leverages marketable properties in a variety of monetization verticals” is coming to a middle. So I tend to buy from smaller studios or solo developers.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

On a completely different subject which I think is related: My parents want a cabinet and hutch for their dining room. I’m designing and building it. Looking on the internet for ideas, I like how that cornice is done. Can’t do those legs the way I’m going to build the side rails" type thing, I notice a trend: There is basically no documentation on the internet that anyone actually uses dining room hutches to store things they frequently use. Those that aren’t just blank to market the cabinet itself are crammed with random knickknacks or worse the White Woman’s Instagram tableau. A scroll sawn cursive word, some brand new ceramic containers with words printed on them in that thin tall font, especially a teapot with TEA written on it in which tea will NEVER be made, a statue of a pig, an old sifter, a fake plant…

I hate the idea of such a large, complicated and expensive piece of furniture used as a trophy case or a diorama of basic bitchery. In the words of George Carlin, “spending money you don’t have on things you don’t need.”

captain_aggravated, 2 miesiące temu

Didn’t the NES produce non-square pixels? Like pure data wise the screen was square but at some point in making it NTSC it gets stretched horizontally to 4:3?

captain_aggravated, 2 miesiące temu

My top three:

1. A Link to the Past. Basically gave the Legend of Zelda its identity, so many staple mechanics, so much lore, comes from this game. First appearance of the Master Sword, the idea of Ganondorf as a king of thieves/sorcerer before becoming a pig monster, Kakariko village. The creation myth with the three golden goddesses came from here. In fact, there’s a passage in the manual that basically reads like the design document for the next 30 years in the series, look it up. Gameplay is polished to a mirror shine, and it’s amazing how it has lasted with the randomizer community.
2. Ocarina of Time. A sequel which referred to previous entries and expanded on the lore without shitting on it. Imagine that! It’s amazing how right they got it as basically the first attempt of a game like this in 3D, even if controller technology had some evolving to do.
3. Breath of the Wild. While it does get a bit samey since there’s only so many enemies to encounter, and exploring the world will result in finding shrines or koroks, the openness with which it approaches puzzles aka “just get to the goal, we don’t care how.” I find very refreshing compared to the previous “you’re in a room with a lock and a key. Bet you can’t find the only existing solution to this puzzle” dynamic the games increasingly had.

My bottom three:

1. Skyward Sword. The artwork is charming, the soundtrack has a few gems in it but is mostly short repetitive and annoying loops, a lot of the gameplay elements are just blatantly recycled from Twilight Princess. The mysterious floating girl who flies back a distance when Link approaches to lead him somewhere would have been more effective if the Zora Queen’s shade hadn’t done it a few years earlier, and I fully expected Fi to explain the collect the light fruit games by saying “Yes Master, ‘this shit again’.” Combine that with the frankly terrible motion controls crammed in as much as possible and the “Master, I have detected a 97.3333% chance that the man you just talked to said that he lives here in town” nature of it all…fuck this game.
2. Adventure of Link. Nintendo Hard via outright unfairness, not much story, not much lore, and rather meh graphics.
3. Tears of the Kingdom. Never before has a game been this much mile wide and inch deep. The story barely exists, there is more content in the Hudson & Rhondson’s daughter storyline than in the main story quest. There are two different crafting mechanics added to the game, plus the one from Breath of the Wild, but none are really explored because there’s no room, there’s no time. In addition to the original map, there’s the entire sky and the entire underground, both full of basically nothing. They could have gotten two games out of the concepts found in this one and explored the individual mechanics a lot more, but no. This game is a mile wide and an inch deep.

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

Not a thing.

I was starting to get nostalgic for an old game called Riddle of the Sphinx, found out there’s a remaster of it on Steam…that is apparently put out by one of those shady fucking churches, so nope.

I’ve been playing the hell out of Satisfactory lately, I’ve had the game beat for awhile but I’m buying all the trophies. I want to FULL CLEAR the game in early access before the 1.0 release and I’m building up coupons for the Golden Nut.

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

Isn’t RWBY that American-made Anime-shaped object?

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

• Please Don’t Touch Anything. What genre does it even belong in? It would have been a flash game if made 10 years earlier. You’re left at a console with a single large red button, and told to wait for a minute and don’t touch anything. Depending on how you interact with this console, there are many different things it can do/behaviors it can have, and your goal is to find all the different endings. It was entertaining, I don’t need to own it anymore.
• Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. Both Zachtronics assembly-em-up games, which…I don’t think there’s absolutely zero replayability, because you might redo the level you just did or go back to an earlier one with a solution you just learned from a later level, but I don’t know finishing these games feels less like beating Bowser at the end of Super Mario and more like graduating from high school. I’m done with that phase of my life and I can now move on.
• Antichamber. The video game equivalent of a Piet Mondrian painting. It’s an abstract and brain knitting non-euclidean first person puzzle game that uses its surreal mechanics as a metaphor for the journey of life itself, and halfway though you get a gun that shoots cubes and it turns back into a video game. A lot of the actual impact of the game comes from how it comments on the epiphany you just had, and that effect is spoiled somewhat by “Oh I remember this part.” I will note there is a speedrunning community for this game.
• Firewatch. There are some games where you’ll watch a Let’s Play, decide you want to have a go, so you’ll buy and play the game. Not Firewatch; a Let’s Play gives you 96.4% of the experience. It’s a walking simulator that probably should have just been a short film. I’m not even convinced it is a “video game” because…how do you play it well or poorly? Like do we need a new term like “narrative software” or something?

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

So did I, which is why I listed it among good games that have no replay value. I enjoyed the thing that it is, I appreciated the visual style, it’s well performed…it’s one of the better walking simulators. The ending is controversial, which I take to mean it’s a work of art.

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

When I think back on my time with AntiChamber, I don’t really think about the ending. I really think of the beginning up through getting the green gun. It starts leaning farther into the direction of Talos Principle or Portal at that point.

To me the game was about the experience of coming to terms with this strange new world you’ve found yourself in, and the THIS IS AN ALLEGORY wall tiles. It’s impressive how long the developer managed to keep that schtick up.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Lots of things stopping me from doing this:

1. I am currently 36 years old, I will not be 38 at any time during the year 2024.
2. I do not own a copy of Wrestlemania 2000.
3. I finished my pizza rolls yesterday.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Microsoft is like Alphabet - why would you adopt anything they make? It’s going to be abandoned with no support long before the devices are worn out, to include desktop and laptop PCs.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

It’s funny…I bounced right off Minecraft but I like games like Satisfactory and Factorio.

A lot of people play Minecraft as an outlet for creativity; it has an end game with a final boss and a victory condition, but most people don’t even try to “win” Minecraft, they want to build cool things. Well between my electronics bench, my wood shop, my 3D printer and my various creative, design and programming software suites, I already build a lot of cool stuff, so that itch is already scratched.

Those factory building games come with a clearly stated goal: “You’ve crash landed on an alien planet with a hammer and a pistol with 100 shots. Build a rocket.” I’ll spend months of my life building a gigantic complex of individual factories connected by an intricate rail network to accomplish that goal. I’ve heard this kind of thing described as “problem solving gameplay” rather than “puzzle solving gameplay.”

As you say I don’t hate Minecraft, I’m often awed and inspired at the things people have built in it, but it’s not for me.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

I haven’t, but I’ll give it a look.

captain_aggravated, 5 miesięcy temu

“The inverse square root function in the C math library isn’t fast enough. That’s okay, I’ll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster.”

captain_aggravated, 7 miesięcy temu

Back in 2013 or so, Microsoft launched the Windows Store alongside Windows 8, and was making some noises that sounded a lot like shutting out independent software stores like Steam and requiring everything on Windows to be sold through the Windows Store.

Valve reacted to this by saying “Welp I guess it’s time to start investing in gaming on Linux” and launched Steam Machines, little PCs designed to be connected to a television to bring the Steam experience to the living room couch. They ran a modified version of Debian Linux along with their own tweaked version of Wine that could run some Windows games alongside several (including Valve’s own library) that shipped Linux native versions.

The project itself was a bit of a flop; they relied on other companies to make Steam Machines, like Alienware and such. But a lot of things came from it.

1. Valve demonstrated they had the wherewithal to take the gaming market with them if Microsoft got too greedy.
2. Big Picture Mode, Steam Link, and the beginnings of Proton among others came from the Steam Machine project.
3. The Steam Controller came from this project, which I’ve heard GabeN talk about as a major learning experience they drew on during the design of the Steam Deck, aka why the Steam Deck has perfectly conventional controls.

They spent most of the 20teens adding steady improvements for Linux gaming to the point that we switched from having a list of games that ran on Linux, to a list of games that don’t run on Linux because that became easier to manage. Then they launched the Steam Deck, an unqualified successful Linux gaming platform. Then I came here, and then it was now, and then I don’t know what happened.

captain_aggravated, 7 miesięcy temu

Unity, as a business, as a stock investment, as a C-suite and board of directors, is rotting in its casket for all I care. I have committed to never buy game built in Unity whose development started after September this year.

This whole debacle wasn’t an engineering problem; it’s not the software development staff’s fault.

captain_aggravated, 8 miesięcy temu

Man I miss the Flash era.

I spent a ton of time in Kingdom of Loathing. I kept an old laptop that still had a flash enabled browser for a few months to play Bloons Tower Defense 4.

There was this game, I forget the name of it, but you had to build and drive little vehicles to overcome challenges. It was technically amazing for a Flash game, and I’d love to have it back.

captain_aggravated, 8 miesięcy temu

In terms of computer power, a Steam Deck is basically a mid-range laptop. Go buy a Dell Inspiron for about the same price and how does It run CS2?

captain_aggravated, 8 miesięcy temu

You know, it seems that several of the games I play has some element of “corporations bad” to it. Subnautica’s Alterra, Satisfactory’s Ficsit…

captain_aggravated, 8 miesięcy temu

The main point of criticism Yahtzee had amounted to “just play the audio log over gameplay. Let me listen to it while I break hard space ships”

captain_aggravated, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

My favorite thing about Illusion of Gaia has to be the fact that the manual contained a complete walkthrough of the game, at least in the North American release. Unless it was the same energy as “the dumb Americans (who invented the genre and introduced it to the East) don’t understand RPGs, so we’ll make Mystic Quest really simple and dumbed down for them” I don’t know why they did that.

Also, I was like 13 when I got my used copy of Soul Blazer…is there a more melancholy game on the SNES?

captain_aggravated, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

Yeah as another Firefox + Ublock Origin user, I came in here to say I’ve noticed a lot of game wikis announcing they’re migrating off of Fandom, and I’m curious as to why. I’m OoTL.

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s been my understanding that the general populace has been asking the developers of GIMP for years now to overhaul the UI and make it much friendlier to use, and the answer came back, “No, stop asking.”

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

And some of them realistically can’t. Every other commercial game engine is developed for the studio first; Cry, Source, Unreal etc. These engines were made for, well, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament. The studio saw returns for engine development in the sales of games, then they said “We could probably further monetize the work we’ve already done if we license the engine and SDK out to third parties.”

Unity on the other hand is trying to have the Autodesk/Adobe business model of “We have a free student or hobbyist tier, and then a commercial license that’s $100,000 per minute per seat.” The thing is, Autodesk and Adobe really don’t have realistic competitors in their market sectors. Unity very much does. Unity competes directly with GameMaker Studio, Godot, Unreal, Source 2 among others, the development of which are either directly supported by the sales of first party titles (or are outright FOSS projects in the case of Godot). So Unity has to set their prices to compete in that market, without the support of first party game sales.

You can see how that’s working out for them.

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

That’s fairly common with open source projects. How do those two people treat contributors? How do they react to pull requests?

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

Unreal has been in a different league basically since its inception. Compare the original Unreal engine to its contemporaries like Quake or Half Life and it’s amazing what they could do, if you had a box that could run it.

The difference between Unreal and Unity is Unreal has a sustainable viable business model (I think I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no “sustainable” business models under capitalism, what with demanding infinite growth and lal that). Epic Games develops their own games; the development of Unreal Engine has pulled its weight as a component of Fortnite and such. Same thing with Valve; I don’t think they ever bothered to charge for developing a game in the Source engine because they made their money for engine development through Half Life 2, Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc.

Unity on the other hand doesn’t make and sell games, so they have to either directly charge developers (which they both do and don’t) or they operate their own adware nonsense. And neither of those revenue streams are enough. Which means they don’t have a viable business model. So they pull a stunt like this to hasten their inevitable bankruptcy.

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

Godot should definitely be adopted more by the indie and small studio scene. I think there’s going to be some folks who slide over to Unreal because Godot’s 3D capabilities don’t even match Unity’s yet, but there’s some stuff it can do, and it’s in active development.

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

Can you cite an example where this has actually worked/led to a stable business model?

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

Amazon is a goods-based business though, they ship massive amounts of inventory.

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

Godot is a full engine, I would position it in the market somewhere between Unity and GameMaker Studio. It is capable of making 2D and 3D games, though there’s some things Godot lacks, for example the asset streaming capabilities that allow for large seamless open worlds without loading screens, they’re working on that.

Godot runs on WIndows, Mac, Linux various BSDs, and they’re working on an Android port. Godot games can be exported to Windows, MacOS, Linux (and thus SteamDeck), BSD, Android, iOS and the web. Godot games can be ported to consoles, but Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are really fucky about licensing. The way you would go about publishing your Godot game to Playstation, Xbox or Switch is to work with a porting company who specializes in such things.

Fun fact: The Godot IDE is itself a Godot “game.” The Godot editor runs in the Godot engine and is built from UI tools available to end users; this makes it pretty easy to create tools and extensions to customize the editor to your team or project’s needs. It’s also a practical demonstration of how robust Godot’s UI creation tools are; I’ve been toying with the idea of building a woodworking CAD program in Godot.

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

Today I learned that Cruelty Squad was made in Godot.

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

So, here’s my understanding:

Unity has an in-house advertising/monetization system called LevelPlay. It’s their system for putting ads/analytics/etc. in games. But not a lot of people use it; a lot of people use a direct competitor called AppLovin, which is just outright better.

Several developers have reported Unity quietly reaching out to them and saying “Hey, we see you’re using AppLovin…if you switch over to our LevelPlay service instead, we might just waive some or all of our new Fuck You Fee.”

So apparently this is being done to kill a competitor.

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

Cruelty Squad was made in Godot. Don’t know if that’s an endorsement or not as the game is deliberately hideous, but…yeah.

captain_aggravated, 9 miesięcy temu

It did just occur to me that the amount of time I’ve spent over the last few years tinkering with Godot as a hobby just got more valuable.