captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok temu

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

captain_aggravated, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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.

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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, rok 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, rok 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, rok temu

I haven’t, but I’ll give it a look.

captain_aggravated, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok temu (edited rok 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, rok temu (edited rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok 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, rok temu

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

captain_aggravated, rok temu

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

captain_aggravated, rok 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, rok temu

Today I learned that Cruelty Squad was made in Godot.

captain_aggravated, rok 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, rok 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, rok temu

2014: “You guys should be careful building your industry around proprietary tools, you really should think about open source-” “Blah blah blah stop your moralizing, open source software isn’t 100% ready to go right now so we absolutely can’t use it, instead we’re just going to pay money for this turnkey solution.”

2023: “Help! The proprietary turnkey solution we’ve been paying for this whole time is enshitifying! Subscription models, mandatory cloud services, more and steeper fees!” “Open source tools are still a thing, you know.” “Yeah but we’ve spent a decade telling an entire generation of talent to learn the proprietary stuff so it’s hard to migrate, and we didn’t contribute any code or money to FOSS projects this whole time so it still isn’t up to snuff.”

Well I guess you can slide over to Unreal and kick that can down the road a bit waiting for Epic Games to enshitify their product as well, you can use and contribute to Godot, you can develop your own in-house engine, or you can keep taking it up the ass from Unity.

Just let me ask this: If even a few smaller games, something like Unrailed or Papers Please, used Godot and contributed what they paid to Unity to the Godot team…where would the engine be today?

captain_aggravated, rok temu

I have a hypothesis: People have heard of Unreal but haven’t heard of Godot, they see folks talking about it and go “What’s that” and google it.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

On the upside, you think this will end the epidemic of worthless asset flips?

captain_aggravated, rok 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.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

Art assets, sound effects, storylines, that sort of thing transfers pretty easily.

Rigging, animations, scripting, physics…these pretty much don’t and would have to be rewritten from scratch.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

It depends on the game you’re making.

Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I’d rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that’s all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

No, that’s why I think Valve is so supportive of the mod scene. Team Fortress and Counter Strike among others started out as mods that the studio hired.

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An increasing number of states are banning billboards along highways. Travelers do need a low tech method for finding certain services though, such as food, lodging, fuel and restrooms. So you’ll see those blue signs that says “FOOD NEXT EXIT” with a Waffle House and Burger King logo. In order to put the logo on that sign, the business has to meet certain criteria (which vary from state to state like all highway laws), for example a restaurant must be within 3 miles of the highway, be open for at least 12 hours a day and feature public restrooms and telephones. The sign itself may include a distinctive logo and the name of the business in legible font but no slogans or ad copy. “This burger restaurant is nearby.”

This I see as an appropriate amount of advertising.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

I remember one of the early Youtube sensations was this teen chick’s vlog that turned out to be a fictional soap opera basically. Because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to do that yet.

This was BACK IN THE DAY, around the same time Boxxy became a sensation, or that one chick who just sat still in front of the camera because the Japanese liked her huge eyes.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

Hell I think you could make a massive improvement to the site if it could realize “Hey, I’ve been suggesting the same exact video to this user 500 times in a row, and he’s never clicked it. Maybe this user likes this creator/series, but not this specific video.”

captain_aggravated, rok temu

That’s the one, lonelygirl15. What a wild story. My internet destroyed brain immediately jumped to “Wow that was before the Youtube partner program, and it was presented as an authentic teen’s vlog at least at first…I wonder what the monetization strategy was?” And it turns out there kinda wasn’t one. They went into $50,000 worth of credit card debt to fund the series, according to Wikipedia. Like remember that episode of South Park (remember that show?) where they had the waiting room full of viral video people waiting to get their non-existent internet fame money?

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The wild thing is, people still buy them. “The gameplay is derivative and insipid, it was delivered buggy and unfinished, it’s barely different than the last one they published, and the business model is outright predatory.”

“Yeah, but it’s Star Wars.”

captain_aggravated, rok temu

I’m a bachelor in my 30’s, Roblox wouldn’t have been targeted at me, but my children…which I don’t have. So the first I heard of Roblox was a Youtube video essay titled something to the effect of “I made a video about how exploitative Roblox is, and then it got worse.”

captain_aggravated, rok temu

As someone who bought a physical disc copy of The Orange Box on launch day, it…kinda slays me that TF2 is still running. It’s a very different game than it was in my day, and it is just wild hearing kids younger than the game talking about it. Gaming almost always moves on faster than this.