dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork, 6 days ago

Panel 3, that’s me right there.

Yes, I have several working controllers. Including a couple of spares, unused, still sealed.

dual_sport_dork, 17 days ago

If the cliffhanger at the end of HL:2 Episode 2 annoyed you, the one at the end of Half Life: Alyx will annoy you even more because it not only returns to that moment but the G Man uses reality warping shenanigans to overwrite what happens in it, and replaces it with a different cliffhanger.

Son of a bitch and his unforeseen consequences, indeed.

On the bright side, this also circumvents the need for the original events of Half Life 3 to happen, since Valve has consistently said they were not willing to make it as it was originally drafted (especially now since Marc Laidlaw leaked/released the entire plot online). So now I guess they’re free to do something new with the story direction… Whatever that might be.

dual_sport_dork, 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

I sort of get it, but also “Half Life game ends with G Man time-freeze BS and a random abrupt cliffhanger that will not be resolved for years, if ever” isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome for anyone who’s interested in Half Life.

You may as well just watch a Youtube LP of Alyx anyway, since I imagine the majority of players do not have the equipment to play it themselves.

dual_sport_dork, 19 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)

If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, patches, day 1 DLC, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it. Anything else is just selling you a rental, but at full price. I find that immensely distasteful.

So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.

dual_sport_dork, 18 days ago

And I also have a VR headset and VirtualBoyGo if I really feel like giving myself an authentic headache.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

Megaman Legends 3.

“We cancelled it because the fans didn’t show enough interest or act like they wanted it badly enough!”

I think a sizable fraction of the world’s population is still salty about that, and it’s been 14 years.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

To be fair, they haven’t managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that’s actually compelling in the intervening years that weren’t rereleases. “Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!”

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

It is now. It wasn’t at first.

It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

Definitely not. Test Drive Unlimited 2 leaps to mind, which while it certainly had racing events and racing related content in it, you could also just drive around doing nothing in particular as much as you wanted.

There are several other racing oriented games that nevertheless had open worlds and you’re never actually forced to race anybody in any of them, albeit usually at the expense of sacrificing any game progression and thus having a rather limited vehicle selection. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Forza Horizon, for instance.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

The trouble with this is that every single statement in it is true.

dual_sport_dork, 1 month ago

Minecraft has a long and storied history of cribbing features from modders and integrating them into the official base game. This includes hoppers, light senors, pistons, slime blocks, several of the types of trees, armor stands, displaying maps in frames, quite a few mobs, several of the current biome types, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I can’t remember offhand.

So yeah, stealing the idea (even if not the outright code) from shader mods would be completely on brand, and not at all unexpected. It’s up to the player base to decide how they feel about this, but honestly it seems nothing short of kidnapping babies and setting them on fire would get any significant portion of people to turn away from Microsoft’s stewardship of the game, given how hard they’ve tried to screw it up post-acquisition and yet it continues to print them money.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

But Ted Woolsey’s original SNES translation is gold for what it is. Remember that he did the whole thing basically by himself and had to get extremely creative to cram the script into the ROM space since English text takes up more characters than Japanese, while also avoiding NoA’s insane censorship rules at the time.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

Getting the full experience from Chrono Trigger specifically, unlike most other similar games, is getting all of the endings. The New Game+ mode will help there.

Chrono Trigger has 18 endings, if I recall correctly, including various permutations. Plus one additional one in the rereleases from the DS version forward. Some of them are only very subtly different from each other depending on which combination of character side quests you fully completed, and they all vary depending at which point your manage to defeat the final boss in the main story sequence. Several of them are significantly different interpretations of the future (or the past) post the defeat of the final boss with various for-want-of-a-nail factors causing huge changes to the outcome.

You have quite a few opportunities to fight the final boss up to and including immediately after discovering the first time gate all the way back at the beginning of the game. (Do that in New Game+ with an overpowered Crono, though, unless you want to get steamrolled instantly…)

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/

You’re welcome.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

Maybe the rights went cheap. Or maybe you’re right.

For what it’s worth there was an NES game back when the Pizza Cats were originally notionally relevant. It was alright.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

I think it’s more that hysterical moral guardians and corporate boobs only see the traditionally casino-like superficial imagery of cards, dice, spades, clubs, slots, etc. and instantly knee-jerk themselves into declaring it “immoral” without actually bothering to take the twelve seconds required to experience the gameplay. At which point they would immediately realize that they are wrong.

This is Kyle’s Mom’s version of only reading the headline, or not bothering to look beyond the dust jacket and only screeching about imaginary content that exists only inside their own assumptions and based purely on the picture on the cover.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Precisely that.

I will add that Sheila Broflovski (a.k.a. Kyle’s Mom) through her sheer incessant nagging (and also blame shifting away from herself and the other parents as spelled out in “Blame Canada”) misses the mark so far that she manages to incite a hot war with Canada that gets enough people killed to spill sufficient blood to fulfill an ancient evil prophecy that literally incarnates both Satan himself and Saddam Hussein’s revenant form back onto the face of the Earth.

Note that this not only predated Saddam’s actual real world death, but Matt and Trey also successfully predicted the eruption of the Karen trend, probably a good decade or so before it’d risen to the height – or sunk to the depths – it’s achieved today. Although senseless moral panics were well known and quite popular in the '80’s and '90’s already, to the extent that they not only managed to accurately predict the response to their own movie, but also parody it within the same movie.

dual_sport_dork, 2 months ago

With Bethesda you can never really tell if it is deliberate malice or simply their typical blistering incompetence. But the end result is the same either way.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Nerd powers activate… (And yes, the redraws are really quite ridiculous. But tiddies sell microtransactions, I guess.)

As a side note, I never quite understood why Fio is wearing glasses in the Metal Gear Slug 2 character select screen except, possibly, so the artists could have this gag where they shatter for a quick freeze-frame when you select her:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/07f66758-22bf-431e-af43-fc26857b4c2e.png

Because she definitely is not wearing glasses during gameplay, visible even when her face turns towards the camera during her reload animation:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/41863814-cc10-453d-8374-f1bef8e56be8.png

Yes, Metal Slug has reload animations. Metal Slug has animations for everything.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

That recycled yank-the-keycard-off-the-corpse animation, though…

It doesn’t look like they learned much from Eternal. I think I’m going to give this one a miss. All I’m seeing is more mechanic overload, and a really annoying parry system that’s just going to result in about 1/3 of the monster roster being, “The only way to deal with this guy is to wait for his green attack and parry it, then you get to hit him once. Other than that he’s functionally invulnerable.” Yeah, because the Marauders were totally the highlight of Eternal, and absolutely didn’t grind the entire game to a tedious three minute halt every time you encountered one and played its silly song-and-dance.

I will happily don my asbestos underpants and declare that I really don’t like the direction the new Doom games are taking. Whatever this is isn’t Doom; they could have just as well slapped a new original IP over top of it without any difference.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

I can beat the Marauders no problem, and I can even cheese them with the shotgun trick. That doesn’t magically make them good game design.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

I don’t know that this has been revealed yet, but it is likely that it runs in id Tech 7, which is the same as Doom Eternal (and not Doom 2016).

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

And here’s the thing with the Marauders, too. They were just in the wrong game.

If having to play silly distance and timing games with solitary enemies were Doom’s jam – If this were ever Doom’s jam – it would be one thing. But it’s not, and it never has been. The fuckers would fit right in the Dark Souls universe and nobody would even notice. But that’s just not how the rest of the game is structured.

The telltale heart thumping under the floorboard here is that the game feels the need to literally give you a popup that pauses the action the first time you encounter one for the explicit purpose of teaching you how to work the fight. If your mechanics are so non-discoverable that this is necessary, maybe that’s a clue that a stop and rethink is in order.

Doom Eternal was actually really bad at that across the board. You will recall that almost every new mechanic was preceded by an action stopping popup and in some cases an incongruous teleportation to a tutorial room to force-feed you the correct course of action (and the only correct course of action, which is my other gripe) for that monster or situation. Very few of its mechanics beyond stick-shotgun-down-monster’s-throat-pull-trigger are organically discoverable, and even the ones that could have been aren’t because of the tutorial popups.

I guess at least you can turn them off… If you know about them in advance.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

Apparently Undertale works this way as well. All of its dialog is one massive switch statement.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

That and with stylized graphics you stand a much greater chance of being able to see just what the hell is happening on the screen.

dual_sport_dork, 3 months ago

But I don’t particularly feel like being eaten by a Grue.

dual_sport_dork, 4 months 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, 4 months 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, 4 months 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, 4 months ago

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

dual_sport_dork, 5 months 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, 5 months 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, 5 months 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, 5 months ago

“Incoming Memo: Stand by to receive memo?”

dual_sport_dork, 5 months 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, 5 months 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, 6 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, 6 months ago (edited 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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, 6 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