Why? It was just a PC on the inside with a slimmed down Windows 2000 variant as the OS. Storage concerns aside, it was probably a very straightforward port, just rip out the Steam bindings, and it probably ran pretty immediately.
No, this would make it much simpler. No translations, differing architectures, or OS bindings to struggle though. Asset and compilation tweaks, and controller bindings, and that's a large portion of the work.
Can never go wrong with summoningsalt. He'll get you invested in things you never knew you had any interest in. If you want a good example of that check out his video on Wii Sports speed runs. If that sounds like something you aren't interested in, give it 10 minutes and you'll be in so deep you'll start thinking about getting into speed running yourself.
I sorta had that same reaction, yeah. His Super Mario video was endlessly fascinating and then from time to time I would go to watch one of the others and they didn't seem all that different or exciting. Then yesterday I happened on this one, and for whatever reason, it absolutely hooked me.
The philosophies behind game development has changed so much.
Developers used to try and make fun games that they wanted to play, in hopes that fun games will sell well.
Now they have marketing teams with budgets that are greater than twice the development cost. Committees designing games to maximize addiction. And of course, the endless need to monetize everything, micro transactions, games as a service, etc., in order to maximize profits. Is the game any good? Probably not, but they just need a few whales to dump money into it.
Still, Indie games continue to be developed. This will be gaming's salvation when the big studios are fully committed to squeezing every loot box/DLC/microtransaction out of "Live service" forever games.
I don't think Clash of Candy Shadow Tanks is going anywhere, but there will always be the next Stardew Valley passion project.
On that note, I think Indy's have embraced a retro aesthetic because you don't need a whole art team rendering your graphics. Combine this with AAA games being rather formulaic (can't risk a big studio budget trying unproven ideas) and I think you have an audience willing to accept older graphics in retro games.
If you liked it and have access to a 3DS, you should play "A Link Between Worlds".
It uses a very similar overworld / "dark" world but a different story/time period. It's not quite a remake, has some cool mechanics, and is a spiritual successor. Definitely recommend it if you like LttP.
I need to get a new battery and backplate as my 3DS battery has bloated but I definitely will be playing a Link Between Worlds soon. Every retrospective I’ve watched since beating A Link to the Past recommends it as well.
Hey.......I still remember the release date. 9/9/99.
Plus, you could use your dreamcast to talk to a fish. An insulting sarcastic fish.....but the game was narrated by Leonard Nemoy. Sometimes he'd insult you too.....
Seaman is one of those games that I'm intentionally not replaying, because it absolutely blew my mind when I was ten years old, and I just want to leave it that way. I'm guessing the tricks they used to mimic conversation would be very obvious to me now, but back then it seemed completely real. That game turned your CRT TV into a fish tank with an honest to god talking fish inside of it... and Spock gave you updates about how he was doing when you checked on him after school.
The fun part is – it is superior because it includes missions you can do in coop unlike it's release on PC where they were cut. I don't remember if it could play your own music tho.
Been playing it on Arch all morning - runs beautifully straight out the box on a gaming desktop. Forgotten how (a) dark (b) bastard hard it is. Superb game, tho, and all the loading screens being essentially gone adds back a bit of pace it was missing.
And yeah, mapping the weird N64 controller to an xbox pad is always going to be strange - been wasting a lot of items when I'd been intending to look around.
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