xyzzy

@xyzzy@lemm.ee

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Exciting New Trailer Released For Gex Trilogy | Retro Gaming News 24/7 ( www.retronews.com )

A new trailer for the Gex Trilogy has been released, featuring all three console games developed by Crystal Dynamics. The collection includes Gex, Gex: Enter the Gecko, and Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko, starring the anthropomorphic gecko protagonist. Pre-orders are set to begin in autumn 2024 with availability on Nintendo Switch,...

xyzzy ,

Eh. LRG puts out dumb stuff all the time, but they're not forcing anyone to buy their $200 Bill & Ted limited edition with stickers, soundtrack, and SteelBook or whatever. It's not a company's responsibility to sell you less stuff.

If you just want an easy way to play certain games on your Switch or PS4, they can be an easy way of doing so if you no longer have the console in question or if the market rate for original cartridges or discs has priced you out.

They also occasionally put out the first Western licensed version of certain Japanese games on original media, which I think is pretty worthwhile and something they should do more of. Provided they aren't just CD-Rs.

No one needs to buy every random thing they put out.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge Of The Seven Confirmed For Release On PS5, PS4, Switch, And PC | Retro Gaming News 24/7 ( www.retronews.com )

Square Enix has announced a Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven remake. This updated version will be available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Steam) starting October 24th at a price of $49.99....

xyzzy ,

I have the 2017 Switch remaster, but I'm definitely going to pick this up too.

xyzzy ,

Once you realize that all this stuff is written by either young Gen Z copywriters or AI, everything begins to make more sense.

A Final Fantasy Tactics Remaster Is Confirmed And In Development | Retro Gaming News 24/7 ( www.retronews.com )

Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier has confirmed that a Final Fantasy Tactics remaster is indeed in development. This confirmation comes after speculation surrounding the credibility of frequent Atlus news leaker Midori, who recently admitted to adopting an online persona....

xyzzy ,

Not having a nose is probably an asset in a medieval war camp.

xyzzy ,

Up voted for recommending real Roland hardware. I have an MT-32, CM-32L, and SC-55mkII to cover all my compatibility bases.

GBA ‘Mega Man Mania’ Collection Is Being Brought Back To Life By Fans, Two Decades After Its Cancellation -- Retro Gaming News 24/7 ( www.retronews.com )

Fans of the Mega Man series were excited about the announcement of Mega Man Mania for the GBA in 2004, as it offered a modern-day collection of the classic Game Boy Mega Man games. Unfortunately, the project was canceled shortly after. However, fans are now reviving this idea and working on remastering and coloring the original...

xyzzy ,

I was bummed when Mega Man Mania was mysteriously canceled. I wish this were an official project, but I'll take it. I just hope they don't make any gameplay or (let's call it) story modifications and stick to upgraded visuals only.

xyzzy ,

I would post more regularly, but my financial situation changes very slowly and there's just not that much to talk about related to it without repeating myself. I don't follow outside FIRE resources, so I can't share anything of interest. I don't even know if I could categorize myself as FIRE exactly since I won't be able to retire in my 40s. 50s is likely... which used to be the normal age for retirement.

I mainly subscribe with the hope of hearing from other people.

xyzzy ,

Just a note for anyone else, it's also on GOG, DRM-free. $6 currently but it goes on sale.

https://www.gog.com/game/arcanum_of_steamworks_and_magick_obscura

xyzzy ,

I don't know what that patch is, sorry.

xyzzy ,

Most of my simulations occur in my head. As in simulating what it will be like to be job-free someday, haha.

When I bought my house, though, I did figure out how to do all the amortization tables myself so that I could compare all the different rates and points and stuff, along with figuring out early payment payoff periods. l felt way more in control having the same level of information available to me that the mortgage broker did.

xyzzy ,

Well, that's depressing. Both because the average retirement savings rate is so low overall and because my savings total is more appropriate for someone a decade younger.

That said, I've been hoarding cash and stocks to pay off my house, and the goal is within sight in less than 18 months. I feel like having no house payment (and no debt otherwise) will have a much greater effect on both my ability to save as well as my sense of security.

When my only regular non-discretionary expenses are food, utilities, insurance, and property taxes, I'd be able to live off of a minimum wage job indefinitely if I needed to. Not that I will, but it's nice to know a corporation no longer owns me.

xyzzy ,

C

<stdio.h>

int main() {

printf("Hello, world");

return 0;

}

C++

<iostream>

int main() {

std::cout << "Hello, world" << std::endl;

return 0;

}

xyzzy ,

tl;dr for article and comments:

Microsoft mangled arrays and code comments with ASCII extended characters into UTF-8 encoding, which makes building many of these files impossible without a lot of extra work. This was mistakenly attributed to Git.

The timestamps for each file are also not preserved, which is debatably a valid criticism of Git (original file timestamps can technically be preserved on an archive like this, but it requires a large amount of work to line up those times and the correct commit times programmatically).

Several Microsoft employees involved in this project appeared in the comments and offered to work directly with the author to correct the character encoding issues. One Microsoft employee indicated that historical timestamps could likely not be included due to Microsoft corporate policy around personally identifiable information.

xyzzy ,

According to people who are way more interested in this than I am, there was a bunch of licensed software in 5 and 6.

xyzzy ,

Do you have a list? What condition are they in?

xyzzy ,

I bought three games and two manga adaptations from this collection, so nothing super rare. But they were all in very good condition.

Unfortunately there's just not that much appetite at museums for displaying the crazy in-depth game collections of some folks. As the article says, most such museums are geared at showing an overall history. If only I were a multimillionaire who could afford to build a museum and put in place enough security to guarantee the safety of the items on display...

xyzzy ,

I know what you mean. I quit my job in 2022 and took four months off, and I realized three things:

  1. I have so much more energy than I realized, because my career just drains the life out of me.

  2. I never need to worry about wasting away in retirement, because I have so many interests and projects and many of them are not passive. I never had enough time during those four months, to the point that I wondered how I found any time at all when I worked a job as well!

  3. I need to become debt-free again as quickly as possible. I had achieved that shortly before I took that time off (coming from an apartment, having previously owned and sold a home some years prior), but bought another house afterward. I decided one of my top priorities would be paying off my mortgage as quickly as possible so that I would never again feel anxiety about quitting a job without having another one lined up first, and therefore could never be owned again by a corporation.

This would change my entire relationship with work. Just seeing my continuous progress toward this goal energizes me.

The amount of safety I'll feel from knowing that I could survive on just $30,000 a year if absolutely necessary—enough to pay for my food, utilities, and property taxes—is enormous.

xyzzy ,

12:30 made me tense up with momentary anxiety

xyzzy ,

This author seems to lament that its a computer doing it, but the way the summary functions is really no different than if a human did the same thing.

It's entirely different. Scale matters.

xyzzy ,

They didn't want you to rent it multiple times. They wanted you to rent it once, be unable to beat it, but be intrigued enough that you purchased the game from a store. If you could play and beat a game in a single rental, there was little incentive to buy it (so the developers thought, and I imagine had some data to back it up).

xyzzy ,

You say this like you're correcting the person you're responding to, but they didn't dispute this. Both can be true.

xyzzy ,

Ouch! For anyone else reading this thinking about playing the PR versions, just a note that I played through 3-6 with no issues whatsoever!

xyzzy ,

It was Compaq. Incidentally, that story was the basis for the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.

xyzzy ,

I was maybe interested in Life on Mars as a take on Super Metroid despite the short play time, but then the developer got super defensive in the comments section about Joe's thoughts on Life on Earth.

The Majestic Birth of Graphical User Interfaces – Xerox Alto and the Alto Trek game ( blisscast.wordpress.com )

Can you imagine a time before the Graphical User Interface, when you could only operate a computer with abstract-looking text instead of using simple menus, and it was unheard of to use the oh-so-common mouse? A time when computers were harder to learn, and even harder to master? Well then, join us on our splendid trip where...

xyzzy ,

Can I imagine? Yeah, I lived it. Even Internet browsers used to be text only. My first modem was <1 kbit/s. (For contrast, the last dial-up modem speeds were 56,000 kbit/s, and today speeds are often 1,000,000 kbit/s or more.)

The mouse came before graphical OSes for me, since games used it but games were executed from the command line MS-DOS. Of course DOS was also capable of using a mouse. I didn't really use an OS GUI until Windows 3.1, which was mostly a novelty at first. That came out in the early '90s. I didn't have any exposure to Macs until System 7 in the mid-'90s.

My daily driver these days is a MacBook Pro. We've come a long way!

xyzzy ,

There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone...

Not following the logic here. Why does Microsoft's choice in 32-bit OS kill Apple?

xyzzy ,

In for Andor for sure, but Obi-Wan was just too poorly conceived and executed IMO.

xyzzy ,

What did you like about it?

If you liked the story, I highly recommend all of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's other movies, starting with Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

If you liked Nicolas Cage, you might also try two of his most recent movies, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and Pig, or even his older movies like The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off, etc. if you haven't seen them.

xyzzy ,

My old homepage from nearly 10 years ago was a page that looked like it was straight out of the late '90s but was entirely valid HTML5 and CSS 3. That included an applet-like rippling water reflection effect beneath a photo of my city at the time, MIDI audio, JavaScript emulating the blink tag, and right-click "image save protection."

It was a total blast to make and people loved it, but being in the tech industry it kind of gave the wrong impression to hiring managers, so I swapped it for a much more boring page.

xyzzy ,

Lots of great quotes from this game.

"Listen, Yuffie. I don't care about the history of Wutai or your feelings." — Cloud

"Those who sacrifice themselves for their jobs aren't pros... just fools." — Tseng

xyzzy ,

It's like the AI text adventures you see now

but actually good and written by a human with lots of warmth and humor, unlike the pale AI imitations

xyzzy ,

There's also the RetroTINK-4K if you'd like to take out a second mortgage. Personally, I prefer to just add HDMI mods and rely on my 4K TV's upscaler, or use FPGA consoles, but not everyone can do that.

Note that if those consoles include GameCube DOL-001 and a good upscaling TV, there's a very easy solution. A Carby will output native 480p over HDMI when booting while pressing the B button.

xyzzy ,

This plays Game Boy and Game Boy Color games and you have to build it yourself.

Analogue Pocket comes preassembled and plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance out of the box, plus Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket, NGP Color, and Lynx with adapters. If jailbroken it plays pretty much anything from a card. And Analogue OS has a ton of options, what are you talking about?

I'm glad we have more FPGA consoles coming out; after all, the RetroUSB AES is better and cheaper in many ways than the Nt Mini. But Analogue also created the market and is constantly pushing the envelope on technology. Analogue builds good products and this Game Boy Color alternative sounds great too.

xyzzy ,

Every small electronics company is dealing with this if they source high-quality parts. It's just gotten much harder in the last several years to source quality components in large numbers from China, and the big hardware manufacturers always get the lion's share.

Follow any similar companies and you see a similar stop-start pattern, quickly selling out, and yearlong preorders.

Hasbro Earnings News (D&D profits) ( icv2.com )

Hasbro lost a billion dollars this year, but D&D made a tonne of profit. And they laid off 1100 people. What I can't understand is how they're business model works. And how laying off 1100 people will allegedly save $400 million dollar (someone check my math, but does each employee cost 350k+ each?)...

xyzzy ,

Oh man, you want the real answer?

The people who run these kinds of companies ascended to their roles through a mixture of amorality, naked ambition, willingness to do whatever it takes to ingratiate themselves to those above them, credit stealing, blame shifting, and sabotage of rivals. As a rule, they are uncreative, unintelligent, and cowardly, but they have arrogance in spades. If you think you've met an exception to the rule, you're either wrong or they just haven't been pushed out yet. Natural sociopaths are common, but so are those who have intentionally become sociopathic in the pursuit of power. It's a trait that's selected for.

They will replace successful leaders with their own cronies and yes people because they would rather suffocate a successful thing they don't control completely than tolerate success from someone that's threatening to their ego.

For all of their performative hand wringing about layoffs, they don't actually care and will say terrible things in private.

Long story short, they're all Carter Burke from Aliens, but the more power one accumulates, the more of an asshole they become.

Source: from millionaires to billionaires, I've had to deal with these human-shaped bags of shit up close and personal my entire career.

xyzzy ,

I was a senior in high school at the time and even back then I thought this kind of advertising was crass, gross, and unnecessary. No nostalgia here, just second-hand embarrassment.

xyzzy ,

Every time I see "backlash" in a news headline it's always just Twitter culture warriors who are always angry about something

xyzzy ,

OK, I'm a big text adventure fan too, as well as a programmer and hobbyist electronics tinkerer, and you gave me a great idea.

I want to take this cheap wireless home theater keyboard and see if I can replace the touchscreen with a tiny OLED display and power it all with a simple board running Linux for text adventure games. The biggest challenge might be getting everything to fit properly in the case, but if I can make it work I'd have a portable text "game boy"!

xyzzy ,

Will do! If I can get it all working (and that's a big if) I'll definitely post about it and create a guide. Total project will be like less than $35 so worst-case scenario I'm not out too much, heh.

xyzzy ,

Smartphone software like messaging or notes is built with imprecision in mind. I don't know about you, but I use the swype method (moving a finger continuously from key to key and lifting at the end of the word) and when writing a message I still spend like 50% of the time correcting mistakes from the virtual keyboard.

Because these are usually short messages, you'd instead likely be hunting and pecking the virtual keys, but without the tactile feedback of a real keyboard. For games that are all about text, it's a preference thing.

Plus a phone comes with a ton of distractions that a dedicated device without notifications doesn't. Sure, you could turn on do not disturb while playing a text game but that feels a little intense. Don't bother me, it's Zork time!!

And if you really think about it, your question is basically like asking why anyone would need a Nintendo Switch when mobile games have virtual controls.

xyzzy ,

All good, I know you weren't and didn't take it that way!

xyzzy ,

This is a very complicated question. Reverse engineering a public game server via network traffic sniffing is legal in the general sense because you're doing it without direct knowledge of the server code. However many game EULAs forbid exactly this, or even forbid playing on private servers. And you have to agree to the EULA in order to use the game client. When in doubt, read the EULA.

However, speaking practically, many game companies don't enforce this.

xyzzy ,

To add to that, I think this may have been the game that started that trend. There was always a difficulty ramp, but the sudden spike level came later in the series. Any Mario platformer these days has a crazy difficulty spike near the end.

I mean, New Super Mario Bros. 2 had an entire DLC called "impossible levels." And don't get me started on The Final-Final Challenge in Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

xyzzy ,

Sure. That's a bit beside the point, though. I was referring to these games based on the hardest levels in them.

TTRPG Product Category terminology?

I settled on using Zotero (meant for academia, but whatever, it does what I need) for cataloguing/organizing my ttrpg pdf hoard and I'm trying to set up some top-level tags to make it a bit easier to sift through what I'm looking for. One set of tags will be genre tags (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc), with another level below...

xyzzy ,

It's apropos that you talk about software meant for academia. Nothing says academia like asking for help creating a comprehensive taxonomic classification system for your gaming hobby, haha

xyzzy ,

Thanks for clueing me in to incube8! I subscribed to their newsletter and signed up for release announcements for a few of the upcoming games currently in development.

Have you had a chance to play this game? If so, what are your thoughts?

xyzzy ,

I played this again many years ago on Xbox when the Disney Afternoon Collection came out, along with Rescue Rangers 2, DuckTales 1 & 2, and Darkwing Duck.

The music for these fans was really great, owing to Capcom. DuckTales is basically an unofficial mini Mega Man soundtrack at times (Moon Stage, Transylvania Stage, Mine Stage). Many of the themes from Darkwing Duck also sound like they come from Mega Man 3 specifically, like the ending theme (very bluesy).

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