I mean, valid.

I think my favorite single moment, a personal anecdote, relating to video game manuals is from Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego for Windows 95. Which came with a full copy of the 1995 World Almanac. I was about 8 or 9 at the time. One of the clues was “I heard he was leaving Lesotho by car.” I went, “Wait, is that the little nation in the middle of South Africa?” I looked it up in the book, it was, and I won that round of the game based on that clue.

I think my overall favorite video game manual has to be the one from A Link to the Past. A lot of manuals had maybe a prologue or backstory in the manual, A Link to the Past has like three, including the creation myth of the in-game religion. Go read ALttP’s manual and tell me it hasn’t been the design document of the entire series since.

One more: For some reason, Illusion of Gaia for the SNES includes a full walkthrough right in the manual. They just outright spoil the entire game in the manual. Not sure why they did that.

If I understand it correctly, the ship’s built-in systems run a Linux-based RTOS, the dumbfuckery is happening on an off the shelf Surface tablet.

They’re still making Microsoft look like a million monkeys fucking a million footballs.

Early mods didn’t have the luxury of engine hooks and data separation designed for the purpose of third-party modding.

Yes they did. id Software, Valve and 3D Realms included their SDKs on the disk. All the way back in the 90’s they gave players the same tools they used to build the game. Any game that descends from Doom, all the way into the Source engine, store their assets in .wad files. We were replacing imps with Simpsons characters and titty chicks back when Clinton was president.

Now, the distinction between a game and a mod, I don’t buy the standard to be it’s own game as “started from scratch.”

Valve licensed the Quake engine from id Software. They changed it so much that the GoldSrc engine is considered it’s own thing; anything from skeletal animations to weapon reloading. They hired a novelist to write the story, they generated a ton of their own textures, models, sound effects and music.

Compare that to the original Counter Strike which was a pack of maps and some logic layered over Half-Life’s deathmatch mode.

Standalone product? Buy and run with no other dependencies? Game.

Officially released product from the same developer and/or publisher and/or rights holder that requires owning the original to function? Expansion pack.

Officially released product from the same publisher/developer/rights holder that does not require owning the original to function? Sequel.

Unofficially released product often a fan work that requires a copy of the original game to function? Mod.

I didn’t have to buy Quake to run my copy of Half-Life GOTY edition back in 1999. Though it came with a copy of TFC, which I think is technically an expansion pack as it required Half-Life to function but was officially released as a showcase of those modding tools I talked about in the beginning.

No, that’s too much of a stretch. Half-Life is it’s own game, they licensed and then modified Quake’s engine. That’d be like calling Satisfactory a mod of Fortnite.

“Somehow” he owns the only PC video game store that matters.

The earliest game I remember hiding loading screens was Wind Waker on the Gamecube. It’s the entire reason the game was set on an ocean, they could load and unload assets between islands while the player is in control sailing.

Firewatch has certain choose your own adventure style “What is thy name, adventurer?” questions that it will refer back to later but it doesn’t effect the actual game that much. You get slightly different dialog lines from Horny Boss Chick On The Radio. What did it do that Roger Wilco couldn’t?

21st century satire is a pissy little bitch, ain’t it?

Never assume reasonableness when businessman will suffice.

My understanding was it was for getting the game out on early access by a certain date, which they were going to hit, which is why they were unceremoniously and illegally fired.

As much as I like Subnautica, I’m not buying Subnautica 2 if Krafton stands a chance at seeing any of the revenue. I might be the only human capable of voting with my wallet, and I’m going to use this power.

I’m American, I strongly believe in collateral damage, I will willingly make the children of the Unknown Worlds Entertainment staff go hungry. That’s the choice Unknown Worlds’ higher-ups made going into business with shifty Asian shit-for-fucks promising executive bonuses bigger than the gross revenue of anything their studio has made.

Subnautica was Unknown Worlds Entertainment’s biggest seller. I don’t have exact sales figures but Wikipedia says “over 5 million copies.” Assuming every copy sold at the full retail price of $30, that’s a gross revenue of $150 million. Below Zero sold for the same price and probably fewer copies, so the entire Subnautica franchise has grossed an estimated $300 million total. They have other games which are small potatoes compared to Subnautica. So, you’re the CEO of Unknown Worlds, you know your games pull about $150 million gross each. What kind of smoke do the Koreans blow up your ass to convince you your next game is going to do so well they’ll be able to cover $250 million in bonuses while still covering rent, bills and normal wages?

The fairies in A Link to the Past were on a spectrum between Tinkerbell gossamer wings and a tiny dress, to angelic bird winged and long gowns. When a fairy appeared on screen, there would be soothing harp music.

On the N64, fairies were either firefly like glow balls with insect wings, or…pointy, head-tentacled, vine clad women that screech like a witch when they emerge or retire?

I forgot Eve Online existed. I got a free trial to it once, tried installing it on my Pentium III desktop, it booted but had this weird pink cast to it, so I installed it on my dad’s Pentium 4 desktop, got through the tutorial, like shot some asteroids, encountered another player in game, asked what the point of the game was, the other player responded “Whatever you want it to be.” and I quit the game and never looked back.

Factorio is the least pointful game I’ll accept: Here is a hammer, a pistol with 100 shots, 10 iron plates, a furnace and a drill. Build and launch a rocket.

Chicks going to cons cosplaying as Lara Croft with half a shoebox up her shirt will never stop being funny.

It does remind me strongly of the people I’ve cut off, yes.

It’s not so bad when it’s your first time through the game and you’ve never seen any of it before, when you’re taking in the scenes for the first time. It’s a bigger issue on the second playthrough, which…this game isn’t designed for a second playthrough. The fun isn’t in the mechanics and it isn’t exactly a feast for the eyes (the monochrome dithered retro styling is interesting in full 3D and I understand it was a pain in the dick to get the Unity engine to do that, but it’s still a bit…harsh), so most of the fun is learning what happened, and if you’ve been through it before, well.

Talking to NPCs to find out things about the immediate area is a major part of the game.

If you do what the King says, you’ll encounter NPCs that have some early world building dialog, an easily climbed tower to start filling in the map and get the shrine sensor, four convenient shrines, one of which has the climbing bandana in it, great time to get that because you don’t have a hat at all yet so the extra armor plus the climbing speed buff is excellent to have, there’s a stable with a sidequest that teaches you how to catch horses, you’ll find Hestu along the path up to Kakariko and likely increase your inventory (or learn that koroks exist), and then in Kakariko the shrine there is a combat tutorial, there’s a fairy fountain nearby, plus Impa sets you on the main quest of the game. Having done four shrines, you can add a heart or stamina wheel sector. Pikango is here, and there are several sidequests in Kakariko to get stuck into.

Impa sends you to Hateno to get the memories sidequest going. Major location in the game with some adventuring and side questing to do, more expository dialog and world building, you get the camera and shiekah sensor, get sent back to Impa, and then you’re kicking around in Kakariko with no immediate goal. You look out one of the exits of town you haven’t taken yet and you see a wide open area with two visible shrines and a tower. Course charted, you get sucked into the Zora plot. Once that’s done, you’ll have Mipha’s Grace, an additional heart, some more armor, and then the training wheels are off and now it’s up to you to pick a direction to explore.

“I didn’t do what the NPC said and didn’t find something important the whole game” gives big “why don’t my kids ever call” energy.

Granted, Obra Dinn’s pacing problem wasn’t about dialog. It was…You find a corpse, click, a musical sting plays, you get a few seconds of audio play, and then you see in glorious monochrome dithering the aftermath, and then you’re stuck there for the exact amount of time that some music plays. If you immediately learned something, you can’t do anything about it. If you learn a piece of information that puts something you saw earlier in a new context and you want to go back and look at it, you can’t do anything about it. If you’re not done looking when the music is over, you’ll clunkily have to come back in here. And woe betide you if there’s another corpse in that scene and you end up doing like five of them in a row.

I discovered it through its soundtrack. I was listening to West of Loathing’s soundtrack on Youtube, which was partially or entirely done by the same artist who did WTWTLW’s, so I got recommended some videos, looked up what it was, decided to give it a try, and…maybe if someone implements it for Apple II or some other machine that physically cannot support voice acting so we can dispense with the pretentiousness.

I bounced off of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. I didn’t really even get into the gameplay because the narration in the intro just wouldn’t shut up. You’d click an option, the caption would pop up, and then it would mail a request for the audio file to the developer. I’d have the caption read by the time the narrator started to speak, and the narrator talked the way old people fuck. I went “I don’t have the patience for this right now, I’ll come back to it later” I chose the Exit option from the menu, and the narrator started delivering a multi-line “everyone gets a break but you’ll come back” dialog, which I ALT+F4’d out of the software and uninstalled it on the spot. Dim Bulb Games is one of many studios on my black list.

In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.

The specialized rendering processors of the NES and SNES and Sega Genesis could push pixels without all the distractions a CPU has, in away they were the first GPUs (although modern GPUs do a much more generalized job).

…What?

The NES had a 6502, the SNES had what amounts to a 16-bit version of the 6502, the Genesis had two CPUs, a Zilog Z80 and a Motorola 68000. I will grant you, their video chips were a bit more specialized for playing games, with sprite generators and such, lacking text or bitmap modes. Consoles mostly dominated arcade action, PC games were often slower paced but in many ways technically superior. True 3D graphics happened on PC earlier, hardware 3D acceleration happened on PC earlier, it wasn’t until the Xbox One/PS4 era that game consoles pretty much became entry level worsened gaming PCs.

Consoles were cheaper, specialized computers made specifically for games, PCs were far more expensive but significantly more powerful. No console in 1995 would run Descent or Mechwarrior 2.

That stopped being the case some time around the Xbox 360 era; By then, it was fairly common to see console ports of PC games or vice versa; console versions might lack multiplayer or have reduced graphics or something, the PC has pretty much always been the home of nerdier shit like flight simulators, but by the PS3 and PS4 era consoles basically became entry level gaming PCs. Console prices increased to the point that, for the cost of a PS5 Pro, you could put together a reasonable gaming PC…then ChatGPT ate all the world’s semiconductors and the child rapist in chief bombed Iran apparently on a whim and that brings us to the present moment.

Oh man I miss old flash-based escape the room games. Remember the Crimson Room?

But no one does.

Nothing I’m conscious of, though a lot of the names of races or peoples end in an oh or ah sound. Zora, Rito, Gerudo, Shiekah,

So, there’s a fun fact about that related to the Zelda series. You know how the Hylian language kind of sneaks out in enemy names? Like, Stal- is a prefix meaning skeletal, -fos is a suffix meaning warrior, so a stalfos is a skeletal warrior? And a lizalfos is a lizard warrior? A stalchild is a skeletal child. -orm or -arm means worm creature, like Moldorm.

Well, in the games prior to the N64, geld- meant desert or sand. The geldarm is a sand worm creature, the geldman is a sand man like enemy from Link to the Past. Then in Ocarina of Time there’s a race of women from the desert called Gerudo. Hmm.

This Lemmy comment will be performed in the voice of that fat British guy on Youtube shorts that talks about marketing

You see, the problem with marketing it as a “second phone” is that you’re implying that it’s too shit to be someone’s first phone. Or that you’ve chosen to do something to it that would make it impossible to live with.

I remember in 2018, Verizon started offering a tiny little Android phone branded as a Palm of all things, and that small but vocal minority who insist they want small phones started clamoring for it only to be told that it’s a “companion device” and you still had to have another device active on that line. It cost $350 plus $10 a month on top of another device and plan.

There was essentially no one on earth who wanted a special phone they only used to take to the gym with them, they refused to sell it to people who specifically wanted it, and so it didn’t sell well, to say the least.

I’d rather have T9 than swiping. T9 actually worked.

I haven’t personally compared Linux performance to WIndows in 10 years. The last vesrion of Windows I used was 8.1. The games I want to play run very well on my Ryzen 7700X, 7900GRE system running Fedora. Subnautica and Satisfactory run great. I don’t care if Windows gets a few fps more, because my computer actually works and doesn’t show me ads in the taksbar or sends everything I paste in a word processing document to the cloud. I get 144 FPS with raytracing in Unreal 5 games. What’s your problem?

Are there a lot of people wanting to plug Zen 1 chips into B550 motherboards? Usually it’s the other way around, upgrading chip in an old motherboard.

remember Socket 7?

I think AMD also did a smart thing by branding their sockets. AM4, AM5, what do you think is going to be next? I bet it’s AM6. What came after the Intel LGA1151? It wasn’t LGA1152.

Yeah, you know, they were trying to get Half Life 2 out as a launch title but the game was delayed?

Well let’s see, what’s on the market in the video game console vertical?

• Playstation 5, initially released in 2020 with 84 million units shipped. Still not an amazing software library, it’s been since the PS3 that I’ve heard of anything on Playstation that even made me want to go over to a friend’s house to play that with them.
• Xbox Series S and X, again released in 2020, only 24 million units sold between the two models, and I’m amazed that many people bought one given how many balls Microsoft’s gaming division has dropped since the 360, to include naming the consoles the “Series S and X” immediately after the “One S and One X”. They’ve all but announced they’re exiting the entertainment-capable software market entirely; it wouldn’t surprise me if they removed the ability to render knock knock jokes from TrueType fonts at this point.
• Switch 2, the only main console that came out this year, in 6 months it’s sold 10 million units pretty much entirely out of force of habit I think because we’re entering our third human generation of “You buy a Nintendo for children.” The library consists of $80 games, most of which are Switch games that run at higher resolution and frame rates. And they’ve been egregiously anti-consumer this generation, like, more than usual and that’s saying something. Oh, and doesn’t the console fall out from between the joycons now?
• Steam Deck, released in 2003 2023, has sold some 4 million units, it almost doesn’t count as it’s a gaming laptop with face buttons and joysticks instead of a keyboard, is also here.

For some context:

• Playstation 4 sold 117 million units
• Xbox One sold 58 million
• Switch sold 154 million

Prices are going up, fewer games are being made, “monetization” is getting more and more egregious, and again I wonder how many people are buying Nintendos for children out of sheer force of habit.

Satisfactory 1.0 released.

I miss casual flight sims that were designed to be played with a joystick. Not so much Janes F-15 1997 or whatever, i’m more talking about Crimson Skies. I want more Crimson Skies.

The number of “cheat codes” that were actually just bonus content. Like I remember there were codes in Diddy Kong Racing where you could change all the power-up balloons to any color, like all red or all blue. I also remember there were codes in Mechwarrior II that unlocked a few mechs. Like, there were NPCs in a few missions that were a Tarantula, a Battlemaster, and there were elementals in one level. You could cheat to play as them, but the Battlemaster crashed the game.

Good times.

I think they had to make that change because there was a Radeon 9700 back in the ATI days or something. I just wish they hadn’t done the RX thing. Because those charts where people compare GPU performance will have legends like:

RX-7600 RTX-5060 RX-9060XT TXT-6060RXT TVX-5040T RTX-4060

and you say "There’s no consistency with generation or manufacturer and I’m pretty sure one of those is the part number of a cylinder head for a Toyota Tacoma.

My PC has 32GB of RAM. I can run a video game while having a fuckton of browser tabs open. I could probably get away with 16.