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What the Car is cute, but not quite the variety you see in What the Golf. More “lol random” and less actually unique gameplay.
Also, just about all of the user created levels are the kind of thing I would have made when I was 10. Just a boat load of boosts and whatnot to see how fast the car can go.
Most mobile game developers just want to attract whales. People who spend thousands of dollars in their app. They don’t care about everyone else because they don’t make any money off anyone else.
For some games, 20% of players spend $1800 or more a year. One of those people spent $90k.
So if your game sucks for everyone else, it’s not a big loss.
Never beat it as a kid, finally 100%ed it when 3D all stars came out.
Honestly? If feels very rushed. Elements like Yoshi are hardly used, the final boss stage is short and finicky, the pachinko machine is 100% broken, and the blue coin collection is needlessly difficult and unrewarding.
I think when I first played it I was blown away by how good it looked, but playing as an adult, I’m more just disappointed in how messy and unrefined it can be at times.
I remember my microcontroller course professor telling us that if we just wanted to learn how to program assembly for microcontrollers, we could just pick up a book and skip the class.
Instead, he intended to teach us problem solving with microcontrollers.
The class was based around the Intel 8085 architecture, and this was in 2010. When I left the class, I started trying to make things using 8085s and assembly. These chips were so old, they needed external memory and flash storage to operate.
Anyway, I eventually learned about the larger microcontroller world; writing C; 32bit processors, real-time debugging, etc.
Understanding the fundamental goings on of assembly has been helpful, but it was only ever a building block.
I might have to switch to HDHR. I have a Plex server too. We kind of went all in on Tablo and bought a lifetime pass for TV listing data, so it makes it hard to switch.
It’s especially frustrating as an AppleTV user because their app glitches out hard when you try to pause or rewind live TV. It’ll keep jumping back to when you first started watching like hours before. I’ve messaged their support about it, but they blame Apple. iPhone app works fine though…
No kids myself, but I saw something really interesting at a restaurant the other day. Kid, maybe 3, was watching something on an iPad. When it was time to go, the parents asked “it’s time to go, can you pause your movie?”
Kid taps the screen to bring up the menu, and taps pause. No problem.
I found it really interesting that that UI paradigm is maybe 10-15 years old, and it really isn’t super intuitive, but it’s universal, and this little kid knew how to do it. And it looked like his parents taught him how to do it and encouraged him to do it.
So it isn’t all hopeless, it’s just a matter of parents teaching kids how to use computers. Just like they teach them to eat, brush their teeth, and dress themselves.
But forreal, I think it’s really interesting how people who aren’t familiar with computers never think to themselves, “there has to be a better way to do this.”
Like, I’m an EE, and electrical engineering software is notoriously terrible (I like to joke it’s because it’s written by EEs). Even knowing that, if I run into a problem where I want to accomplish something where the default option is to click and drag something 200 times, the first thing I do is google “how do thing Altium.” Sometimes the answer really is to do it the hard way, but I at least check first.
Edit: I’m just remembering a story where I was asked to review a PCB and schematic design for a client. I think they had hired like someone’s kid to do the design work to save money as there were problems all over the place.
Probably the most glaring was with the component markers or “reference designators.” In Eagle CAD, when you place a component (resistor, chip, etc), it comes with a little label to be printed on the PCB. This label has a default location next to the part and moves with the part, but you can’t move it relative to the part without using a separate tool to allow that. This is important when designs get dense as labels might overlap each other or other parts.
Any way, rather than searching for how to move reference designators relative to components (it’s called the “Smash” tool), this kid deleted all reference designators from the design and just manually placed labels. That means that when you move a component, you have to manually move the label. Also, normally, reference designators are hi-lighted when you select components so you know which one goes with which component. These manual labels had no association with the parts. The only way to tell if a label was next to the right part was to select the component to figure out its name, and then visually scan the labels to look for the one with a matching name.
There were hundreds of parts on the PCB. This was $1500 software, and they assumed that this was the correct user flow. Place parts, delete labels linked to parts, make new labels not linked to parts.
I understand the attitude of “if you want a curated stream of music or a free app, you need to accept that you are giving up your privacy to get that.” Like, pay for the app or buy the music and curate it yourself as an alternative. Just like people have done for generations.
But we’re talking about a thing that just four years ago required only a paper ticket that could be purchased with cash suddenly requiring an app. The product didn’t change in any way, it just requires an app now. I think everyone should be angry about that.