_NetNomad

i’ve even heard rumors that tennis for two is a knockoff of a sport called “tennis” although this has yet to be proved conclusively

that’s the funny thing about genres and knock-offs, the only difference is scale. every game after pong is a knock-off of something that came before, and the great ones are the ones who purposefully or inadvertedly added something that made it a new standard for which to knock off, birthing a new genre. people hate terms like metroidvania or roguelike but imo those are the best genre names because they most clearly communicate the context and intent of the game

very cool to see how many people chose OSTs that are super different from their own work

while i think “old bad new good” is an overly simplistic way to look at things, i do appreciate this fire in SEGA’s eyes again. i hope they can find a way forward to expand their horizons creatively without alienating their existing players

it’s wild just how many Pokemon ROM hacks there are. there’s one that recreates Sword and Shield on the GBA and it’s pretty wild how faithful it is, it even has the raid battles. another cool one is Emerald ROWE which is an open world conversion where you can start anywhere. it uses some advanced hardware features so it doesn’t work in every emulator

there’s a hack of Sonic 3D Blast for the Saturn that basically chains all of the special stages into their own game, it’s a very cool look at what a true 3D Saturn Sonic could have been, even if the stages are all just halfpipes

if you count translations, i have poured an ungodly number of hours into Shiren the Wanderer 2 on the N64 (different from the Shiren 2 on the DS). it’s another one that doesn’t always play nice with emulators but if you take copious savestates you’ll be fine. each of the post-game dungeons is essentially a whole new game, and while i’m usually not much of a completionist i just can’t put it down

the reason transactions take so long is because of compliance. COBOL, CICS (the tramsaction manager) and mainframes themselves are constantly being updated and optimized because no flavor of the week in the last three decades has been able to handle the throughput needed by the companies that still use them. if anything in the tech stack at banks is slowing down your paycheck getting cashed, it’s the small army of nodeJS servers whose entire codebase gets rewritten every six months because some exec thinks COBOL isn’t sexy enough and we can get rid of it we say the word “agile” enough. the fortune 500 has been planning on being “off the mainframe in the next 3 years” since the 90s

i see a lot of comments saying how the current situation is better than if streaming platforms became fragmented like TV, but part of why streaming services for TV became so popular is because TV and movies are things you don’t often return to- aside from a few favorites, you might watch a show or a movie only once every five or ten years, whereas you listen to your favorite music over and over and over again. imo if Spotify were to collapse, it’s less likely that people would shell out a fortune for WB+ and Sony+ and more likely that they would just go back to buying an album every month or two, which is a win win because it’s cheaper for them and way more money going to the artist. hell, even if 98% of people just went back to limewire and 2% started buying music again, that’s still ultimately way more money for artists

hell yeah, it’s very comforting to know that someone actually gives a crap and is advocating for us. when i first started driving, driving at night was one of my favorite things, bar the occassional asshole with permahighbeams. now driving at night is a truly horrifying prospect. between that and car size, i feel like 90% of the cars being built today shouldn’t be street legal

of course the best possibility is replacing cars entirely with bikes and robust public transit- and that’s coming from someone who loves (or loved) to drive- but in the mean time i’d really just love to be able to drive to rite aid or the laundromat after work and not be blinded six or seven times on the way there!

clone wars and farscape teach us that oceanic (oceaniac?) accents come from space so it’s probably a character option in one of the spelljammer books

do you have any examples? i can’t think of any Coromon that resemble Pokemon aside from sharing a base animal, whereas a number of Pokemon look closer to specific Pals than they do to their own regional or gender variants

Coromon is only a ripoff in the same way that any scrolling platformer is a ripoff of Super Mario Bros. building off the basic chassis of existing games to make new ones is a practice as old as videogames itself and why genres exist. the difference is that Palworld is full to the brim with monsters that can be difficult to tell at a glance from existing Pokémon- look at this article’s embedded image, that’s just a Wooloo with horns on it’s hind legs- whereas Coromon, Digimon, Dragon Quest Tamers, Yokoi Watch, Cassette Beasts, and anything else in the genre aren’t ripoffs and are even available on Nintendo consoles

i know that’s not the angle Nintendo is using in court, but it’s certainly the reason why they’re in court in the first place while ignoring the plethora of older games that would also clearly violate those patents

the article is more about AAA games than consoles, and i agree with the article’s takeaway. graphical improvements have been an Emperor’s New Clothes situation for about a decade for me now. the reason we have those hundred hour AAA games is because with today’s technology, the only advantage big studios have over indies is sheer volume of content. people are starting to wise up to that more and more and those studios will have to find a different way to justify those massive budgets and price tags or simply go under

as for consoles, though? i think the average PC gamer underestimates the value of things Just Working to the vast majority of customers. PCs themselves are having a tough time against smartphones and chromebooks and computer literacy is decreasing from gen z to gen alpha as a result. the seeming failure of the newer xbox and playstation has more to do with the aforementioned dying AAA market and the fact that they’ve become dumbed-down gaming PCs themselves instead of Just Working. the Switch successor will probably not be great but still sell gangbusters because Nintendo is monopolizing the market on Just Works, even if just barely!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuism

Neither are perfect because Christian Athiests includes people who are “culturally Christian” as that can include clergy as an authority and rituals, and Jesuism would include splinter religious groups and is very easily confused with the Catholic Jesuit order. hopefully it’s a starting point though!

oh hell yeah

this might not be too far off, i know flarum is planning to include activitypub in their 2.0 release and nodebb already has it working in test

i think pops up in early computer rpgs like ultima a lot because the original Dungeons and Dragons was full of that kind of anachronistic stuff. TSR probably didn’t intentionally make it post-apocalypse though. they were just cramming whatever they thought was cool at the moment into their game, which is why you’re just as likely to find a downed spaceship as a dinosaur in Blackmoore. the post-apocalypse angle probably game to be when early crpgs wanted to ape that but wanted give it a proper story justification

i’ve also heard people say that the silmarillion has scifi elements, but i’m not sure how much of that is what tolkien intended versus what people read into it. i’ve also heard that the trope originates from medieval people coming across ruins of ancient roman architecture, but no examples were given- although it’s funny to think we have robots in The Legend of Zelda because aquaducts

not for political reasons so much as commerce reasons. you see, the universe was created by Big Universe to sell more universe

AND WHEN THE NIGHT IS OVER, LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL, I’LL BE GAWN, GAWN, GAWN…

i am a diehard for old school SEGA sprite-scaling racers. OutRun, OutRunners, Super Hang-On, GP Rider, and Power Drift are all must-plays. they all run great in MAME and have also had a number of high-quality console ports. later polygonal titles like SEGA Rally and Hang-On GP are also great but will be less impactful if you’re already used to modern racing games

i see a few comments mentioning different F-Zero games and would like to throw F-Zero 99’s hat into the ring. the sheer chaos of that game is really something you have to experience for yourself