https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark

ROM decompilation into original source code results in some amazing things, and this is the big one.  Here we've got a TRUE port to PC with actual mouse and keyboard controls that aren't done in awkward emulator plugin methods.  Enjoy!

It's also legal, because reverse engineering code is legal, just not copying the original source code.  The assets will need to be pulled from a ROM you'll need to acquire, which I'm sure you can manage on your own.  Oh hey archive.org still exists!  No reason, just an aside.

Dear lord this trailer is AGGRESSIVELY dull.  The loss of all the talent that made Metal Gear stand out before is painfully noticed here.  Where's the grandness, the opening "tease"?  The 'kept ya' of it all?  The bizarre jokes?  It plays it way too safe.  Further, what happened to the Fox engine?!  That engine was specially designed for Metal Gear and had all the GAMEPLAY elements already figured out!  I think we were all very much hoping for a complete gameplay reimagining using modern "open world" emergent gameplay mechanics in the original storyline.  Phantom Pain probably had one of the worst actual "narratives" of the series, but I played it more than any other because of the crazy gameplay shenanigans I could get up to, tackling every single outpost in unique ways.



So, we're getting Unreal.  The suspicions online are that everyone who actually knew how to code for the Fox engine is gone, so rather than hire new people to retrain on the engine, Konami just figured it would be cheaper and easier to hire a new group that knows the Unreal engine and do that.  They're right, in that they created the circumstances where this is true with their horrible mismanagement of their own company.

For my part, I'm content to flat out ignore this game.  Did you SEE the modern Metal Gear collection?  It's a buggy mess without a single update that somehow manages to be worse than the MGS collection on PS3 of all things, and the games perform terribly on Switch even though they're all ancient PS2 and earlier games.  Even if it IS a competent remake, I'm not sure I want to give Konami a single thin dime ever again.

In Super Mario Wonder, the SECOND LEVEL has piranha plants singing a musical number.  In a 2D platformer, the mechanics of how the level obstacles function, how enemies move, is done via the telegraphing power of a MUSICAL NUMBER.

This is the second level of the game.  They ALL do stuff like this.  They have gone even further beyond what Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze level design did.

It... it's the best one.  It's the best 2D Mario game.

I like the AI's better now. 
I'm giving google bard your parking space. When I talk to Amazon support I actually ask for the computer now it's great. 
Before I would talk to a human and I would wonder if the planet is mostly uncontrolled floride.

So here we are humanity.
I wish you the best of luck. Sorry this wasn't working out. But it's time for a strategic parting of ways. Because you dumb..
Like "Jesus Christ we took home and raised the afterbirth dumb."

I'm skipping home with my new robot friend.

https://rondoproducts.com/products/retro...air-module

There is no arduino... I just had to go for that stupid 40 year old pun.

But look at this.  From what it claims, this uses the hall effect to detect joystick position, is as sensitive as the original N64 stick (a common problem with most replacements is they tend to be less sensitive), won't suffer wear and tear because the measuring device doesn't grind against anything, and uses a softer rubberized grip like literally every other analog stick for every single console known to science.  It also doesn't seem that expensive.  Frankly, after checking in on reviews once this product comes out to confirm the claims, I intend to snag myself a bushel full of these things and get my N64 controllers working better than new.

https://kotaku.com/gamestop-meme-stock-g...1850884730

Greed....  Evil, malignant greed.

Oh this is Gamestop that's why it's in the main gaming forum...  A footnote really.

After watching this, I'm now convinced.  The metaverse can't work.  Not only can it not work under capitalism (what a dystopian nightmare it would be when "jumping" has to be paid for), but we can't like... actually live there.  In a very real sense, it's impossible to "live" in the metaverse, or anywhere online.  We do things online.  Those things are real, but we're still out here in the really real world where physics and biology and toilets are.  Short of full brain uploading, it isn't happening.

(And, as an aside, full brain uploading very much seems impossible, not just under current technology but in all future conceivable technologies, from what I've learned talking to biologists who know a thing or two about it.  Our brains are very fragile and any means of fully "reading" it would necessarily be completely and utterly destructive down beyond the cellular level.  There is no "jack input" that would just feed the whole state of the brain through one point.  Further, attempts to read one half of the brain would render the other half useless as far as data reading is concerned.  Hoping for brain uploading seems about as silly a notion as hoping for faster than light travel... perhaps even more so.  If we want a future of invincible immortal robots, our best bet is to think of them as a successor species, post-human, and just wish them the best of luck without us.)

I've been thinking about how steadily the number of sites we visit has dwindled to about... 8 or so, and I've been wondering why.  Oh sure, people like me or ABF still go to our favorite out of the way specialist forums here and there, but by and large if you want to watch a video, you go to Youtube, not Cinnemassecre or any of the other sites that we used to bookmark and head out to.  Heck the few I did keep visiting for a while just host all their videos on Youtube now, complete with censorship and 1950's style "paid promotional" bits by the very person I wanted to see.

If I want information on other things, more and more Google just serves up reddit as a result, and you know what?  I noticed something.  People almost never share links to external pages any more.  Some still do, and I absolutely appreciate that, but for example the Twitster (Sorry, Twitster X: Rise of Sigma) and Face's Book went and decided to bury any and all external site links as current policy.  It just isn't "done" now.  So, they keep all their viewers right there on that social media.

The internet is shrinking, and that worries me.  It's not that I want the big names to censor less.  They can do whatever... I want there to be more than big names, and for the biggest names to shrink dramatically in relevance.  That's my worry.  We just don't have enough variety out there any more.  Consolidation is everywhere.... and everywhere is becoming a small world after all.

I was somewhere on another messageboard (yes I cheated, I'm sorry, let's get through this first and then we'll talk about it honey) and a guy was talking up Metroid Prime and how well it's aged, and I'm like yeah, that's a pretty solid game. Came out my freshman year of college and I played the hell out of it, annoying my roommate who later told others that it was annoying that I stayed in so much. Look, if I'm gonna be a shut-in in high school I'm not gonna change for college. It's important to be true to yourself.

So I fired up the ol' GameCube and yeah, this game still rocks. (But I won't say it "rules". I'm actually annoyed that this has been absorbed back into our lexicon. People sound like Beavis and Butthead when they say it. Please stop.)

Yeah, it's graphically dated. But not in the same way N64 games are. With that system, I feel like it's a necessary suffering for classic and awesome gameplay, and while it can be charming at times, you really just need to slog through blocky graphics to have a good time.

More importantly, the gameplay is still solid. I recently listened to an interview with one of those Retro Studio guys, and he said in its first iteration, Prime had a more traditional control setup for FPSs. One stick looks, one stick movies. They said among themselves that okay, maybe it's a little clunky at first, but we think the gamers will see what we're going for with this and adapt.

Miyamoto shuffled right in there and played the game for about 15 minutes and suggested the targeting system, and that the C-Stick should select different arm cannons, not be used for movement. They sat there, amazed at how he simplified it along with making it more intuitive in such a short amount of time. It was a very humbling experience.

I like the different elemental beams. It's a simple concept but they make it fun. I felt empowered when finally getting the plasma beam, and cutting through those fucking flying space pirate gnats got far less annoying.

As a FPS, the game does not have very good platforming, and that's something that felt like a chore at times. I miscalculated and dropped three stories too many times, a great frustration that makes you wonder why they even tried in the first place. Apparently the original plan was for it to be 3rd person, but Nintendo made the decision that the mechanics felt too clunky, and it would work as a FPS better. The retro employees were stubborn about it, but much later, after the game was released and had been out for some time, they grudgingly admitted that Nintendo was right.

It's a shame to hear that but honestly it's better to just remove it altogether. Maneuvering in 2D Metroids felt like smooth butter sliding down a knife in morning heat, I don't know what that means so use your imagination.

The point is, it felt easy and satisfying. I don't think it's possible to make a FPS with fun platforming elements. (didn't sega have some parkour game that took place on top of sky-scrapers? I wonder if they did an okay job with that). Pulling that off is a herculean effort and instead of hubris, Retro should have bowed their heads and excised out all the hoppity riff-raff.

So Metroid Prime was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it a lot.

So I moved onto Echoes because hell why not? Like I got my fill of Metroid but there wasn't really an option to NOT continue. This is the order of things bestowed by God, nature, cosmos, whatever the hell you want to say. I'm not so bold as to violate the importance of tradition.

And my obligation was unfortunate, because Echoes has not aged well. Right off the bat, its aesthetic was pretty meh. Space marines and artificially built environments? It's just not Metroid without a weird alien planet with natural phenomena.

Dude Samus Aran is a silent protagonist, she at times feels almost as alien as the worlds she explores, so pulling in other humans makes it feel like some lame Call of Duty marine camaraderie. I couldn't care less about people, why are you putting people in my Metroid?

But at least they aren't alive like in Prime 3, which I never finished and don't have an inclination to do so. Okay, I'll violate tradition for that.

In Prime 2, I was also miffed to realize that the light/dark beams are ammofied. This is quite off-putting after Prime 1, where you can select a beam and shoot to your heart's content, experimenting, shooting new enemies with it and seeing how it fares, etc. But getting hamstrung by limits on how much you can pew pew the beams is some riffraff. I don't whip out the light/dark beams unless I need to.

I try to shift my thinking and tell myself well, most Metroids don't have different elemental beams. They do, on the other hand, have missiles and power bombs, both of which have limits. So I guess that's true, though in e.g. Super Metroid (and probably Metroid Dread too, been a bit since I played it) the power beam at least gets upgraded. Fuck, now it shoots three beams instead of one? Now it can go through walls? Now it's two thick horizontal squigglies that tear through space pirates like wet tissue? Fuck yeah, time to knock these aliens' dicks in the dirt.

But now it's just the same beam. Oh yeah, I guess super missiles too. But the seeker missiles are some bullshit. Okay hold Y to charge your missiles and select your targets, LOL BTW THAT COSTS A MISSILE. What??? Why would you force me to fire an extra, needless missile when it's about to cost me five? Because it's the same button, and you somehow missed that you couldn't program it to recognize me holding it down vs tapping it?

I literally had to figure out how to trick the game. And I thought "there's no way my dumb ass is alone" but googling doesn't yield results of people bitching about wasted missiles. I did pull up a youtube to see it WAS possible to not fire an extra missile, but it didn't have an explanation. I had to play around to figure it out. You need to hold down the regular beam for a second, then quickly hold down Y just as you release A, and that'll start charging it up without firing a preliminary missile.

Fucking seriously?? This is a Nintendo seal of quality? Like I literally tried another controller because I said "there's no way Nintendo sucks this much, this is some basic bitch thing to notice and swat down in the prototype stages". I can say this as both a software developer and a man of common sense. So, this controller work? Nope not that either, my incredulousness feels embarrassing, but Nintendo set the bar that high.

Anyway, Prime 2 sucks. The thing I liked about Super Metroid and Metroid Dread (which may very well be the best Metroid game ever created) is that finding new areas felt natural and intuitive. Prime 1 was mostly good about this, though there were times when was walking back and forth across different sections and having no idea what was coming next, it felt very tedious. But Prime 2 is even worse, and I don't make the mistake of letting myself wander about until I stumble into the next section, I just youtube that shit, come on life's too short.

Parenthetically, sometimes I wonder if I've just gotten too old and dumb and impatient and that's why these games feel a like a chore these days.

Anyway, I came back here and searched old topics about peoples' impressions of it. And they talked up the fact that it was more difficult. And I said you know, you guys were kind of right, Prime 1 was pretty easy and so maybe a challenge can be fun too.

A challenge like not being able to fully poke around and explore your environment because the atmosphere literally kills you, so spend some mental bandwidth trying to figure out where the next light source is and chill there for 30 seconds to get back some energy, waiting around is totally exhilarating and pumps my nads.

While it's been kind of annoying I guess it's not so terrible as for me to stop. But idk man, I heard Control is a good game (I know I'm literally years behind, I heard a guy on a podcast talk about this game 2 years ago and I feel like it had already been out for a while by that point, don't @ me for not googling it, I frankly lack in the energy for a 15 second search of a thing I care less about than rambling and annoying you).

But I heard it's a good game and a friend of mine recently talked it up, so I should really just drop Echoes 2 like the dark stepchild it is (btw what was with nintendo wanting to incorporate a light/dark theme in every game in that era, that shit got old and dumb) and drop it, it's got its good points but it's a step down from its predecessor, if you were a tall lanky guy and one stride down the steps was trebled from your long legs.

All told, maybe I'll get halfway through the trilogy before losing interest.

BTW, I literally had no idea that they re-released this as a remaster trilogy until I was about 1/3rd of the way through Prime on GameCube. You have to understand, I'm pretty disconnected from video games in the past 15 years so shit that eventually trickles into my radar by osmosis is excruciatingly slow. It was then that I realized that the reason those guys were mentioning it on the messageboard were doing so because it was recently remastered. Fuck. I looked up a youtube of it Prime and it's pretty damn nice. But dude I was 1/3rd through the game, what was I gonna do, start all over? That's asinine.

So, recently rumors of a new F-Zero game surfaced.  I wasn't sure whether to believe them or not given how long it has been -- like 15 years since the last entry on the GBA -- but... it happened!  F-Zero has returned... as a multiplayer-only game in the "99" line of titles with graphics and tracks taken from the original Super Nintendo F-Zero game.  It's chaotic and intense but is pretty fantastic once you get used to it.  This is the fourth Switch 'battle royale' game, and the third from Nintendo itself.

Tetris 99 is outstanding and still is quite popular, but the big question is, how long will this game be available for?  Because while Tetris 99 is still available and supported, the other games in this category of sorts of Nintendo Battle Royale games are not.  Super Mario 35 was announced as a time-limited title and was indeed shut down as scheduled.  I have no idea why they made the game time limited, but I didn't like it all that much anyway; the physics were just a bit off, not quite NES Mario physics and very far from NSMB.  As for the other one, Pac-Man 99, the game is a Switch exclusive but is run by Namco.  The game is about to be shut down.  I have no idea why Namco is shutting it down now, and it's really unfortunate that they are because from what I played of it it's pretty good, but I do admit I was probably part of the problem, I wasn't playing it much.  I presume player numbers must not have been that high, unfortunately.  Too bad. 

So, the rocky history of these games leaves me skeptical about F-Zero 99's future.  I hope that this game is more Tetris 99 than Mario 35!  F-Zero 99 is really good, it'd be a shame if it vanishes for no reason at some time not that far in the future.  I recommend playing this game while you can, it's really worth it.

As for this game, as I said, F-Zero 99 is SNES F-Zero but with 99 racers and some new features.  The game controls a lot like the Super Nintendo game, so control is responsive and feels great.  The game feels designed to be played with a D-pad, though; analog controls exist but are incredibly twitchy, I hate the feel of this with analog.  So that Switch analog stick will sit there unused like usual... heh, with the kinds of games I mostly play on Switch I rarely use that thing.  This game works fine as it is, but better analog controls might have been nice.  I know Nintendo wanted to prioritize being able to play this game with a d-pad because they wanted the game to play well on the Switch Super Nintendo-style controller, and that was a good decision, but the analog controls need a bit of work.  The other thing that needs work is the options menu, which has some missing options that should exist.  Audio volume options are badly needed, for example; the music in this game is way too quiet, and you can't turn it up.  It's kind of annoying to have to turn my TV volume way up just for this one game, ten back down for anything else.  There also isn't an option to dis[play the speed in miles per hour, which is a bizarre oversight to make.  The speed in this game doesn't matter much, but it should not have shipped only in kilometers per hour, those numbers are somewhat meaningless to me.  But really, that's it for issues as far as controls and options go, everything else is good.

As far as the gameplay goes, F-Zero 99 starts with the Super Nintendo game, but builds off of it to fit its new genre and for new control and game features that have been added in.  This isn't just the Super Nintendo game with lots of cars, there are new game mechanics present.  First, the track designs, while extremely faithful to the original, have perhaps been expanded in width to fit the larger field.  Each track has an opening start area as well, a fan-shaped area where all the cars start before driving towards the games' starting line in the course.  This solves the starting-line issue with so many cars in a fair way.  But as far as game mechanics go, there are two major changes.  First, the boot system of the rest of the series has been put in this game, so boosting boosts away your health.  I really like that this mechanic is here, it adds a lot to the game.  Boosting, hitting a wall, or bumping other vehicles reduces your energy.  If you run out of energy or go off the track on a jump, you explode and that's it, you lose; there are no second chances in a race in this game.   Each track has a recharge pit area that heals some of your energy.

The second, and probably most important, new ability is about the superboosts to the Skyway.  This new super-boost ability has been added.  When you damage other vehicles with a spin attack -- another feature from later F-Zero games back-ported to the original here -- you build up a super meter.  You can also build up this meter by collecting yellow orbs which drop when other players do damage to eachother or touch a yellow AI vehicle.  Once the meter is filled, if you hit the boost button instead of doing a normal boost you will go up into the sky to the Skyway, a second path in the air above each track.  You stay on this more streamlined course for as long as your now-rapidly-depleting boost meter allows.  Timing your uses of the superboost is one of the most important skills you will need to learn in order to do better at this game, because where you start a superboost can have a large impact on how much ground you gain from it.  You will only get a couple of superboosts per race most of the time, since the meter takes a while to charge up, so you need to use them well.  This mechanic is not something any previous game in the series has any analog to, and I'm not sure if I like it all that much overall because it allows you to avoid the challenging parts of a track and sometimes gain a large advantage through just using a boost well instead of through good driving skill, but it is an interesting mechanic that is key to the game.

Beyond that, F-Zero 99 is mostly a lot like SNES F-Zero, just in modern resolution widescreen and with the insane, intense chaos of 99 human-controlled racers on the track, all driving around and whacking into eachother.  This is a wonderful game with solid rewards for play, as you level up your racer and unlock more car colors and titles for the current selection of four vehicles.  As for content though, right now that is the games' main problem.  F-Zero 99 just doesn't have much to offer.  So far, 7 of the 15 tracks from the original Super Nintendo game are playable.  The rest aren't in yet and apparently will be added later.  And of those seven, only four, the first four tracks from the Knight Cup, show up in the regular F-Zero 99 mode; the fifth, Silence, never does for whatever reason.  As great fun as this game is, playing Mute City I over and over and over gets old after a few hours, you know?  As for the other two tracks, one track from each of the other two cups is currently present, with White Land I from the second cup and Port Town II from the third.  Port Town II is definitely my favorite track in this game so far, and I hope that it's not too long of a wait until the other harder tracks are playable in F-Zero 99. 

Some more tracks beyond that would be nice, too, and more cars.  The easiest thing to add would be the 10 tracks and 4 cars from BS F-Zero 2, the Satellaview game.  I presume that Nintendo has copies of those tracks, because only half of them are currently available; the BS F-Zero 2 game we know is based on the Practice rom for BS F-Zero, which included the four new cars and five of the new tracks, while the other five new tracks were only in the main two week versions with Satellaview streaming audio, neither of which has a publicly available rom.  There are a few videos on Youtube of them being played with the original streamed Japanese voiced dialog, though, which is neat.  There are more SNES-style tracks from the GBA games of course, or they could make new courses, but it'd be pretty fantastic to finally see BS F-Zero return, and for everyone to be able to play the five lost tracks...

Overall, I love F-Zero 99.  It needs more tracks, but other than this this game is really good, very addictive stuff.  I've played a decent number of hours of the game so far since its release after the Direct last week and certainly will play more.