This is a "confirmed" rumor, but if it is true, it's not good news for the game, certainly. Oh, it could be great, but... Namco? They make some good games, sure, but I've never been much of a fan of Namco. They make some good games, but more that don't interest me much... and this game is going to be held to a VERY high standard, considering how unbelievably great the original Metroid Prime is. The original is one of the greatest console games ever made, after all! I will withhold judgment on this one until the game actually releases, but this definitely reduces the hype, for me at least.

The other part of the rumor is that the Switch will also be getting a Ridge Racer game. Huh. Ridge Racer is alright, but definitely isn't a series I have ever loved, so I was fine with it going away... but if it does come back I hope the game is good.

Here's a hateful fool that just so happens to have been a huge fan of Sierra. That's got to be some high grade cognitive dissonance, a misogynist that all the same loved a game company with an internal culture supportive of women. By the end, every last person he asked for an interview turned him down, and all for the same reason, his hateful views of women and his past rants on Anita Sarkesian.

This is kind of embarrassing. So, about two years ago we went on a trip to visit some relatives. I brought some console stuff with me, including my Wii and some Gamecube stuff for it as well. As I'd need them for that, I brought my five Gamecube memory card 251s with me as well. But because I couldn't get them to stay in the disc holder case thing, I put them in a bag, put them somewhere... and then they vanished, I couldn't find them anywhere when we got there and I thought they were all gone. After having most of my original GC save files die with my Memory Card 1019 when that thing failed on me years back, with this I then had none of my original GC save files left at all, sadly, including many saves for games I've gotten over the years and a few original saves for games like Eternal Darkness (including a file at the end of the second loop) and F-Zero GX.

Some time later, I got some GC memory cards to replace the lost ones. I played a handful of GC games, but most of those cards have just sat around unused, as I haven't played much GC in some years now, partially because of this but also because I played a lot of Gamecube for quite some time, but more recently have moved on to other things.


But then a couple of days ago, I was going through the pockets in my coat looking for something. I emptied the inside pocket of the coat, which I used to use all the time but haven't more recently, and ... along with stuff like some pieces of paper and a few old clementines, was a ziploc bag with those five memory cards in it. So, to not lose them I'd put them in my coat, which makes sense... only to forget about that completely later, and never think to look there. Well, oops, but at least the story has a happy ending, I have those memory cards back now! And now I have like ten Memory Card 251s, which is as many as anyone would probably need unless they play sports games.

I didn't realize they made these anyone older than 5, but here we are.

https://newrepublic.com/article/126580/r...ring-books

"I wish I were mahogany." Hahahahaha!

https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-core-polaris

So, MS announced a new version of Windows 10, codenamed Polaris, which is going to be their new main consumer version of the OS... and it won't natively run Win32 applications, it's UWP-only. Other "unimportant legacy features" are also going to be disabled. What this means is that people who only use their PC for web browsing and such will be fine, but for gamers is catastrophic!


I think that if Microsoft sticks to this path they will have signed Windows' death warrant as a gaming platform. Because no UWP-only, Microsoft Store-focused OS will ever be the amazing gaming platform that the PC is. I wonder, will Microsoft come to their senses (or be forced into it by user criticism), or will they stick to this awful, AWFUL idea?

I don't want to have to go to Linux; I mostly like Windows, its issues aside. I'm used to it, it has a good interface, it's got the largest software library of any platform, and so much more! I have some issues with Windows 10, but for the most part it is still Windows. But THIS? If this is what it sounds like, this thing is not Windows, and it's not an open computer operating system the way all computer OSes need to be. It's one more step towards turning PCs into a walled garden and requiring developers pay MS for the privilege of releasing software on the "PC", while turning Windows into a service you pay for yearly for the privilege of continuing to use. Anyone who thought MS was not going to do that should have their confidence seriously shaken now, because it seems to be happening.

This ResetEra post by Jams775 sums up quite well why this is such a big issue:

Quote:Yup, companies do it all the time. I used to have a checking account that got bought out by a bigger one. They promised to keep the free checking for grandfathered accounts. They did... for like a year. Then they didn't.

This is how it'll go. They promise support for win32 and keeping normal 10 updated. They'll do it for a year or two. All the while win32 apps will be in compatibility hell either right away or after "updates" that'll keep breaking compatibility. Over time, companies like Adobe can switch over. But stores like Steam will probably not be allowed to. Eventually they'll just come out with some statement saying it's been long enough and now they're dropping support completely. By that time though, most people have been forced over because they're not knowledgeable enough to Linux or have the dough for Apple. The conversion will be assisted by apologist or whatever you'd want to call them. They'll continue brow beating and calling people who dare question Microsoft crazy or ridiculous.

People are way WAY more different than I ever knew. Now I know what this one old teacher I had insisted that thought was "impossible" without language, which seemed so bizarre to me since I don't usually think in words at all but rather connect the raw ideas and logic in my head instead. I can "picture" things, but I guess some people do it like, literally and not metaphorically?

Seriously, this site has a bunch of lingering issues which need fixing!

- This text is on the top of the screen on every page in Tendo City:

Quote:Warning: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is deprecated, use preg_replace_callback instead in ..../includes/class_bootstrap.php(430) : eval()'d code on line 118

Quote:Warning: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is deprecated, use preg_replace_callback instead in ..../includes/class_bbcode.php on line 2958

This seems like what Amiibo and other toys to life should have been from the start.  It's a toy you actually play with to play the video game, and its a cardboard kit you can probably just make yourself if you don't want to pay for Nintendo's own kit (excluding the needed software of course).

May it be a better year than 2017 was...

Warning: Unmarked spoilers!



So I saw this movie last night, and I've got very mixed feelings on it.

In its style, writing, plot, and more, I saw this as the least Star Wars movie ever. This shows throughout, such as in the acting and composition. Even more than The Force Awakens, this is clearly a movie by a different person, not George Lucas, making a very different film. It also shows in the writing, as the central "kill the past" theme is a major divergence from Star Wars' past. It also ignores or very weakly answers the major unanswered questions from the last movie, The Force Awakens, which is kind of annoying.

All of that stuff is understandably divisive. As a big fan of all of George Lucas's Star Wars movies, but a critic of the post-Lucas ones, I was expecting to not exactly love this movie, and that is the case for the most part. I love the Lucas movies, "bad" acting or no, and this extremely different style was offputting. Even I didn't think it was all bad, though; I liked it sometimes and disliked it other times. Like the style or not it is, for the most part, a well-made movie which tells an interesting story. I think that story has some critical flaws, but still, it was interesting and tense. The space battle scenes are probably the highlight, I think.


Here's the thing, though. Beyond any complaints about some other details of the plot, and I could get into that, I think there is a central, crippling irony behind this movie. While on the one hand The Last Jedi goes against Star Wars convention in many ways, on the other hand it continues on one element of The Force Awakens: it is dedicated to the terrible idea that they must recreate the universe of the original trilogy, whether or not it makes any sense whatsoever.

So, in The Force Awakens, the New Republic was a thing... but then, seemingly out of nowhere, a massive force appeared called the First Order. It is not explained how they got so strong so quickly. They have a giant superweapon which can blow up multiple planets at once, and during TFA it fires, destroying the New Republic's capitol world and some of their fleet or something, as if it would all be in one place or something. The Last Jedi continues on this theme; now the Republic is dead, the Order has taken over the galaxy, and the movie cuts the good guys, the Resistance, down more and more until it's like a couple dozen people by the end, max.

Now, two problems: first, none of the First Order's rise makes any sense at all, and none is explained in either film to any degree worth mentioning. And second, this basic concept, that a secret army appears out of nowhere and crushes the actually weak known armies of the world/universe in a single stroke, in order to set up an 'underdog' arc in a series where it does not make any sense at all, is REALLY REALLY BAD writing. It's terrible conspiracy-theory stuff, and I pretty much hate it. This is not an uncommon trope in fiction, and it is both always terrible and makes absolutely no sense almost all of the time. I am not one to believe in conspiracy theories, I want things to be plausible within their world's rules. This kind of story fails on that level. It's one thing if it is a literal alien invasion out of nowhere, but in a known world you can't do this and get away with it, not if you want to have written an actual credible story! And yet, the plots of both TFA and TLJ ONLY work if you accept this, without almost anything in the movies themselves that makes me believe for a second that any of that could ever have happened.

Now, part of my dislike is of course also about the old Expanded Universe, about all of those Star Wars books I read in the '90s and '00s. The EU had its ups and downs for sure, much more downs than ups in its later years, but to distill the difference between the EU and TFA/TLJ, the EU's version is "safer" and more positive. Lots of really bad stuff happens, more and more in the books from the '00s on, but it never gets anywhere near as bad as it does in these new movies, and in retrospect I appreciate it for that. This is not my main reason for disliking this kind of story, but seriously, I know that sci-fi is often quite dark, but this movie is a bit much.

So overall, considering all of that, how can I take this movie seriously at all? The whole plot of The Last Jedi is about the chase, about how this unstoppable, galaxy-controlling First Order has the last remnants of hope on the run, dying one by one. It's a dark and sometimes interesting film, and I like parts, such as the settings, the space battles, the segment with Rey in the cave, and more. It has other issues as well, such as how its version of Luke goes. I think that this Luke made for a good story, but does not fit well at all with the Luke of the original trilogy, or with how the Jedi work. Or how about Leia? Even ignoring the silly flying-through-space bit, she's reduced back to her ESB-ish role of "base commander of the rebellion", which is certainly not what an older Leia should be. The politician Leia of the Expanded Universe was a much better character I think... but behind all of that, the whole setup only happens because of an idiotic and impossible to believe piece of badly written nonsense! The rest of that stuff matters, and I might address that in another post, but this is the most important problem with both of the new, post-Lucas Star Wars movies: that they felt the need to recreate the "rebels versus empire" setup of the original trilogy, in a setting where you cannot do that.


On the other hand though, I definitely like that this series has a female lead protagonist. Lucas's Star Wars movies are great, but the original trilogy barely has any female characters, and the prequels aren't as much improved as they should be. Apparently the idea of a female lead in this series actually comes from George Lucas, but regardless, seeing in this movie that it's not only Rey, there are a lot of female roles, is a very good thing.


On the whole though, I think that it's kind of unfortunate that The Last Jedi, while making a boldly different kind of Star Wars movie -- in a lot of ways that rub me seriously the wrong way as a longtime Star Wars fan, but also some that I liked -- on the other hand also decided to double down on the previous film's worst element, the devotion to recreating the rebels-versus-overpowering-empire universe of the original trilogy in a setting where you really cannot do that credibly. It's really ironic that this movie which exists to "kill the past" and 'free' Star Wars from its past... is also dedicated to recreating that past in a central, and yet really badly conceived and almost utterly unexplained, way. Too bad.

... So yeah, I thought The Last Jedi was ... okay-ish? Disappointing, but maybe not as awful as I thought it might be, I guess? And yet, it is very disappointing and a waste, in some key elements; it's sad that this movie will be the last time we see Luke and Leia on screen together, because it sure doesn't do well with them in so many ways! The Force Awakens is, in my opinion, the worst Star Wars movie. This one... uh, it might be better, or worse? I'm not sure that I can decide that yet.