Those horrible scalpers that butted their way into our hobby to artificially jack up the prices? It looks like that didn't go so well for them. The prices are plummeting, and they're under a lawsuit in any case. Here's hoping they leave to some other hobby like... leaf collecting. Yeah leaf collecting. Let's see them madly running around and scraping up every last leaf in front of our homes and trying to inflate the prices of leaves.
Give it another year. We might actually be able to collect retro games for reasonable prices again. Super Mario Bros. is NOT worth hundreds of thousands. It's Super Mario Bros! EVERYONE owns a copy!
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.
Posted by: Dark Jaguar - 26th October 2023, 5:03 AM - Forum: Tendo City
- No Replies
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."
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.
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.