I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and well, I'm pretty sure Kurt was trying his best to resemble Jeff Bridges, and also steal his character's entire backstory from the movie Starman. So, imagine that character wasn't as benevolent as he appeared and actually had repeated that same thing across the galaxy.
Well, here's my main thread about this game. I'll put up a detailed review when I'm finally done, but well, I take my sweet time with these things. I still haven't grown sick of it.
They did just recently do some patching to optimize frame rates better and just yesterday added a "voice acting language" option to the game itself. That's two issues resolved.
I found this gem at Goodwill and it immediately occurred to me that it might be severely undervalued being a Sid Meier's game in the old big box. I don't know if there is supposed to be a full manual, but there is the install guide and reference card. The disc is in perfect shape, no scratches or flaws.
I looked on ebay and Amazon and see the game in just a jewel case or sleeve for $30-40 so this should logically be worth more, but I can't find a listing for the boxed version. I know you are an aficionado so you may have an idea of its value. I have better photos on my camera but I'm out of town at the moment.
I find myself saying that a lot during this game. It's probably the best survival horror I've played since Silent Hill bit the musty ol' attic dust. The premise is that you're a freelance investigative journalist who travels to a remote insane asylum, hearing of abusive practices in the place. You get an anonymous tip from a man who worked at the facility as a software contractor for two weeks. Possessed by ambition, you drive out to the place with your handheld camera to record what you find and break the story.
Before long, you're trapped inside the asylum with no escape. Equipped with nothing but a video camera, you have to explore and find your way out. Along the way, you build the story by gathering files and recording the horrors you witness. It's a very simplistic game: there's no fighting, no puzzles, simple objectives... the bulk of it is exploring, running, hiding, and surviving.
You're pursued by various inmates who, through dream therapy and hallucinatory experiences, claim they've found a new god. Their messiah is Father Martin, a man who finds you and decides to guide towards salvation. He separates from you but leads you along, giving you direction from time to time, usually through trails of blood to show the path.
Aside from that, he leaves you to your own devices. Which are, of course, your video camera, and batteries you must collect. The batteries are needed for night vision; there is no shortage of dark rooms and corridors in this game, so you'll need it. In true survival horror fashion, resources are scarce, so you have to conserve the batteries you find as much as possible, leaving you quite literally in the dark.
This game almost gave me a heart-attack in the beginning. You have to go to the basement to start the generator and get the lights back on (yeah, yeah, horror movie cliche). There's a man stalking about the rooms with a stick with nails hammered through the end. As he patrols the rooms, the only way to avoid him is to hide from him, and sneak past him when possible. The game isn't particularly merciful in letting you spy on the man (remember, you have to save battery and use that night-vision sparingly), and audio cues of his whereabouts are limited. I found myself hiding in a room from him (easy enough), but once he walked about out, there was no way to know for certain where he was. Once he spotted you, the only option left is to run back to the beginning, or into another room (and outrunning him is NOT easy). Once, I was able to flee into a room and slam the door and hide under the bed, just barely getting away. (The man in question is obvously not bright; apart from seeing God, he couldn't figure out to check all the hiding spots).
Before I got used to the controls, any time I was in a chase, I found myself screaming and running into walls of tight corridors, frantically trying to turn the camera's night vision off so I didn't waste it, then switching it back on when I needed it again. Once I gave the guy the slip, I just sat back to catch my breath. It was a real love/hate relationship that only a good horror-masochism can provide. Now that I'm more used to the controls, it's a little easier... and unfortunately, also less scary. But that's okay! No more heart palpitations. And it's still scary enough to keep me hooked. I wanted to wait until tonight to pick it back up (to enhance the creepy), but I couldn't wait. I find myself not playing much more than an hour in one sitting. Too tense.
Apparently there's a sequel out (I almost typed SQL, fucking day job) called... Outlast 2. Which was my inspiration in picking up this one. I actually tried it (the first Outlast) months ago at a friend's house, made a note to download it, decided I was too cheap, and let it go. It's supposedly a short game, so it's only 20 bucks... but damn it, my friend got it on XBone for like 10 bucks through some promotion! I wanted that too! Another 10 dollars? What do I look like, an adult with a job?
I don't know the premise of the second one, but I'm eager to see it, plus there's also some DLC on this one. Happy trails, I'll let you know what I think when I beat it.
Well, what are you going to do when it comes time to play those retro games? You can look for a port to modern hardware. That could be the best possible option, if the port is faithful and properly debugged. Among modern ports, you've certainly got no shortage of options, but that's only a small portion of retro games, and those obscure gems made by a company that no longer exists probably aren't getting a modern port. There's also the small matter of "modern" being subjective. Give it a few years, and that modern port will now be a "classic port" for outdated hardware, and if your old hardware is busted, you just have to hope for it to get ported again. "New Super Mario Bros" is now 11 years old, for an unrelated example of how quickly these sorts of things can date themselves.
Alright, so the next best thing is emulation. These days, even the big publishers regularly make their own emulators and sell their retro games as ROM packs (such as the Disney Afternoon collection that just came out). There's also less scrupulous ways to get your collection on modern hardware with a massive host of fan-made emulators, all with features and IPS patching that can make those old games more enjoyable than in the past. Emulators are a pretty tempting option that'll be good enough for most people, but with them come issues of accuracy. Emulators trade off CPU utilization for accuracy, so the more accurate the emulator, the more powerful your hardware needs to be. This is exponential, so while the SNES can be emulated perfectly on modern "gamer" PCs, even slightly more powerful hardware like the N64 ends up requiring computers far more powerful than today's in order to provide theoretically perfect accuracy. As far as how good "imperfect accuracy" can be, it depends on the game. Namely, it's popularity and what sorts of quirks the original programmers used. The biggest most popular hits tend to get the most focus, at the expense of fringe games, especially if those fringe games used undocumented workarounds to get the most out of the hardware they were designed for. Further, while "headerless ROMs" are becoming standard now, in the past headers were expected, and also many ROMs had "dirty" rips which many emulators expect. Further, there's issues of exclusivity. Most emulators store their saved data differently. Things like save states or even the "internal RAM" state can vary too much between different emulators to be portable. Some emulators render the saved data of the game entirely differently than originally coded (such as ScummVM, which emulates a game engine rather than hardware) and will occasionally break compatibility with their own save structure from update to update. Mods are also tricky. Best practice is to design a IPS hack using original hardware, but many modders either can't or won't do this and will use an emulator for testing purposes. As a result, there's a decent chance a hack that worked fine in SNES9X (for example) won't function correctly on other emulators or even the original hardware via flash cart. If that hack becomes popular (such as a translation hack), other emulator designers get pressured to "support" the hack, which pushes their own emulator out of spec even further with actual hardware. Again, how much these issues matter is down to personal tastes, but if you care about experiencing the game exactly as it was originally designed, emulation is full of pitfalls.
Okay, what about just buying an old console and playing it on that? Heck, most Youtubers go that route. This will certainly get you that authenticity, but it comes with it's own downsides. For rarer games and consoles, you're looking at either a long search or paying very high costs for the used hardware. Bigger than this, the hardware IS old and no longer manufactured. That means there's a limited supply and the hardware will all eventually fail with no replacements. For most of us, it's been very fortunate that our gaming hardware has survived so long beyond their eras. However, they all will eventually fail. Some of this can be repaired, but when the processors fail, there's almost nothing that can be done. The games themselves will also fail. The soonest to fail will be the battery backups and those games stored on floppy disk. They're already starting. Lastly, it's important to note that it IS the original hardware, so none of the sweet perks of emulators can be expected, from save states to IPS patching. Although, bit by bit each console are getting custom flash solutions like the Everdrive.
Now we get to reproduction consoles. These are consoles meant to replicate the functions of a specific console. The ideal version would be an exact part for part rebuild with the exact parts being manufactured again for that purpose. None of them hit that ideal. A decent chunk aren't even true reproduction systems, instead being little more than a computer with custom emulators built in to handle the games (at which point it's probably better to go with PC emulators again). The quality on these varies greatly, namely because almost none of them are licensed and they're being made and sold cheaply, and also because there's often not enough documentation so the engineers have to do some reverse engineering, which runs the risk of missing details both big and small. Often, the sound or the color or some other aspect is way off, and just as often various titles simply fail to work at all. There's a few that work better than others, and it's always an option, but again this isn't the accurate experience those who want to preserve history are after. One little spinoff of this idea is the "made from original parts" reproduction. These really are accurate, because they're taking the original parts of the console and repackaging them in a new shell. This raises a number of preservation related issues (one in particular did promise they only took parts from broken systems), but it also isn't sustainable anyway.
At last, we get to FPGAs. This stands for "field programmable gate array". This is a special processor that can be transformed into another processor by adjusting it's logic paths. Due to it's design, it isn't nearly as shrunk down as modern CPUs, and it can only take the form of processors it has enough logic gates to support, but it means it can be custom set to any task within those limitations a designer can dream up. It was originally designed to allow data centers to design hardware accelerated processing of any function they wanted (such as weather forecasting or protein folding). The advantages of having the hardware specially set for that particular task outweigh the relatively fewer logic gates it has to work with, and they can be designed and configured to run in series.
You probably already see where this is going, but since this processor can take whatever form you wish, it can also be turned into a game console's processor or processors (a single one can act like multiple processors linked to each other, so long as the total logic gates is below the count in the FPGA). Due to the limitation on logic gate count, it'll be limited to older consoles for now, but still this is an amazing boon to game preservation. In fact, there's one repro console out there that uses this very method, and the results are incredible. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/08/t...ffordable/ Now, accuracy depends on accurate knowledge of the chips in question, but if you get that nailed, you've got a perfect reproduction. This sucker even gets the little graphical glitch line in MM3's menu looking identical. Further, they're adding the "mappers" (special addon chips in various NES games) to the FPGA profile to perfectly replicate them too. They're adding processors via software updates, because we're living in the future. This repro isn't limited to NES games either. One of the main designers is releasing "unofficial" profiles that set the FPGA up like a Master System or Gameboy and so on. In fact, due to them having full control over the chip's layout, they can do things like "pause" games at any point, save states, real time IPS patch injecting as ROMs are loaded, and all of those things one would expect from emulators. I expect it would be easy to set up cartridge and saved data backups too. They can even apply certain patches that disable hardware limitations like sprite flickering or overclock the system, since the FPGA can easily perform faster than the NES hardware could if it's asked to.
This isn't a panacea that'll resolve all the problems with maintaining classic game history, but it's a huge step forward. It's the first time I've seriously considered getting a reproduction console to replace my actual NES hardware, and I'm paying very close attention.
Yes, a slightly updated version of Starcraft, with its Brood War addon, is now free as of the just-released patch 1.18! It's kind of a promo for the Starcraft Remaster that Blizzard is going to release (for money) this summer, but still it's a pretty nice thing to do. Unfortunately for those of us who have owned the game forever you will need to download the new version and run that in order to play the patched game, as it requires a new install due to the updated menu interface, but once installed it works just fine, and the menus, particularly in Battle.net, definitely look better now; the old, sort of broken on modern OSes BNet interface, with its overlapping text glitches and all, is gone in favor of one that actually looks decent. It's a nice improvement. There are some other minor bug fixes in the new patch as well, and they added one new feature, real Observer support with separate slots, instead of observers having to take up some of the eight player slots.
On the other hand though, there's one problem with this: you now cannot play online multiplayer without this new version, which, since it has those updates, is not going to run on old computers that could previously run the game just fine but now are stuck running it offline-only -- the new version apparently requires more CPU power than the original release, an actual graphics card and not just integrated Intel graphics, and BNet might require an OS newer than XP, instead of running fine on anything from Win95 and up? It's not clear since there aren't system requirements. I should try this on my Vista computer and see what happens. Fixing BNet for modern computers is great, but it's unfortunate that to do that they broke it for old machines, and don't have an option to use either interface depending on system power. Ah well.
I actually played a little SC a few weeks ago, and comparing that to this, the free release sure has gotten a lot more people onto SC BNet, as you'd expect. I wonder how long it'll last... it's still nice, though! But it reminds me, as much as SC is better than WC3, WC3's BNet interface and featureset is better, both in its more powerful map editor, and in added features such as auto-matchmaking, which is much simpler than having to find something in the games-open list as you have to do here. Ah well, it's still the best game ever regardless. :)
You can get the new version either by trying to log on to BNet with an original copy of SC, which will prompt you to install and download the new version, or from the website, where you can also find information about the upcoming Remaster, which will have the same gameplay but all redone in a much higher resolution. The images you can slide between the two versions are interesting, and the new one sure is much higher resolution. Does it look better? I'm not sure about that, I'll need to see more... SC has always looked how it does, so it's kind of weird to suddenly see this highly detailed version of it, you know? We'll see. (I also hope they add auto-matchmaking in the remaster, that'd be nice... so long as SC/WC3-style UMS/Custom support is in, but I am not too hopeful there given how SC2 does things. Who knows at this point.)
It's been a while since I've played much SC, and I never was any good so I'm sure I'm even worse now, but it's still the best game ever made no question.
I finally found out what those stickers that don't use glue are called, those ones I remember playing with as a kid. Static cling stickers, and they still make 'em.
Well, good, now I can know what I'm talking about when I say that those "self destructive" board games never needed to be so self destructive. Replace all stickers with static cling stickers, and make the surface of the board something like dry erase with a dry erase marker for writing on it.
I've heard, and made, the arguments. Nintendo doesn't want it cannibalizing virtual console sales. Nintendo might not have wanted to renegotiate the licenses for third party games. Nintendo never intended it to be a long lasting product. Nintendo didn't want to take attention away from the Switch. Nintendo knew it had been hacked and didn't want to support piracy. Nintendo wanted the factories making it to focus on Switch parts.
I'm just not sure those hold water. This device is basically something Nintendo could have left "on autopilot" and just steadily raked in profit.
As far as virtual console sales and threatening Switch sales, this device was aimed at very different people than the Switch was. I bought one for my niece, not for myself. I'm the sort that already owns every game on this thing anyway. Even gamers who don't have some big retro collection have other ways to get those classic games without Nintendo's blessing. Nintendo has a problem dealing with it's VC library anyway. They trickle those games out and force their loyal customers to buy the same thing over and over again if they actually want to use them on the newest hardware. (For my part, I'm fine playing those games on the oldest hardware and generally only buy VC games that never had a US release or are so ridiculously rare that the prices are beyond what I think is reasonable.) If Nintendo did better with that, the issue of "cannabalized" sales would vanish, and the NES classic would end up being more like a profitable double dip for Nintendo.
I can't speak for the companies Nintendo holds licenses with for those third party games, but they already have a solid license for those games on the virtual console. It seems to me that unless one of those companies raises a stink over renegotiating the terms (if anyone, it'd be Konami), Nintendo could just stamp their approval on renewing those licenses right up until the point the NES Classic stopped being profitable.
I really don't think the NES Classic being hacked would have influenced Nintendo one bit. The NES Classic is not an "active" platform. Nintendo isn't selling games for it. Third party companies aren't selling games for it. This isn't like when the PSP was cracked open and developers worried sales of any games they developed for it would be eaten up by pirates. Nothing is threatened by someone jamming a bunch of NES ROMs on this thing. It hardly "encourages" piracy either. The sorts of people with the know-how to hack the thing are the same sorts of people who have PCs and probably already have a bunch of emulators far beyond the NES and a vast library of ROMs for them. Heck, I've got ROMs of all the games I own for those older consoles, just for the sake of convenience. Many MANY people have pointed out how easy it is to configure a Raspberry Pi into an even more effective "Classic" console. All of those things are still there whether Nintendo makes their Classic or not, so what difference does it make if the thing was hacked?
Regarding factories focusing on other parts, I really don't think the parts used in the NES classic are easily translatable to the Switch. Different assembly lines, different parts, so I really don't think this would speed up Switch production any more than cancelling Amiibos would.
This brings us to the last point, and Nintendo's official line on the matter. They never intended for it to be a long term product, just a short term little side item. To that, I've only got this to say. So what? Who cares what your intentions were? The thing took off like crazy, almost as crazy as shutting off the assembly lines and saying "eh, no thank you" to all that money you should be printing from this thing. This is really the BEST time for them to cash in on it. Nintendo is still well known and 80's nostalgia is at it's peak. 80's nostalgia is only going to go down from here out, as later decades start to fill that niche more and more. You know, both Atari and Sega have no issues just leaving the companies making their retro systems for all eternity. This really seems like a no-brainer to me, but maybe I'm missing something.
I've been hearing far too many progressive people praising that statue. Now, don't get me wrong, taken entirely by itself, that statue sends a clear message of defying big business in favor of women's rights, which I would be for. But, you CAN'T take it by itself. That statue was commissioned and paid for by the bank that owns the same space the bull is on. It's impossible in that light to interpret that statue as anything other than either pandering or sarcastic.
Because, and this is important, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR AN OPPRESSOR TO CHEER ON A REBELLION AGAINST THEM! It can't be done! It doesn't make sense! If they really believed the rebellion had a point, they would immediatly stop BEING the oppressor, but the bank didn't change anything about themselves, they just bought that statue.
At worst, rather than just pandering to them and claiming the impossible, that they are on the side of those who are against them, this statue ends up sarcastic. As in, "okay, just TRY to rebel against us little girl, see what happens". Because, well, what WOULD realistically happen if a little kid tried to stand up to a charging bull? The message is one of stubborn futility or foolishness in that light. The imagery doesn't even work very well, unless you put the bull in a cage or something (the cage symbolizes government business regulations).
Ultimately, I just wish people would see this for what it is, a stunt. ANY message of rebellion has to come FROM the rebellion, not the oppressor, or it's hollow.
![[Image: A8FFh2n.jog]](http://i.imgur.com/A8FFh2n.jog)
