Of course, corporations are now abusing whatever the original purpose was to prevent employees from having the freedom to find the best job. I'm very glad to see this done, coming into effect in August.
Now let's tackle NDAs, because right now those are being abused to force employees not to reveal abuse they've suffered.
So being bored I asked google genimi to task me with a UE something to do.
I began with asking for a code project. And to order the engine to call me skyfox from now on. Just accept it. I'm sky fox. and I could. Just Accept it.
Wasn't terribly happy with those idea so I asked about a puzzle game. Still calling me skyfox.. He he.. This is fun
Legacy products can have a long tail of sales for years to come and are worth supporting to make sure they still work and are still accessible.
For video games, the general attitude of large game corporations seems to be "let the past die". But, we've just seen a recent phenomenon that shows that this is a terrible attitude to have after all.
Fallout the TV series just recently came out on... Amazon or Hulumon or Netflixmon or whatever service it is... Max! Peacock? Anyway, it's led to the old Fallout games seeing a level of sudden popularity the series hasn't had in years. Fallout 4 is currently the best selling game in Europe, apparently. My friend has been playing Fallout 76 of all things. I for one intend on playing a modded out version of Fallout 2 pretty soon. It's only a good thing that these games are accessible to this day and fully playable. Now imagine if The Crew got a movie today and it turned out to be popular. What are fans going to do if they want to explore the original? Suck a tailpipe that's what!
This isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Lord of the Rings movies led to people buying the Lord of the Rings books. That Avatar movie led to people exploring the original animated series about the blue cat people connecting to nature with fiberoptic USB cables.... I may be getting some things confused there. Heck if you make a biopic about a musician, their songs will briefly skyrocket in sales. Why wouldn't that be true of properties made based on games?
Companies just abandoning old games and not caring if they're still available for years to come are leaving money on the table. Filthy.. FILTHY table money! Get it off that table!
There was a time when I didn't really see the big deal of things like Steam's online verification requirement to play Half-Life 2. ABF, for his part, saw this as the problem it was even then.
Now, I think I more than agree with ABF, I've slid pretty far to the left and consider any game that requires some method of online DRM to be basically a scam, a "time bomb" just waiting to go off.
I BOUGHT Overwatch, and it's now dead. They killed it and I can't even play a hacked version that uses custom servers. It's a game they disappeared from existence, and the substitute they gave me, Overwatch 2, isn't even a feature complete version. It's the very limited "free to play" edition with very few character choices, and entire modes missing. They promised a single player mode, and that's been cancelled.
This is real. Alright here we have a game made as a loving spiritual successor to... the two side scrolling CD-i Zelda games. Even the cut scenes are of that same infamous quality and they got the old voice actors. "Good."
Thing is, apparently it's much better designed than the CDi games and is actually fun, closer to Zelda II. Frankly I'm shocked such a thing came to exist but... here we are!
This was very interesting. Seems that Miyamoto himself hated the "cel shaded" look, which is shocking to me after all these years. Also, weird women were writing in saying toon link wasn't hot enough or something.
Well, I'm still glad it turned out like it did.
This is also some final confirmation that yes indeed the development of Wind Waker was drastically rushed to the point of Nintendo pushing for some painful levels of crunch. Thing about crunch is that quality of work suffers under it, which is another reason to avoid it in favor of longer development times. Two missing dungeons! I knew for sure the one blown up by Ganon had been cut, but seems another got cut as well.
The original idea to "loop" the edges of the map was a good one, but got cut due to world building reasons. I understand, but a little imagination could resolve that. Make the edges of the map part of a "curse", the loop forcing people to stay within the flooded Hyrule and never escape until the triforce breaks that curse at the end of the game.
Alright so we all know the drill here. The N64 analog stick is simultaneously incredibly sensitive and amazing, and also terribly prone to wear and tear into dusty loose trash with just a few months of use. Heck I bought a brand new unused N64 controller and it broke down within a few years, and I don't play my N64 nearly as much as I did when it was current. Even the new remake of the N64 controller for Switch basically reuses the same manufacturing process for a lot of the parts, but the plastic quality is actually lower so it'll grind down faster.
The cause of this is the plastic bowl the mechanism rests in and the plastic curved "axis bits" that slide along that bowl. This friction is the source of all the problems and could have been resolved by making that bowl out of metal, but of course at greater expense to Nintendo. There's other parts that wear down too, such as the gearlike assembly that drives the portion translating your movement into a digital signal, but that bowl is the key weakpoint. Many solutions have been engineered, from sourcing original warehouse analog sticks (a harder and harder thing to do these days, and even Nintendo's new N64 switch controllers were made in such small numbers that this hasn't replenished online aftermarket sources) to using Gamecube style analog sticks or using third party controllers like HORI's. All of these work adequately, but the N64 stick was so finely tuned (out of the box at least) that none of these quite allow the same level of finesse in games like Mario 64.
Oh and there's the hard plastic nub you rest your thumb on which seems specifically constructed to give you gamer's callous. Modern rubber tips are far superior in that respect.
Someone's gone and decided to half-refurbish and half-reengineer old N64 sticks. A metal bowl custom cut, metal stick for greater durability (though I've never snapped a stick), and those little gear components refinished to pristine original condition. There's even options for a replacement cap for your thumb up top from a refurbished original cap to new rubberized versions that provide better and more comfortable grip. It's an amazing solution that looks like it'll go the distance and last a good long while, but there's always a cost to these things, and well, any site that hides the cost on a product page is a warning sign on what to expect. The price of a fully refurbished kit is 125 Swedish monies, which converts to 135 or so US dollars. Add in the $20 it'll take to ship to the US, we're looking at a hefty cost to fix up just ONE N64 controller. Decking out four of them? That's a pretty crazy up front price to get a few games of Smash Bros, Perfect Dark, or Mario Party in with friends without someone saying "It's not my fault, the controller's broken!".
So, what we have here is an amazing solution which I'd love to get, and which I can see myself potentially plonking down enough for ONE of these things at some point relatively soon, but I can't honestly recommend it for most that have more sense than cents and I certainly couldn't recommend it for a full four player setup. A shame, but I can't imagine it being that much cheaper considering that economies of scale simply won't apply to such a niche product.
So, as you all probably know Nintendo is shutting off Wii U and 3DS online service completely in April, early next month. This is a just terrible decision that I hope modders fix -- and they will, I expect -- but for the official service, the big question was, can the Mario community beat every level in SMM1 before the servers turn off and make the game mostly useless? Of the millions of levels made in the first Mario Maker most were cleared years ago, but tens of thousands were left uncleared, most very difficult. The community got to work, though I doubt that even most of the people clearing the levels thought they would succeed...
But, weeks before the deadline, they did! With one exception, but it kind of doesn't count. Yes, all of those tens of thousands of extremely difficult levels fell to the games' best players. I'm not one of them, I'm pretty average at Mario sadly. Then it came down to only one level that was discovered to be exceptionally difficult. It's only ten seconds long, but requires 18 frame-perfect inputs in that time and more within that time. Several people are still playing it, but it still has not been cleared...
Because after a while of people trying, the level creator admitted that the level was actually tool-assisted. Somebody had found a way to make a TAS (tool-assisted superplay) work on real hardware in SMM1 on the Wii U, and made use of that to upload this level, Trimming the Herbs, and one other, bombs5. Nobody knew before this that it was possible to do that in SMM1 back when you could upload levels to the game, so this was a somewhat surprising revelation, but given how insanely hard the level is it makes sense. Illigitimate levels like tool-assisted stuff don't count towards the 'beat all the levels' goal since the goal is to beat evey level acually uploaded by a human, so with that SMM1 was declared cleared some days earlier when the last legit level, somewhat amusingly titled The Last Dance, was cleared. Now, even though it's a TAS, Trimming The Herbs is possible for a human to beat. bombs5 was cleared within the past few months, so despite it being not a legitimate level it's possible to finish these stages, just extremely hard. I hope that someone does clear this last level and some are making progress, but a human matching TAS perfection is really hard so we'll see... but either way, all legit SMM1 levels are cleared, and that's an amazing accomplishment given how many millions of stages were uploaded and not deleted!
There's a lot to like about the new Dune movies, but there's one tiny thing that I just couldn't overlook, and that's Christopher Walken as the emperor of the known universe. He's one of those actors who just looks like himself no matter what roll he's in. I felt the same way about Steve Buscemi in The Grey Zone, which probably says more about me because that movie is HAUNTING.
