FM Chiptune Musician | DX Complex Staff | SEGA, MSX and Retro Tech Dork | He/Him

Formerly _NetNomad@kbin.run
Microblogging at _NetNomad@oldbytes.space
https://netnomad.dxcomplex.com

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • for me it’s the other way around. i do like Adventure but it’s a game full of compromises, with most areas needing to work for multiple characters and the Adventure fields ultimately limiting the scope of the game to three relativey-close locales. then comes Sonic Adventure 2, a game with purpose-built stages for each playstyle spanning multiple continents and even space. while the treasure hunt stages were arguably worse, the mech stages were ten times better without the timer and the random tranaformations. and the speed stages, oh man. without the spam dash you really have to learn how the physics and movement options work, but when you do you’re tearing through the stages rolling on walls and making gravity-defying leaps. it’s amazing. 3D Sonic does have a trend of turning things that were challenges in 2D loops into just breather setpieces, but SA2’s introduction of rails is the one time they bucked that trend- get enough momentum going before you hop on or you’re not going anywhere! shame every game since has locked your speed once you’re on them. the extra power-ups and chao boxes scattered throughout the levels give you extra places to explore and reason to do so. to me Sonic Adventure 2 really finally delivers on everything Sonic Adventure wanted to be. it does lose points for it’s rocky voice acting and overreliance on automation- although in both cases to a degree less than Adventure 1- but it’s a great game and the only 3D Sonic i can say that about, as close as Adventure 1 and Frontiers may have came


  • the 2600 and the coleco telstar are the first that come to mind. it’s a shame wood grain fell out of fashion right as game consoles fell into fashion! i also love the the grey variant of the Saturn. Panasonic got two hits in a row with the 3DO and their GameCube-compatible DVD player thing.

    honorable mention goes to the Daewoo CPG-120 which I only just learned about today. it’s a consolized MSX2 that looks like a cross between the Enterprise and a Roomba. i can’t decide if it looks magnificent or awful and it’s arguably not a console to begin with but hey

    edit: oh, and sharp’s twin famicom! in general companies that made other kinds of electronic appliances had a way of bringing a certain class to console design without eliminating the fun


  • everyone is quick to takes sides here but to me this just feels like a sad situation all around. i can see why the original translators thought that closing the repo was essentially revoking permission. i can also see why eadmaster saw the GPL license as explicit permission, and that closing the repo meant they weren’t working on it anymore. i hope cooler heads prevail because it would be a loss to the community if anyone involved were to take their ball and leave






  • you’re getting downvoted but you’re not wrong. N64 emulation has been as good as it’ll get for a long while (remember, we were playing N64 games flawlessly on the Wii, which itself is now retro to many!), and compared to older consoles with quirky bespoke hardware, the benefits of hardware emulation like FPGAs over software emulation are diminished for the N64 to begin with. if you do want to go the FPGA route, Taki Udon’s MiSTeR Pi is cheaper than this and can load any number of cores instead of just the N64. ultimately you’re paying a premium for an experience that’s either as good as or worse than a plethora of cheaper options





  • The one drawback to Bluesky’s block feature is that a user’s block lists aren’t private. Through third party apps, you can find lists of everyone anyone’s blocked. That probably won’t bother most people, but it’s a potential issue for those who worry that public block lists could be used perniciously by persistent stalkers or harassers.

    The only missing function is the ability to lock your account or go private as you can on Twitter, which would let you hide your account from non-followers while still posting to folks who already follow you.

    But Bluesky has gotten considerable criticism at key points over the last year and a half for failures in handling anti-Black racism in particular. Rudy Fraser wrote extensively about some of these issues along with a deep dive into his goals and challenges as the creator of the now legendary Blacksky feed in a great post a year ago.

    Every time someone recommends me Bluesky, I learn something else about it that makes me never want to make an account. Any one of these three quotes should be a dealbreaker on their own



  • i think pops up in early computer rpgs like ultima a lot because the original Dungeons and Dragons was full of that kind of anachronistic stuff. TSR probably didn’t intentionally make it post-apocalypse though. they were just cramming whatever they thought was cool at the moment into their game, which is why you’re just as likely to find a downed spaceship as a dinosaur in Blackmoore. the post-apocalypse angle probably game to be when early crpgs wanted to ape that but wanted give it a proper story justification

    i’ve also heard people say that the silmarillion has scifi elements, but i’m not sure how much of that is what tolkien intended versus what people read into it. i’ve also heard that the trope originates from medieval people coming across ruins of ancient roman architecture, but no examples were given- although it’s funny to think we have robots in The Legend of Zelda because aquaducts





  • any fan could tell the difference, but i can see parents being confused, and they’re the ones footing the bill for the vast majority of pokemon fans. pair that with the guns and back in the day if my parents caught wind of it, Pokémon would be banned in my household no matter how hard i tried to explain Palworld was different

    for the record i am very anti-copyright and think Pokémon should be in the public domain by now, and generally hate Nintendo’s over-ligitous practices. i also don’t understand the patent angle of this action. but i ln this one specific case i can see where they’re coming from, as opposed to if they were going after good-faith tributes like Coromon or Cassette Beasts or a ROM hack