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

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  • the article is more about AAA games than consoles, and i agree with the article’s takeaway. graphical improvements have been an Emperor’s New Clothes situation for about a decade for me now. the reason we have those hundred hour AAA games is because with today’s technology, the only advantage big studios have over indies is sheer volume of content. people are starting to wise up to that more and more and those studios will have to find a different way to justify those massive budgets and price tags or simply go under

    as for consoles, though? i think the average PC gamer underestimates the value of things Just Working to the vast majority of customers. PCs themselves are having a tough time against smartphones and chromebooks and computer literacy is decreasing from gen z to gen alpha as a result. the seeming failure of the newer xbox and playstation has more to do with the aforementioned dying AAA market and the fact that they’ve become dumbed-down gaming PCs themselves instead of Just Working. the Switch successor will probably not be great but still sell gangbusters because Nintendo is monopolizing the market on Just Works, even if just barely!




  • 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 first Pokemon game i owned was XD on the GameCube, and like any good kid i overtrained my starter and ignored the rest of my team. i evolved Eevee into Flareon and Fire Blast quickly became my favorite move, killing anything and everything in just one shot. it only has 5 PP, though, so things started getting tough once trainers had six Pokemon. i eventually reached the Ground-type boss and never did get farther than that lmao. but my soft spot for Fire Blast still remains!




  • 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


  • i am a diehard for old school SEGA sprite-scaling racers. OutRun, OutRunners, Super Hang-On, GP Rider, and Power Drift are all must-plays. they all run great in MAME and have also had a number of high-quality console ports. later polygonal titles like SEGA Rally and Hang-On GP are also great but will be less impactful if you’re already used to modern racing games

    i see a few comments mentioning different F-Zero games and would like to throw F-Zero 99’s hat into the ring. the sheer chaos of that game is really something you have to experience for yourself