gingerbeardman

Voiceover doing their best to channel the spirit of Sean Bean

@H_Hog you are enitrely in control of who and whose posts you see on Twitter and Bluesky and any other platform.

I once worked with a guy who asked me to stop posting as many photos of cars on my Facebook feed. I was dumbfounded, so I showed him how he could curate his own feed by hiding and muting. Teach a human to fish.

Super cool to see this. I appreciate his manifesto and honesty around its creation, it doesn't sound like vibe coding to me as he has steered it all the way. How exactly I would describe this type of development is a different question.

@Zeebor15 if the programmer wrote the subhead, it would be self-destructive. As it is, it's just destructive.

Aside: I saught funding for a Street Pass clone at one point many years ago, but at the final hurdle the funders (some UK game industry luminaries) said they thought it was too niche.

Here's my review that I wrote a while ago on my backloggd

> Frogger 3D is to Frogger what Super Mario Galaxy is to Mario Bros. Literally the pinnacle of the concept.
>
> A friend said "Probably the highest praise I can give to the game is you can never quite expect what happens next" and I agree. Stages set in cities with roads are a given, but it goes so hard exploring every opportunity that the concept allows. There's a stage at the Itsukushima Shrine complete with a rising and falling water level, really inventive and makes superb use of the 3D effect - you sort of peer into it and you can judge the water level instinctively. Plus there are boss battles, like the one where you have to jump around the rusty roof of a moving truck whilst avoiding oncoming road signs and a bird of prey. This game throws so much Frogger at you.
>
> I will say that there are two approaches to playing this, which it attempts to make clear but can be easily missed. They equate to giving yourself an easy time (just get to the end of the stage) or a hard time (100% completion, sort of thing). And the hard time is a very old school Japanese idea of a hard time. So, if you're finding it difficult, take the easy road.
>
> 9/10

@Cybolic I agree, I noticed the also wobbly lines.

@Damo good to know! quite amazing what these little things can do

@Sylamp that seems like a bit of a jump in logic. working with original master tapes doesn't automatically exclude ai.

I simply can't believe this little thing has a CPU with enough power to run N64 emulation.

How have they remastered the video? AI or not AI?

I've also been playing them on Wii/vWii through Nintendont homebrew for just over a decade. Great that they're playable on more platforms.

It's fake in-game money. You wager an amount of money that you will win the hole and the winner takes all. So it's no more real gambling than the space trading in Elite. But, the dev really need to say that as people who don't know golf are going to think this is real gamblin'.

Looks great! Though the trailer has a distinct lack of both golf and how the gambling will work.

Note: it's an Android device

@smoreon typical accuracy of a video from that channel

I downloaded the report and it's quite balanced in representation: for, middling, against. Which I guess is quite interesting. But more than that, there was no definition of what they mean by "genai". I guess that was in the questionnaire?

I know Steam recently had a policy change where their question about "ai use" now app lies only to content that is witnessed or consumed by players and not to any tools used for "increased efficiency" during development (can't remember the exact phrasing). Previously, for example, if somebody allowed GitHub to automatically title a commit they would have had to tick yes to the ai question.

Bitmap Books is the publisher, but no author is listed? Curious and/or worrying.

There's also a well regarded (by some; not me) YouTube game historian who is trying to sell the narrative that the Game Boy wasn't popular. Honestly!

I would say let it be released before passing judgement.

@CO_Andy i can't believe you're arguing pro-guns, qed.

@CO_Andy I disagree, and I think you need to look a little deeper. One could argue that such game desensitise people to war, which leads to ambivalence to human misery and death. It's part of the problem, not the solution.

@Atariboy also, if we're going to make a stance against Game Boy clones made with the same metal as war drones, I think we should be a making stance against games glorifying war.

Missing "game" in the article heading

Is this one of the decompilation projects that's being done with ai assistance, or not?

This announcement has left me with a few puzzling questions. Why did they choose New York instead of teaming up with established groups? The vague call for “knowledgeable people” sounds a bit like they’re still looking, rather than executing a plan.

If GPS has exclusive access to Japanese materials, the pitch could be about collaborating with organisations that are already doing this work effectively. Starting from scratch in a random city in a country that’s currently going through a tough time with politics doesn’t seem like the best approach. Did someone randomly suggest help in New York? This feels a bit reactive rather than strategic, which is a bit concerning when they’re asking for Patreon funding.

I'm probably missing lots of subtleties.

I knew I liked that guy.

I still have my text message receive tone set to a sound from one of these games.

So what do we think the real story is here? That this person bought a copy of the game for a high price and now thinks that entitles them to claim copyright against anybody else even mentioning it? Bizarre.

X68000 has two light blue lasers, one from top-right one from bottom-left https://youtu.be/rFO3bRCXL44?t=50

But there are lots more, game-specific variations. The chime also seemed to vary even on the same system as the sound driver or synth sounds varied by game.

I find this whole thing quite troublesome.

A keyboard that costs what the Dreamcast did at launch? Madness.

Is there a list of what games and what versions? eg. is it Amiga or Atari ST Llamatron? (Or the period DOS or modern Jaguar versions, both of which are worse)

Edit: found it https://songbird-productions.com/product/evercade-llamasoft-collection/

Abductor (VIC-20 version)
Andes Attack (VIC-20 version)
Deflex V (VIC-20 version)
Gridrunner (VIC-20 version)
Hellgate (VIC-20 version)
Laser Zone (VIC-20 version)
Matrix: Gridrunner 2 (VIC-20 version)
Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time (VIC-20 version)
Ratman! (VIC-20 version)
Ancipital (C64 version)
Attack of the Mutant Camels (C64 version)
Batalyx (C64 version)
Gridrunner (C64 version)
Hellgate (C64 version)
Hover Bovver (C64 version)
Laser Zone (C64 version)
Matrix: Gridrunner 2 (C64 version)
Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time (C64 version)
Revenge of the Mutant Camels (C64 version)
Revenge of the Mutant Camels II (C64 version)
Sheep In Space (C64 version)
Voidrunner (C64 version)
City Bomb (Spectrum version)
Superdeflex (Spectrum version)
Llamatron: 2112 (Atari ST version)
Revenge of the Mutant Camels (Atari ST version)
Super Gridrunner (Atari ST version)

I watched one of my favorite YouTubers play a bit of it the other day. Nothing short of astonishing.

I made a game for Playdate called YOYOZO. It is 39KB...and features custom physics, particle system, vector graphics, two music tracks, synthesized sounds, custom soundtrack support, bitmap font, menu system, instructions, online high scores. It was listed as a GOTY alongside Super Mario Wonder, Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3. Any dev can do this, they just have to care enough. The easiest way to do it is to not use any engine, frameworks, or plugins. I did it with the standard Playdate SDK, and no includes.

The overclocking is great - I wonder how that works behind the scenes.

I'm noticing none of the reviews for the Analogue 3D compare or contrast it with the MiSTer N64 core. Was this stipulated for access to a review units, I wonder?

It seems like the most obvious thing to compare a new device with the leading existing device that does the same thing. If it can't be in the review, maybe there can be another article to compare the two?

Edit: Euro Gamer mention MiSTer but offer no direct comparison. Digital Foundry have a short paragraph acknowledging what MiSTer can do.

@Mrakey it doesn't matter what you want, people can make whatever they want for whatever reason. Nothing is ever wasted, the lessons learned by the dev making this will make their next project even stronger. All power to them!

One question I had is... do they have permission to make this? Who owns the Vectrex trademark and ip, etc? No mention of it on the Kickstarter worries me.

@Crabbitsteve this is a magnitude cheaper, smaller, and probanly more reliable. I appreciate the original, but I just don't have the space or time to be bothered with old temperamental electronics. I'm happy to accept the modern substitute.

A friend who has a Vectrex saw this at an expo and says it's good.

@missingno_fgc check the latest videos of it running. I was concerned but not any more.

I missed the early birds, but got pre-order in. Going to be hell to wait for almost a year.

I want aware of the EA thing or the 87% blimey

Yeah back in the day I found the controls and criteria for that Driver tutorial very unforgiving.

This looks great. Hopefully it plays well.

Urgh. So disappointing.

I didn't back the Kickstarter book because at the time something felt off to me about the way it was written, hard to put my finger on what exactly, but it just didn't seem like the text itself was something I would enjoy reading. Anyway, I'm relieved about that now.

Obsolete Sony is run by somebody called Eddie, here's a video podcast interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xmtt_NUSto

Edit: Just did a search of my Twitter, after seeing that I'm blocked by Obsolete Sony, and found that back in December 2024 there were reports that an article by them about the Sony 43" CRT had the hallmarks of being wtitten by ai. I asked them to confirm/deny, but they never replied. https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/1871478067656613973

Edit 2: I also asked them about the source for the photos in the book. Also no reply. Maybe publisher @S4ndm4n can answer that one? https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/1859573999249805462

RetroArch can already do this, for years now. It translate either in place or as closed caption style.

Another vote for 640x480 (or multiple of) here too, it's the most sensible resolution for the majority of these old games

Who are PLAION REPLAI?

Word is it's not as good as the original. Too short and too easy. Can any shmup fans deny/confirm?

Chip Shot: Super Pro Golf...is an amazing game. Better than it has any right to be.

It influenced my way of making games a lot, from its procedurally generated holes, to drawing everything with circles/shapes. A really brilliant piece of programming.

I used both of those techniques in YOYOZO my "Best Games of 2023" and "Game of the Year" accolade winner, my Atari-award-winning game HERD NERD, and many more. Good ideas last forever.

But can I use it to mod my original Xbox? iykyk

@FR4M3 I know what they are. A licence violation would have been worth mentioning in the news report.

So they forked it and added some stuff of their own? Standard open source practice.

If they used ai to do it does that taint the work that was done on the emulator before they did that? What if Nintendo used ai in the new Super Mario Galaxy would that taint it? It's an interesting philosophical question. I don't have a good answer.

I see look and feel, but I see zero gameplay.

This is such crazy—and lazy—use of totally the wrong tool for the job. Really disappointing, and I'm glad people are taking them to talk on it. Have Taito responded?