_NetNomad

you spend most of your time “hopping on a quick call,” replying to an email reiterating what you said last time, and doing the needful

calling these “game boy clones” isn’t quite right because they don’t take physical cartridges, but this is a real shame. companies like them and Miyoo and Retroid have been carving out a nice niche of gaming devices between a fully locked down console and a Whole Ass Personal Computer but this tariff situation is gonna kill them in their tracks stateside

i’m definitely gonna wait until hori releases a joycon 2 pro set or whatever before getting a switch 2. even just the regular joycons are an ergonomic nightmare, and my hands are fucked up to the point where that makes the difference between whether or not i can play for more than five minutes. and even if they release a better mouse, if it’s not a vertical mouse then it’s the same issue. you’d think with the huge role computer inout devices play in out daily lives, ergonomics would be a bigger focus by everyone across the board!

longs

I’m reminded of that onion article, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made An Excellent Point.” on one hand, as an independant musician who has many friends in different artistic fields, we all agree IP law is a net negative for us all. the threat of wrongly being accused of copyright infingement and being punished for it is very real, whereas the threat of having our work stolen is non-existant and wouldn’t matter anyway because we’re making fuck-all money in the first place. and the fact that we can’t legally iterate on existing music the way humans have for as long as we’ve had music until very recently is just criminal. it makes me absolutely sick

on the other hand, if IP law exists to protect small creators but in actuality protects corporate interests, and suddenly corporate interests think IP is bad, then we should be very worried. i said earlier that the threat of our work being stolen is minimal because we’re not making money, but with all this generative AI bullcrap, they’re using our art as raw fuel to displace artists entirely and burn the planet to a crisp. it makes me even more sick

not for nothing, the one-standard-multiple-manufactuters thing has been done before with sony and microsoft both involved. the real truth of this article is that the people yearn for MSX

joking aside i’d love to see something like that come back, because you get the convienence of a set standard that makes games Just Work like they do on consoles while offering way more options to consumers. i guess once the floodgates open on third party steamOS machines we’ll be halfway there

i definitely agree with the sentiment, but “USians” looks very awkward and “youessians” is even more awkard to say. i’d rather get rid of the name america altogether, both for the country and the two continents, and use indigenous names for everything instead of honoring someone involved in early colonization. granted there are many indigenous languages between both continents so finding something that works for and respects everyone might be difficult but if we could it’s two birds with one stone

i’m personally the other way around- i live for FM soundtracks and can’t stand how muffled the SNES sounds compared to even other sample-based systems. beauty is in the… ear? of the beholder

despite my love for the Saturn, there’s no denying that between it’s bizzaro architecture and short lifespan to make way for the Dreamcast, it ended up leaving a lot on the table. thankfully the homebrew community is picking up more and more speed

if you’ll stretch the definition of console to include computers, the MSX Turbo-R is another example. it was an 8-bitter but with a souped-up, faster z80 meant to at least give it a fighting chance against the onalaught of 16-bitters, but the few games it’s known for are all RPGs that look great but don’t exactly flex the speed of the new processor. and while the MSX homebrew scene is massive and still pumping out games by the dozen, the Turbo-R is a rare target for new games with it still commanding 1000+ USD prices. someday!

as i understand it prices varied widely because ROM size was a huge factor, so a massive jrpg and a smaller superfx game could cost the same amount. i’d be very suprised if any developers just ate the cost of it considering the chip shortages of the mid 90s

it’s a shame that this period of chaos at SEGA ended up giving console add-ons such a bad name. people were willing to shell out for add-ons in the cartridge, with how well SuperFX games did even though you were essentially buying the same upgrade over and over. people were and still are happy to buy mid-generation refreshes too like the DSi or the Master System even though if they already had the system they had to essentially buy it again. add-ons like this are more consumer friendly and more environmentally friendly

the reason they don’t combine into the worst no no word is because of an integer overflow

at least with influential you can argue that Shenmue influenced a lot of major games in the pop culture even today (although none quite as popular as Minecraft) even if it itself is a bit obscure. last year they declared Lara Croft the most iconic video game character or something like that and that one i can’t quite figure out from any angle

i’m pretty excited. i was disappointed by 8 and disapointed even more when we got it again on Switch instead of a new installment, with . one of the main things that bugged me was the kart customization that felt more like picking nerfs than buffs. having that eliminated alone makes the game 10x more appealing, and then this new rally mode seals the deal for me

…aside from the price like everyone else is saying. i’ll gladly get it used, but if we all wait for it to go on sale used, there won’t be any used copies to buy used! the comments in the gameplay streams nintendo did today where flooded with demands to drop the prices so i think everyone is on the same page. it’ll be interesting to see in the coming months if nintendo budges

Air Ride’s big differentiator was it’s City Trial mode, where instead of racing you drove around a city collecting upgrades and after a certain period of time only then do you race (or fight or do a minigame). the new Mario Kart’s free roam mode has some overlap with that conceptually but maybe it was a late enough addition and Air Riders was too far along to scrap or something, or maybe City Trial isn’t the focus of the new game and they’re trading places. it’ll be interesting to see!

people being nice online? god forbid!!!

i think gunpei yokoi called it “lateral thinking with withered technology” or something like that. it’s a lesson i wish the rest of the industry would learn- even “weak” computers today are capable of incredible things and we could be passing those savings to the customer or spending the extra budget on actual innovation Wii-style but no! more triangles!

while i wouldn’t go that far, there are people out there who would call the 3DS remakes retro now

i’ve seen a few pictures like this before but it only just dawned on me- why is the card 3dge connector for mega drive and 32X games the same? you’d think even if it was all the same signals they’d add a few duds to the 32X card slot so that you don’t try to plug a 32X into a 32X or a 32X game into a mega drive. even a piece of plastic like the ones used to keep 3DS carts from being inserted into a DS would get the job done. i guess they wanted you to always leave the 32X in even when playing standard games?

“i don’t understand, we trained it on hours of the anime and it keeps using electric moves on rhydon!”