JDPoZ

GameCube³

Is this the non-American cover? As an old Yankee, I may be forgetting a few things, but I remember the corner art (specifically the “only for” bit) looking different.

Edit: yep this is the one I remember :

https://images.nintendolife.com/b056f83e2b311/us.900x.jpg

Again, it’s a snowball effect.

Students and amateurs want to learn how to do something. Their choices are either - (sometimes) get an EDU address, fill out a form, apply for a discount or free version, see the watermark or lose a ton of functionality, and only see tutorials via classes or other a-la-carte method (how many folks are doing Houdini lessons online out there - probably not many if I had to guess considering Houdini’s price), or start paying $20/month for a program that they someday hope will allow them to earn money - knowing that if they stop paying, they lose access to files… OR…

They can download a program for free, that anyone can add stuff to, with thousands of really well done tutorials online on free places like YouTube, that studios will love because there’s no licensing fee or if there is - it’s only when they are really profitable or whatever.

The more that people use it, the more there are people doing tutorials, expanding functionality, etc.

Blender used to be garbage in like 2010, but now - you’d be an idiot not to grab a copy and teach yourself if you used to regular in apps like 3DS Max, Maya, or other premium closed application now requiring a bunch of DRM installers, license tiers, and subscriptions…

Same goes for Adobe’s stuff. I imagine there are more and more people sick of Creative Cloud’s garbage and are ready to find and learn and contribute to FOSS services… All that needs to happen is critical stupid event by bigwig, and suddenly a mass exodus begins.

I always go back to one of my favorite CollegeHumor vids literally making fun of that. 🤣

…which is why Godot now is quickly slipping into the niche that Unity largely used to be for.

And since Godot is FOSS, there is no going back for Unity once Indie game devs have shifted, since - like with Blender being free to use - it destroys the competition by becoming the defacto king when it comes to things like video tutorials - since the audience is less likely to be a niche of people willing to pay thousands for a license to an application they don’t yet have any professional reason to pay for. Being open source in any way also usually then leads to a snowball effect of gaining popularity and then people extending its functionality.

This is also what I think will soon happen to Plex with Jellyfin since the Plex bigwigs have decided they want to be Netflix more than people’s personal media server frontend.

All it will take is one big mistake and the ground will fall beneath their feet just like with Unity.

All fascinating and frustrating to watch as I used to work with Unity a ton since its early days.

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Leisure suit Larry is not really a parody like Conker was though, was it? I thought it was just a point and click adventure game with dirty jokes.

Forgive me, if I’m wrong on that. I actually have not really played the leisure suit Larry games. 

I think, Conker not only makes fun of platformer games and game mechanics in general, but directly references movies like Saving Private Ryan, the Alien franchise, and the Matrix. 

I guess it should have qualified it as a “major console release.”

A lot of early 3D console games - whether platformers or FPS games, have aged pretty poorly. Go try to play GoldenEye again and see how it feels compared to modern shooters. Really Super Mario 64 is kind of the outlier.

Conker and Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 are all cut from the same cloth at mid-90s Rare. The Xbox release version fixed a few things with Conker but broke others. Honestly Conker was one of the first “parody” type games (at least as major console releases went anyway) and it only works well if you have the nostalgia goggles to appreciate it as it existed in an era where if you wanted to play 3D platformers, you were mostly limited to baby games like Croc, Spyro, or the other Rare platformers.

My man. Now THIS person knows about CRT gaming. I’m merely an old man with limited time to research all this. Anyone talking about phosphor strips and halation and magnetic interference /gaussing probably knows their 💩.

I just know I like wearing the nostalgia goggles that add those artifacts my old eyes still hazily remember and weirdly prefer.

Man I’m such an old fart I prefer my emulated games appear using different era CRT shaders to accurately reflect the sort of TV connection I had access to when playing. Like emulating shittier RF for older NES games, S-Video for SNES - N64, and then component for PS1 - PS2 era.

Like… I enjoy playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out using a shader that makes it look like a shitty RF connection with inaccurate desaturated colors bleeding, interlace jitter, etc. I’m actually kinda wistful when I can’t see the preview channel 3 TV guide blending through the crappy connection. I almost want to see if someone has made a shader that could render in a YouTube stream of retro late 80s to early 90s TV at like 5% opacity to get the same effect I saw as a kid sitting 2 ft away from my old 16” Magnavox.

To be fair, that probably is a REALLY nice broadcast-grade CRT like a SONY BVM-20F1U or something… which most people did NOT have access to back in the day.

Hell, my wealthy buddy’s family had a “flat screen” (meaning the CRT didn’t have a curved face) SONY WEGA CRT in the mid-90s and I know it had S-Video, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t even have a component connection, let alone the quality aperture grille/shadow masking, or the contrast ratio that the BVMs did (because those things were at local TV news stations running 24/7).

In reality, there’s a bunch of differences with connection types providing various levels of quality and CRT display technology , but the accessibility that new TVs give us all to astoundingly good picture quality at a pretty reasonable price means we are living in a golden era for retro gaming if you know what you’re doing.

I’ll take my gigantic 4K OLED hooked up to a MiSTer with some great shaders rendering the sub-pixel effects a real CRT has to emulate this visual effect with run-ahead to minimize the latency + input lag over anything except a BVM-20F1U in near mint condition almost any other day of the week.

TL;DR - you can emulate those sub-pixel CRT era display technology display artifacts with a decent shader on a good 4K OLED, and probably spend less than you’d need to get almost the exact same visual effect with pretty much none of the pitfalls you get with old CRTs like massive electricity use, having to carry a 150-250lb CRT, hope it has no burn-in, decent remaining bulb life, etc.