Redkey

@Redkey@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Citizen Sleeper: A Compact, Sci-Fi Exploration of Survival at the Fringes of Space and Humanity⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  In communities for the Murderbot Diaries series of books, I sometimes see this game mentioned as a good fit for the feel of that universe. What I’ve seen in clips of playthroughs bears that out; I bought the game a while ago but haven’t gotten around to actually installing it yet.

  Anyway, I just wanted to shout out the Murderbot series as something that folks may be interested in if they enjoyed this game’s world and are looking for something to read.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you or anyone else is interested in playing more, I recommend:

  • Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (aka Director’s Cut). Not a continuation of the story of the first game, but a separate story in the same universe. Generally agreed to take everything good from the first game and improve upon it. The “Restless Dreams” version has a substantial extra scenario which adds some backstory and lore, but should probably be played only after completing the main game.
  • Silent Hill 3. This one does continue the story of the first game, somewhat. To be honest I remember enjoying it but not much in terms of particulars.
  • Silent Hill 4: The Room. Started out as a separate game unrelated to the Silent Hill mythos, but was rewritten to become an SH game during development. This sounds like it might be a terrible cash-in, but it really is a perfect fit for the SH universe. IMO almost as strong as SH2.
  • Silent Hill: 0rigins. A PSP game set as a prequel to the first game. A little light on story, and with some odd combat mechanics, but I still found it very enjoyable. I played the later PS2 port.
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. A “reimagining” of the story from the first game. It plays and feels very different to the previous games, but I still found it very engaging.
  • Silent Hill: Orphan. A series of point-and-click adventures for Java-enabled mobile phones from the 2000s. Totally different mechanics from the mainline games, but they do the atmosphere and story well if you don’t mind the slower pace of point-and-click. They run on some J2ME emulators.
  • Silent Hill: Alchemilla. A free fan-game centered on the Alchemilla Hospital, but also including several other locations. First-person view with many puzzles and no combat. Very polished and really nails the atmosphere.

  I played a little of Silent Hill: Homecoming but got tired of it about 1/3 of the way through (I guess). I also bought Silent Hill: Downpour but gave up on that even more quickly. I don’t recommend either of them. Things introduced in the earlier games for specific psychological reasons related to the plot - especially sexy monster nurses and Pyramid Head - tend to be regurgitated in the later games for no real reason other than “Silent Hill”, which removes their impact completely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game of the day - Return of the Obra Dinner - did you enjoy it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I was kinda in the same boat as you.

  In theory, I loved the fact that if you wanted to check, the game would tell you when you theoretically had enough information to identify one of the crew or passengers, so you knew where to focus your thinking. But I got stuck on some characters who seemed to me to be implied or hinted, but for whom I didn’t think I had positive proof.

  I eventually got tired of continuously reviewing the same scenes over and over, looking for some detail that I had overlooked, and read a walkthrough to find out what I was missing. It seems that I hadn’t missed anything, and “an educated guess” was the standard expected by the game, not “definitive proof”. But I was burnt out with the game by that point and stopped playing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gorogoa, video game equivalent of an LSD trip⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  LSD: Dream Emulator must also rank up there, surely? :)

  Gorogoa has been on my “pile of shame” for several years now. Perhaps today’s the day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jade Empire, the prototype for Mass Effect⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The morality system was a huge disappointment for me. You said most of what I wanted to say, so I’ll be brief.

  Right near the start of the game, an NPC outlines the Way of the Open Palm vs. the Way of the Closed Fist, more or less the same way you described them. And I was so excited to see a morality system in which both sides were morally defensible positions. But from the very first Closed Fist follower you meet (just minutes later), they may as well all be monacle-wearing moustache-twirlers who punctuate every sentence with “mwah-ha-ha!”

  The worst example that I remember is a bootlegger who’s essentially holding a town hostage. Far from following either philosophy as described, he’s just plain evil, and in fact I easily came up with (IMO solid) arguments for actually swapping the game’s morality labels on the player’s options. But no, one option is clearly “evil”, so that’s Closed Palm, while the other is obviously “good”, hence Open Palm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help identifying my dreamcast⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re quite right! I didn’t notice that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help identifying my dreamcast⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Many special editions of the Dreamcast were released over the years, in a variety of different colours. However, every special edition Dreamcast that I’ve seen has had some other visual change besides just the colour.

  Looking at the pictures, I suspect that your console has just been put into a replacement aftermarket shell. However, if the bottom half of the console is solid grey, and there’s a pale yellow limited edition number sticker on the back, then you have a quite rare Code: Veronica (Claire version) console. I’m guessing that if the sticker was there, though, you wouldn’t be here asking about it, as it’s a real giveaway.

  That being said, it still looks cool, but I don’t think it’s going to command an especially high price or anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Saudi man earns world record for 444 game consoles hooked to one TV⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder when he last sat down and really played a game for an afternoon. Now that everything is plugged in and ready to go at the push of a few (spreadsheet-tracked) buttons, he has finally overcome all the difficulty of switching consoles and can now play through all the games he’s been wanting to play. Right? Right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What stick should I get?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, your request is unrealistic. Bluetooth shouldn’t be too much of a problem, either built-in or with a dongle, but a stick that can emulate much of anything from the PS2 library is going to be ridiculously expensive compared to other options. I’m not aware of any Fire Stick, however new, that could do it. The majority of sticks are good for up to 16-bit, and quite a few that are at the upper end of the sane price range will stretch to PS1, some N64 and Saturn, and maybe even some Dreamcast and PSP.

  If you have to have PS2, I’d really recommend going for a micro-pc or high-end Android box if it absolutely has to be as small as possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ATOM Collectible Keychain Controller Is A New Miniature Marvel From CRKD | Retro Dodo⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Worse than companies that release doodads virtually identical to things that have been cranked out of Shenzen factories for years as “new and unique” products, are news sites that go along with them.

  I’ve tried a couple of things like this over the years and none of them has been very useable. They’re just too small to really hold comfortably, but also, what do you do with your phone while you’re holding this with two hands? Putting it on a stand on a table is possible in a cafe or library, but not on the train or standing in line.

  Most phone controllers seem to fall into one of two categories; either too small to really use (and with no way to attach them to a phone) like this, or huge, ergonomic things with clips or stretching middles that are too big and bulky to carry everywhere for unexpected gaming time. I have found two small-ish, square-ish controllers with clips and the full, standard range of buttons that work for me (not so small they cramp my hands, not so big and oddly-shaped that I can’t throw them in my bag and forget about them), but I think they’re both out of production now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anybody tried one of these RPi based N64 cart dumpers off Aliexpress?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a bit odd, but I don’t have more than a passing familiarity with the N64’s library and I still got it on the first guess. If you know the N64 library inside-out and you can’t place it, it’s the Japanese cartridge for a famous worldwide release.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Only ever played OOoT, MM, and WW. Just ordered an Analogue Pocket. Suggest an order.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Swap the positions of Minish Cap and Link to the Past, then play them from the bottom up.

  I’m not sure if that’s the actual release order, but it feels like the right “progression” to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gamecube, PS2 and Wii just chilling in the evening sun. This picture just kinda happened, I thought you would appreciate it too.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When the Wii launched, a few pundits called it “two GameCubes taped together”, which I thought was a bit rude and overly dismissive.

  Years later, I started really looking into the technical side of things, and oh my goodness it really is almost two GameCubes taped together. I mean, it works wonderfully and I’m not knocking it, but IIRC the majority of what’s under the hood is either an upgraded version of what was in the GCN, or a doubling of the capacity (in some cases literally two) of the same component.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨dues ex and disco elysium : and ps plus catalog discussion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not a really big thing, but it is a pet peeve of mine (and some others); the name of the series isn’t “Dues Ex” but “Deus Ex” (day-us ex), as in “deus ex machina” (day-us ex mack-in-a).

  “Deus ex machina” literally translates as “God from (the) machine”, and originally referred to a type of stage prop used in ancient plays, then in more modern times the term came to refer more generally to the sort of plot device that used that prop, which is a previously unmentioned person or thing that suddenly appears to save the heroes from an otherwise inescapable threat. At some time in the 60s or 70s it started to become popular to use it in a more literal sense in sci-fi stories about machine intelligence or cyborgs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Banjo Kazooie Meets Zelda: Wind Waker in N64 Mod⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone like me who doesn’t already know how this (apparently) works, the only place I eventually found the file was via a Mega link in the description of the matching video on the modder’s YouTube channel. The thumbnail has the word "DOWNLOAD’ written across it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's honestly good advice, but I much prefer original hardware when possible.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s nothing wrong with wanting to stick to original hardware, if you already have it or can afford to buy it.

  Setting up a Pi or other single-board system as a dedicated retro game emulator is also an absolutely valid choice IMO. It’s a fun, generally affordable little project that you can tinker with forever, e.g. changing cases and controllers, UI tweaks, ROM file organization, per-game settings optimization. But I don’t think that it’s ever been the “best” emulation option for anyone who didn’t already have their heart set on “doing something fun and interesting with a Pi”.

  The smartphone you already have, dedicated retro gaming handhelds, Android TV boxes or sticks, and cheap/secondhand/already-owned PCs (desktop, notebook, or kiosk) all arguably match or exceed the performance and value-for-money of any Pi-based system.

  Yet in any thread where someone new to emulation is asking for advice, there’s always a flock of folks who suggest getting a Pi like it’s the only game in town. It honestly baffles me a little. Especially because almost all of them are just running a pretty frontend over Retroarch, and Retroarch is available for virtually every modern consumer computing platform (and so are a lot of pretty frontends, if that’s a selling point).

  For context, I’ve got a dozen or so retro systems, but I prefer to emulate as much as possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hamster Will Release VS. Valkyrie’s Adventure: Legend of the Key of Time As The Newest Arcade Archives Game On Switch | Retro Gaming News 24/7⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  After watching some of a playthrough on YouTube, the PC Engine version looks fairly close to the original arcade game (also called Valkyrie no Densetsu/Legend of the Valkyrie). The Famicom game (called Valkyrie no Boken: Toki no Kagi no Densetsu/Valkyrie’s Adventure: Legend of the Key of Time) is very different. The two games really only share the title (sort of) and a little backstory.

  Legend of the Valkyrie is an on-rails multi-direction shooting game with light RPG elements. The most similar games I can think of are the D&D beat-em-up games Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara, which were also originally arcade games.

  But the Famicom’s Valkyrie’s Adventure is a ridiculously open world action RPG. The player is dropped in the middle of the wilderness with a sword and no idea of what to do first. You’re free to walk in any direction, like most home 2D action RPGs. There’s virtually no text, and many “puzzles” which involve using particular items in particular one-tile spaces (without any clues or hints). There’s a guide in the original Famicom manual that will get you part-way through the game, but from there you’re on your own.

  This is another very odd choice for a Switch re-release, but I guess that’s the point of this series. At least this game has a small fan following (in Japan, anyway).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duke Nukem's Co-Creator Reveals Old Pitch For 'Big Trouble In Little China' Game⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That sounds similar to the actual game that was released for 8-bit home computers at the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Van Buren Recreated: Canceled Fallout Game Revived by Modders⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I just wanted to say that I checked the site yesterday on two different devices, and there was no link (the relevant text was visible, but not a link).

  I happened to look again today, and now the link is available on both devices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What YouTube channels discuss Atari video games?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Zero Page Homebrew. That guy is absolutely on top of Atari homebrew. Every relase, demo, and announcement, as far as I can see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Genesis Virtua Racing Port Almost Cost As Much As The Console Itself, Thanks To The SVP Chip | Time Extension⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried it somehow back in the day (it might’ve been in a store) and it was absolutely amazing. Noticeably more polygons and higher frame rate than SuperFX games. The price was crazy, though. IIRC in Australia it was close to twice the price of an average Mega Drive game (like 1.7 or 1.8 times). As a kid that was way too much for me, especially for what was (aside from the 3D graphics) a very ordinary racing game (not really my taste even in the best case).

  Several years ago I picked up a copy in Japan for just 100 yen. I didn’t particularly want the game per se, but knowing some of the history that OP outlined, I couldn’t pass it up at that price! However, even with retro game prices shooting up in recent years, the price of Virtua Racing for MD doesn’t seem to have ballooned as much as many other games, at least in Japan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here's why modern gaming suuuuucks.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  People are writing a lot of things that I agree with, but I want to chime in with two points.

  The first, which one or two other commenters have touched on, is that in 2024 we have approximately 50 years of content already in existence. There’s no need to limit ourselves to what’s been released in the last 12 months. Classic books, music, plays, and movies stay popular for decades or centuries. Why feel shamed out of playing old games by 12-year-olds and the megacorps?

  The second thing is, yes, try indie games, and IMO the best place to find them is for PCs on itch.io. Forget 95% of what’s marketed as “indie” on consoles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zelda II Has Been Ported To The SNES | Time Extension⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It looks like they took it down themselves and uploaded a revised version. It’s there on their user page.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poor Sega just didn't get the timing right.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately I think that Sega themselves weren’t the only group lacking confidence in the Dreamcast. In fact, I feel like they put up a valiant fight, with marketing and first-party titles.

  Critics and consumers all had an extremely “wait and see” attitude that I think took the theoretical advantage of the incredibly early launch and turned it into a huge liability. People didn’t want to commit to buying their next console without seeing what the other offers were going to be. So Sega had to work hard for about two years to keep the real and actually available Dreamcast positioned high in the market while their competitors had the luxury of showing jaw-dropping demos of “potential” hardware (i.e. “Here is some video produced on $50,000 graphics workstation hardware that is made by the same company that’s currently in talks to produce our GPU.”)

  Third-party publishers also didn’t want to put any serious budget toward producing games for the Dreamcast, because they didn’t want to gamble real money on the install base increasing. This resulted in several low-effort PS1 ports that made very little use of the Dreamcast hardware, which in turn lowered consumer opinion of the console. When some of these games were later ported to PS2 as “upgraded” or “enhanced” versions, that only further entrenched the poor image of the Dreamcast.

  I have owned all four major consoles of that generation since they were still having new games published for them. And if I had to choose only one console to keep from that group, it’d be the PlayStation 2, because of the game library. It’s huge and varied. I have literally hundreds of games for it, while I only have a few dozen games for the others. But looking at the average quality of the graphics and sound in the games for those systems, I’d also rank the PS2 in last place, even behind the DC.

  Sony was a massive juggernaut in the console gaming market at the time. The PlayStation 1 had taken the worldwide market by storm, and become the defacto standard console. It’s easy to forget that the console launches for this generation were unusually spaced out over a four year period, and Sony was the company best positioned to turn that to their favour. People weren’t going to buy a DC without seeing the PS2, but once they did, many were happy to buy a PS2 without waiting for Nintendo or Microsoft to release their consoles. The added ability to play DVDs at exactly the time when that market was hitting its stride (and more affordably than many dedicated DVD players) absolutely boosted their sales in a big way. Nintendo’s GameCube didn’t do that, and by the time the original X-Box came to market, it wasn’t nearly as much of a consideration.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poor Sega just didn't get the timing right.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They did, but apparently everyone has forgotten how prevalent swap discs and modchips were.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poor Sega just didn't get the timing right.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.

  Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour.

  You make it sound trivial. While Sega left a security hole open for games to be loaded from a regular CD, the official games were released on GD-ROMs, a dual-layer CD with a 1.2 GB capacity.

  So first off, you couldn’t read them completely in a regular CD-ROM or even DVD-ROM drive. (I’m not counting the “swap” method because it’s failure-prone and involves partially dismantling the drive and fiddling with it during operation.) You had to connect your console to a computer and use some custom software to read the GD-ROM on the console, and send the data over.

  Once you had the data, you then had the problem of trying to fit a potentially 1.2 GB GD-ROM image onto a regular CD-ROM. A handful of games were actually small enough to fit already, and 80-minute and 99-minute CD-Rs would work in the DC and could store larger games. But for many games, crackers had to modify the game files to make them fit.

  Often they would just strip all the music first, because that was an easy way to save a decent amount of space. Then if that wasn’t enough, they would start stripping video files, and/or re-encoding audio and textures at lower fidelity.

  Burning a CD-R from a downloaded file was easy, but ripping the original discs and converting them to a burnable image generally was not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Modder releases Unix-like operating system for the NES⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nope, it was very much seen as only a console, despite the naming, Family BASIC, FDS, other peripherals, etc. I’ve been living in Japan for years with a keen interest in retro gaming/computing, and FC is never mentioned in the same breath as PC-88/MSX/FM/etc. By the by, on the rare occasions that it’s mentioned, the SC-3000 is also lumped in with the consoles rather than the home computers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Capcom and GOG join forces to release the original Resident Evil™ trilogy!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Colour me double-surprised! Not only is it available for purchase in Japan, but also the descriptions for the individual games even have full Japanese translations, right down to the system requirements!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have win7 laptop. What to play on it?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The same places you get old console games. Online auction and classifieds sites, and thrift stores, mostly. Flea markets and garage sales too, but they’re more hit-and-miss.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have win7 laptop. What to play on it?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Back in the olden days, when we used kerosene-powered computers and it took a three day round trip to get IP packets via the local stagecoach mail delivery, we still had games even though Steam didn’t exist yet. :b

  We used to transfer software on these things called disks. Some of them were magnetic, and some of them used lasers (you could tell them apart because for the laser ones it was usually spelled “disc” with a “c”).

  Anyway, those dis(k/c)s mostly still work, and we still have working drives that can read them, and because the brilliant idea of making software contact the publisher to ask if it was OK to run had only just been invented, we can generally still play games from the period that way. Some people kept their old games, but others sell them secondhand, which I believe the publishers still haven’t managed to lobby successfully to be made illegal, unless I missed a news report.

  Even if you can’t get the original physical media for a game, sites like GOG sell legal digital downloads of many old games, which are almost always just the actual old software wrapped in a compatibility layer of some kind that is easy to remove, so you can usually get the games running natively on period hardware/software. Finally, some nicer developers and publishers have officially declared some of their old games as free for everyone to play.

  There are still legal options for playing old games on old systems.