Redkey

@Redkey@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨similar to the word of mouth post, what game did you not expect much from but loved it?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Die Hard (for the NES)

  Warning: You MUST read the manual!

  At first glance it might look like a simple top-down scrolling shooter like Commando or The Chaos Engine, but it’s so much more. It’s very free and open, with seven floors to explore, and once the in-game timer ends you must go to the 30th floor for the final showdown. The thing is that there are a few ways both to pick off the terrorists singly or in pairs, and to extend the time limit. If you just hide in some corner of the building and wait for the timer to run out, you’re going to get mown down by 30 armed terrorists in a fairly small space. But if you’re good you can use that time to wipe out almost all of the terrorists, leaving only the leader Hans himself to face you, which is much more manageable.

  Die Hard wasn’t high on my list at all when I first played it in the 1990s, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s still one of my all-time favourites. But ever since AVGN did a video on it, it’s become popular to dump on it.

  Most “complaints” that I see about this game either show that the person hasn’t actually played it for themselves at all, or are solved by reading the manual. Funnily enough, in that AVGN video he even says something like “Maybe this would make sense if I read the manual, but f*** that, who reads manuals?”

  The only negative thing I have to say is that IMO the “foot power” meter, which affects movement speed, runs out a bit too quickly even when you walk everywhere instead of running. That being said, I’ve only noticed it on later replays, and I don’t recall it being a problem the first time I played it all those years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Overlord 1 & 2, being the bad guy can be fun!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I bought these… holy macaroni, 16 years ago. I played the first one for a little while but then stopped. I don’t remember why, so most likely it was just that something else caught my attention.

  It might be time to have another look.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Setting up a DOS/Win98 system for gaming⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that when RHoI wrote “3D”, they meant “hardware accelerated 3D”. Many early 3D DOS games either did their 3D entirely in software, or supported hardware acceleration support as a kind of optional bonus. Software 3D shouldn’t give DOSBox much more trouble than most 2D games. The original release of Quake didn’t even have any accelerator support; it was patched in later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sell or keep 2600 heavy sixer woodgrain?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A tiny number of original releases don’t run properly or at all on some 2600 Juniors or 7800s, due to a reliance on quirks that were changed in later versions of the graphics chip. Probably not a major issue for classic collecting, but if you’re interested in modern homebrew, it could be worth considering.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Finally got a Gensis (Megadrive) after years of wanting one!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, Zero Tolerance is amazing from a technical standpoint, and a solid gaming experience as it goes, but I personally felt it dragged on for too long without enough variation. Then again I felt about the same regarding the original Doom and Doom 2, so it’s probably more my tastes than the game itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Finally got a Gensis (Megadrive) after years of wanting one!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So many great games. Some of my favourites (mostly action RPGs, exclusives marked *):

  • Landstalker*
  • The Story of Thor*
  • Wonderboy in Monster World (* virtually an exclusive)
  • Soleil*
  • Flashback
  • The Immortal
  • Quackshot*
  • Light Crusader*
  • Arcus Odyssey
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2* (the other main games are good too, but this is my favourite)
  • Desert Strike and Jungle Strike (I don’t remember playing Urban Strike, but it got excellent reviews)
  • The Lost Vikings
  • Sword of Vermillion*
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Check out this ultra-tiny Game Boy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Alas, that’s already the name of a game engine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What first emulation handheld would you recommend?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re not going to jailbreak a New 3DS (probably my choice if I was focusing on DS and 3DS games, because those real dual screens make a difference), then why not just get a controller to use with the smartphone you probably already have in your pocket? Even a mid-range smartphone will match or beat most inexpensive handhelds for retro game emulation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There's a brand new Dreamcast game that's out, called Mute Crimson, and it's free⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why not? I think it’s just an interesting side project fo the dev. This is a port of the original version for modern home computers, so it’s not like they’re limiting their audience.

  But I would suggest that while it should be possible to make a good adaptation for 3rd generation systems (NES etc.), you’re not going to be able to make a substantially similar product until you reach at least the 5th generation (PlayStation etc.), and perhaps not even then. The blurry parallax backgrounds, high number of particles, and level of detail make it necessary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Last Tokens⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Outside the major cities, at least, video arcades in Japan are still hanging on in 2025 with a mix of games. There are a lot of pseudo-gambling token games (think prize tickets), crane-style prize games, and simple, highly physical games (big buttons and levers, controller and body tracking) aimed at the 5-to-10-year-old segment.

  In terms of things we’d recognize as “real” games, almost everything is groups of locally networked terminals with some kind of physical gimmick that doesn’t translate well to a home experience. There are still some racing games, music games, and the like, with uncommon controllers and layouts, but the most common format right now is probably a flat table with an embedded screen that has some way of scanning and tracking collectible trading cards. The cards aren’t just scanned in once for use and then put aside, but actually moved around the table as tokens within the game. Obviously there are “Magic” style games, but also RPGs (both turn-based and action), MOBAs, real-time strategy, and more. Horse racing games are also popular, but to be clear, the players don’t “ride” the horses; they raise, trade, manage, and “bet” on them, and watch simulated races.

  And these days almost everything uses player profiles saved to IC cards, ranked across the country and sometimes even the world.

  Occasionally you’ll see four or six of the old sit-down “city” style cabinets (like the ones pictured in the article) in a corner, running 1-on-1 fighting games, but those are mainly found in the specifically “retro” arcades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your preferred way of buying games? (digital/physical/physical digital)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My main concern is getting games in a form that I can store locally for 20 years and then reasonably expect to boot up and play. A secondary concern (ever since I moved permanently to another country) is going digital whenever possible because shipping stuff long distances is expensive. I had hundreds of physical books that it pained me to give away, but it simply wasn’t economical to move them to my new home. I kept my physical games, CDs, and DVDs, because they’re mostly thin discs and air-filled plastic cases (often replaceable once paper inserts have been removed) and I was able to bring them over affordably.

  Over the last few years I’d say I’ve slowed down on physical retro collecting and only bought a couple dozen retro console games. More often I sail the high seas looking for them because morally there’s no sane argument decades after release that paying $50-100 to a private collector or dealer today has any impact on the developer’s or publisher’s profits in terms of secondary or tertiary sales. The physical game media and packaging have ceased to be games and have become artifacts, almost independent of their content, like other vintage or antique items. Of course that doesn’t apply if the game has been rereleased in more or less its original form, in which case I either buy it (if the price is reasonable) or don’t play it at all (if the price is unreasonable). I actually have such a game in digital storage that I’ve been meaning to play for years, and I learned that it’s quite recently been put up in GOG, so now I’m morally obligated to buy it if I still want to play it, heh. Luckily for me the price seems fair.

  And speaking of GOG, the majority of my recent game purchases have been split pretty evenly between GOG and itch.io; about 95%. I basically haven’t bought anything directly from Steam for more than a decade. I understand that many games there are actually DRM-free, but I’m not interested in trying to research every game before I make a purchase. If each game’s store page indicated its true DRM status clearly (not just “third-party DRM”), I’d consider buying through Steam again. As it is, whenever I learn about an interesting game that’s on Steam, I try to find it on itch.io or GOG, and if I can’t, I generally don’t buy it; I’ll buy it on Steam only if it looks really interesting and it’s dirt cheap.

  Whenever I look at buying “leasing with no fixed term” anything with DRM, I assume that it will be taken away from me or otherwise rendered unusable unexpectedly at some point in the future through no fault of my own. It’s already happened to me a couple of times, and once bitten, twice shy. I know that everyone loves Gabe Newell, and he seems like a genuinely good guy, and he’s said that if Steam ever closed its doors that they’d unlock everything. However the simple fact is that in the majority of situations where that might happen, the call wouldn’t be up to Gaben, even for games published by Valve.

  So yeah, I may put up with DRM in a completely offline context, but in any situation where my access terms can be changed remotely and unilaterally with a forced update, server shutdown, or removal, that’s a hard pass from me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Renovation was right—and we're ahead of schedule⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Gain Ground and Arcus Odyssey both got many hours of play on my Mega Drive back in the day. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Old School Rally scratched our ‘90s arcade racing itch... then promptly disappeared⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe we could treat the appearances of recognizable, non-living entities in games (cars, buildings, airplanes, etc.) the same way we treat musical scores; the producer would be legally obligated to pay some reasonable, small, fixed fee per use to the original creator, and that creator wouldn’t be allowed to object. And this wouldn’t entitle the producer to use any trademarked brand or model name, just the form.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Wii The Size Of A Game Boy Cartridge Finally Released Open Source⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the Gameboy logo check and the actual display of the logo happen separately, there were ways to pass the check while still displaying a different logo on the screen. Given that I bought cartridges from major retailers that did this, I’m guessing that Nintendo either didn’t know about them, or didn’t like their odds in court.

  Sega was doing something conceptually similar around the same time, and that did get tested at trial (Sega vs. Acclaim), where the court ruled that Sega could go suck a lemon. So there’s some doubt as to whether any of this is enforceable anyway, although Sega kept including a similar system in their hardware up to and including the Dreamcast.

  Of course, a company as large as Nintendo could just bankrupt a lot of smaller companies with legal fees via delaying tactics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the games you played in your youth that you still play today?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Apparently the original game and Brood War expansion are free to install through the Battle.Net launcher these days.

  If you have the original discs, the later official patches added the ability to copy the “mpq” files from the CD into the game’s directory, so you no longer need the disc in the drive. Of course, you’re still going to need a drive for the initial installation. That should work for single player (it’s been a few years since I last did it) but I don’t know about online multiplayer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hypothesis: Modern retro-inspired indies are much more enjoyable than the retro games themselves⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t kept up with anime much for many years now, but I can easily imagine that this is the case. There had been mecha anime with angsty pilots and behind-the-scenes politics before, but Evangelion pushed it all to a whole new level by adding mysticism and psychological dread into the mix. I know that almost immediately following the initial release of Evangelion we got Gasaraki and RahXephon, both of which bear obvious influences from Evangelion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hypothesis: Modern retro-inspired indies are much more enjoyable than the retro games themselves⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a mini movie night with two colleagues, one is around middle age like me, and the other in their twenties. We were going through some DVDs and Blurays, and Die Hard came up. We two older folks said we liked it but the younger said that they’d never seen it. Well obviously we had to watch it right then.

  Afterward, the young colleague said they found the movie boring and unoriginal. Talking it over, we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.

  Although I haven’t played it myself, to read someone saying that Ultima 4 is derivative and lacking in originality feels a lot like that experience with Die Hard. Additionally, I think that the real old games usually expect a level of imagination and willingness to put up with discomfort that even I sometimes find a little offputting in 2025, despite the fact that I grew up with many of those games and had no issues with them at the time. If I don’t remind myself of it, it can be easy to forget that old hardware wasn’t limited only in audio-visual power, but also storage size and processing power.

  I still search through old games, but I’m looking for ideas that maybe didn’t work well or hit the market right the first time, but still deserve further consideration, especially in light of technological advantages that have happened in the intervening years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Resident Evil fans, meet your Victorian cousin⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I played this on PS2 and I remember thinking at the time that it was extremely adequate. As you say, the reviews at the time were lukewarm but I think it’s worth a look for anyone trying scratch that itch who’s already finished the bigger names in the genre.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does Super Metroid get any better?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never played the GBA games, and I still found Super Metroid bland.

  I didn’t have an NES or SNES growing up, so I came to those games a little later on. However, Super Metroid was still the most recent game in the franchise when I played it. There were plenty of rave reviews even then, so I looked forward to playing it once I got my hands on a copy. I even bought a new controller for it.

  Initially I actually found the game somewhat frustrating, but once I got used to Samus’ momentum and how the game had been designed to be played, I found it to be very well balanced. But I never felt like there was any real reason for me to go on other than to open new areas. Since it wasn’t referenced in any way (that I noticed) outside of the manual, “The Mission” didn’t seem important. And while the graphics were gorgeous for the time (and still are), that wasn’t enough for me. People often talk about the haunting and creepy feeling of the game’s world, but I didn’t get that. I felt that way about the Prime games, but Super Metroid just seemed empty and abandoned to me, not atmospheric.

  A few years ago I was able to play AM2R and stuck to it all the way to the end, even 100-percenting it, and enjoying it thoroughly. But I don’t think I ever finished Super Metroid. I just put it down one day and never got back to it. And I don’t feel like it’s something I need to tick off some gaming bucket list. If you’re not really enjoying it, stop playing and don’t feel bad about it. There are already more good games in the world than anyone can complete before they die. You can’t play them all, so stick to the ones that resonate with you personally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kool-Aid Man (1983) for the Atari 2600⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been trying to research the various glitches and variations between versions because I’m working on something that uses some undocumented features and precise timing. Unfortunately, I don’t have one good link that explains it well.

  The issue stems from how player objects (the 2600 equivalent to sprites) are placed horizontally. For good and interesting reasons which are also technically involved and complicated, programmers can’t just send an X value to the graphics chip. Instead there’s a two-step process. First, the program sends a signal to the graphics chip when the TV raster is at approximately the desired horizontal position on the screen. Then, because it’s often not possible to nail the timing of that signal to the exact pixel position, the graphics chip has a facility to “jog” the various graphical objects left or right by a very small amount at a time.

  According to the official programmers’ documentation, this final “jog” should only be done at one specific time during each video scanline. If we only do it this way, it works correctly on pretty much every version of the console. However, doing it “correctly” also introduces a short black line at the left side of that scanline. If we instead send the “jog” signal at certain other times, no black line appears. Additionally, the exact distances moved change depending on when we send the signal, which can be worked around or are sometimes even beneficial.

  Kool-Aid Man uses these undocumented “jog” timings, as several games did. But it displays a score counter at the top of the screen by using the player objects placed very close together. It seems that the console versions in question (later 2600 Juniors and some 7800s) are more sensitive to the timing being used, as you can sometimes see the parts of the score flicking left or right by one pixel.

  The Atari 2600 also has a hardware collision detection system, which reports when any two moving screen objects overlap with each other or the background. Once a collision occurs, the relevant flag will stay set until the program clears it. Kool-Aid Man uses this system to detect when the player character touches enemies. But the program only clears the collision flags once, at the bottom of each frame, and the same player objects are used to draw the score. So when the two parts of the score flicker into each other, it registers as a collision between player objects, which the game interprets as a collision between Kool-Aid Man and a Thirsty.

  As you mentioned, I’ve read that setting the console switches a certain way can prevent this issue, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that setting some switches one way rather than another causes a conditional branch instruction that checks the switches to branch rather than fall through, which takes one extra instruction cycle (or vice versa), which is then enough to stabilize the score display and stop the parts from colliding.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kool-Aid Man (1983) for the Atari 2600⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a… not exactly a bug, but an unannounced change, in the graphics chip in some later versions of the Atari 2600, which has been named after this game by the fan/homebrew community. On most 2600 console versions, it’s possible for a game to perform a particular graphics operation at an unintended time and get an undocumented but consistent and useful result.

  On the differing consoles, the result is slightly different, and because of the way this game is written, it often causes a chain of actions that end up making Kool-Aid Man bounce around continuously as if being hit by enemies, even though nothing is touching him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When all you have (or you try to convince others that all they need) is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I guess this shows that it isn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Batocera] Is there any way to enable multiplayer gaming on Game Boy Advance using two locally connected controllers?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As a handheld console, the GBA hardware was explicitly designed to support exactly one player. To play multiplayer GBA games on real hardware, either the game must have some kind of “hotseat” mode, or you need to have multiple consoles connected via link cables.

  A “hotseat” game should run just fine on an emulator without any tweaking, so I’m guessing that’s not what you want.

  That means you’re wanting to emulate multiple GBAs at once. But RetroArch is designed to run only one instance of one emulator at a time. I’m somewhat surprised to learn (although I suppose I shouldn’t have been) that someone has created a RetroArch core that emulates two Gameboys/Gameboy Colors at once. But it doesn’t look like anyone’s done the same for the GBA. So AFAIK your only option is to have two separate Batocera devices (one for each GBA) connected over a network (if that’s possible with your Pi and the emulator supports it).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There was a special magic to the 3D Renders of the N64⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Who else remembers seeing images like this – that would’ve taken a few seconds to a few minutes to render even on high-end graphics workstations of the time – presented in gaming rags as examples of what PS1/N64/Saturn and later PS2/GameCube/DreamCast/XBox were “going to be capable of producing”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game Boy Advance: Incredible tech on just 2 AA Batteries⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, I put an Afterburner mod in mine back in the day and got the best of both worlds: a screen you can see without standing outside at midday, and a comfortable, wide layout that doesn’t make your hands cramp up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is nobody talking about the fact that The Simpsons Arcade Game got home ports to DOS and Commodore 64 but not NES, SNES or Genesis -- and didn't arrive on console until Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even crazier, the C64 version was only distributed in North America, ignoring the majority of potential buyers. And it apparently runs OK on PAL machines without modification.

  One of the big draws of the game was all the detail in the backgrounds, and the little touches of animation. The C64 version being disk-only allows it to retain a surprising amount of this. As a tape game, the already long inter-level load times would’ve blown out and ruined the game.

  I don’t think that an NES or Master System port could’ve covered the game even as well as the C64 version. But I agree that it is strange that there was no Mega Drive or SNES version. The SNES in particular could’ve replicated a lot of the arcade’s scaling effects with a minimum of trickery.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a brand new, unused Pong console from 1979 in an Edinburgh charity shop for 20£⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  These “home pong” consoles were very common at the time. They don’t really do much, so their main value is historical interest, and this isn’t a particularly famous model. A quick eBay search seems to indicate it might go for GBP 80 at most, but probably more like GBP 20-40. So OP got a good deal, but they didn’t find a lost Vermeer. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a brand new, unused Pong console from 1979 in an Edinburgh charity shop for 20£⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They probably did. It’s not exactly honest, but the system is technically outputting a colour signal, and it was released at a time when that wasn’t a given. They didn’t say “full colour” anywhere on the box, did they?

  Let’s call it a mix of lower expectations for the time, and a bit of marketing deception.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a brand new, unused Pong console from 1979 in an Edinburgh charity shop for 20£⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Found in an Edinburgh charity shop, so while it’s not impossible, it’s unlikely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Atari 2600: The Atlantis of Game Consoles⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, they’ve changed the Pitfall image. Originally they were using the first image from CrayonRosary’s post.