Gyokuyoutama
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Posts posted by Gyokuyoutama
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On a slightly related topic, I was watching some South Park videos on Nico Nico (as you do) and got to a Canada episode. One of the comments was something like "ah! so Canada is like America's South Korea." And I was enlightened.
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Got Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds from GOG because it was cheap on sale and one of the few Star Wars games from that era that I didn't own.
I knew it was based on Age of Empires 2, but I thought it was just using the same engine with tech levels used to separate things. I wasn't expecting skirmish play to be town center + scout cavalry + three workers, and you usually begin by sending sheep (excuse me, nerfs) back to base for early food.
EDIT: So as to not triple post.
I've also been replaying the Shadow of Death campaigns for Heroes 3, which I haven't played in like ten years. The basic premise of these campaigns is that four heroes, Gem, Gelu, Yog and Crag Hack, have to oppose the necromancer Sandro. Each of the four heroes gets an introduction campaign, then you play as Sandro, then there's the biggest campaign in all of Heroes 3 where the four heroes come together to fight Sandro.
So you start with the campaigns for the four individual heroes. What I forgot about is how schizophrenic the difficulty is. Gelu and Gem have campaigns which aren't trivial, but not too bad if you know what you are doing. Mainly you can't dick around because the enemy has more stuff than you do at the start, but if you press the attack and don't take early losses you should be fine. Yog has a rough first mission because they don't let you learn spells with him, but the remaining missions involved breaking up the Angelic Alliance artifact and you are allowed to use it until you need to ditch a part. Its full form gives +21 to all stats (where +6 to a stat is huge) and casts expert prayer (4th level spell) for free, so you're pretty good on the second mission, and even when you have to start breaking the artifact up Yog will be so leveled that you should be fine.
But for some reason they decided to absolutely fuck over Crag Hack. On three of his four missions you don't start with a tavern in your main town. This means that you cannot recruit additional heroes, which means that your power hero Crag Hack must waste time picking up resources and going back for reinforcements. And if you end up going down a dead end before you find a tavern, you've wasted too much time. You practically have to play his maps at least twice so you know what the map looks like before you start. (By the way, the one mission where your main town actually has a tavern has you start without a town, and it's tricky to get to the nearest town in the 7 day time limit before you lose.)
On top of that, on three of the missions the enemy is given a one-way teleporter into your domain, meaning that the enemy can send heroes to attack your base while you are far away, and you can't follow them back to their own towns. Incredibly annoying, especially if this happens before you've found a tavern meaning that you have no choice but to send Crag Hack back to base.
And on top of that, in the last two missions the enemy towns are protected by border gates of a color you do not have access to, meaning that the enemy can leave his base but you can't go into it and hence you can't take out their towns to shut the enemy down. This is particularly annoying on the last mission, since the enemy's town advantage means that you'd normally prioritize taking their stuff early so you don't fall behind on troops, but that's not an option. You have to prioritize going for the artifact needed to win, which involves a mandatory trip to an island which costs you three days each way (board ship, get off ship, traverse island) and which you must go to twice. All while the enemy is attacking your main base. And the enemy starts with three high level heroes. And I don't know if this part is programmed in, or if I got unlucky on the random spell rolls, but when I played they all had animate dead and town portal with expert Earth Magic. Animate dead with high spell power means that they will often leave a battle with no casualties, since they just reanimate all the troops they lose. Expert town portal means the second they take one of your towns they can all pop into that base from anywhere on the map, and they can also use it to retreat to their impregnable fortresses to run away when you are going to take them out, or just to pick up more troops.
So the difficulty on the Gem and Gelu campaign is like 5/10, the Yog campaign is 7/10 on the first mission and 3/10 on the rest, and the Crag Hack campaign is 9/10, possibly 10/10.
I imagine that a lot of people who were introduced to heroes by Shadow of Death (since it was standalone) were completely blocked by this campaign. Though to be fair, a similar thing happens in the original Restoration of Erathia campaign where the last mission of the first evil campaign is at least 8/10 in difficulty with a very tight time limit, and no other campaign mission goes above 4/10.
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What amuses me about this point in the game is how pissed off some people get at Vtubers. And believe it or not, I'm not talking about anything posted at this site; nothing here has really gone beyond annoyance at the number of vtubers and their reach.
Some people go absolutely ballistic at the very idea of a vtuber even though vtubers have become so diluted that they're basically just streamers at this point. I mean, sure, some vtubers do more than that, but the only common factor that you'll find among vtubers is that they usually don't face stream (though even that isn't universal anymore.)
Where I find this most amusing is in various, shall we say, social commentary communities where it's been common for over a decade for people to not show their faces, and where many of the people who stream anonymously got avatars and even had multiple versions of their avatars that would change as they spoke. PNG-tubers before PNG-tubers were a think. Often with a tinge of anime aesthetic. And there's even many people in those communities who flip out at any of their big names doing a stream with a vtuber.
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8 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:I'm sure that many an editor would proudly proclaim the difference between schizophrenic rambling and a publishable article is a good editor. Unfortunately I don't have an editor to hand this statement to so they can make it actually work.
I vaguely recall hearing it claimed that another editor told Palmer something like "you know this stuff is all crazy nonsense, right?" with Palmer responding something like "yeah, but watch how much I can make it sell." But I can't immediately find the source where I saw this.
A 1970 Corvette reacted to this -
Let me tell you about the "Shaver Mystery." This is one of those things that I only found out about last year, despite being interested in pulp fiction and the paranormal, so I should have known about it for a long time. Almost like it's been intentionally forgotten... but it's not like there's a conspiracy to erase it since everything involved is still easily available. People just don't talk about it much.
The "Shaver Mystery" refers to a series of articles published in Amazing Stories based on the writings of Richard Sharpe Shaver (if you think that that name is ridiculous it's okay; Shaver hated his name too after being told "sharp shaver? You're a real cutup, huh?" a million times.) This was the mid-40's, the time when the likes of Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon were breaking out into the magazine, and which science fiction fans have long classified as "The Golden Age of Science Fiction" (even though the stuff from the 30's was probably better, but that's another discussion.) But the truth is that Shaver's articles were by far the most popular in the magazine, with Asimov et al.'s being mainly known on the convention circuit.
What were these articles? Well first of all, you have to understand that it was common for magazines of those days to mainly publish short or serialized fiction, but to also have a few random articles that really could be from anywhere. For example a sci-fi magazine might have articles on engineering projects you could do at home. So in this vein Amazing Stories published a weird article from Shaver where he claims that every letter (or rather sound, though he always tied things back to English letters) corresponds to some concept in a language "Mantong" which is the ancestor for all human languages. For example "D" refers to harmful energy (ex. "degeneration.") A lot of these were simple stand ins for words. Ex. "M" is for man, "P" is for power. Some did that, but required interpretation. "O" is for orifice, but Shaver meant it specifically as an orifice that is the source of something (ex. a faucet.) Others were puns, ex. "C" is for "see", i.e. seeing things. Nevertheless he claimed that you could interpret words in any language using this system and get information accurate by at least 75%. He later claimed that this experiment had been done in every European language as well as things like Chinese and Japanese, though I don't know what he means by that.
In any case, the article was really popular. Readers enjoyed interpreting words and names by this method, and were intrigued by the idea of a "Mantong" language. So naturally Raymond Palmer, the editor, smelled money and asked Shaver for more. And boy did he get it. Shaver gave him pages upon pages detailing how he received past life memories of living in a previous subterranean society. This was published as Lemuria, but I've hard that Shaver himself didn't use that term, though he did at least use Atlantis for another location at that time in Earth's era. This wasn't just a vague "I kind of remember some things from a past life" either; Shaver had a detailed account of his life as Muton Mion and with it he details not one but several ancient civilizations and many lost technologies and scientific teachings. This includes the idea that all aging is the fault of radioactive elements, and that some point our sun's energy was corrupted from beneficial "T" energy into the current "D" energy which lasts until today and is the cause of most of our biological woes. On top of that, he wrote of things happening in the current day, particularly his belief that while most of the ancient races of the Earth had left for the stars, some had been corrupted by this D-radiation and lived underground, where they still spy on us and torment us.
If you are familiar with Francis E. Dec, some of this may remind you of stuff that he ranted about. Really, it's astonishing that Shaver didn't just go down as another paranoid schizophrenic. It could be because the original alphabet article was pretty innocuous, and when Palmer wanted a follow-up he was already invested. Or maybe Shaver wasn't as incoherent as his beliefs might lead you to think. It's hard to say because I don't think much if any of Shaver's original writings are extant. What would happen instead is that he would mail things to Palmer (and later to other magazines) and these would be edited into more palatable forms. Most famously, Shaver's memories of being "Mutan Mion" were published in novella form ("touched up" by Palmer) as I Remember Lemuria.
That novella is a good starting point, and also adds another level to this whole affair in that it's quite possibly the first work of monster girl fiction. Mutan Mion meets many "variforms" (a term still used by some sci-fi authors) which are the results of crossbreeding between Earthly races and those from the stars. The results... well, I'll just give you some excerpts from I Remember Lemuria:
The image of a tremendous six-armed Sybyl female filled the screen and the electrically augmented body appeal of the mighty life within her seized the youth in me and wrung it as no embrace from lesser female ever had.... She was a forty foot Titan, her age unknowable.
and shortly afterwards, in an encounter with another variform:
She was but a girl, younger than myself, but what a girl! Her body was encased in a transparent glitter; her skin a rosy pale purple; her legs, mottled with white, ended in a pair of cloven hooves. And as my brain struggled to grasp her colorful young perfection— she wagged her tail!
It was all too much. Speculating about the life-generating force possible in the variform creatures was one thing; but having it materialize beside you was another thing entirely. Such a beautiful tail it was. Of the softest, most beautiful fur.
You get the picture. It's hard to know if these encounters are from Shaver's writings, or if Palmer added them to try to drum up readers. I imagine that he at least made them more tantalizing than they originally were.
The effect of the stories is bizarre, since in addition to these asides we get lectures on science and history which are frequently interrupted by Palmer's footnotes that connect the events to mythology, history and recent scientific advancements. These frequently refer to further letters that Shaver sent in response to Palmer's requests for clarification; sometimes doing a good job of expanding what was meant (for example, explaining that "row" is used to mean something like "psychic persuasion") but more often just adding more questions.
Of course this is just scratching the surface. I haven't really touched on Shaver's claims that there are malicious "Deros" living under the Earth to this day, the degenerate and irradiated remnants of past great civilizations, who kidnapped and tortured humans. ("Dero" of course meaning "degenerate robot," though despite this being the era were robots were popularized in science fiction, Shaver did not mean mechanical creatures. And by the way, this is the inspiration for the Derro dwarves that inhabit the Underdark in Dungeons and Dragons.) Shaver also claimed that these Deros had flying ships that they sometimes used to leave their subterranaean lairs... and we had the UFO flap just after he started writing. Thus UFOs and underground bases were just evidence for the reality of Shaver's claims. (Though Shaver also said that the Atlanteans, or "Atlans", had left to space and would investigate various worlds, so UFOs could also be blamed on them.)
The really interesting thing about the Shaver Mystery is the amount of influence it retains despite rarely being discussed. I've already mentioned how D&D took the Derros, and really the idea of the Underdark in general, from Shaver's contemporary writings. Many UFO reports from the 50's and 60's make claims that the aliens have a propulsion system that is based on using magnetic fields to deflect gravity... which was a technology discussed by Shaver even in his earliest writings. (And people still play around with this idea even to this day, though that also gets us into time travel with the likes of Mad Man Marcum, though Steins;Gate also touched on this at least in the VN.) It's a real rabbit hole, and unlike a lot of other similar rabbit holes it's really easy to research. For example, I Remember Lemuria is available in full on the internet archive.
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Man, there's nothing like sentence mixing.
EDIT: Oh wow, he actually's doing the whole series
A 1970 Corvette reacted to this -
But will we get members to 300?
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I was just about to make a comment about Hypnospace Outlaw. Specifically, I had been playing around with like Cosmology of Kyoto which isn't really a game or a reference tool. I mean, you do wander around Heian Kyoto and you do interact with stuff and I guess you kind of solve puzzles, but it's more about exploration and experiencing what is there to get a sense for Heian era Japan and Japanese Buddhism than it is a game with actual goals. There were a lot of games like this in the early CD era. Eastern Mind, LSD: Dream Emulator, and Yume Nikki are more Japanese examples, and Bad Day on the Midway is a good example outside of Japan. Closely related are things which more obviously are games, but are so weird and convoluted that the experience is still the goal, not the game. Things like Total Distortion or Seamen.
These things really do make a unique experience that is utterly different from watching a movie, reading a book, or playing a conventional game. Around 1994-1998 the idea of computer games was so ill-defined, and there were so many nebulous "multimedia" programs (think Anime Hyperguide, The Way Things Work, etc.) that you could put this kind of stuff out and no one would question it. I mean, even at the time these games were weird, but no one really questioned why they were made as computer software. But such things are much less common these days.
Since the main goal is exploration in most of these things, I suppose people would compare them to walking simulators, but I don't think those are the same sort of thing at all. Walking Simulators are usually just a mechanism to tell a story. The software I'm talking about usually didn't have a coherent linear story beyond what you happened across on your own playthrough.
But when I tried to think of a modern example, Hypnospace Outlaw came to mind. It's not exactly the same thing since, but very much in the same vibe.
So I'm very sad that we won't get a sequel.
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My own thoughts:
Half-Life 3: Possible, but severely hampered by Valve being in "we used to make games, now we make money" mode. The chances are significantly greater after Half-Life: Alyx where I believe that Valve at least is working on Half-Life 3, but I could see them getting frustrated with their designs not working out and scrapping everything.
Girls und Panzer: das Finale: Part 6: The first four parts have (eventually) come out, so it's pretty reasonable that we'll get the last two. My guess would be that part 5 comes out in 2026 or 2027 and part 6 comes out sometime from 2029-2032 (the latter date making it the twenty year anniversary of the series.) This one got my vote.
The Winds of Winter: Never gonna happen. George RR Martin is the kind of guy that likes being a famous author more than he likes writing, and he's built up enough clout that he can continue doing that without finishing his series. He's also hampered by the TV series ending. If he adapts the unpopular ending it will be a let down and people won't like it anyway (since they want the books to "fix" the show.) If he does something completely different, it will look like he changed things due to the show ending on an unpopular note. And nothing could live up to the hype anyway. So there's no good reason for him to actually finish it, and he won't. I mean, Gordon R. Dickson had a hundred times the work ethic that GRRM does, and even he never wrote the last book to his epic series (the Childe cycle/Dorsai series). If somehow GRRM does try to finish I expect it will go like Dickson's last books, i.e. continually splitting up the finale into more and more parts with less and less happening so that the book is never actually released in full.
Protomen: Act 3: I still believe!
They actually have shown work on half the album or so, but it's also clear that there are songs detailing major events that they are having trouble finishing such as
Spoilerthe death of doctor Light.
I guess if I'm being consistent with the rest of my predictions, the release date would need to be 2035 or something. Maybe it ends up like Blue Oyster Cult's Imaginos where most of the band loses interest and the one or two guys who are passionate about it finish things up in whatever way they can.
Alicianrone: I really don't know much about this game other than the number of "cameos" of it in 100% orange juice, despite the game not being released yet. The characters started showing up in 2017, so the game's been in development for at least that long... but do we even know what type of game it is? I.e. shmup, rpg, etc.? Honestly it feels like a way for Hono to unload OCs, so I doubt it will actually come out... but I guess it's possible.
Legacy of Kain: To be clear, remasters don't count. So if they remake Blood Omen 1 or 2 or Defiance, that won't fulfill this one. I'm looking for either a sequel to Defiance, or something in the same universe like Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun. It also has to leave beta, so Nosgoth doesn't count.
The remasters of Soul Reaver 1 and 2 are a hopeful sign, but as for a new game... I don't know. I have a feeling like Squeenix only went along with the remaster project due to the huge amount of love that Soul Reaver 1 has. The later games were not as well received. Furthermore, if you want to make a true sequel to Defiance you need to go through five games worth of convoluted timeline bullshit. This probably could be done by having it center on a new character (similar to how playing as Raziel means that you don't need to have played Blood Omen 1 to understand Soul Reaver), but I can also see executives saying that it's still too confusing. The series also has a history of getting screwed over by management at the last minute, so even if a game enters development, it very well might not be released.
I put a 50-50 shot that we get a sequel by 2040.
The Last Volume of Megatokyo: The reason I put this one up here is that I'm consistently surprised that Megatokyo isn't a dead webcomic. It just updates very, very slowly. For perspective, the last update was just last month. But the update before that was from February and before that the beginning of December 2024. If it was any other webcomic with that schedule I would assume that the creator had given up... but every time I think Megatokyo is done, I check the website and there's always an update within the last six months. Having a family wasn't enough to stop Fred from updating, so it seems like he's going to keep doing it as long as he can. And let's be honest; ain't no way that the plots are going to get wrapped up. So while the series will eventually end, because Fred Gallagher isn't going to live forever and this isn't the type of thing that would get changed into a franchise independent of the artist, I expect him to keep updating into his late 70's, which brings us to around 2045.
A Shenmue Game where you beat Lan Di: For those of you not familiar with Shenmue, Lan Di is a martial artist who kills the Ryo Hazuki's (the main character) dad. The game is basically a revenge story where Ryo wants to take down Lan Di. The first game involves him investigating what the hell happened and then realizing Lan Di left Japan, meaning that Ryo must find a way to Hong Kong. A pretty decent first act, especially since Ryo hast to deal with local gangs and such due to being a dumbass in his investigation and stirring up all sorts of unnecessary trouble. In the second game Ryo tries to hunt down Lan Di in Hong Kong and China. While he finds more information about why Lan Di killed his father, he still doesn't confront Lan Di. It's not until the end of the third game that Ryo finally finds Lan Di (which you'd only get to after at least 100 hours of gameplay, and which came out twenty years after the original)... and Ryo gets utterly demolished by Lan Di. Apparently the original design for Shenmue involved six games, and I don't expect that Ryo would be able to take on Lan Di til the very last one, but it's not clear whether the released games correspond to the original plan on a one to one basis. So maybe it gets resolved in Shenmue 4, or maybe we have to go to 6, or maybe the Yu Suzuki gets dumber than normal and extends out the series to seven or eight games. In any case it was 18 years between Shenmue 2 and 3, and 3 wasn't exactly popular. I doubt 4 will come out before 2029, and I really doubt that Ryo will beat Lan Di in that one. So best case scenario he gets his revenge in 2034, but probably a lot later, if ever.
(As a side note Shenmue is a pretty cool game in an "Animal Crossing with Martial Arts Fights" sort of way, but I wouldn't bother with the rest of the series... especially not 3.)
Guillermo del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness: One of HP Lovecraft's most popular stories, but also one considered unfillable in the modern environment. It'd have to be a period piece, it would have an entirely male cast, no romance, no villains with any personality, etc. And del Toro isn't budging on any of that stuff. He actually gave up completely a decade or so ago, but recently he's started talking it up again, so who knows? Maybe it gets a relatively low budget release, like the Hellboy movie from last year.
Andrew WK: At the time I made the poll I was unaware that Andrew WK actually did release an album in 2020; I thought his last release was the Gundam tie-in from 2009. So I guess that it's not that unlikely that we will get more releases in the future... but I'm voting as if he never released anything since 2009.
Star Citizen: Lol, we all know that this is never coming out. It's far more profitable as a work in progress, and there's no way that any game could incorporate all the features they promised. It's basically what you get if you tried to implement all the insane stuff that Peter Molyneux promises in interviews, but you didn't have any release date fixed to keep him in line.
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Pretty self explanatory. I wanted to include enough things so that the easy answer of "none of these things are every going to come out" was impossible. At least one of these things will happen.
I almost put Wintersun's Time 2 up there until I remembered that it was actually released last year.
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2 hours ago, John Caveson said:I'm getting Star Wars Battlefront Collection flashbacks.
It's literally being done by the same people who did the Star Wars Battlefront collections.
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They are finally getting around to making an "enhanced" edition of Neverwinter Nights 2.
As far as I can tell the features are:
- Enhanced textures (though they look the same to me in screenshots)
- New camera controls
- Controller support (just what I always needed in a menu-heavy CRPG)
- Around 30-40 GB increased file size
- $10 higher pricetag
So a pretty standard "remaster."
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This is something I never really thought about until watching this video:
For those who don't want to watch, he discusses a phenomenon where children remember being able to float on the air down the stairs (but not up the stairs.) This is something that they are only able to do in private, and lose the ability to do when they get older. And it's never something that can be used to go up the stairs, only down them. Apparently this is something that a lot of people remember.
Now I don't remember ever having this happen to me. But this is the "dreams" thread and I do dream about this quite often. I don't lucid dream very much, but I do sometimes get a partial awareness that I'm not in the normal world but in the dream world. And when this happens I am able to float down stairs like is described in the video. I've always thought of it as "falling, but you miss the ground." How it works is that I take a small jump at the top of the stairs, just enough to be above the next steps. Then I simply continue moving forward in such a way that I never touch the ground. It's not just jumping because I do not get to the ground as quickly as I should, and I can even go around corners in spiral staircases and the like. Furthermore, I am able to maintain this state for quite some time after the stairs end. It's not flying because eventually I will hit the ground, and when this happens I can only get back to the floating state by getting to the top of a stairway (or a slope) and jumping off the top again. So this technique can't be used to up the stairs.
The thing is that when I am dreaming, this feels completely natural. Like it's just something that any human could decide to do. But in my dreams most people do not descend the stairs like this, and that actually causes me confusion. Like, it's so simple so why don't they do it too?
I've had this experience in literally dozens of not hundreds of dreams. It's so common that the cases where I walk down the stairs in dreams are probably rarer than the times that I float down them. Until I saw the video above, I thought that this was just a quirk of my psyche. That is, I knew that dreaming of having your breaks not work, being late for an appointment, losing a tooth, etc. are common dreams so I don't think of anything when that happens to me. But I assumed this was one of those things that are unique to me. But I guess it's a common thing?
Of course, most people responding claim that this happened to them in real life, just when they were real young. It makes me wonder if they are just remembering dreams though, since I've confused dreams from childhood with reality. (In particular I remember an event where our family computer got infected with a virus that caused it to display flashing ASCII art in a golden ratio spiral. There is no distinction in how I remember this incident versus other events from my childhood. But no one involved remembers this happening, the virus in the dream destroyed the computer but the computer worked just fine throughout my childhood, and when I think of the room where this event supposedly took place I realize it doesn't correspond to the room the computer was in, nor indeed any room in any house that I've lived in. So it must be a dream... but if I hadn't had investigated I easily could see myself telling someone else about a weird virus that ruined one of our computers like it really happened.)
A 1970 Corvette reacted to this -
I want to see an indie game that captures the aesthetic of late 90's early 00's freely distribute games.
Like this:
or this:
Note that having crappy MIDIs of Final Fantasy, Earthbound and Chrono Trigger/Cross music is an essential part of the genre.
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On 5/3/2025 at 2:04 PM, Gyokuyoutama said:The ideas persisted for a while. I recently picked up a Hoyle's Board Game collection from the late 90's (after Windows 95). It's Clubhouse Games but without quite 51 things. It does have virtual opponents though, who will make various commentary on the games as you go through them. The game has a default menu for picking games (which resembles the aesthetic of Packard Bell Navigator):
If you click the spaceship, you get this instead:
Clicking on the buttons causes a hologram for the game to appear. (Also note that an astronaut has randomly drifted by, why not). You then click "engage" to play the game.
If you click the cabin you instead get this:
A prerendered 3D cabin you can navigate Myst style. The games are scattered throughout. You can see in this screen the combination checkers/chess board. Click on the pieces you want to use and you'll play the game. Something I didn't realize about this is that the game will actually default to changing seasons with the system clock. When I first played this game it counted as "winter" and hence the background looked like this:
(The snow and fire is animated, by the way.) Here is another location in the cabin with more games:
If you play in this mode the background will carry through into many of the games:
(The bear talks, by the way.) None of this was necessary. The game would have been perfectly fine as just a collection of 10 board games. But they did it anyway.
I think at the time the idea was that old people would feel more comfortable using a computer for games by using the cabin environment, and that kids would be more excited about things with the sci-fi environment. That's certainly the explicit idea behind the Packard Bell Navigator environment. (I have the disc for that too by the way, but it's designed to come pre-installed with a computer and as such relies on some files which are either not on the disc or which cannot be installed automatically. So I can get it running to the point of showing off a location or two, but it will crash almost immediately.) I can see why companies stopped bothering doing this sort of stuff, but I do like this aesthetic a lot. It makes the whole process of using the computer a fun experience.
Maybe this thread isn't the best place to keep going on this, but I found a site that goes into a lot more detail about Packard Bell Navigator (as well as about every single operating system and shell that you can think of).
Of particular relevance for this conversation is the discussion of Packard Bell Navigator 1 (Not really useful, but a unique aesthetic):
http://toastytech.com/guis/pbnav.html
And Packard Bell Navigator 3.5 (where they leaned into the "Computer as an Environment" idea):
http://toastytech.com/guis/pbnav35.html
EDIT: Finally got it working... kind of.
The issue is that it reads the text from a database file, and this is not properly configured in the default installation. For some reason the database won't open in Windows 3.1, even though this is a Windows 3.1 version of the program (there's even a preview of Windows 95 on the CD). But it's possible that the database configurer I'm using is Windows 95 only, since I got that separately. The program still isn't entirely functional since the tutorial videos (accessed by the glass doors in the network room) don't work. This is almost certainly due to missing some visual basic files which I could fix but don't feel like doing now.
(The number of windows icons on the Kidspace picture is due to it having programs mapped out that haven't been installed on this computer, and hence no corresponding icons.)
I can see why this sort of navigation never really took off... but honestly accessing programs in this way isn't much more inefficient than using something like Steam. Just add on a good file explorer for when you want to do something not in the presets, and it's probably more efficient than using the Windows 10/11 start menu.
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No!!! Now you'll never be able to reason out which comments were mine!
For the record here are the comments I remember:
Cryptic Command (which doesn't even fucking come up when I search for it in the new Gatherer, adding broken search engines as a common topic) - Normally modal spells give you subpar options but are playable due to flexibility. For example, Assault//Battery is either a sorcery speed shock or a green Hill Giant, neither of which is great on its own, but the ability to switch between removal and threat makes it playable. For Cryptic Command you get six modes, each of which is absolutely worth 4 mana, meaning that the value this card gives you is insane.
Jedit Ojanen - This card is kind of a litmus test to when you started playing. When he came out he was cool: a bit cat guy with a fancy gold frame and evocative flavor text. Definitely something to get nostalgic about. But everyone who played later realized that this guy wasn't even well costed for the time.
Order of the Sacred Bell - These guys were awesome in Kamigawa limited. The block was stuffed with high cost but low stat spirits with tricky abilities. So rather than take part in that nonsense, you drafted these guys and smashed face.
Sinking Feeling - At a sealed event my opponent carefully looked over all my cards and then put this on my biggest creature... which was Morselhoarder.
Viashino Cutthroat - Don't think about this as a creature, but rather as repeatable burn for 5.
Word of Command - The art is just a closeup of the art on Howling Mine.
Iron Will - When your creature tries to block, show them that it rocks!
Crackleburr - If Thundermare is an elemental horse, how is this thing not an elemental fox? I mean look at it!
Arctic Foxes - It's funny that this is an Amrou Kithkin variant, and both ended up being the only creature of their type for years.
Foxfire - I don't remember if I actually posted this comment, but this is my favorite card art.
Master of Arms - For confused new players, when this card was printed tapped creatures would not deal combat damage when blocking. So the activated ability was at tricky way to prevent damage done to Master of Arms. The sixth edition rules did away with this rule, making the ability largely pointless. Then they later added errata to make it so the tapped creature wouldn't deal combat damage, restoring the original functionality in a similar way to what they did with old "continuous artifacts" like Howling Mine. Then a few years later they removed the errata, making the ability pointless again. So I guess five years from now they'll errata it to prevent combat damage again.
(They didn't.... though apparently they did make a fixed version in a "Mystery Booster" just to spite us.)
hugthebed2 and A 1970 Corvette reacted to this -
So I realized that the HD mod for Heroes 3 does not enforce expansion differences.
Each Heroes 3 map is marked with an expansion version, Restoration of Erathia, Armageddon's Blade, Shadow of Death. if you load in a map from an earlier version, it will not spawn content from later versions of the game. So for example if a map is marked "Restoration of Erathia" then it will not generate conflux creatures as random creatures or have conflux heroes available for hire, since these were introduced in the Armageddon's Blade expansion. (They wouldn't appear in the map normally since you can't place them in maps marked as Restoration of Erathia, but without this restriction they could appear on heroes or creatures with random identities.) Similarly, you can't make combination artifacts, since those were introduced in the Shadow of Death. But it will keep later changes to the base game, like the ability to use spacebar to revisit a location or the changes to how moats worked.
I played Angelic Pride, a classic Restoration of Erathia map (since it was made before Armageddon's Blade came out.) I realized early that the edition forcing wasn't working properly since the archery items given to me early on allowed me to make the Bow of the Sharpshooter, which made the early game easy. I wondered if I should keep this, since it's basically cheating.
Then I got to the point in the map where the neighboring necromancers were able to break through their border towers into my territory and I didn't regret using the combination artifact at all. You see, the map designer had placed the Amulet of the Undertaker, Vampire's Cowl and Dead Man's Boots. In Restoration of Erathia that bumps up the Necromancy percentage by 30%, which is potent but something you can deal with since it just gives more skeletons. In Shadow of Death though that makes the fucking Cloak of the Undead King for those not in the know, this gives another 30% boost to Necromancy (total of 60% boost) and improves the type of creature it raises. At expert necromancy (which necromancers will always prioritize early anyway) it raises liches. A level 5 ranged unit. Keep in mind that the 60% is a boost, with expert necromancy raising 30% already and the Necropolis town having a building which buffs this by 10%, so it effectively gives a necromancy rate of 100%. Thankfully there was a nerf before Shadow of Death which requires that the creatures killed have enough hitpoints to equal what you are raising, so that you need to kill 30 peasants (1 HP) to raise 1 lich (30 HP), but it's still an insane ability. And the map maker ended up unintentionally giving all the necromancer heroes one of these under Shadow of Death rules. When I got attacked the enemy hero literally had over 700 liches, at a point in the game where having 700 of a level 1 unit would be impressive. I can actually whittle down the enemy heroes armies by killing everything but the liches and killing 100 or so liches on top of that, but since after they win the battle they get another 100-200 liches, it doesn't really matter.
The funny thing is that to fix this problem I have to convert the map into a Shadow of Death map, since banning artifacts was not a feature present in the Restoration of Erathia and the map maker enforces that policy.
EDIT: That doesn't work since banning the Cloak only bans it appearing randomly. It can still be assembled from its parts. Looks like I have to go back to the original game...
EDIT2: Actually I tried this on a non HD mod of the complete edition and the same problem happens there. I swear I had an install that was done by Restoration Erathia + Armageddon's Blade + Shadow of Death that didn't have this issue, but maybe I'm insane.
hugthebed2 reacted to this -
I just beat Star Fox for SNES again and now I have to leave my TV on for ten minutes to hear the secret music.
This is part of the contract you enter into when you play Star Fox.
hugthebed2 reacted to this -
I get into a lot of conversations about generational behavior on other websites. This usually involves discussing what's the best way to break things down into different groups without needing terms like "xennials" or "geriatric zoomers." The solutions are always shorter generations; my preferred fix is to just use decade of birth and go from there (i.e. born in the 70's, born in the 80's, born in the 90's, etc.) Breaks down a bit with Baby Boomers but works well with everyone else.
But there's always some guy who comes in and says "you can't do that because generations must be 20 years long!"
The ridiculous thing about this is that everyone uses the Pew Research Center generations, since those appear on Wikipedia. Let's see their definitions:
Lost Generation: 1883-1900 (18 years)
Greatest Generation: 1901-1927 (27 years)
Silents: 1928-1945 (18 years)
Baby Boomers: 1946-1964 (19 years)
Generation X: 1965-1980 (16 years)
Millennials: 1981-1996 (16 years)
Zoomers: 1997-2012 (16 years)
Generation Alpha: 2013-"the mid 2020's" (if we define 2028 as the latest the "mid 2020's" could be, this is at most 16 years)
So they haven't used 20 years for a single generation, and have shown a strong preference for 16 year generations lately with Generation Alpha potentially being less than 16 years. And the people who make the objection that 20 years is standard generally use the above classifications, exactly.
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Also, for those of you who didn't understand what I meant about Shenzhen I/O being autistic even for a Zachtronics game:
EDIT: Looking at this I realize that there's two lines of code that can be deleted and only are there due to an old version of how this all worked.
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I've been replaying Heroes Chronicles. For those of you not in the know, these are 8 standalone games that basically are each a gimped version of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. They are single player only, have one campaign (albeit one with 8 missions, longer than the average length of a heroes 3 campaign) and are limited to troops from 4-5 out of the 9 possible towns. Except for The World Tree and The Flaming Star, which have campaigns which are 5 missions long and have troops limited to 3 towns.
The idea behind these games were to capture the discount buyer. I think most of us remember seeing cheap computer games, often hidden object games and the like, for sale at places like Walmart or Target. They'd often be $20 or less. These games were similarly cheap, while buying Heroes 3 would cost $40-$60 (or more if you wanted the expansions and didn't get them in a pack.) So the hope was not to get serious strategy gamers, but impulse buys from people on a budget or grandmas thinking "my grandson likes those fantasy computer games, right?"
The difficulty for most of these games is trivial if played on normal difficulty. This is because maps tend to be filled with resources to pick up, meaning that you don't have to budget your resources at all and often will be building at a far more consistent rate than the computer. You also have heroes transfer from map to map, which is particularly ridiculous in the Master of the Elements campaign since by the end you will have a hero that can summon so many elementals and deal so much damage through magic that he can solo big fights with a starting army (using expert resurrection to nullify any losses on the troops you started with.)
However the campaigns actually are much more in depth than most that shipped with the actual game, so there is some interest from long time fans. This is done mainly with timed events; the first time I played these games I didn't get half the plot because I would always beat a map before most of the timed events triggered. However, you can play on impossible difficulty. This means that you start with no resources the AI is maxed out and the AI gets more resources. On many maps this won't really matter, since you get so many resources to begin with. On others the game actually becomes quite challenging. This is because impossible will slow your start, at least a little. On a random Heroes 3 map this usually isn't a deal breaker, since the AI isn't great and you can make up the deficit by the time you run into the AI. But in Heroes Chronicles a slow start can mean that the AI eats up all the goodies that were left around and intended for the player. This can cause it to snowball very quickly, especially if there are a lot of external creature dwellings. Where this really gets to be a problem is in late game maps where they put level 30 or so heroes around, meaning that even with a high level hero your troops are fighting on an even playing ground, meaning that you absolutely need the numbers to win.
If you just want to enjoy the game without tearing your hair out on random maps (since in every campaign most maps are manageable even on impossible) I recommend putting the difficulty to "Expert", or maybe "Hard" if you haven't played Heroes before. "Hard" is just even footing with the AI, the AI is actually penalized in multiple ways on "Normal."
I would give advice for which one to buy first or how to get started there, but let's be honest, if you're going to pick this up you're going to pick up the pack that has all the games from GOG. And you're only going to do that after buying Heroes 3, since they sell for the same cost and no one in his right mind would recommend buying Heroes Chronicles over Heroes 3. But if you've already bought Heroes 3 and want some more maps to mess around in, Heroes Chronicles isn't a bad investment, at least on sale.
(I do wish that someone would fix the bug in the second one where some AI players are assigned on your team, which makes no sense flavorfully and actually maps the maps harder since they will steal your mines. But since 3DO saw fit to hide the map data for Chronicles, probably so you couldn't juryrig playing normal Heroes 3 maps in by changing the data, this is hard to fix and no one cares enough about Heroes Chronicles to try to solve this by hex editing or something.)
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What's truly depressing is not just knowing that this "auto-dub" feature exists:
It's knowing that within a couple of years most sites will make the feature very tricky to turn off without setting your IP to a non-English speaking nation (which will also cause all English videos to be auto-dubbed.)
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What I've learned is that if it sounds like the 80's, you can usually get normies to roll with it.
The Protomen, Astrophysics's Miku covers and the Bubblegum Crisis soundtrack are all fine. Similarly Haken is in general too weird for most people to accept, but you can get away with Affinity.
A major no-no is lyrics that can be easily parsed but not understood. No normie is going to let you get away with playing lines like "lad did you know a girl was murdered here?", "the demon in your mind will rape you in your bed at night," "And they vowed to eradicate Hasbro, crashed the plane, kicked the door, went inside" or "Do not forgive us Father, because we believe in alien lifeforms."
A 1970 Corvette reacted to this
The IT thread.
in Techmoology
Posted
I've been backing up stuff regularly from the drive, but otherwise it's been working fine. I think between this post and today there's been two times that I got a similar error, and the drive came back after a reboot both times. I've also been keeping track of stuff on CrystalDiskInfo and things have been firmly in the "caution" area with Reallocated Sectors Count high but usually stable (I think it was at like 100 sectors?)
Then in the last few days I've had some random crashes and other issues when running games off that hard drive. Today I got the drive message again and the drive vanished. It came back after a reboot, and when checking CrystalDiskInfo it's officially a "bad" drive now. The Reallocated Sectors Count actually lists "0" which I don't know if this is an overflow error or what, but the health percentage was like 23 and it's since dropped to 21, so I think the drive has finally died.
Even though everything I care about has been backed up, I've been moving files from the drive to an external hard drive manually directory by directory, with the idea being that the drive could crap out on me during any copy operation. Only thing left is Steam files, though those could all be easily downloaded again if it dies during that transfer.
I can't even really get mad. I got this laptop in the summer of 2018, so it's been going for 7 years of heavy use and managed to last with near perfect operation despite sending up the warning signs that every tech site on the internet will tell you mean "your drive's going to die within the next week, back up now."
Really, other than the built in keyboard crapping out less than a week after the warranty expired, it's been pretty solid. Even the stupid plastic hinges that look like they'd break by brushing up against them haven't even cracked. So I guess I can't be completely anti-HP.