Gyokuyoutama

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.)

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.)

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."

Looks like Space Jam isn't the only webpage that hasn't been updated since 1996:

https://www.two4u.com/pizzacats/index.html

EDIT: Compare this to the Fandom Samurai Pizza Cats wiki and tell me that 90's web design was worse than what we have now.

I find the 90's fascinating as a decade for music because the mainstream never settled on a sound for the decade, other than maybe grunge.  You can contrast this with the 80's (synth pop, arena rock and new wave), the 70's (basically what is classified as "classic rock" these days, plus disco), the 60's (early rock n' roll and cheesy pop) or the 50's (doo wop, blues and rockabilly.)  I've intentionally ignored rap since those exist in their own universes, as far as public perception goes.

Anyway, I thought I'd challenge myself to find 20 songs that capture how I feel the 90's sounded like (again, excluding country and rap... well except for non-rap that had a rapper added to it; it was the 90's).  Most of these songs are pretty well known.  I'm not trying to find some obscure band that's great but you haven't listened to, just to get a feel for the decade as a whole and its variations.

EDIT: I really wanted to put "Epic" by Faith No More on the list since it captures the "90's sound" to me in the same way that Nena's "99 Luftballons" is the quintessential 80's song.  But Epic was actually released in 1989...

I also probably should have put some award bait R&B songs on there since there was one of those at the end of practically every movie across the decade.  Oh well.

Current state of youtube search:

5% relevant results (not shown first.)

10% stuff you already watched.

10% "people also watched" chosen seemingly at random

5% Breaking news!

10% Videos that might be related to the search if you really squint, but don't make much sense

60% Youtube shorts

It says a lot that Oblivion Remastered is a very strong contender for RPG of the year 2025.

Maybe game of the year.

In honor of the new Phase Debuts, a revised ranking of the phase girls:

Haven't seen enough to rate tier:

Don't hate, but don't like watching tier:

Familiar with, but have no strong opinions about tier:

I enjoy watching, but not enough to specifically seek out their content tier:

Will actively tune in, but not my faves tier:

Faves Tier:

EDIT: All three of the new debuts are in the top 10, so overall very strong night.

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.

A lot of you probably played Hypnospace Outlaw without realizing how accurately it nailed the vibe of not only the mid-to-late 90's internet, but also the advertising surrounding it:

On a highly related topic, here's a glimpse to what UIs might have looked like if we hadn't just kept copying Windows 95 forever:

Tenma sums up my opinion of over 90% of Vtuber drama:

She also sums up my opinions on the remaining 10%

I don't know, I don't really get any vtuber drama recommendations on youtube and my recommendations look like this:

EDIT: Not pictured on this particular slice: Fuwamoco, Go Go Nippon, Ljot Swanhild, Polka, Tenma, Neuro, Jelly, Lumi, Marimari_EN, Nanahoshi Suzu, Nekomasu, Shondo, random 10 view channels

I really don't know if the Vtuber drama rate is higher than the yotuube/twitter drama rate in general.  It's hard for me to get a gauge on it since the ones that I want usually don't get involved in drama.  Or rather they do, but it's the type of drama that I don't give a shit about.

I mean for example take the "Angry Reviewer" genre from the mid 00's to early 10's.  Take away all the ones that didn't get involved in some form of drama or other and you're left with what?  AVGN?  (No wait, there was that time people expected you to get mad at him over ghostbusters.)

I mean "moe" is an actual Japanese term so of course it's going to have more longevity than an inside mispelling meme like "gar."

But the bigger problem is that (despite originating as a Fate term) it's pretty wrapped up in the mecha genre, and the mecha genre died almost immediately after "gar" was coined.  It all started with people declaring that Master Asia was G Gundam was the most gar man to ever live, leading quickly to the "trinity of gar" (G Gundam, GaoGaiGar and Gurren Lagann) and in turn to G becoming the most hotblooded letter of the alphabet.

"Moar" of course predates all of that as a spelling of "more", but for a bit people were using it to refer to "gar" moe shows like Nanoha or the original Pretty Cure.

The last time I was actively browsing 4chan, /m/ had just decided that "moar" was a combination of "moe" and "gar."

It really is amazing how aggressively Cat's Eye avoids the question of why the girls don't wear masks on heists.  I mean, they're regularly in view of security cameras, openly run through public places, and get within visual distance of the main detective nearly every episode (who is the boyfriend of the middle sister.)  Yet the idea of wearing masks is never discussed, even though they do wear Lupin III style perfect latex masks when they need to con someone as part of the preparation to the heist, just never on the heist itself.

It gets particularly ridiculous in one episode when the lead detective actually does see the face of his girlfriend.  They only get away with it using wacky shenanigans where they knock him out, convince him it was all a dream (to be fair, he was sleeping immediately before the encounter), and then have him catch a different thief.... except this is actually the same sister who is now wearing a mask.  Even then no one asks "why didn't we just wear masks the first time around?"

I mean I know the real answer (they wanted to stress that the girls are so good that they don't need masks, and also knew that they were cuter with their faces visible) and I am perfectly willing to roll with it.  But it's so ridiculous if you think about it for two seconds that it approaches the point of parody.

So Gura's retiring.

Does this mean that Pippa Pipkin will be the most well known active Vtuber?

(No.)

I'd say "end of an era" but the Gura era effectively ended a while back.  I don't really think there's even a unified culture to the VTuber fandom at this point.  This is more like when One Piece finishes; it will definitely be big for the anime community but not really something that redefines what anime means.

Am now 18 puzzles into Shenzhen.  The game gets my full recommendation, though of course you have to be of the right mindset for it.  There have been multiple puzzles where I got stuck for ten minutes and then realized "oh wait, that command is a strict less than, not a less than or equal" or "I forgot to put the "+" and "-" in the rows after a conditional statement to cause them to have any effect."  I know that even a lot of the people who are willing to try out the programming in this game will go crazy due to stuff like that, so this is a very niche audience.

One thing that I like a lot about the game is how it gives you all the tools you need at each part, but gives only a little guidance in the early stages and none at all later.  I just did the first puzzle that required the use of a ROM module, and nothing in the game indicates that this is the case.  There's a couple of early puzzles where someone says "this would be a good chance to try out this part" but nothing like that here.  But it's obvious from context since you need to output a string of numbers which will, if hard coded, would require more space then is available even in the advanced micro-controllers.  I suppose you could have a complicated daisy-chain of those microcontrollers to do it, but the more obvious technique is to have those numbers stored in memory and read them off as needed, requiring only five or so lines in a loop.  This also means that you are not given any information about how to use ROM controllers, even though this is the first thing that requires pointer manipulation.  RTFM.

While the game goes to a further extreme than most games should, it is a real breath of fresh air from so many modern mainstream games where the first hour is "use your mouse to look", "use WASD to walk," "when you are shot you get hurt," followed by "puzzles" like placing a box on top of another box after someone says on your radio "hey, I bet if you stacked those boxes you could climb them to get over that wall!"

Now that Alpha Protocol resurfaced, I want to see people playing that.  It's a also a game with lots of hidden content and plenty of ways to surprise an unwary player, but it also never made much impact on the popular consciousness and was flat out unavailable outside of piracy for 5 years before 2024.  Also a great game for punishing streamers who are not paying attention to what is going on.  Among other things, it is possible to have various enemy factions give you false orders to take out their enemies, and go through the game without ever realizing that this is what happened.  Conversely, there are instances where you can make them think that their ploy worked until to pull the rug out from under them at the worst possible time.

Also a game where doing random crap will likely lead to interesting scenarios.  Even actions which seem insane on their face can have benefits down the road. The game even outright tells you that tanking character relationships can help out (of course, having people like you can also help in other ways.)  The stupidest actions can help you out in the final act simply by being so stupid that no one factored the possibility into their calculations.  So I imagine there are scenarios that you can encounter on a blind playthrough, but people searching for a specific ending won't find.  For example, on my first playthrough I ended up as solid allies with a guy whose daughter I killed in our first encounter.  And the game actually made it very plausible that he would agree to work with me down the line, given the circumstances (though it also had him passive aggressively reference that whole "murdering his daughter" thing whenever he got the chance.)  There is a unique ending scenario for this exact set of circumstances that I saw, but if you were going for an ending where you had that faction as an ally you definitely wouldn't start things off the way I did.

I keep getting results for "anime recap" videos with hundreds of thousands to millions of views.  When I check them out on a private browser, the comments are always active and don't seem bot driven, so there does seem to be a community of people watching this stuff.  The videos are not reviews or commentaries or even reactions, just blandly stating what happens in each episode with however many scenes they can put up from the show in the background without tripping the copyright filter.

It makes me wonder if people under 20 even watch anime, or if they just watch summaries of it.  I don't know any young anime fans, but I do know people in that age bracket who find it uncomfortable to sit through a 90 minute move, so maybe this appeals to that sort of person?  Though most of these have dumb video titles that don't even say what series they are covering, and they will often use the same title when covering more episodes from the same series, so it doesn't seem like it would even be easy to decide that you didn't want to watch a show and search up one of these for a specific series.  Maybe it's just meant to be background noise?

I'm only about 8 puzzles in but so far I'm enjoying Shenzhen a lot more than I thought I would.  I can see how the game would piss off many people, seeing as how you will very frequently run out of lines of code (especially since you need to burn a line to label the destination of a jump) or I/O ports.  You also have to work to implement even basic programming structures like loops or nested conditional statements.

But I find that the restrictions make you focus on what you really want to accomplish in the project, rather than just vomiting out code by rote that you know will probably work.  When I get to the point that I know I can't fit all the code in one microcontroller I now need to make a conscious decision as to what the responsibility of each microcontroller should be.  The limitations also force you into neat tricks.  For example, you get a part that can output a series of three digits for true and false inputs, like 101 for true false true.  If I was doing high level programming I would do a nested conditional statement where I checked the first digit, then the second, then the third (with maybe some logical operators.)  But checking an individual digit burns three lines of code (one to read the output, the next to update the unique arithmetic variable to only store the value, the next to compare what that value is, and since you only have one variable for storage on the basic microcontroller you have to repeat the whole process for the next digit.)  This means that you can literally waste all of your code just checking digits unless you find a workaround (I have one, but I imagine that someone found one even slicker than mine.)

I posted this years ago and no one ever cracked it:

https://pastebin.com/bQGbEGG6

I myself forgot what the message was, so I had to decode it from scratch.  Truly, it is wisdom that should not have been lost.

It's interesting comparing M:tG and D&D.  I think we are to the point where we can agree that the current iterations of these franchises hardly resemble the originals.  But for D&D this matters much less since going back to the older versions is easy.  You can easily pick up legitimate copies of the white box + chainmail,  Holmes Basic, the B/X books, the 1st edition AD&D trinity of core books, or Rules Cyclopedia for BECMI and you're good to go.  You have a game which is stable and can be played like it originally was at your home table.  For 2nd edition and beyond there's a bit more chaff in terms of how many of the source books are "essential" but you even if you wanted to get all the class books or something it still isn't a monumental investment (and that's if you are getting the rules legitimately.)

For Magic: The Gathering though, it's much harder.  If you have your old collection, you can make a cube or something, as Corv says.  Though that isn't so much capturing the old game as capturing your personal experiences of it.  But what if you don't have the old cards?  Well, you could theoretically buy enough from old sets in order to play the game from that area (maybe even reverting to pre sixth-edition rules or something.)  But that's going to bankrupt most people, and why do that when you can just buy a deck building game or boxes of a much less popular game and get a similar experience?  The old Duels of the Planeswalkers games do capture an era somewhat, but you are limited to just the decks in that game.  The really old Dules of the Planeswalkers (aka Shandalar) does a much better job of showing the state of the game, but the AI is derpy as hell so unless you can convince someone to play with you, you're not getting the same experience.  And there's just something about holding the cards in your hand, you know?

I suppose you could print out old cards, especially if you just did one side on cheap paper and sleeved 'em.  But I doubt you'd find a playgroup that would be fine playing that way, and even if you did since you control all the cards you miss out on having different card pools from different players and decks built beforehand.

I went into this blind, but I've been looking at Jelly Hoshiumi's solutions after I do my own.

I felt like an idiot considering I needed 3 microcontrollers costing ￥11 to complete the fourth one, but then I checked and she used five costing ￥15.  So at least I'm smarter than a VTuber.

EDIT: She beat me by using two lines less code on the fifth one because I was too dumb to realize I didn't need to use jump commands.