Super Nintendo:

• Megaman X. I was never a fan of classic Megaman, but the faster, more action-oriented sequel/spinoff X series rates amongst my favorites. It has tight controls, good music, varied stages, and memorable bosses and combat encounters. I must have beaten the first game dozens of times over the years.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It and Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy were so close to perfect that decades later they’re still the basis of comparison for any new 2D Zelda-like.

PC:

• Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn. it was the game that introduced Bioware’s trademark party banter and focus on interesting and likeable characters. The systems are a little rough but it still mostly holds up. Though it’s been a while since my last playthrough, and I usually stop once I hit the Underdark and the open world structure constricts for a few hours.

I can only hope you’re a dab hand at this. It’s high time someone provided answers!

What am I looking at here? I’m guessing that’s weed?

The motion capture excuse would also hold more water if they didn’t go for an actor only two years younger than David Hayter.

He wanted out for a long time, IIRC as early as MGS 2. 4 was originally planned to end with Snake and Otacon being captured and executed for terrorism to put the final nail in the franchise’s coffin, with Kojima only dropping the idea after his entire writing staff protested.

I think you hit the nail on the head with his dissatisfaction being why 5 felt so different. It barely feels like a Metal Gear game even if the stealth is at its all-time best, but you can definitely see some proto-Death Stranding DNA in it in retrospect. He was clearly experimenting with new gameplay ideas, which might explain why the game went so far over budget and ended up unfinished.

You need to hold the PS button and select (I’ll never stop calling it that) until the LED starts flashing, then it’ll be in pairing mode.

You can buy phone mounts for PlayStation controllers. It’d definitely be cheaper than a whole new controller.

It looks like the game that changed its dailies was Star Rail, not Genshin Impact. Which makes sense: I remember seeing the change in-game but I haven’t played Genshin since around the time of that event in Enk… whatever the underground area is called.

I’m trying to find good articles about it but internet search is abysmal these days, especially for news outside the anglosphere. I did find a forum thread about the Star Rail change as well as a Reddit comment translating and explaining the proposed law though.

The TL;DR of it all seems to be that some time around December 2023, new restrictions were proposed affecting gacha games to curb addicting behavior. The news caused stock prices for affected Chinese companies to plummet, and the person who proposed the law was quickly removed from his position and the proposal dropped.

I do, but I also know he’d been trying to get rid of Hayter for a while by then even though he was the voice of Snake, so the excuse rings hollow.

Remember when he got rid of David Hayter, the iconic long-time voice actor of Snake, main character of his most popular series, just so he could replace him with some Hollywood actor doing a generic gruff guy impression? Then said actor ended up being so expensive that there was barely any dialogue… in a Metal Gear game?

Charlie was my first crush and I’d still let him wreck me

Instance checks out? Though that result is better than being scarred for life by ADGTH* like so many other children were.

• This can be replaced with any other Don Bluth film.

You can’t just share a story like that and not say how it ended. I’m invested now!

I’m normally a cat person, but this photo is making me doubt myself.

the same small group of lemmings was transported to the location, jostled on turntables, and repeatedly shoved off a cliff to imply mass suicide

That Wikipedia quote implies it wasn’t deadly, but checking the end line citations, their reference calls it a “mass animal killing made to look like natural suicide” and makes no mention of using the same group multiple times.

Added the new feature: looting of mutant parts.

I look forward to ignoring the main storyline and roleplaying a wandering monster hunter instead. Hopefully the new mod support can flesh this out even further!

Thanks for the detailed write-up! I’ll have to pick it up at some point; even if it doesn’t hit the same highs as JA2, there hasn’t really been much else that comes close and a more modern coat of polish would be welcome.

What did you think of the new aiming system? I’ve heard mixed things, but it sounded good to me (or at least way better than a flat percentage).

I’m curious why 16-bit support is being dropped. Too much additional codebase complexity for such a small use case, or are there technical reasons it’s difficult to support in a 64-bit environment that somehow don’t exist in a 32-bit one? Or is it simply not implemented yet due to a lack of dev time/interest in the feature?

I know 16-bit programs are incredibly niche these days, but I’d be way more comfortable with enterprises running their ancient software in a secure, up-to-date WINE environment as opposed to an actual Windows 3.x one with its nonexistent security. Even in an isolated VM, that kind of setup is one misconfiguration away from disaster.

Many programmers who start working on new personal open source projects wrongly assume that building something cool guarantees users, fans, and revenue will follow. Maybe it’s because they have seen too many cool stories of influencers on Twitter and believe it is true.

It’s statements like these that remind me just how different the internet is for some people. I don’t think I’ve ever strayed far outside of the “look at this cool thing I made!” parts of the open source community. The idea of chasing fame and monetization isn’t really a thing in those circles, let alone “influencers” shilling content like that.

The Unix epoch problem is completely unrelated to a program being 32-bit or not. The architecture affects the maximum addressable memory space, not the size of individual types. You could easily define and use a 128-bit type in a 16-bit environment, for example.

The epoch problem is simply due to a bad design call a long time ago - one that proved foundational and incredibly difficult to change once it’d become an entrenched standard. They could have made timestamps 64-bit at the time, and probably would have if they’d known their work would survive the several decades it’d take for that decision to pay off.

I’ve heard good things about 3, but haven’t bought it myself. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts if you ever get back into it!