I found Partners in Time incredibly skippable for some reason. I dunno, something about the shroob humor was a bit off, but what I really couldn’t get past was the *music.* Definitely a miss for the series as a whole, the battle theme in particular just sounds so flat to me:

Actually, as the author of a Gameboy emulator written in Lua, this isn’t such an easy assumption to make. There, each pixel is *several* function calls, to emulate various bits of the graphics subsystem, draw one of the backgrounds, and handle any sprites that overlay it.

I mean, if we’re going to pull teeth, one million checks per second isn’t necessarily very much at all. A Nintendo Gameboy plots on the order of 1.3 million pixels every second at its paltry resolution of 160 x 144. Computers are fast, and running thousands or even millions of operations in a given second means…

Ever tried to play those games on Linux using Wine? You can’t, because the Wine team refuses to implement the methods that anti-piracy tools use to rootkit the system and implement their protections. Most Asian MMOs fall into the same territory; they would technically work on Linux just fine were it not for the…

I kept my virginity until I was 26 years old, and was not particularly shy about that fact. I spent a good deal of my early life trying to convince myself to be straight for the benefit of some of my relatives, and didn’t come out as gay until earlier that year. Huge relief really, and now that I’m past it it’s not a…

Funny you should mention that, Extra Credits did a whole feature video on that very subject:

The largest company capitalizing on the speedrunning scene at the moment goes by the name Twitch. You may have heard of them. :)

Brawl’s tripping mechanic was *incredibly* un-tournament friendly, adding an unpredictable amount of randomness to pretty much any technical movement players might try to perform. I’m sure it’s the primary reason Melee stayed as popular as it did.

Well, one way to narrow that down is that, excepting the castle’s secret stars, there are 7 stars in each course. The 100 coins star can be obtained while collecting some other star (usually red coins) but every other star in a course resets you to right outside that course’s entrance.

I read the owner’s manual for my Mazda 3 when I first bought it, and referred to it again on several occasions, notably when the maintenance mode light came on (I didn’t know that was even a thing, it’s just a timed annoy-a-tron) and also to figure out what the low tire pressure indicator meant. (I realized quickly…

Honestly, the thing that’s pleasantly surprised me about my Mazda 3 is how usable the entertainment system is. I completely forget that it even has a touchscreen until one of my passengers reaches out to put fingerprints on it; the knob-based interface works so well, and is so easy to use with my eyes still on the…

I’m going to gripe a bit here. As much as I would *love* a Yoshi’s Island and Star Fox release on the thing, the Super FX chip is not the easiest thing in the world to emulate. I strongly suspect they’re having technical limitations with that chip more than licensing restrictions, though it’s hard to know.

Yes, this is quite valid and is known as a segmented run. Often these types of runs are done using the in-game save system, and I think it would be quite appropriate for the 100% category in this game, which has a fairly ridiculous number of collectibles. I don’t see this category ever falling below 24 hours unless…

I find it especially interesting that the switch is already cracked for homebrew (like, a week after release) and the operating system is apparently similar to the 3DS. Which does makes sense, given it’s an ARM-based system. This means the work done on the Citra emulator might well be applicable to the Switch if…

I look forward to the shit-percent speedrunning category. That should be fun for the whole family.

Well, I do buy a *lot* of my Steam games in the form of Humble Bundle sales. These are usually handed out in the form of steam keys. My biggest question is, do these keys count as real sales? Or as gifts?

You did not, although they certainly helped. Most fire based puzzles could be solved by shooting an arrow through a torch flame to light in mid-flight, and you could also pick up the magic item Din’s Fire from one of the fairy fountains, which could light torches in a pretty wide area around link. I haven’t tried…

Welcome back Narcissa! I’ve missed you at the last few SGDQ marathons, you always brought a positive energy to the scene that was refreshing and welcoming.

Wha...? You’d think for a device marketed on and *named for* its ability to switch modes, Nintendo would make this a hard requirement for any games launching on the platform.

I remember being turned off of MyFitnessPal when I looked into it a while back because it wanted me to subscribe to remove ads, something which I am morally opposed to doing. (I shouldn’t have to pay money for software to stop doing an annoying, privacy invading behavior; that’s backwards. I’ll gladly pay for…