Someone actually programmed an 8k homebrew demo for the Atari 2600 that recreates the original Pac Man quite faithfully. It’s a shame Atari couldn’t hire this guy, as it’s the game we could have received way back then:

I’m pleased to see a reignited focus on exploration. It was one of my favorite aspects about platformers on the N64 (Super Mario, Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64) and we seem to have lost it somewhere along the way. Open world games are fun, but most of them aren’t platformers in the traditional sense, so I’m super…

Might I recommend then Computer Science? Especially games design. “What do you mean all the characters are cylinders? I only need one collision resolution function for the *entire game* and that works?” With enough pretty graphics shaders, you can hide all the good enough in the world.

That was my thought exactly. “What player base?” Every person I know, every streamer I watch, plays the original Java version of Minecraft, often with some of its extensive mod library installed to make the game more interesting. Shader mods have been around for ages and look this good or better.

Aye, it’s a tricky subject all around. My wording there is terrible from a legal standpoint, a real lawyer would choose their description much more carefully. Perhaps personhood is not even the right term, but then what is? There’s obviously an intelligence threshold past which certain types of captivity are inhumane,…

I feel like you’re combining personhood and citizenship. I have no issues with assigning personhood status to sentient beings, and feel like that’s what the threshold should roughly be: sentience, and a reasonable demonstration of communication skills and social functions.

My first thought when I saw that logo: “Oh Sonic, what has SEGA done to you this time...”

I could not agree more with this sentiment. I’m against DRM as much as the next guy, but it’s for philisophical reasons, not because I actually want to pirate software. I buy my games, and then want the freedom to play them on all my machines going forward. I’ll gladly apply community patches and mods to make them…

I think Risk of Rain is a good example of both a hit and a miss. The art style does a lot with very little, and the *enemies* tend to read fairly well, but they made humans tiny on purpose to sell the atmosphere (success!) at the cost of readability. (...not so great.) Combine that with lots of particle effects…

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…

That’s not... quite how LCD displays work.

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.

This is why I don’t bother trying to dual boot on a single hard drive with Windows. Microsoft has no respect for other partitions or bootloaders, and assumes it owns the whole drive. On my machines that dual boot, I run two separate drives, and Windows gets a whole drive all to itself.