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…

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.

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…

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.