Oh my! Thank you for this, these are gorgeous!

That top image is exactly why this is my favorite entry in the series. It’s been a while since I played the game, so I don’t remember the context from that scene, but I can tell that Zidane is somewhat alarmed, possibly creeped out by the eyeball structure. Garnet on the other hand is not intimidated, and walks right…

I have two guesses from those screenshots.

But will it have the return of this music??

No, it’s a fairness thing. If you get a loot box right before a special event wins, you still have your normal chance of getting event-exclusive unlocks from that box. On the flip side, you can’t stockpile loot boxes before some special event, then open them all during the event to tip the odds in your favor. For…

The change to Gyms is fantastic. It sounds so simple, but now it means that if I want to take down a Gym, rather than trying to find the one kid in my neighborhood that plays the game way too much, and therefore has a single creature strong enough to defeat the Gym, I can now attempt to track down *every body with a…

I definitely agree with the critique on NSMB Wii U being lazy; many of the level mechanics and ideas were lifted straight from earlier NSMB titles, and it felt lazy. Nintendo eventually did recover with Super Mario 3D World, which is all sorts of fantastic, but by that point I feel like they’d missed the boat. That…

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.