As the owner of a Nintendo, Super Nintendo, N64, and several handheld systems, let me tell you that this is a particularly difficult challenge in the modern age. Some of the older games (*Especially* the better SNES titles, looking at you Chrono Trigger and Earthbound) are extremely difficult to come by at a fair…

You know, that was my initial reaction too, but I’ve had to take a step back. This is pretty far removed from a flash clicker that would deserve a $10 price tag; it’s clear the developers have put a ton of work into it, even if the gameplay is relatively simple. I don’t know that I agree with the race to the bottom…

Super Metroid is a really great game with a pretty... okay, and sometimes frustrating control scheme. It’s easier to appreciate it in the context of its era, where most gamers would have the time to sink into its winding levels and slowly acclimate themselves with its difficult controls, mastering the mechanics one…

There’s a Kinja bug that appears to cause Twitter embeds to only load at half-size, and it’s kinda random. Might be a problem with some people’s ad blockers perhaps, but I noticed it happening a few months ago and it never really fixed itself.

Ah, the author isn’t specific, but here’s the relevant quote from the article:

The 13 hearts thing is also not nearly as bad as it sounds; each Divine beast gives you one whole container, and if you've been picking up stamina wheels, you can swap them out for hearts using the evil statues, then switch them back when you're done. By the time you've completed 2-3 of the beasts, you've practically…

The unlock system in League isn’t actually all that slow. If you’re playing as much as these professional players do every day, you very likely already have every champion unlocked and a huge cache of Blue Essence (previously called IP) banked. Even as a very casual player, I’ve unlocked half the roster and am picking…

In this particular case, I think the technique could quite easily be adopted to smartphones and tablets. Any two touchscreen devices with reasonably similar DPI should be able to perform the trick as described. I wonder if we’ll see those pop up? Might be an interesting mechanic to play with as a game designer.

This is a lot closer than you realize. The “thing that makes SNES games” for the artwork in this case is a paint program that understands paletted images, and some process to take that image and divide it up into tiles, so that it will fit into the memory of the SNES’s VRAM and can be drawn correctly by the hardware.

Oh man, that means you missed out on Kirby 64! Do yourself a favor and check out that game. I remember that it also used the D+Pad for movement, and had a really unique ability combining system that I don’t think has been re-done in any of the later games.

The iQue player also has a distinct advantage in that it doesn’t lag the way a physical N64 console does; its emulator, although still officially sanctioned, is just a tad overclocked. This makes it particularly attractive for certain categories, especially Any%, where several normally quite laggy end-game cutscenes…

Heather, the Twitch embed in this post is set to autoplay. I think this is their default, but y’all are normally pretty good about disabling autoplay on these, so this one probably slipped under the radar. Took me a moment to figure out which tab was playing audio. :)

“The movie, due out in November 2019, will be a mix of live-action and CG, and is also amazingly the first time the 27 year-old Sega character has appeared on the big screen.”

To expand on this, the CPU in the NES is in no way capable of generating an RGB signal via the expansion port, primarily due to its clockspeed. The PPU in an NES is clocked 3x faster than the CPU (on NTSC anyway) and still manages just one pixel per clock, and that’s with some major simplifications to its NTSC signal…

I’ve tried streaming services like these and I just can’t enjoy them. There’s juuuust enough latency between when I press the button and when the action happens onscreen that I notice it, and it kills my suspension of disbelief. It’s always there, nagging in the back of my mind.

Can anyone explain the rationale behind the no tipping policy? I’ve seen this at a bunch of different places and it makes me really annoyed at the management of the place. Having worked in retail, and in the food industry, I fully appreciate the level of crap those workers have to take on a decent basis, so when I…

Ignoring any puzzle elements, I’m strongly reminded of the Viruses from the Megaman Battle Network series. Almost all of those words are chip types you can obtain from fighting viruses, and the abbreviations are in line with the series as well. But a Virus isn’t an animal... I don’t know if that’s helpful.

This can be reduced somewhat on current models, but usually not eliminated entirely. Check your TV’s menu options for a special low-latency “Gaming” mode, and disable all the picture enhancements (upscaling, motion correction, even the Sharpness filter) to reduce the delay as much as possible. That should help, maybe…

Right, you’re absolutely correct. The timing is really hard to get nailed down in a general sense, such that it’ll work correctlty for all games. Unless your emulator is extremely hardware accurate (hard to do without sacrificing performance), it’s pretty much going to have weird timing bugs that require workarounds…

That... shouldn’t necessarily be the case with a good emulator. It’s very possible to recreate the timing of the original hardware well enough to have identical performance, especially when you’re working with a known game.