The soundtrack and vocals can’t be overstated, as they *completely* sell the atmosphere and mood. MGS in particular had a certain heft to its actions (helped by the PS1's novel-at-the-time reverb effects) that made your movements feel so much more visceral. Its voice acting was also top notch for the era, and still…

I think what would really matter is whether Daesh men would find being portrayed as homosexual shameful. (Presumably it would go against their religious motivations?) But the author (of this game) has clearly done more of her research than I have, and I suspect she’s closer to hitting that mark than I would be. Alas,…

I figured having a local server for the tournament would mostly serve to reduce latency and remove the public internet as a failure point for the gameplay. But I dunno, I haven’t ever played in one of these tournaments (or run one), so perhaps I’m reaching there. If the game client does that thing where it promotes…

Oh man, I work in a datacenter for a living. All the careful planning in the world, and occasionally, for no apparent reason at all, the NIC just straight up decides it doesn’t feel like forwarding packets, or acknowledging requests, or refreshing its route table... there’s a whole multitude of different ways that a…

If the development team were using City Skylines to actually construct a model of the project they intended to build, that would be awesome! But as noted in the original article, this particular City Skylines screenshot was from an old reddit post from three years ago. They got caught being lazy, and there’s no…

This seems pretty spot on. It’s one thing to make an open source clone of the game mechanics with original art, or even to require the base game to lift the artwork from. But to include copied assets in your repo from a commercial game is just asking for trouble. Still, seems like EA are being reasonable about things;…

Albert, I have a lot of respect for you, but WHY did this article not end with “That’s All Folks!”???

I think perhaps this is a holdover from the older days of 2D animation. When your in-betweens are all hand-drawn, then smoothness is MUCH harder to achieve, and it became sort of a general purpose compliment.

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. :)