I *hated* Mode 7 effects back in 1991. I thought they looked hideous and cheap. Age has not improved them. But kudos to the developers here for implementing a gross-looking but certainly technically challenging look on the Genesis.
I *hated* Mode 7 effects back in 1991. I thought they looked hideous and cheap. Age has not improved them. But kudos to the developers here for implementing a gross-looking but certainly technically challenging look on the Genesis.
This is why I don't watch SM64 speed runs without first turning off my speakers....
Lucy Bradshaw was a good company man (woman). Whether or not the various recent missteps made by Maxis were internal decisions or forced on them by EA, there's no accident that they aligned perfectly with EA's long term commercial goals. Maxis couldn't have gone against that if they had wanted to.
No, that's step 5. EA shuts them down, but keeps all their properties and IP. Then they get a newer, cheaper studio to pump out some cheaper sequels with a higher profit margin. Eventually that destroys the brand, but by then EA has moved on to its next victim, er, acquisition.
And everyone is really skeptical about that narrative, because it's difficult to see what Maxis stood to gain from the decision, while it absolutely seemed to benefit EA and align with their apparent goals. The whole thing reeked fairly badly of EA forcing Maxis to fall on EA's sword, or, to use a common political…
You're not wrong, but there is a difference between criticizing the religious and criticizing religion. An attack on the tenets or institutions of Catholicism, for instance, is not the same as a personal attack on a Catholic. But there is, to be fair, much confusion on this point both among the faithful and the…
I'm not sure if I reached that point, per se, but my break-up with Christianity was followed by a period of cynicism toward the idea of religion. I thought it bred mean, closed-minded people, that it was—more often than not—a well-disguised tool for manipulation. Or more than that: a Batman-style utility belt of…
I dunno. Sometimes I think I'd rather live in denial. I mean, in the end, if there is no afterlife, then I won't be around to be embarrassed by being wrong. The problem, of course, is that while I don't really have any problem living in denial, I'm not crazy about the idea of having to turn off the part of my brain…
That's not it. The dress itself is blue and black, as has been pointed out repeatedly. The original image that was circulating, though, is demonstrably not, probably because of the poor quality of the photo. Open it in Photoshop (or even MS Paint) and use the color picker. It's a very pale blue (admittedly closer to…
But rather than get rid of the lives system entirely, many designers shoehorned in workarounds. For instance, in Super Mario World, if you found the secret passageway in the first Ghost House, you opened up a path to the Top Secret Area, which you could visit an unlimited number of times.
But what works in one medium doesn't necessarily work in another, and there were some home console games that suffered from having a lives system. With arcade games, you actually had an indefinite number of lives, so long as there was some spare change in your pockets. But now, with the home consoles, a 'lives system'…
Even if that were true, it's still a small fraction of overall union activity, arguably notable mostly because municipal unions are still relatively powerful compared to their private sector counterparts. And that's assuming that it's not just another in a long line of "unions are the devil" rhetoric that has been…
That's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. Unions have been derided and demonized to the point where they have trouble functioning in the first place. Their major purpose is to enable collective negotiation on behalf of the workers, and that's difficult to do when many states have purposefully disincentivized…
No, and I'm not saying you should be condemning capitalism "for the flaws of entities working within it." But I think you're missing my point. You talk about how unions have "become poison to America" and how "they're leeches, and we'd be better off without them" based on "the flaws of entities working within it." My…
And this is exactly the behavior I was talking about. "Sure, there are some bad actors," but heaven forbid the system that enables them be drawn into question. That would be unthinkable, right? But unions? Bah, all unions are responsible for the "bad actors" in their midst. Because they can do bad things, we have the…
There's this perception that just because something is Japanese, it has the special power to manipulate or corrupt children, or that Japanese trends are ploys to undermine western nationality. Again, this might be racism at work.
Yeah, but why is that? Why is the good that unions do overshadowed by the bad when the same doesn't apply elsewhere? When Enron's shenanigans came to light, the people arguing that our entire capitalist system was corrupt by design and should be thrown out remained a decidedly fringe sentiment. Sure, there were people…
That's an accident of history, I suspect. Most of the other media you mention are decades older than video games, and date from a time when the country was, if not necessarily union friendly, friendlier than they've been since 1980 or so.
The thing is, it's only unions where corruption is such a deal breaker. I'm a solid supporter of unions. What that doesn't mean is that I'm either unaware or forgiving of corruption. But the standard argument goes something like "unions are corrupt, so we don't need them." Which is a logic that is seldom applied to,…
What's more shocking to me is how few people make the connection between lack of unionization and monumentally bad working conditions. If I had a nickel for every friend I've had who can go on about how evil the big bad unions are and still express shock and outrage over the kind of behavior described in these sort of…