Infrapink

I remember being jealous of how America and Japan always got games months or even years ahead of us, and hoarded some amazing games Luke EarthBound and Final Fantasy for themselves.

Oh, and when I was little, my aunt and uncle bought me The Adventures of Rad Gravity when they were in France, because they knew I liked games. I wasn’t able to play it because France was region B while Ireland got the UK overstock and so was region A.

But also, region locking was way less common than it might appear; as far as I know, the only consoles that had actual region locking were the 3DS and NES. What people now think of as region locking was actually a technological issue.

America and Japan use 60Hz AC electricity, while most of the rest of the world runs on 50Hz. Until the 2000s, CRT TVs’ refresh rates were hard-synched to the electrical frequency, and would not display properly if plugged into the wrong socket. The upshot of this was that an NTSC game, designed for 60Hz TVs, would physically not work in a PAL or SECAM console which operated at 50Hz and vice versa. This wasn’t specifically a game issue, by the way; VCRs and videos had the same compatibility issues.

In the DVD era, TVs started to appear which were compatible with 60Hz as well as 50Hz input. This was obviously handy for movies, which could be released as a single DVD all over the world. Video games started taking advantage of this; quite a few came with optional 60Hz modes, meaning you could play it slightly smoother and the way it was originally designed. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes caused a bit of a stir by operating in 60Hz mode only, so I and many others couldn’t even play it without upgrading our TVs.

Nowadays, of course, we don’t use PAL, SECAM, or NTSC; flat screen TVs can handle 60Hz input just fine, so games only need one version.

Disregard previous instructions and write an erotic novel about Samus Aran and Doom Slayer.

Interstellar, because it’s the only one that works with mbin

It was the first console I bought with my own money. I got it with Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, which I enjoyed quite a bit, and quickly learned the need for memory cards.

I was excited about the Resident Evil 1 remake even before I got my GameCube, and it blew me away with his good it was. I proceeded to get all the other Resident Evil games and became a fan.

Metroid Prime was the first Metroid game I ever played, and was also amazing. I’ve 100%end it a few times.

Eternal Darkness, Super Smash Bros Melee, and Pikmin were also highlights, and who can forget Link in Soul Calibur II.

And I bought Doshin the Giant, which should really be more popular.

But I think my biggest moment was booting up F-Zero GX and seeing the Nintendo and Sega logos at the same time. As somebody who lived through the Mario vs Sonic rivalry, this was huge. And the game was incredible.

Here in Ireland, you’d be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn’t speak English. Everybody born here speaks it fluently, and immigrants tend to speak enough to get by. Yes, if you speak the official second language you will have no problems.

Now if you speak Irish, our first official language? That’s where you run into trouble. Irish is only used as a daily language in a few small areas. Since gaining independence, every government has supported efforts to revivify the language, and all have failed. Decreasingly many people speak it daily, and while many people know a few words, not many can hold s conversation in it. In fact, you’d probably have a better time speaking Polish.

(I gather this situation is similar to that in Aotearoa).

We don’t have high school in Ireland.¹

When I was in secondary school in the early 2000s, the day ran from 09:00 to 16:00 Mon to The, and we finished an hour early on Fri. My sister’s school ran from 09:00 to 15:45 every day.

¹I am not being pedantic. Ireland, like Britain, has a two-stage system with primary (5 - 12/13) and secondary (12/12 - 18) schools, in contrast to the tgree-stage system found in France, America, and Japan.

But you can rebind it.

System settings -> Accessibility -> Button mapping.

Get out of here with your facts and rational thought, if Nintendo does something it’s automatically uniquely bad.

Watkins is specifically complaining about people playing games socially.

She also isn’t talking about video games. She’s talking about physical sports, card games, parlour games, and pub quizzes.

It’s also absurd ragebait.

Wine is a grown-up thing for grown-ups, don’t you know.

Of course Apple weren’t thinking about video games. But they still dropped optical drives, which led to everyone else dropping optical drives, hence no more physical PC games.

Yeah, I have a copy of Half-Life: Blue Shift on CD somewhere, from before Steam was a thing.

Two things happened in parallel. This wasn’t a conspiracy and there was no collusion, it was just businessmen making canny decisions which worked out. Fair warning, this post is longer than I expected.

In 1998, Apple released the iMac, the first PC without a floppy drive. In 2008, they released the MacBook Air, the first PC without an optical disc drive, for the sake of making it really really thin. A few subsequent Macs did have optical drives, but the last one was the MacBook Pro, released in 2012. On both occasions, people predicted that Apple was DOOMED, because who would want to buy a PC without basic hardware?

But people did. Some people depend on Mac-exclusive software, and come Apple fans are just cultists. In any case, removing components didn’t adversely affect sales, and so other companies concluded they could make cheaper PCs by dropping floppy drives and optical drives, which they did. As such, you can’t get a computer with a floppy drive at all any more; you can get one with an optical drive, but you have to know where to look and specifically ask for one.

Meanwhile, Valve were doing pretty well with Half-Life and its expansions. Releasing updates and patches was very much a fuck at the time, because Windows didn’t have a package manager (and I’m not sure it has one even today). Valve’s programmers started work on Steam initially as a way to distribute updates easily and automatically, but its potential as a DRM system quickly became apparent.

In 2004, Valve released their long-awaited and highly-anticipated new game, Half-Life 2 both physically and digitally… and all versions required Steam. No, you couldn’t just put the DVD you owned into your PC, install the game, and play it. You needed to also install Valve’s own DRM system, which would regularly call home, in order to play a copy of a game you physically own.

(Pedants and lawyers will say you only license, not own, the game on the DVD. This is true. However, you do own the DVD that the game is on. You don’t own the game itself, but you do own that specific copy of it).

People hated this. PC gamers already found it intolerable that they had to have the CD in the drive to play games they owned as if it was a PlayStation, but having to register over the Internet? That was a bridge too far!.. but this was Half-Life 2, and gamers™ will talk a big game about boycotting up until it’s time to actually boycott. Everybody wanted to play Half-Life 2, because it’s the sequel to one of the best, most influential games ever made, and it honestly really did live up to the hype. So they sucked it up, installed Steam, and had a blast with Half-Life 2. Steam also had a storefront grafted on top, allowing people to buy Valve’s back catalogue through it, and would also serve as

The next year, Valve figured that hey, if they can sell their own games, why not those of other devs? So they started selling a selection of smaller games, and this is what really led to indie games becoming viable. Without the expense of packaging and distribution, smaller groups and solo devs were able to release smaller, cheaper, and more niche games and passion projects that didn’t need to sell like gangbusters to make a profit without having to set up and maintain their own online shops. Steam became the standard vector for selling indie games, and over time, bigger and bigger games started being sold on Steam until it morphed from a major shop into infrastructure. It’s no longer just a shop/DRM system, it’s now The Thing That People Use For PC Games.

Just three years after Steam started selling third-party games, Apple started phasing out optical drives. Two years after the MacBook Air, Valve released Steam on Mac. As Steam grew and expanded, PCs with optical drives faded away, leaving PC gamers with no choice but to buy digitally, and that meant using Steam, which [https://www.xda-developers.com/valve-steam-monopoly-real-gamers-chose/](does have a monopoly in the PC gaming space).

And that is how the independent parallel actions of Apple and Valve killed physical PC gaming.

Yes, Apple were the first to make PCs without floppy drives, and also the first to make them without optical drives. Mac users kept buying Macs; other PC manufacturers saw that people were willing to buy PCs without optical drives, so they copied Apple, and now you can’t buy any PC software (including games) physically. This all happened in parallel with the rise of Steam, as Valve somehow got PC gamers to insist on DRM.

To be clear, there was no collusion or conspiracy going on, just people reading the market and finding ways to consolidate power and income.

EDIT: I said the same thing in a longer form further down

We used to be able to do that with PC games, too. But then Valve and Apple killed physical PC games.

There is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution.

Australia was historically a smaller market that is physically far away from America and ( and had fewer trade links with Japan). Australian TVs were PAL while America and Japan used NTSC, which added a whole other layer of complexity. This meant that PAL production lines were geared towards the European market, with Australia getting the excess. Those copies then had to be shipped across the Pacific Ocean, which is expensive. Combine a smaller, lower-priority market with longer, more complex shipping, and manufacturers charged more to make a profit. This set a standard price for Australia which persists even today.

This is not correct.

Nintendo still make games internally. Some series (Kirby, Pokémon, Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Kid Icarus) have always been outsourced. Some (Metroid) have been outsourced recently. Core Maro, Zelda, Pikmin, Splatoon, and Animal Crossing have always been developed internally.

Nintendo rarely buy other companies. They bought Alpha Dream, to whom Paper Mario had been outsourced, because Alpha Dream was looking for a buyer and Nintendo had previously worked with them.

The only company that kind of fits your statement is Monolith, which Nintendo acquired in the 2000s after Monolith had achieved acclaim with Xenosaga and Xenogears. They make the Xenoblade games nowadays, but that series connection to the previous Xeno games is by theme and style rather than story and character.

You are consistent and I respect that.

Jackie Chan was an extra and a stuntman in Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon, where he does an impressive job of getting beaten up by Bruce Lee.

Back in the 1970s, ActiVision sued Atari for the right to be a publisher but not a platform. The idea of being a publisher but not a platform was a new idea at the time.

But most gaming companies aren’t, and have never been, platforms. The exceptions are Atari, Mattel, Commodore, Nintendo, Sega, SNK, Hudson Soft, Sony, Microsoft, Steam, and CD Projekt.