dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

What, like how Obsidian made a better Fallout 3 than Fallout 3 with New Vegas?

Consumer burnable CD and DVD disks often have an astonishingly short storage life, especially if they are not stored very carefully. They’re not an archival medium. Competently pressed commercial (aluminum) disks meanwhile have a storage life that is near as makes no difference to infinite provided they are not physically damaged in some way.

I’ve got tons of burned disks of pirated old games from the early aughts that don’t read anymore. This is highly annoying from a preservation standpoint as I can’t get them to play despite possessing them on disk, and they’re now unpopular enough that they’re likewise difficult to impossible to pirate again.

Who the hell has a built-in CD player or even a BD-player in this time and age?

The answer is nerds. The specific answer is the type of nerds who would buy this sort of thing.

You’re looking at one right now, in fact — I have an internal 5.25" Blu-Ray burner in the lone singular bay in my current case. (The machine with the conga line of nearly every type of floppy drive ever created down the front of it lives in the basement.)

I twigged to that immediately, also. Canonically according to the Internet the Arwing is supposed to be 28 “sm” long in its SNES incarnation and 18.5 of them thereafter, only raising the question of what the hell the “sm” is as a unit and how that translates to real world ones. But assuming that Fox and his furry pals are roughly the same proportions as humans, the way the Arwing is consistently depicted is with a single seater cockpit that one of them fits in to handily, roughly analogous to a real world fighter jet. Thus we can assume they’re about the same proportions. So, like 18 to 20 meters long, which makes Star Fox’s units (maybe they’re “space meters”) seem pretty comparable.

I think the Arwing’s on the wrong page, here.

Where’s MatPat when you need him?

I feel like President Skroob and his luggage, here. This encapsulates what’s already on my own ban list nearly verbatim. Incredible.

Current “classic” Doom is generally played at a much faster pace overall than in the DOS era anyway, now that auto-run is a thing and the assumed default for many WADs and maps, and the majority of people are at minimum using mouse aiming and also probably mouselook.

2016 felt pretty spot-on by comparison. Eternal and its restrictive ammo capacities and “you must defeat this kind of monster exactly this way” bullshit got tiresome very quickly. Evidently nobody was brave enough at the time to tell id that if the discoverability of your gameplay mechanics is such that you feel you have to yank the player away into a dream-sequence arena to tutorialize at them with the One Approved Way to defeat that type of monster, your design is bad.

I could feel the block and parry thing in Dark Ages getting old before the trailer was even over.

2016 is the superior game of the three. If you only had to play only one of them, I think you wound up making the correct choice.

Eternal had some highly questionable gameplay design choices made about it and I have no idea what the fuck Dark Ages is supposed to be doing or what anyone thinks it’s got to do with Doom. It’s begging to have a new setting and IP made for it. And in fact I suspect (with zero evidence) that this was the original intent before some suits got involved and insisted on slapping the Doom trademark on it for the brand recognition, or whatever the hell.

But it’s Bethesda, and now they’re owned by goddamn Microslop of all people. So I’m not buying Dark Ages at any price, DLC or not, and not especially how they did Mick Gordon dirty the way they did during the development of Eternal, and et cetera and so on and so forth. Fuck 'em.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I can think of few stewards worse for Doom and it’s legacy than Bethesda and fucking Microslop.

Another sequel of something called “Revelations?” Doom has officially jumped the shark, hasn’t it?

That, and the leviathans become a total non-issue once you get the stasis gun. You can find the blueprint fragments in fairly safe and easy to reach places (albeit in a somewhat RNG dependent manner, I believe). A fully charged shot freezes one in place for a full 30 seconds. An uncharged shot nails it there more than long enough for you to make the next one a fully charged one. Then you can either knife them to death trivially or, if you’re a weenie, simply swim away.

Sure, but I built my previous rig in 2012 and kept it in service up until I put together my latest one just at the end of last year. Even with the best will in the world I had absolutely no intention of building yet another new gaming computer any time in the next two years regardless of geopolitical fuckery.

I get what you’re after, but space sims in particular do get one thing right in that asteroid fields are made up of rocks in largely stable orbits, i.e. they’re not moving around relative to one another and crashing into each other and so on. Because if they were, they wouldn’t be asteroid fields for very long.

My vote is for Star Fox, anyway. Some of the astroids legitimately do have it out for you there and home in, and a couple of them also inexplicably have faces.

In defense of Raiden in MGS2, though, I submit to you: But that backflip he does when you hang off of railings.

Ha. I still have my Pokéwalker in my box of random Game Boy shit that’s on the shelf over there. Its battery is very, very dead. I imagine I left somebody in it before losing interest but I have no idea who.

I see these things sell for $50 to $80 on eBay now? Damn.

When computers were just a teletype attached to a mainframe?

Only if you want to have the black and green version of Toy instead of the white and blue version, at this rate. Barring a handful of exclusives everything gets released on PS5 and Xbox now and maybe also a watered down port on the Switch/2. The current Xbox and Playstation are so architecturally similar to each other that they may as well be the same machine with the only difference being which asshole is at the helm, and for either of them you may as well have a PC.

How many other games from 2011 just got re-re-re-released on the Switch 2 for a full $60, though?

Not until somebody shuts off the investor money faucet for AI. Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.

But hey, look at the bright side. We’ve already had the cryptocurrency mining boom and bust, and “AI” boom and soon to be bust. There’s still time for some idiot to invent the next tech scam fad which will conveniently require a shitload of hardware for no recognizably useful purpose.

And even in the cases when you think it might have games, it turns out they’re not on the cartridge.

Your example sounds like Ikaruga if it were deliberately designed to be annoying.

…We probably shouldn’t give any mobile game developers any ideas.