Just started Beyond Good and Evil on GameCube.
I never played many console games in 2003, so I don’t have much point of reference, but I’m impressed so far. I think the stylized graphics aged well. Environments look organic and detailed without losing readability, and characters look like they belong. The voice acting is solid, and I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Porco-Rosso’s banter is good. I don’t expect much from the plot, but the characters and world seem well-realized.
I don’t recommend the upcoming Lenovo Legion Go 2. The Go 2 is around $1300, and only offers some 20% performance increase over the previous gen (with the Z1E CPU) which is currently $750. The ROG Xbox Ally X pricing is yet to be revealed.
The elephant in the room is the Steam Deck OLED, which you can find refurbished/certified for $440. It’s not as powerful, but power is never going to be a handheld’s strong suit anyway. They’re everywhere and tons of indie games are made with it in mind.
If you’re willing to get a bit nerdy, game streaming is getting pretty good these days, and is really easy on battery life. Moonlight lets you stream games from your desktop PC, while Xbox Remote Play can stream from your Xbox. If cloud gaming is your jam, Nvidia Geforce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming are available. For any of these, the Steam Deck would be perfectly adequate, but if you want something smaller and lighter, you could also go with an AYN Odin 2 Portal, which is an Android-based handheld with WiFi 7 and a nice 120Hz OLED screen for around $330.
Not an expert, but here are some good ones:
Earthbound (SNES) - Kids-on-bikes fight aliens and meet cryptids in a quest to stop a cosmic horror in a JRPG set in suburban America. It’s weird, wonderful, musical, and sometimes startlingly heartfelt. Not too grindy as JRPGs go, but keep the 2x fast,forward button handy anyway.
Chrono Trigger (SNES) - Another must-play. It’s a time-travelling fantasy JRPG with one of the best OSTs ever made. While playing it, I had an existential crisis realizing I’d never run a D&D campaign this cool.
Metroid Fusion (GBA) - A metroidvania (duh) set in an infested space station, where an injured Samus races to arm herself against an unknown enemy. It manages to feel desperate, claustrophobic, and fast-paced, which – hot take – I feel is rare for the genre.
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA) - A self-indulgent pick for me, as I imprinted on this short-but-sweet game at an early age. It’s the last isometric Zelda and a swansong to the genre. The central gimmick, shrinking Link to the size of a mouse, gives the pixel artists the rare chance to show environments in lush, up-close detail that makes the world spring to life. Also: Ezlo sounds like Danny Devito. That is all.
Google’s ongoing Android lockdown feels like the end of an era, with the understanding that eras don’t end overnight. They fade away slowly.
The situation on the ground is rarely reflected accurately on the internet. We are organizing. We are disrupting. Do you think the black-baggings in L.A. just dropped off by accident? That’s been a combined front of legal and quasi-legal activity. When we’re up to something good, you probably won’t hear about it. The news doesn’t like those stories, and we don’t exactly advertise.
We’re also marching. The news covers that because it’s uncontroversial.
Running Steam games on Mint, I don’t think I’ve ever run into a game that flat-out didn’t run. Usually they work out of the box. The most I’ve ever had to do was select “Force the use of a specific compatibility tool” and try out a different version of Proton from the dropdown list.
It’s been remarkably unproblematic.
Nobody Cares If Music Is Real Anymore
I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too?
It’s highly dependent on the music and context. As pointed out in this study, strategic application of the wrong music at the wrong time can inflict measurable pain.
All they have to do is look outside or step outside themselves and lend someone, anyone a hand.
Touch grass, if you will.
I remember years ago watching a video – I desperately wish I could remember the channel – where the author shared his experience with depression and the early days of 4chan anime forums. He found it easier to browse forums about anime than to go out and actually watch them. Then the negativity piled in. That anime you like? “It’s shit.” Any hint of optimism or passion was an opportunity to get a rise out of someone or smugly ridicule them. The only unassailable belief was to doubt everything. The only winning move was not to care.
I’ve been thinking about that video a lot recently.
Online activism has led to a handful of noteworthy victories. But the ease of online activism has also made people (myself included) rely too much on it, and get disillusioned by it, as if we’ve forgotten that online activism is pointless unless it leads to real-world resistance.
I don’t believe doomer trolls are right-wing plants (though I acknowledge it’s a potential avenue of attack in the future). I don’t think they usually have ulterior accelerationist motives (though I have spoken with a few). I think for the most part, they’re just people who’ve given up, or otherwise mistaken cynicism for maturity, and seeing anyone else expressing optimism or trying to organize real-world resistance just pisses them off.
Voluntarily disenfranchising yourself is complying in advance.
A broken tool still has its uses. A bent screwdriver can still be a prybar. A rusty sword can still kill, so don’t ask people to drop it before have something better. It is possible to explore and acknowledge the failures and limitations of a system – and to reduce overreliance on it – without abdicating all influence over it.
The Democratic Party is a disappointment. They follow popular (polled) opinion rather than sticking to principles, and that makes them vulnerable to Overton shifts. As public opinion towards trans people has been poisoned by the Jugendverderber libel, Democrats have largely thrown trans people under the bus instead of fighting back. Likewise, Democrats stick closely to corporate interests because money is power. These issues may never be fixable.
The solution to this is not to capitulate and discard what political influence we still hold.
The first half of the solution is to primary the hell out of Democrats. A left-wing caucus within the party could easily tilt things in our favor, just like the Freedom Caucus tilted the RNC in the opposite direction once before. Bernie Sanders (link) and David Hogg (link) are now spearheading multiple campaigns to do exactly that. Even if you have no faith in your ability to change the norms of the party, just think how much impact your resistance could have if you held an office, even a low one, even for just a week. Do you have any idea how much trouble a county clerk can make?
The second half of the solution is to build solidarity-based power structures outside government to reduce overreliance on a broken system. Economic desperation, social isolation, and cultural “other”-ing make people easy to exploit and oppress regardless of the type of government, so attack those problems directly. Unions, mutual aid networks, churches, you know the drill. Put in the legwork to find them in your area or your profession.
Embrace nuance. Embrace diversity – even political diversity. Political beliefs are not sacred, but the lives under those political systems are. Don’t try to reduce the vast complexity of politics to 120 characters. Don’t treat the ongoing wellbeing of human beings flippantly. If you think the problem is the existence of a state, then say so, but make your case for why making the state worse makes conditions for its subjects better. If you think voting third-party will teach the Democrats a lesson and drag them leftwards, then make your case and acknowledge the risks of what happens if you’re wrong.
Don’t just ridicule every positive effort you see. Doomer trolls (or cuckoos, if we’re going with that) are pithy, but reductive, and their criticism is never constructive.
@remington is all about healthy discussion. He doesn’t mind when people disagree, just as long as they say why.
I just moved into my first house. The president is using modern-day gestapo to disappear undesirables and political dissidents against supreme court orders. My career work has paid off and I have a nice new job and there are dogs in the office. The party I vote for now thinks it’s a winning strategy to throw trans people under the bus. Probably thanks to social transition and HRT, I’m getting a grip on my social anxiety and expanding my friend group. I carry pepper spray when I’m alone now.
My life is coming together right as the world falls apart. I am filled all at once with indescribable hope and unfathomable dread. Hell of a thing to find your soul during an apocalypse.
I could make one of these, but first I’ll need to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.
Yeah, the video really isn’t making the point its title suggests. I think we’re all just primed to expect gatekeeping in video games at this point.
If you’re using Retroarch, I’ve found this overview useful. https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2024/10/19/showcase-for-retroarch-shaders-2024/
I strongly disagree with the premise that there’s a “wrong” way to play retro games. Don’t gatekeep. Imagine if people told you not to listen to Pink Floyd unless it’s on vinyl. It would be lost media.
That said, CRTs present images fundamentally differently than LCD displays, and a lot of developers took advantage of those idiosyncrasies. There are scanlines everywhere. CRT phosphors aren’t square, and appear smaller when darker. Bright pixels can “bleed” into nearby pixels, particularly when using composite signals.
Before LCDs, many (not all) pixel artists used this to their advantage, basically harnessing the imperfections of analog TV to provide equivalents to anti-aliasing, bloom, extra color depth, and even transparency. Some particularly famous examples came from Sega Genesis games. This video goes into good depth on the whys and hows, and there are some solid examples of the outcomes here.
I’ve attached examples below (hopefully they upload). If you like the raw pixel art, then no harm done. Enjoy! But if you like the way CRTs interpreted and filtered those signals, you owe it to yourself to look up some shaders for your favorite emulator.
(Zero Tolerance, 1994, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)
(Sonic the Hedgehog 2, 1992, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)
I’ve started playing through some classic SNES and GBA games.
Chrono Trigger – Oh man, this one’s good. The soundtrack is on fire, and the game does a good job at making you feel like your actions make a difference.
Metroid Fusion – If you told me this was made in 2024, I’d probably believe you. It has a sense of pacing and suspense that I wasn’t expecting for a metroidvania.
I haven’t gotten very far in either, but so far it’s looking like they’ve aged like wine.
I gotta say, this was a weird week to start HRT.
I hardly speak for everyone, but I though the objective was pretty clear: attract cameras and control the narrative for once.
The first round was intentionally scheduled so that the news would publish pictures of massive protests alongside Trump’s pathetic military parade. I’d speculate the date for the second round was chosen in anticipation of a deadlock over the appropriations bill (it was selected by August 23rd).
Optics aren’t my thing. I’m not good at them, and I care a lot more about direct action. Nevertheless, I still think seizing control of the narrative is important work. Trump relies on image projection and promises of power to corral Republicans, after all. Put him on the defensive, and the image falters.