Yeah, we can basically just put every speedrunner of every game into this topic. “Man, I love this game so much. Let’s see if I can break it so I can 100% it in under a minute!”/“This is the best shooter ever made! Let’s see if I can complete it without hurting anybody!”
There seems to be one or two Sims channels on YouTube where the people running the channel have little or no interest in playing the game and instead just build and furnish houses/shops.
Not me, but there’s a great example of this in chess.
There’s an opening called the Bongcloud. You move the pawn in front of your king out for your first move, and then for your second move you move your king up a square. It’s memed as being the strongest opening possible, but it’s actually almost the worst 2 opening moves you can possibly make. Because modern chess does have a large online component and the current best players are young and like memes, it has been played in tournaments, which means that if you play it in an up to date chess programme the programme will name it as the Bongcloud.
A lot of people seem to think that it’s called the Bongcloud because you’d have to be stoned to play it. But almost all chess openings are named after one of three things: a person, a place, or an animal. In this case, the Bongcloud is named after a person - Lenny Bongcloud.
Lenny Bongcloud is a now-inactive user of chess.com. He would always open with the moves described above. That’s because, unbeknownst to them, Lenny wasn’t playing the same game as his opponents. They were trying to checkmate him. He was trying to walk his king to the opposite side of the board as quickly as possible. If he gets checkmated, he loses. If he gets his king to the other side of the board he counts it as a victory and resigns.
So, yeah. One of the oldest known games in the world has an opening the “official” name of which comes from a jokey alias adopted by someone who was deliberately playing the game wrong.
Sure, I’m just arguing against the framing of this as “he got this super-graphics-intense programme to run on a PC which would have been considered a relic at the time”, when actually he ran significantly downgraded graphics on a PC which would have been 2 years old at the time.
I haven’t seen that in ages. The main thing I remember being wowed at was her hair.
Brave probably still wears that crown now, though.
The article says it’s a 2002 laptop and says it would have been “significantly out of date” when Half-Life 2 launched. Half-Life 2 launched in 2004. So that’s 2 years. He’s also reduced the resolution to 512x512 - less than half the original resolution - and hasn’t recreated several of the lighting effects.
I don’t know what unoptimised games this is supposed to be a middle finger to specifically, but it strikes me that it wouldn’t be considered particularly out of the ordinary to find a modern game that could run on a 2023 machine at less than half resolution and with significantly reduced lighting effects.
There are two types of people in the world:
It’s because they’ve been right about that their entire lives.
They’re called Boomers beause they’re the largest generation. Being the largest generation means that you’re the generation with the most purchasing power, the most cultural cache, and the most voting power. Corporations, the media, and political parties have spent the past 50-60 years making the Boomers the foundation of their strategy.
The whole of mainstream society has been telling the Boomers for their entire lives that they’re the most important people in society.nIt’s only now that they’re dying off in a significant way that this strategy is starting to fail.
This is true, but everything is copied from everything else. Star Wars was written to the template of the Hero’s Story myth as outlined by Joseph Campbell, and the plot and several characters are taken from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. This is not conjecture, Lucas has openly said this.
If you do check it out, then I’ve got two recommendations. The first is as I’ve already said - try to know as little as possible going in. Progression is the aquisition of knowledge, so the more you know going in, the more cool discoveries you’re not allowing yourself to have organically.
The second is to not treat it as a game. Every person I’ve seen not like the game has treated it as a game with quests and having to finish an area before progressing to the next, etc. etc.
Instead be the character, and be in the world they’re in. If you see something and think “oh, that looks interesting”…go and look at the interesting thing. If you see something and think “oh, does that mean…” …go and find out if it does mean. And if you get distracted by something shiny along the way, get distracted by the shiny thing.
Lots of games sell themselves as being open world. This game really is, one necessary trigger right at the start aside. It’s my most-watched YouTube let’s play because every single person who plays it has a very, very different path through it. The first thing one player does might be something that another player does right before the end. And it’s so well-written that both are equally rewarding and make the player feel like they’ve discovered things in the “right” order.
And that is a big part of what gives it its power. It’d honestly make a good film, book, or TV series. But none of them would be as good as the game, because here you’re not being told the story, you’re discovering it for yourself, and in a way that nobody else quite has.
I’m very evangelical for this game (can you tell?), but that’s because it really is an experience. There’s a review quote used in one of the trailers which calls it a “once-in-a-generation game”. I really, strongly, believe that to be true. There’s nothing else quite like it, and I want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to experience it, because - more than anything else I’ve ever played - you really can only play it for the first time once.
It’s always wild when characters in the public perception are very different to in the source material.
Jeckyll & Hyde is another example. Jeckyll is a doctor who drinks a potion which changes his personality into a ruffian. Except he’s not, at least in the original short story.
Jeckyll is always in control and aware of what he’s doing. All the potion does is change his appearance so that he can do the bad things that he’s been doing since he was young without losing his social standing.
The whole point of the story is that his personality doesn’t change at all and that he’s just donning a disguise (albeit a sci-fi disguise) so that he can get away with it without losing his day job.
Yet in every adaptation is basically treated as a werewolf story.
If we’re specifically doing recent games, then Outer Wilds really is a once-in-a-lifetime gaming experience. Which, if you’ve not played it, you really want to play with as few spoilers as possible. It’s genuinely one of the most profoundly moving experiences I’ve had while consuming any media.
For a serious answer WRT the people who genuinely didn’t think this administration would act the way it is - in his first term, he was mostly surrounded by people who were competent and who respected the law & checks & balances. When they got told “kidnap people off the streets” they said “I can’t do that, that would be illegal”.
So the fact that these things weren’t done in the first term made people think they wouldn’t be done in the second term.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of people are incredibly uninformed about politics.
I mean, I do believe that Joe Rogan is both ignorant and stupid, so…
I’m reminded of a case here in the UK a few years back where bigots left something like 200 bacon sandwiches on the doorstep of a mosque. The next day the mosque released a statement to the press thanking the unknown people for their kind donation and that the local non-Muslim homeless population had very much appreciated the sandwiches that the people at the mosque had distributed to them.
Get the emulator BbebEm: http://www.mkw.me.uk/beebem/
Developed for Windows, but ported to a bunch of other systems and OSes.
Then go to the BBC Micro Games Archive. [edit because I forgot the link] https://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?atoz=C
There are a tonne of games to download, but I’m going to recommend 2, both of which are still incredibly fun to this day.
The first is Citadel, which is a puzzle platformer. Would probably be called a Metroidvania today, as the formula is exploring a labyrinth of screens to find keys, objects, and solve puzzles, but it was actually released a year before either Metroid or Castlevania.
The second is Chuckie Egg. This is a much more straight-forward “one screen is one level” platformer where you have to dodge enemies and collect objects before a timer runs out. Where this stands out from the pack is the physics. Your character is really bouncy when jumping against walls and platforms, which allows you to fling yourself around the stage in a way that’s really fun.
And, if you’ve never played it, I recommend last year’s UFO50 on Steam. The concept is that some game designers found a forgotten 80s console from forgotten studio UFO Games along with 50 cartridges and ported them over. So what you get for £15 is 50 8-bit games, all of which have some modern ideas but which could conceivably have been released in the 80s. It’s incredible value for money, and there’s even a kind of meta-narrative as you watch the studio’s games get more sophisticated over time (for example, the first release doesn’t have any background music) and characters return. And, of course, there’s a huge variety of styles and genres.
It’s not made before the 90s, but if you’re after that feel rather than necessarily specifically games which were actually made then, then UFO 50 is very much worth your money and time. You’ll honestly marvel at how ridiculously underpriced it is.
As a last note, if you are at all interested in archaeology, then Elite Dangerous is basically a modern port of the original BBC Micro game. If you’ve played the former and boot up the latter, you might be surprised how little has actually changed and how much they stretched computing technology to fit that entire game into 8 bits and 16Mb of RAM.
But it really all you’re after is strictly just games made before the 90s which still play well, then try Citadel and Chuckie Egg. The emulator & ROMs are all free.
This is called the “relative privation fallacy” - where it’s stated or implied that action shouldn’t be taken on one issue because larger issues also exist. It’s like suggesting that the police shouldn’t try to catch pickpockets because unsolved murders exist.
The truth is that it’s possible for organisations to work on multiple fronts at once and that making rules around food labelling doesn’t imply that “the world is[…] burning” isn’t also something that’s being worked on.
I think that can be accomplished by rules like, say, having to have the words “plant-based” clearly visible next to the word “burger” in a legible font at an equivalent size. And if it contains any actual meat, then it has to say something like “40% real meat” in an equally visible place in an equally legible way.
At the moment what happens here in the UK is that you get things advertised as “mlk” or “scheese”. There’s no standardised language, and it’s actually harder to work out what it is you’re looking at. I imagine it’d be similar if people have to start selling “brgers” and “bergurs”. Might even lead to more chance of a mix-up for people who can’t read well.
A specific logo would be good, too. Separate, easily distinguishable logos for vegan, vegetarian, and containing meat. At the moment there’s no emblem which tells you something contains meat, and there’s no standardisation on vegan/vegetarian logos, which means that both are a “V” which is either green or in the negative space of something green, and which can be in any font. This isn’t optimal for quickly and easily informing people about the contents of what they’re buying.
So, again, it’s helpful but nowhere near as helpful as it could be - not least for the fact that there are plenty of manufacturers who have veggie/vegan products who don’t label that fact at all. Presumably for fear that the vocal minority who say they won’t eat anything which doesn’t contain meat might not buy their products. But if everything had such labelling, then that would just make it commonplace and people would get used to seeing these labels on their bread/pasta/whatever.
That’s a 90-ish minute video by evolutionary biologist Forrest Valkai goes over the science of sex and gender. The TL/DW version is that the quote here is exactly right. Sex is fuzzy and before you could even start to say something like that it’s binary you first need to establish which of the many sex markers you’re going to use and why you’re excluding the other ones, gender is a social construct which is not the same as sex, and any modern biology textbook above a high-school level will say exactly that. Not implicitly, but explicitly.
If it’s the kind of thing you’re interested in and you’ve got 90 minutes to spare you could do worse than listen to a scientist lay it out.
There was a story a couple of years ago about corporations trying to get people to work unpaid hours while working from home. The logic, such as it was, went like this: if you live an hour’s commute away from work and you work an 8-hour day, then you’re actually spending 10 hours of your day dedicated to work because the travel time isn’t time you get to do whatever you want in. Therefore, since you’re used to work taking up 10 hours of your time, you should also spend 10 hours working while working from home.
It’s astonishing, really.