Granted, Obra Dinn’s pacing problem wasn’t about dialog. It was…You find a corpse, click, a musical sting plays, you get a few seconds of audio play, and then you see in glorious monochrome dithering the aftermath, and then you’re stuck there for the exact amount of time that some music plays. If you immediately learned something, you can’t do anything about it. If you learn a piece of information that puts something you saw earlier in a new context and you want to go back and look at it, you can’t do anything about it. If you’re not done looking when the music is over, you’ll clunkily have to come back in here. And woe betide you if there’s another corpse in that scene and you end up doing like five of them in a row.

I discovered it through its soundtrack. I was listening to West of Loathing’s soundtrack on Youtube, which was partially or entirely done by the same artist who did WTWTLW’s, so I got recommended some videos, looked up what it was, decided to give it a try, and…maybe if someone implements it for Apple II or some other machine that physically cannot support voice acting so we can dispense with the pretentiousness.

To port over a semantic argument from elsewhere on Lemmy:

You know the phrase “own the means of production?” A phrase I’ve been taught to associate with communism is “the workers shall own the means of production.”

Well, ‘the workers’ means ‘the people’, and ‘the people’ means ‘the public’, and anything owned by ‘the public’ is actually owned by ‘the government’ and ‘the government’ is controlled by ‘the elites.’ Which is why any communist nation falls immediately to despotism, the instant you actually form your communist government the elites are in 100% control.

I’ve argued with someone on here before on the difference between a free market economy and capitalism. I was taught in a free market economy, private individuals own the means of production. An individual has his tools, he works, and trades goods or services to others at prices set by the laws of supply and demand. Under capitalism, capitalists own the means of production, a capitalist is a wealthy individual who invests that wealth - or capital - in ventures with an aim to make a profit. The boss owns the tools and pays workers a wage. The American system has sloshed around between those two extremes since the industrial revolution, periods like the early 20th century trusts and robber barons and…now, where large corporations headed by a very few very wealthy individuals own basically everything, and periods like the 50’s and 90’s when smaller startups in exciting new fields were springing up. The former are the closest we come to the elites owning the means of production, and it tends to be a terrible time to be alive for the average citizen, the latter are the closest I think humanity has come to “the people” meaning individuals at large actually owning the means of production.

Neither system “lifted millions out of poverty.” Neither capitalism or communism has the means or motive to do that. Industrialization did that. Turns out, improving the reliability and quality of food, water, tools and medicine increases the population’s standard of living.

Go to Wendy’s and get a 4 for $4 add bacon. bacon cheeseburger, nuggets and fries. That counds as three.

If I made a list of things I could do, that would be on the list.

You don’t take Tylenol because something something bullshit autism.

I don’t take Tylenol because I seem to be among those for whom it doesn’t do shit as a pain reliever.

We are not the same.

I bounced off of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. I didn’t really even get into the gameplay because the narration in the intro just wouldn’t shut up. You’d click an option, the caption would pop up, and then it would mail a request for the audio file to the developer. I’d have the caption read by the time the narrator started to speak, and the narrator talked the way old people fuck. I went “I don’t have the patience for this right now, I’ll come back to it later” I chose the Exit option from the menu, and the narrator started delivering a multi-line “everyone gets a break but you’ll come back” dialog, which I ALT+F4’d out of the software and uninstalled it on the spot. Dim Bulb Games is one of many studios on my black list.

In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.

Did they do that in Halle Berry’s Catwoman movie? Or would that have been too clever for that film?

There are 330 million of us. There are a lot of them that are bad people. Many of them in office.

Well remember when turn-by-turn GPS driver guidance was new, and it would say “Turn right now” and people didn’t interpret that as “make a right turn at the next intersection” they interpreted it as “hard a’starboard!” and drove into buildings and lakes? There’s gonna be a lot of that.

People are going to get sold regular cab headliners for their extended cab pickups because the computer said it would fit. That’s gonna happen a lot.

What did the natives call the region in their language?

Asphalt for pavement and shingles is amaong the most recycled materials on the planet.

Soap and shampoo can be made from animal fat or vegetable oil.

Hydrogen can be made from water. You get oxygen too.

These are not unsolveable problems.

someone said they have nothing to hide, respond by stating to take of their pants.

It has gotten almost impossible to find a practical pickup truck. they’re all giant penis enhancent vehicles.

Some aspects of streamer culture I get, I do not understand vtuber culture. Youtube started recommending one to me because apparently played a video game I like and watch videos about, and…as far as I can tell her job is to be professionally sexually harassed. Like, men used to whistle at showgirls in saloons, now they throw virtual acorns at anime girls to “nut on” them.

Fun part is her mom apparently found out, and participates.

There are a few reasons why I’ll watch a stream or let’s play of a video game:

1. the sports angle. If you like to play a game, be it basketball or A Link to the Past, watching someone else play it extremely well can be gratifying.

2. Additional performance. Streamers themselves are characters, watching someone react to the game can be compelling in a way that’s difficult to describe.

3. Rediscovery. Watching someone play a video game I know well can help me see it through fresh eyes. I can never play A Link to the Past for the first time again, but watching someone play it for the first time can help revisit that experience.

The specialized rendering processors of the NES and SNES and Sega Genesis could push pixels without all the distractions a CPU has, in away they were the first GPUs (although modern GPUs do a much more generalized job).

…What?

The NES had a 6502, the SNES had what amounts to a 16-bit version of the 6502, the Genesis had two CPUs, a Zilog Z80 and a Motorola 68000. I will grant you, their video chips were a bit more specialized for playing games, with sprite generators and such, lacking text or bitmap modes. Consoles mostly dominated arcade action, PC games were often slower paced but in many ways technically superior. True 3D graphics happened on PC earlier, hardware 3D acceleration happened on PC earlier, it wasn’t until the Xbox One/PS4 era that game consoles pretty much became entry level worsened gaming PCs.

Consoles were cheaper, specialized computers made specifically for games, PCs were far more expensive but significantly more powerful. No console in 1995 would run Descent or Mechwarrior 2.

That stopped being the case some time around the Xbox 360 era; By then, it was fairly common to see console ports of PC games or vice versa; console versions might lack multiplayer or have reduced graphics or something, the PC has pretty much always been the home of nerdier shit like flight simulators, but by the PS3 and PS4 era consoles basically became entry level gaming PCs. Console prices increased to the point that, for the cost of a PS5 Pro, you could put together a reasonable gaming PC…then ChatGPT ate all the world’s semiconductors and the child rapist in chief bombed Iran apparently on a whim and that brings us to the present moment.

Oh man I miss old flash-based escape the room games. Remember the Crimson Room?

What…is this shit? What’s the real reason behind this? What senator or governor has a brother in law in the age verification business that got this corruptioned into being a thing all of a sudden?