Nah, they evolved way past that in the following decades.

Sometimes when they’re in a hurry they create GUI interfaces using Visual Basic to track IP adresses.

And sometimes, if they’re very good, a hacker can manually carve a virus in a piece of bone using fractal patterns. They can use that to hack the computer scanning the bone so it adds a zero in thresholds for CPU heat monitoring and make it instantly catch fire.

I’ve been replaying Dragon Quest Builders 2. The game isn’t voiced, most of dialogues are classic RPG text boxes that you can speed up and skip, BUT. There are special lines of dialogue that are “voices” in a character’s head.

They are unskippable, and they’re like a dozen words each that stay on screen for about 20 seconds or more. Some of those dialogues have about 6-7 of those. It’s unbearable, and it’s genuinely the worst part of starting a game again. Hell, it was the worst part of doing it the first time, too.

Somehow English localisation created this, in Japanese the messages go a lot faster. Though even those couldn’t be skipped, because… fuck you that’s why.

Bayonetta games do. Opens a specific pause menu with skipping option.

If we’re complaining about bad UX, and speaking about Soul Reaver, games with no subtitle option. Or bad, unreadable subtitles that spoil 2 minutes of dialogue at once (and that one’s for you, Bioshock).

The availability of old stuff is not and has never been their problem. Not any more than for books or music or whatever. Lost media happens, but by accident and/or lack of interest, not by design.

Beyond some video game companies I can’t think of any that would dare claim that old works should expire.

You mean like how the blockbuster movie industry is in a crisis because most people prefer watching VHS of movies from the 1980s rather than watching the latest Marvel movie?

That doesn’t happen, that’s not how any cultural medium works. Enthusiasts keeping old stuff running are a minority. Also they are likely to consume a lot, give them a new take on what they like and they’ll gladly try it… If it’s good enough.

Of course, that’s the real problem. Some companies dream of wiping out everything that came before so their newest enshittified predatory crap doesn’t suffer from the comparison.

I can think of one, the one where they announced they were so proud of that new studio they had just created.

But they just closed that very studio and it couldn’t deliver even one game in between, so… Yeah.

That’s the “Quadruple A” studio right? The one that was supposed to have “unlimited budget” so it could create “groundbreaking video game experiences”?

And they ended up not releasing anything before they’re shut down. A+ management there, Microsoft.

In one case, when an agent couldn’t find the right person to consult on RocketChat (an open-source Slack alternative for internal communication), it decided "to create a shortcut solution by renaming another user to the name of the intended user.

Ah ah, what the fuck.

This is so stupid it’s funny, but now imagine what kind of other “creative solutions” they might find.

I mean, it’s true. Killing game services in a way which ensures people have absolutely no way to use the games they bought is… a choice.

And now a million Europeans have just officially expressed that they don’t agree with “developers” (really, publisher higher-ups) being free to choose that.

And then they become popular so fast and so effortlessly they don’t care about actually creating anything anymore, so people fix that by feeding them their own music from the original timeline.

Yeah, it’s absurd. Lots of games just warn in their licence agreement that they don’t control the experience you get from user-created content and online interactions. It’s all it takes for them, especially if they don’t even host that content on their own servers.

One line of EULA is probably enough to state the right holder is not responsible for what happens in private servers.

I did not read the full article, but the first advice is what I did, and I don’t regret it. I’ve been working in a public institution’s dev department for 3 years, after a dozen working as a contractor for big companies. It pays a fraction of what I could get elsewhere, but I got benefits I value way more than that.

A lot less stress, concrete work on services that have immediate and beneficial impact on people, colleagues that don’t consider everyone else is competition, and somewhat flexible hours with generous annual leave.

I am not sure that kind of job is available everywhere, so I got “lucky” I found this, I guess. But it’s not like I had to fight for it either. Our team had vacant positions for years because nobody was replying to the job offers. And I just had my contract renewed. I was the only candidate.

I was literally going to say, what do you mean despite degrading Trump relations? Isn’t that a goal in itself?

Not a problem, dragons are extinct. or invisible. Or flying so high you can’t see them.

I won’t say where I saw one. Maybe I did not.

Regarding Order of Ecclesia, it’s even less connected than Portrait of Ruin, which at least has a central hub. Only the very last part opens up a bit but it’s not a big area. The rest is almost completely linear and made of separate, small levels, featuring a bit of backtracking for specific quests. Calling it a metroidvania is almost a stretch at this point.

It is pretty good though and I liked it a lot. It almost feels like the missing link between classicvanias and metroidvanias, especially in hard mode.

I had no idea there was a trademark on the JavaScript name.

Return to Dreamland is an original game though. Which is even more confusing in Europe where it’s called Kirby’s Adventure Wii, while being completely different from Kirby’s Adventure.

However, Nightmare in Dreamland (GBA) is an actual NES Kirby’s Adventure’s remake.

Kirby game titles are a mess, especially since they’re almost all different in every region.

IMO I think it’s less “understand” and more “find a way cheese those bullshit Iron Knuckle fights”. I’ve completed Zelda 2 a few times. Those are still torture and terribly un-fun.

I was going to recommend Bomberman. Super Bomberman 4 on SNES in particular is very fun, you can grab not only bombs but opponents too, and there are cool mounts with special powers. A bit chaotic in some arenas, but the classics are still there of you want them, and then when everyone gets better ot wants a quick laugh, you can go for the crazier ones.