LSD: Dream Emulator must also rank up there, surely? :)

Gorogoa has been on my “pile of shame” for several years now. Perhaps today’s the day.

The morality system was a huge disappointment for me. You said most of what I wanted to say, so I’ll be brief.

Right near the start of the game, an NPC outlines the Way of the Open Palm vs. the Way of the Closed Fist, more or less the same way you described them. And I was so excited to see a morality system in which both sides were morally defensible positions. But from the very first Closed Fist follower you meet (just minutes later), they may as well all be monacle-wearing moustache-twirlers who punctuate every sentence with “mwah-ha-ha!”

The worst example that I remember is a bootlegger who’s essentially holding a town hostage. Far from following either philosophy as described, he’s just plain evil, and in fact I easily came up with (IMO solid) arguments for actually swapping the game’s morality labels on the player’s options. But no, one option is clearly “evil”, so that’s Closed Palm, while the other is obviously “good”, hence Open Palm.

You say active waiting, but I wonder if you mean a busy-wait? Busy-waiting is generally bad, but don’t forget that your main loop is just what executes when the OS decides to give your program some processor time. If you just check a stored timestamp vs the current clock at the start of each iteration, and then do nothing unless enough time has passed, control will go back to the OS for a bit, not the start of your next loop, so it’s not a true busy-wait.

The original PC’s hardware timer was… not great, and I believe that the situation only got worse over time. I understand the desire not to waste resources, but modern OSs are designed with the fear of not fully exploiting resources, so there’s only so much you can do.

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It’s not a really big thing, but it is a pet peeve of mine (and some others); the name of the series isn’t “Dues Ex” but “Deus Ex” (day-us ex), as in “deus ex machina” (day-us ex mack-in-a).

“Deus ex machina” literally translates as “God from (the) machine”, and originally referred to a type of stage prop used in ancient plays, then in more modern times the term came to refer more generally to the sort of plot device that used that prop, which is a previously unmentioned person or thing that suddenly appears to save the heroes from an otherwise inescapable threat. At some time in the 60s or 70s it started to become popular to use it in a more literal sense in sci-fi stories about machine intelligence or cyborgs.

Maybe, but it’s gonna be more like SkyNet with electrolytes; it’s what terminators crave.

I think I can appreciate where you’re coming from, but in the context of the article it was legitimately necessary to address the topic somehow; it’s not like it was written apropos of nothing as a commentary on transsexuality. As a CIS person, I also have a “percieved gender” with which I identify.

Would “post-transition gender” be a more sensitive term, or less?

Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.

Theoretical search: “slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie”
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever “celebrities” have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.

The same places you get old console games. Online auction and classifieds sites, and thrift stores, mostly. Flea markets and garage sales too, but they’re more hit-and-miss.

Back in the olden days, when we used kerosene-powered computers and it took a three day round trip to get IP packets via the local stagecoach mail delivery, we still had games even though Steam didn’t exist yet. :b

We used to transfer software on these things called disks. Some of them were magnetic, and some of them used lasers (you could tell them apart because for the laser ones it was usually spelled “disc” with a “c”).

Anyway, those dis(k/c)s mostly still work, and we still have working drives that can read them, and because the brilliant idea of making software contact the publisher to ask if it was OK to run had only just been invented, we can generally still play games from the period that way. Some people kept their old games, but others sell them secondhand, which I believe the publishers still haven’t managed to lobby successfully to be made illegal, unless I missed a news report.

Even if you can’t get the original physical media for a game, sites like GOG sell legal digital downloads of many old games, which are almost always just the actual old software wrapped in a compatibility layer of some kind that is easy to remove, so you can usually get the games running natively on period hardware/software. Finally, some nicer developers and publishers have officially declared some of their old games as free for everyone to play.

There are still legal options for playing old games on old systems.

I want to say that I wish I could’ve read this 25 years ago, but really, I wasn’t ready to take it to heart back then. In fact, even though I’ve had a couple of minor successes with free games that I deliberately didn’t get too attached to, I still have extreme difficulty just sitting down and making something–anything–rather than falling into a death spiral of over-thinking and grandiose designs. I might have to re-read this a few times to make it sink in.

The Steam Deck is a handheld Linux-based PC with a built-in game controller. The special Steam version of Linux (SteamOS) comes with software (Proton) that lets you run a lot of Windows games, and Valve have put some effort into helping/encouraging developers to get their games working with it.

The Nintendo Switch is a closed system that can only play official Nintendo-licensed software. Even if you “jailbreak” a Switch, I don’t think that there’s any realistic way to get modern Windows games running on one.

I bought this back in the day, and played it through to the end. I vaguely recall somewhat enjoying it overall, but the strongest impression that I have now is of frequently being bombarded with unrepeatable, dense, plot-critical dialogue (usually from teammates via radio) during intense action scenes when I was busy trying to sneak around, evade, beat up, or have a shootout with multiple enemies simultaneously. This often seemed to be by design, with enemies spawning at the same time the dialogue begins. As a passive viewer watching a show, it’s cool when the characters have intense philosophical debates during fights, but as an active player I found it extremely difficult to follow both at the same time. I don’t even remember what the story of the game actually was, because I missed so much vital information that I gave up trying to follow it. That was a real disappoment for a big GitS fan.

Also, many of the missions can seem very open initially in terms of how the player can approach them, but quite soon I got the feeling that there’s exactly one “right” way through each challenge, and it’s up to the player to find it, sometimes with very few hints.

I’ve tried several times over the years to give it another go, but somehow I never seem to make it past even the first mission before I put it away again.

It is available on mobile BUT I encourage you to get the PC version on Steam because the mobile one doesn’t include the pretty decent voice acting

That’s odd; I was sure that I played some of this on Android with voice acting, so I searched my records and discovered that I also got it from Humble Bundle. I just downloaded and installed it to check, and aside from a warning that it was written for an older version of Android, it seems to be working fine, full voice acting included. There’s an option to turn it off, but it was on by default for me.

Maybe there was an issue with your specific device?

Perhaps similar to OP, I gravitate toward whatever’s handiest. That’s usually my smartphone or one of a number of old-ish Linux laptops. I have a handful of smartphone games that I play pretty much every day, and I’ve got controllers for both, so there’s also lots of emulation of older games, and also some newer indie games on the laptops. After that I have a “gaming” PC (nothing amazing but it does enough for me) for more current games, although I’m finding that I don’t turn that on as much as I’d like to, lately. Then I have a handful of less-old consoles that my other devices can’t emulate well, but I can’t even remember the last time I used one of those.

It’s definitely bad design, but in a pinch it is readable in landscape mode for me. Alternatively, if your browser has a “force desktop mode” option, that often makes badly-written websites useable, if annoying.

I think that the demographics of gamers have been skewing older and older, and it’s finally reached the point where a critical mass are past the age where they place significant value on the “newness” of a game.

You can still find 13-year-olds decrying PS3 and 360 games as being “unplayable” due to their perceived technological shortcomings, but every year they represent a smaller and smaller slice of the total market. The surveys I’ve seen lump 18-35 into one group, but I’d be interested to see the results of splitting that into two groups at around 26-27.

Unfortunately we all know what happens when you tell hackers that something’s going to be very hard to break into.

I understand that they were excited about the idea and wanted to share it with gamers, but if they actually wanted to give the system the best chance of success, they should’ve kept their mouth shut.

I’d argue that you do need to be good at math to be an effective programmer, it’s just that that doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it means. You don’t need to know all the ins and outs of quadratics, integrals, and advanced trigonometry, but I think you do need to have a really solid, gut-level understanding of basic algebra and a bit of set theory. If you’re the sort of person whose head starts to swim when you see “y=3x+2”, you’re going to find programming difficult at best.

Object pooling is an absolute necessity for performance in modern environments that remove all manual memory management in favour of automatic garbage collection. And it’s still good practice to reuse memory when you do have some manual control.

Not many things will slow your program down (or make a garbage collector blow up) as effectively as alternately freeing and requesting tiny chunks of memory from the OS thousands of times a second.