Open Thread

Open Thread #367

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28 thoughts on “Open Thread #367

  1. The premier archive for ROM hacks, romhacking.net, has shut down after almost 20 years. There is a lot of he said/she said drama going on at the moment, but it seems that this is the result of some danger hairs wanting to take over the site and the owner getting fed up with it. The logo of the new and really lame competitor site with its rainbow colors gives a hint. This strategy, albeit incompetently executed, reminds me of the engineered drama on NeoGAF a few years ago that led to the creation of ResetEra, which had the benefit that the woke clowns were quarantined in the latter forum. Presumably, the main goal of those activists is to make money by such a takeover or by setting up a competing site and if that does not work, destroying and old site is a welcome secondary goal.

    EDIT: The drama is bigger than I first thought. There are several copycat sites. Romhacks.org seems to also be involved. The owner, of course, has no responsibility at all. He is running one of the major ROM sites, so, surely, his motivations for starting up a competitor to romhacking.net are completely pure. My take is that people just wanted a piece of the pie, i.e. advertising money.

    1. Archive.org has full sets up to, and including, Xbox360/PS3/WiiU. The collection you linked to is probably a better approach than getting full sets, given the size of, for instance, a full PlayStation collection. I have been working on my own little collection — obviously only copies of games I physically own — and the list is not particularly long, if you only focus on the very best. Should I ever have a son, he will get introduced to gaming this way.

  2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30319503/

    I saw the movie yesterday in the sneak preview at the Savoy Hamburg on Steindamm. Interesting movie. Highlights the hurdles and difficulties that a “fatherless” young Asian male has to struggle with in the United States. It’s no secret that Asian males are often perceived as feminine and “soft” and therefore have a harder time than white or black men, for example.

    The nice thing about the movie is that there is no happy ending or bad ending, but we are taken on a non-judgmental journey through the boy’s everyday life.

    The plot of the movie is set in 2008, which, in combination with the social media elements in the movie, is a nice little trip back in time.

    (The father lives but works abroad / Taiwan)

    1. Yes, it’s ridiculous, even that, for example, some “tranny men” with XY chromosome set compete against women in Olympic boxing.

    2. I’ve read that Carini is now apologizing. Presumably they feared her waking too many people up and took her to one side to say, “nice career/life/family you’ve got there; be a real shame if anything happened to them.” Sadly, she is now going to learn that appeasing the left never, ever works.

    3. Carini has also gotten a bribe. In a truly astounding move, she was awarded the same amount of money as the man who made her resign. One punch in the face is apparently worth $100k:
      https://archive.ph/uBCuz
      The news stories are ambiguous. It is not entirely clear to me whether the guy also gets paid. I could also imagine that the officials no longer care about their own rules, award Carini the prize money, and find some bogus reason to not pay Khelif any money at all. From the article I linked to:

      International Boxing Association (IBA) will award Angela Carini, who abandoned the fight against Algeria’s Imane Khelif at Paris 2024 Games after 46 seconds of the first round, the IBA prize money as if she were an Olympic champion, President Umar Kremlev claimed.

      Maybe this is sloppily written, but “awarding the prize money” can be read as her getting it all. In any case, there is no clear statement regarding Khelif.

    4. The backlash to that fight and the opening ceremony are positive signs. I hear Paris isn’t getting nearly the bump in tourist traffic it was hoping for, as those foreign yokels have some silly aversion to third-world crime and filth. In Belfast I hear Irish and British nationalists are protesting together against mass immigration.

      In the US the wheels are now visibly coming off the economy (check the waterfalls on the charts of the ten year and three month bond yields). Like Biden’s dementia, that’s another turd they were hoping to hide under the carpet until November, but they might again be out of luck. No worries, the left will just spin it as Heels Up defeating inflation.

  3. Kamala Harris explains cloud computing:
    https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1819808519891374285
    No, Heels-Up, files are not stored “up there in a cloud”. It is shocking how clueless the puppets of the elites are. I can understand that they do not want to have people who can think for themselves but there is no need to go to the opposite extreme. We have seen how well this has worked out with Joe Brandon.

    1. I was actually wondering if maybe she was saying it in a folksy, silly way, so I clicked only to see that she legitimately thinks files can live in some sort of ether. Astonishing

    1. Good luck with that! Historically, Capcom has shown to be a very well-managed company and when they notice that something is not working out, they course correct, just as they have doubled-down whenever they struck gold, for instance by putting out one Street Fighter or Resident Evil game after another. They invented the modern “belt scrolling” genre but dropped it once it was no longer commercially viable, they left the arcade once it was clear that consoles are the future, and they also understand that they have to serve a large customer base, which is arguably why they dialed back the incredible complexity of Street Fighter III. All of this may seem obvious in hindsight, but competitors like SNK or CAVE have made a lot of bad decisions in that regard. Modern Capcom is still very good at reacting to the market, and if they see that female managers are not working out, they will hopefully be able to rectify the situation.

  4. Somehow the Japanese have figured out that attractive, white women help sell games. Tekken 8 has a character named Lidia Sobieska that is very popular:

    1. Something about this gameplay seems satisfying. I don’t know how Tekken 8 stacks with the former titles, but I like the ‘minimalist’ approach. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, though I assume there is more depth to the game than meets the eye. I’m more referring to how Tekken 8 seems to not rely a lot on gimmicks like the X-Ray cheese in modern Mortal Kombat, for example. After you’ve seen all the fatalities and what not, they start to become a chore to witness over and over.

    2. Mortal Kombat is a horrible franchise; it is incredibly shallow. It also happens to be the top-selling fighting game franchise, primarily because it seems to appeal to normies much more than relatively more technical games like Street Fighter or Tekken. In contrast, in the FTG community, Mortal Kombat holds little sway. It was one of the least popular games at the most recent EVO.

    3. I used to game/ live in actual arcades in my teens.( CJ lights up his pipe and reflects)
      We kids learned how to 1CC SF 2 for example quite quickly and easily w patterns …
      But I could never get anywhere with MK also.
      it looked new and impressive at the time tho, w those “photo graphics” ( name?) and the funny gore finishing moves. (Cooool!🤩😎)
      ‘Killer Instinct’ was a fun one for me after SF2.

      An aside -Not a fighting game , but if u wanna challenging game try ‘Rastan Saga’ the Conan-style platformer on MAME. I’ll presume u all know it.
      That was a real coin-gobbler everywhere.

  5. Aaron, have you happened to hear about the recent update and improvements made to No Man’s Sky? If not, then Digital Foundry has covered it. I remember this game being a joke when it came out, though to nowhere near the degree that Stafield was/is. I kind of feel that for a game as massive as NMS that it kind of gets a pass for taking so long to come along. I’m not interested in playing it, but it is pretty hilarious comparing it to Starfield (LOL at Starfield’s loading screens), and neat to look at clips of here and there.

    1. I am not familiar with NMS, but I recall that it was panned at release. I do not quite get what the appeal is. It seems that you can explore thousands of procedurally generated planets. Starfield is quite a dumpster fire. Apparently, part of the reason why this game is running so poorly is because of substandard work delivered by Indian contractors. I have seen a few 3D meshes that had geometries that were extremely complex, and needlessly so. 4chan was quite amused by the incompetency on display:
      https://i.redd.it/wf4jayzsb9pb1.jpg

    2. “Poojeets”, lol. I didn’t know Starfield was contracted out. Coincidentally, I came across this former short of a Blizzard employee talking about how poorly compensated he was: https://youtube.com/shorts/a8aumvAq5gM?si=ykq87D6Dr7s5sB2n

      I can only surmise that Indian contractors are extremely cheap to employ. Also, with games becoming more and more expensive to make something has got to give. This is reflective of society as a whole, where innovation has all but ceased and it’s quite an undertaking simply to maintain what’s already been created.

    3. The problem with Indian contractors is that the quality of their work tends to be poor. Thus, the savings are normally imaginary. There is even the problem of negative productivity, i.e. people who are so bad that you need others to clean up their mess. You may also have clowns in infrastructure who click the wrong button and end up spending a few extra million on Amazon AWS, for absolutely nothing in return, for instance because they let a machine-learning experiment run for far too long or set up infrastructure you do not need. A lot of software is virtually unmaintainable. Microsoft Windows has bugs that have not been fixed for over a decade. I recall reading that there are bugs that are over twenty years old. Nobody dares touching that Jenga Tower, it seems. There is nothing to see here, goy! Just look at this fancy new screen effect or desktop background instead.

  6. https://youtu.be/qX0uMS8VKxU?si=H_NJDH0sshwjNssL

    Trump is right once again. Black Africans and Indians are not the same. Left-wing politicians pretend that all people in the global South belong to a single homogenized ethnicity or race.

    She has always presented herself as an Indian and has let her black or African origins slip under the carpet. Now, when it is opportune to win over black voters, she is suddenly black and African.

    1. Trump walks into a room full of black people and enemy propagandists and announces that Heels Up (who IIRC is half Jamaican and half Indian) is black only when she wants to pander to them. It’s convenient for her that the term “African American” has now been memory-holed, as it would have been an awkward fit.

      I’ve also read that Bill Clinton used to go looking for people who disagreed with him to try to win them over, as Trump does.

      Hillary. meanwhile, has her audiences carefully screened for potential hecklers, and Heels Up refuses to take a single question even from friendly reporters. She knows debating Trump, even with the usual “heads I win tails you lose” terms, is suicide. Even a swamp creature like Pence was able to best her in 2020, and Gabbard needed all of 30 seconds to end her presidential campaign. I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t simply refuse to debate him and hope to steal the election anyway. It worked for Kari Lake’s opponent in Arizona, after all.

      The former two people belong in politics. The latter two don’t.

    2. May be off-topic, but even South Asians are not the same. Indians are different from Pakistani, and Bangladeshi are not both of them. Bangladeshi could or could not speak Hindi. They all don’t like each other much.

  7. What do you guys think of Skyrim in 2024?

    My Xbox one came with it.

    The stealth mechanics seem pretty bad.

    That said, there’s some sort of upgrade that costs 12ish bucks I can download.

    There are also some mods on the Bethesda website, but I currently don’t know how to get anything on my machine that’s not from the Microsoft store.

    Idk if these would fix the stealth stuff or not.

    Enjoying the game well enough so far, but having just finished Far Cry 5, I’m slightly underwhelmed. Might enjoy Skyrim more if i played as something besides a thief.

    1. I haven’t played Skyrim in a while but it’s one of the few I would bother with if I had time. I tried playing as a thief and didn’t much enjoy it. Playing a spellcaster was better but not that great. At some point you can summon demons and just them do your fighting for you, but after the amusement wears off it becomes boring. As it turned out, the best way to enjoy the game was to just grab a big sword/axe and run up to bad guys and smash them like a roid-addled meathead.

      From what has been said about Starfield elsewhere in this thread, it sounds like Bethesda is now an Indian-outsourced clown show so I guess we can forget about Elder Scrolls 6. I wish they’d just sold the IP to someone who would actually do something with it, instead of sitting on their ass for 13 (!) years and counting.

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