Alright guys. Question time.
Does our fictional little house world have Covid-19 in it or not? We should be hitting 2020 very soon here, and I have no particular stakes in either choice, but it will change things pretty substantially either way, so I’m putting it to you guys.
I’ll hold back my evil laughter.
This week I am still playing Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. I’m getting the hang of the economy, I now own a town, and done much more smithing. People like your product better if you give them what they ordered, turns out. It’s amusing to watch my small army run around with me (a man who is basically a merchant with a small army) while I do smithing quests. Seems like a good enough deal for them. I pay them, and they do very little actual fighting. Save for the few times I’ve accidently let them starve, they have it pretty good.
What are you guys up to?
Remember that time Nintendo released a console named after an embarrassing bodily function? Remember that time everybody was laughing at Nintendo for thinking handheld motion controls were the future of console gaming? Remember when Nintendo followed up their hit GameCube console with…two GameCubes taped together?
The “success” of a console can only be judged in context and with understanding; there are very few absolutes. The Wii did some important things, but only lasted five years…half of the hardware generation it was part of. It was replaced with the WiiU, which only lasted five years as well, and was basically a trial run for what would become the “Switch,” Nintendo’s actual next-gen console. The WiiU was technically a “better” system than the Wii, but is generally considered a lesser success. Our interest in the WiiU is because it actually has the ability to play every Nintendo console that preceded its release.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “An Experiment in Retrogaming: Backward Compatible Consoles”
–Â Shamus, Friday Nov 17, 2006
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings Remaster XXXI: Familiar Lamentations”
Lottie’s BookNook is a modest success. It’s not lines down the block or somewhere people drive to go see, but completely empty afternoons are rarer than full ones. Kids 12 to 16 come in and pool their money together to rent the Wii for a few hours to play Super Smash Brothers. They’ve gotten requests to sell manga and anime art books, and fulfilling that request gives them another little bump in activity. Manga isn’t yet the easiest thing to get in their area of the world, it will be soon, but for now the couple is jumping through some hoops to get it. Kitchen Princess, Naruto, and Bleach are their main sells, because they’re some of the easier to stock, but they start to get kids asking about renting the books instead. Manga is expensive and the current main demographic for it isn’t old enough to have money to buy. The library doesn’t have manga yet, and it’s leaving the BookNook as the only outlet to get it. They begin a rental system. For $3 the kids can rent any book for a week, with a surcharge if they get damaged in any way.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sims 4 Overthinking: David”
This week I am playing Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. I am also playing Marvel’s Spider-Man remastered. I don’t know what I’m doing in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, but I’m having a good time; I’ve recently discovered smithing, and so far I’m enjoying the mechanic.
What are you guys up to?
So at this point, I had an HP Laptop with RetroArch for 8-bit and 16-bit emulation, and a Wii for GameCube games. I had wanted to keep this as simple as possible, but two systems isn’t really a problem. Except it’s not two systems. This puts me at three systems, actually; because I already had Sony games taken care of. I didn’t mention that before. And arguably, PlayStation and Xbox emulation are really at the heart of a lot of what I want to play. Complicating the issue is that Microsoft *REALLY* doesn’t like backward compatibility. Sony seems to play this weird moving target game. And Nintendo really is just as bad as Sony, if not worse…but they left a couple of big caveats out in public.
And on top of all that, I really don’t want to do this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “An Experiment in Retrogaming 1.5: This is getting complicated…”
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As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
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A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
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Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
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