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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Mario games were always kind of tech demos for Nintendo innovation and the innovation is kind of boring now

    In the 90s it was graphical fidelity and gameplay mechanics, smb1-3 on the nes, smw on snes, m64 were serious contenders for “oh my god this shit is crazy and plays like a dream”.

    Sunshine is around where the graphical fidelity started to lag but the physics were still nice.

    Then they started to innovate in other ways and galaxy brought in motion controls which were well done (arguably) and the (by then) distantly lagging graphics were almost a feature

    But odyssey showed that doesn’t work anymore. Everyone has motion controls now, even phones, and they’re often just annoying. The switches innovation isn’t something that really applies directly to gameplay itself, so ultimately odyssey stays just a standard game, with solid graphics thanks to great design but noticeable slowdown in several areas because it’s running on an outdated tegra tablet, and the same old platformer gameplay because there’s nothing new to do with it.

    They did have some cool level design that helped it feel fresh and interesting at times but it ultimately felt like it had similar problems to sunshine: not a bad game, but not an experience the way mario 64, mario world, or mario 3 was. Maybe I’m just too old



  • Yeah absolutely, and any bugs that are found are permanently gonna be there, stuff like that. It sucks. Thus the “I probably wouldn’t bother either”. But if you’re really passionate about it I say go for it, just cover your tracks really well, only work with people you trust implicitly, and don’t popularize the project until you’re ready to be done with it. The moment it gets hyped and picked up by ign/kotaku/etc you’re done.

    I think you can still get the word out to get other modders though. These things don’t seem to get squashed at the planning stage, otherwise publishers would be spending tons of resources going after people who have maybe done no actual work. It seems like what happened with this mod, when they make socials and release ongoing updates, screenshots, videos, etc, of their work, that’s what gets people hyped and all the attention (and eventual hammer) on them

    Of course this means you get no credit for your work, which sucks. If you’re undertaking such a massive effort and getting 0 credit I could understand why you wouldn’t bother (although it’s kind of badass to do it for no clout)







  • The audio improvements are more impressive than the video improvements but they’re niche

    8k is a boring upgrade. We’ve officially reached the point where pixel density is like “well that looks better but only a little”. 1080p was dramatic, 4k was solid, 8k is eh

    The audio improvements are really for people who have external sound processing and want ultra low latency. This is cool but again only impacts really niche use scenarios. They use the example of AVR and headphones. I will use the example of gaming with an avr and games that rely on on low latency sound like bemani/rhythm games.

    I have an avr and playing rhythm games on it requires calibration every time, and often changing settings about muting player sounds so I don’t disorient myself with sounds that are triggered late by my own playing. The game I’m currently into shows an audio delay of just over .1ms with the calibration tool, mostly imperceptible for media watching and playing easy songs but a nightmare on hard difficulties.

    Certainly not worth upgrading my tv, avr, and cabling though


  • Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement

    For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.

    Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available

    I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet

    Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that

    Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file

    Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.

    And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall

    I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)


  • oh my god Pokémon! For sure. This is just making me think of more: the games from when i was really young, like leisure suit Larry, police quest, day of the tentacle, sam and max, the dig, grim fandango, that are ultimately like 1-2 hours if you know what to do but in the absence of a walkthrough take like 600 hours of trial and error with endless save hopping

    Those old adventure games used to be punishingly difficult


  • Red dead 2, persona 5/royal, sekiro, Elden ring, Stardew, Skyrim, tekken 7 and 8, botw and totk, animal crossing games in general going back to the gamecube one. Sank a lot of hours into taiko no tatsujin too

    That also makes me think of all the games that didn’t track playtime or where my saves are long gone. Like really that’s just modern era stuff. The snes and psx final fantasy games, chrono trigger, secret of mana, earthbound, parasite eve, etc are all fairly long and I’ve played through them multiple times. Then there’s games like streets of rage and sonic 2 that aren’t terribly long but i played them to death. Oh and stuff like street fighter 2 and tekken, mario 64, so many hours of my youth that I probably should’ve been studying





  • Every game for the year?? That’s crazy

    Highlights:

    Tears of the kingdom: amazing game, sunk an absurd amount of hours into this

    Like a dragon: infinite wealth: so good, favorite franchise, rgg consistently puts out quality and is the only studio ill bother to buy full price games from

    Tales of arise: really good

    Hi fi rush: extremely good, but no jet set radio

    Bomb rush cyberfunk: not as good, much closer though. actually felt like next gen jet set radio. just wish they bothered to improve the formula at all from 2000 or whenever

    Dead space remake: I found myself having to push through the end of this, got very tedious

    Silent hill free game on psn (I forget the name, the suicide one): so heavy handed, awful writing, awful voice acting, but it was free so whatever

    Silent hill 2: pretty great remake but wish I waited for a price drop.

    Persona 3 reload: basically same as above

    Ff7: solid overall, really liked it

    Spider-Man 2: not as good as the first one but decent

    Unicorn overlord: really good

    Forspoken: not amazing but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be based on the initial reactions

    Tekken 8: love it even though I fucking suck

    Smt: vengeance: great

    Dave the diver: played on a whim without knowing anything about it, sucked me in

    I know there weee more but that’s what I can remember off the top of my head

    Excited to play metaphor, hellblade 2, Indiana jones, riven remake, erdtree dlc for Elden ring, cyberpunk dlc, Alan wake 2, god of war ragnarok dlc, new taiko no tatsujin, armored core vi, like a billion more