• 5 Posts
  • 253 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 20th, 2023

help-circle


  • Castlevania has always had a pretty heavy emphasis on movement abilities to access new areas

    The -vania part always seemed a bit odd to me as well because of the history of the games, but it makes sense based on when the term became popularized. If someone had tried to coin a term for the genre earlier I think it would’ve been Metroid-like alone, specifically because the early entries of Castlevania didn’t really have any movement-based mechanics upgrades until SotN. Even things being locked behind item progression was only in Simon’s Quest before that (although it looks like Vampire Killer had some more open levels where you had to find keys). I’m not familiar with Rondo of Blood, which looks like it had some exploration of levels with the secondary character, but again without upgrading movement mechanics.

    So you basically had Metroid ('86) and Super Metroid ('94) being quintessential examples of the modern metroidvania genre, whereas there were almost a dozen Castlevanias before SotN ('97) that were mostly linear.








  • I agree with that to a certain extent, but computer classes (at least where I grew up) weren’t very comprehensive or germane to the skills people are talking about in this thread. If I think back, in elementary school we mostly had a few educational programs (typing, spelling, oregon trail, etc), and in middle school we did some stuff with excel and I’m sure some other things I’m forgetting, but we definitely didn’t have anything about how computers fundamentally worked. Maybe there was some very simple coding in basic, but it would’ve been very limited.

    The reason I learned how to mess around with files and things was because computers simply weren’t very easy to use. Trying to get games running when they didn’t work just out of the box was a great teaching tool. Early on you had to learn the DOS commands (which by necessity meant learning file menus), and in windows (I can’t speak to anything Mac related) before plug and play worked well there was still endless tinkering you had to do with config files. Like you get the game installed but the sound doesn’t work, so you have to edit the config files to try different channels for your soundblaster. Or maybe your new printer won’t print, so you have to search online for the dll files you need.

    There just stopped being a need to learn how to do anything like that, so the functioning of computers became that much less understood. I agree that the whole digital native narrative was dumb and hurt children’s learning (if anything the generation who dealt with the problems outline above are much closer to digital “natives”), and there’s a ton of stuff computer classes should be teaching these days. But classes will always only be effective in a limited capacity compared to learning about something because you need or want it to work for you in your life outside of school.



  • Current students generally have horrendous computer literacy. There was only about a 20ish year window where using a computer meant you were forced to become vaguely proficient in how it worked. Toward the end of the 90s into the 2000s plug and play began to work more reliably, then 10 years after that smartphone popularity took off and it’s been apps ever since.

    Students in high school this year were born from ~2007-2011. Most of them probably had a smartphone before a computer, if they even had the latter at all.


  • “I am personally so excited to talk to you about the finale of Lower Decks because my wife [Rebecca Romijn] is Number One in Strange New Worlds,” says O’Connell. “I now outrank my wife in Starfleet. I’m a captain. I want to say to my wife, because when the finale comes out of Lower Decks, I’m going to sit down, I’m going to watch it with her.”

    I wonder when these interviews were done-- the article date says Feb 8 but the finale was in mid-december.

    Wish we got the classic 7 seasons, even if they’re shorter than old TV seasons used to be. Feels like they rushed a couple things in the final season that could’ve been explored more.





  • Remember when most sites had simple banner ads, and there was no widespread outcry about how much they sucked and we needed ad blocking software? Then they started flashing, then the popups and pop-unders came, then vids started autoplaying, and now here we are.

    If advertisers hadn’t gotten greedier than banners on the sides of sites, maybe no one would’ve gotten around to blocking all their shit.