vaguerant

Badmé Amidala.

Missed an opportunity to say “Fuck cars and fuck Carr.”

This is a tough question because it’s like asking “What’s the most forgettable game you’ve ever played?” I can remember some of the best and worst games I’ve ever played, but mediocre games are explicitly not interesting.

That said, the first one that came to mind for me was Starshot: Space Circus Fever for N64. It’s just a very generic late-'90s collectathon platformer. It’s hard to be mad at it, because it’s not terrible or anything, there’s just no reason to play it. If you’ve got an N64, there’s Mario, Banjo, Rayman, even B- and C-tier stuff like Gex and Chameleon Twist. There’s hidden gems like Space Station Silicon Valley or Rocket: Robot on Wheels.

That last one is the only reason I played Starshot, I saw it clearanced at a used game store and was like “Oh yeah, I remember hearing this game was good,” but it turned out I was thinking of Rocket. That game actually is good, while Starshot is just fine.

Yeah, exactly. The goal is to preserve the reveal of Darth Vader’s real identity. If you just watch them in number order, the prequels spoiler the original trilogy. With the Machete order, you get the Vader reveal in Empire, then a “flashback” that explains how it happened.

Skipping Phantom Menace is just because the guy who came up with the Machete order didn’t like it and felt you got enough context from 2-3. But you can do roughly the same thing without skipping it by just going 4-5-1-2-3-6.

The 4K trilogy (4K77, 4K80 and 4K83) are original theatrical film scans by enthusiasts. Where Despecialized manually recreated the originals by using multiple sources to restore changed scenes, the scans are just that. The results are ultimately very similar.

The main advantage to Despecialized is that it uses the official 4K Blu-Rays as its source for anything that doesn’t need restoring, so it’s mostly a professional quality transfer, while the 4K trilogy were scanned and cleaned up by fans. The main disadvantage is obviously that Despecialized is not a “real” theatrical cut while 4K is.

Either will probably satisfy somebody who wants to watch the unmodified orig trig.

There’s a couple of things people who don’t like it criticize. For one, the Christensen footage is from an early test for Revenge of the Sith, so he’s just weirdly glowering at the camera because he wasn’t thinking about this moment when it was filmed. That’s also why it’s just Hayden’s head comped onto Sebastian Shaw’s body.

Then there’s obviously the question of … why Hayden Christensen at all? The implication is that the “real” Anakin Skywalker died decades ago and was replaced by Darth Vader, which kind of runs counter to the idea that he was ultimately redeemed by his love for his son as presented in the original cut.

Then you’ve got the fact that it kind of makes the original trilogy nonsensical in standalone. If you come to Star Wars and watch 4-5-6 first, there’s some random guy you don’t know at the end. It forces you to watch at least 1-2 and probably 3 first, or do something wacky like the Machete order (4-5-2-3-6), just so that the ending makes sense.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t like it myself. But I don’t care because I’ve got the Despecialized editions, so Maclunkey it up.

I think what you’re identifying as the groundhog is Gimli from Lord of the Rings.

But if they were just re-using old recordings of her as Peach saying “Yeah!”, there’s every chance she wouldn’t get a call for that at all. Not getting a call back for the new Mario Kart doesn’t immediately mean “I’m not Peach any more,” until the game comes out and it becomes clear they haven’t used archive recordings and somebody else is Peach in it.

On the day before launch, she was basically Schrodinger’s Peach: “I haven’t recorded any new lines for this one, so I’m either in this game via archive recordings or I’ve been replaced.” She doesn’t need a phone call for either of those to be true.

I feel like Mario Kart is a bit ambiguous, there’s always the potential they could just re-use voice work from a previous entry rather than bringing all the actors in to go “Whoa! Ha-ha-ha. Luigi number one!” I don’t know if they still do this, but in the N64 era a lot of the same samples were used for Mario Kart, Mario Party, maybe other stuff, so the actors wouldn’t have been involved after the original recording sessions.

I guess the upside of dedicated communities like this is not having to explicitly tell people “If you don’t fall into this specific group, go die in a fire, I don’t want your input.” Which, as far as I know, is the most polite way you can phrase that.

You seem like you might like osgameclones.com. It’s absolutely massive because it includes projects even if they’re unfinished or abandoned, but you can sort by playability, development status, even programming language if you’re looking to contribute.

How solid are they? From the picture it’s hard to tell if they have a crisp texture or more chewy, brittle, you get the idea. They sound delicious though, might have to try this.

Not even fake, here’s a news story from 15 years ago featuring the same image: https://phys.org/news/2010-12-million-years-oxygen-drove-evolution.html

That’s eight years before Among Us was released. I checked archive.org as well because … well, it’s sus. But they have captures there too, it’s not a backdated modern post.

I wonder how Konami decided which of their licensed beat-'em-ups did or didn’t get console ports. In order of release, they go …

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989 arcade, 1990 NES)
• The Simpsons (1991 arcade)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (1991 arcade, 1992 SNES)
• X-Men (1992 arcade)
• Asterix (1992 arcade)

Maybe the answer is just “TMNT was a juggernaut”? The Simpsons was extremely early in its run (mid-season 2) when the game launched. The X-Men cartoon hadn’t even started yet. Asterix is just aggressively European. The games probably all did well, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the TMNT titles eclipsed them in earnings.

I don’t think it’s a hardware capability thing, or we wouldn’t have console versions of the TMNT games, either. While the SNES hardware is obviously less capable than the original arcade cab, many consider the SNES port of Turtles in Time to be definitive. There’s no reason Simpsons couldn’t have been similar.

Are you sure? It’s streaming on Disney+ already in regions where they have the rights. The BBC web site has a “watch now” link.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002c5lx

It should be out at 8 AM on Saturdays, UK time. That was about three hours ago.

I like how the author says Google killed the Fitbit Sense so they could sell an inferior product without having to compete … then said author reluctantly buys and recommends that inferior product. I’m way pettier than that. I’d use anything else, even if it sucked, rather than directly reward a company for fucking me over.

That’s closer but rather than being a wrapper, it takes the original architecture’s instructions (MIPS in the case of N64) and generates a C/C++ function which implements that instruction. Then you call those functions in the same sequence as the original compiled machine code ran instructions.

That’s a relatively inefficient way to make a port, because you’re basically reimplementing the original CPU in software, hence why some have described it as emulation. At the same time though, most recompiled games are like 15-20 years old, so a bit of overhead on a modern PC isn’t going to hurt you too much.

But anyway, unlike WINE, the original binary is not used any more after recompilation. Instead, you have a native binary for the target platform, the translation having occurred at the time of recompilation (when you built the port binary).

Not really. The Ship of Harkinian ports are based on decompilations, which is where you reverse engineer some equivalent source code using the final binary as a reference point. Then, you can port that source code to anything else you can build for, like a PC, phone, Wii U or Dreamcast.

Recompilation, which is what this project is, is closer to (and some have gone as far as to say that it is) emulation. It’s taking the final binary and then, without actually working backward to get source code, translating the raw instructions directly into code that compiles for a different platform.

It’s kind of difficult to get across the difference without being familiar with what both are doing behind the scenes, because the result is obviously similar. Both require human intervention, but decompilation is the more labor-intensive approach, while recompilation is somewhat more automated.

The advantage of former is that you end up with a relatively human-readable codebase to work with, while the latter doesn’t bring you any closer to understanding how the game works internally. Both ultimately allow for porting the game to new platforms. Decompilation will almost certainly result in a more optimized final game, because it avoids the overhead of “emulating” the original architecture. However, for the same reason, recompilation can be generalized to other games that originally ran on the same hardware.

If I can be off-topic for a second, this community does seem like it needs a bit of help. The only mod has been inactive on Lemmy for 8 months. Somebody probably needs to request ownership or whatever before the lack of moderation actually has results. (Not it.) There is [email protected] which is active and moderated, but I know there are those who don’t like that instance.

Back on topic, I really liked this one. I’ve been pretty cool on season 1/14, but 2/15 has been more up my alley so far and this one was the strongest yet. I watched the behind-the-scenes Unleashed episode and it was nice to see how much impact Rose Ayling-Ellis was able to have on the episode. The original concept didn’t involve being deaf at all, but once Ayling-Ellis came on in the quasi-monster of the week role, it really changed the direction. Somebody hiding behind you has got an additional layer of sinister for a deaf character and they were able to play with what it means for her when others turn their backs.

I don’t think being a sequel to “Midnight” really helped or hindered it much; it functions just fine as a standalone episode. Some apparently felt like the “Midnight” stuff was shoehorned in (which in a sense is accurate, the Unleashed episode talks about how this was not originally a sequel), but it seems harmless. Either you don’t care and it doesn’t affect your enjoyment of the episode, or you get the reference and can DiCaprio point at it.

Overall solid story, guest cast were great, Chuti Gatwa got some good stuff. Another neat thing from Unleashed was that he actually learned a bunch of BSL from the instructor they had on-set rather than just being guided for the specific dialogue he needed to convey. There’s behind the scenes footage of him talking to Rose Ayling-Ellis where he is continuing to sign to her, which was nice to see.

The one weakness for me was that Varada Sethu didn’t really get a whole lot to do. I really like her as Belinda but the voice of reason isn’t the most dynamic role you can have in a Who story. It was just a shame she didn’t get to be more involved.

In service to your point though, Davies … wrote those characters to have those roles. He could have written different characters who would offer some insight into segregation from the other side, whether that meant replacing some of those characters or just adding more. The kid behind the counter at the diner would almost certainly be white, but it wouldn’t be unusual for kitchen or cleaning staff to be black. It’s not that hard to come up with a way to introduce one of these employees, especially late at night when the leads arrived.