high-tech gimp mask

Okay, I wasn’t sure how to describe this… This is perfect.

Not really. I am just a bit younger, growing up between the 80s and 90s. I still play old games, only those that aged well though, but sometimes decades after their prime. I play new games a lot too. And games from any time in between, as long as they do something right.

And there are many, many games around which you can bond just as well as you could back then. Not even talking specifically about multiplayer games (which I don’t play very much at all) I’ve always been a fan of “co-piloting” games, just sharing the experience of playing, spectating, commenting around a game.

Some games are fantastic for this. Some games are rich enough that you can share your experience and discover other people do stuff completely differently. This sort of always existed (for example, what’s the right way to complete Legend of Zelda?), and this is still true even for somewhat simple games, but possibilities have only increased in range. I am pretty sure nobody plays a game like Rimworld or Tears of the Kingdom the same.

Dude. Mario Kart sells consoles, not the other way around. You’re delusional.

I have the Switch 2. MK world is nice I guess, but it’s nowhere near what 8 was. It feels like they were so proud of their connected gimmick they decided they would create nothing for this episode.

8 cups, almost all of them redone old tracks. The “highways” connecting them feel very similar except a couple areas (and those include, again, bits of old Mario Kart tracks). I mean, the way they redid these old tracks is cool, but base MK8 also did that very well with its 4 retro cups, and had 4 main cups full of awesome new tracks. And that’s before DLC/Deluxe added 4 extra cups. Not counting the pass for the Tour tracks, those were subpar.

There’s a lot of music… But apart from that game’s theme, all of it is remixes from Mario games. The karts also are almost only rides from previous episodes.

The free roaming mode is frankly not that great. I had loads of fun messing around in Forza Horizons games, but here it’s just a bit boring. Challenges must be activated and interrupt your driving, they’re mostly so easy you can mess up and still clear them, and though they do track records, they don’t do anything to make you want to improve them. Also you don’t meet other players. For fuck’s sake, the last actual Mario game had you meet and play seamlessly along random people!

MK World is like 90% fueled by nostalgia. This is not what I expect from a new Mario Kart game.

Chiropractics is brain waste in itself.

You know, despite not really believing LLM “intelligence” works anywhere like real intelligence, I kind of thought maybe being good at recognizing patterns was a way to emulate it to a point…

But that study seems to prove they’re still not even good at that. At first I was wondering how hard the puzzles must have been, and then there’s a bit about LLM finishing 100 move towers of Hanoï (on which they were trained) and failing 4 move river crossings. Logically, those problems are very similar… Also, failing to apply a step-by-step solution they were given.

I thought Impossible Lair was pretty good. Of course, it was a complete different genre, and basically that genre was just “Donkey Kong Country”. Nevertheless, great execution.

I played the actual YL after that one, and… Yeah, I went through it all and barely remember it. Sure, I don’t even have a lot of nostalgia for collectathons, except if you count the 3D Mario kind… But it was definitely bland, and had annoying design problems.

It’s kind of the point I was trying to make though. They could have unlocked CPU speed for O3DS games by default, and they chose not to. I assume they didn’t because of all the games, there will always be the odd ones that behave unpredictably when they’re running on unintended specs. So they went for 100% compatibility unless the game was specifically patched for N3DS.

Even though this time it’s software emulation, they could have played a bit safer by emulating exactly a Switch 1, including clock speed. Turns out Switch 2 seems to have very good compatibility, with only a couple problematic games they are working on, so in the end, good that they did it that way.

I didn’t expect it would enhance framerate at all without a game patch to be honest.

I was expecting something like new 3DS, where all games that were not specifically patched for it ran exactly the same. But I guess the difference is that new 3DS must have run in pure hardware old 3DS mode for those.

I felt DQB2 was already somewhat playable, but I probably never did very crazy builds. I remember people warning that destroying mountains on the main island for example was a very bad idea, because they were supposed to limit how much of the island the game had to render. Maybe I should check my old island on Switch 2.

Out of the loop. What did gearbox do that time?

I mean, that sounds obvious to me after that one : https://www.404media.co/mark-zuckerberg-ai-chatbot-friends-interview-podcast/

Nevermind having to talk to human people to buy food, the zuck thinks your friends should be AI too.

We need other ways to discover shit on the internet.

I don’t know, maybe bring back the fucking webrings or something.

The first trailer of Breath of the Wild had a lot of people literally wondering whether that Link was a girl. I didn’t see a lot of complaining about it, I wasn’t looking for some though.

Also, Gerudo town. I’m not sure what kind of mental gymnastics you’d need to shit on “wokeness” and somehow filter out BotW completely from it.