tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on The most influential video game of all time - Bafta 11 hours ago:
Half Life
I don’t think that Half Life was all that influential. It was a successful game, had a story at a time when FPSes tended to barely bother. But I think that it was less that it was very innovative and more that it competently executed on mechanics and technology that already existed.
Minecraft
I don’t know if I can agree. Yes, it was successful and a sandbox game, but (a) Terraria, for example, came out earlier, and I don’t feel like it was that transformative. It certainly inspired some sandbox games, but I don’t think that this was really an incredibly broad shift.
The Sims
This one brought a lot of new mechanics, but I don’t know about influential. There wasn’t really a large Sims-like genre that it inspired.
Baldur’s Gate 3
It a 2023 release. How can it be influential? Hasn’t even been time for a generation of games influenced by it to come out.
- Comment on Police launch urgent search after girl, 11, falls into River Thames 3 days ago:
swim-central.uk/what-age-should-children-learn-to…
In England, swimming becomes a part of the national curriculum around Year 3 or 4.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_1_(education)
Year 1 is an educational year group in schools in many countries including England, Wales, Australia and New Zealand. It is usually the first year of compulsory education and incorporates students aged between five and seven.
Hmm. So she probably should have had swimming instruction by that age.
- Comment on Ninja sword owners will be paid to surrender weapons before ban 4 days ago:
Yeah, i mean if someone really wants to decapitate someone they can just go to the next best hardware store and get a chainsaw.
archive.is/52YjV#selection-515.0-533.242
Butter knife ‘an offensive weapon’
A butter knife can be an offensive weapon, the High Court ruled yesterday.
The decision came in the rejection of an appeal by Charlie Brooker, of Welling, Kent, who had been convicted under the Criminal Justice Act of carrying a bladed instrument.
Mark Hardie, appearing for Brooker, argued that the knife had no handle, sharp edges or points and therefore could not fall foul of a law intended to protect people from dangerous weapons.
But Lord Justice Laws, sitting with Mr Justice David Steel, disagreed. He said: “I would accept that a sharp or pointed blade was the paradigm case - however the words of the statute are unqualified and refer to any article that has a blade.”
I will bet you that Parliament would be willing to impose a ban on possession of a chainsaw without just cause.
- Comment on Ninja sword owners will be paid to surrender weapons before ban 4 days ago:
This “Ninja sword” is apparently a straight sword:
2.4. The legal definition that we tested as part of this consultation was as follows:
A fixed bladed article with a blade between 14-24 inches (the length of the blade being the straight-line distance from the top of the handle to the tip of the blade) with:
(i) A single straight cutting edge; and;
It sounds like most katanas and such, what I think people probably normally think of when they think of a “ninja sword”, are already banned under existing legislation:
www.katanamart.co.uk/…/27-uk-samurai-sword-law
Samurai and other curved Swords
On April 6th 2008 a law came into effect banning samurai and other curved swords with a blade length of 50 cm or more; there are some exceptions for registered martial artists, re-enactors and even certain genuine Japanese swords.
Here is to the law:
gov.uk/…/import-controls-on-offensive-weapons#imp…
An amendment to this act was passed, which came into effect on the 1st of August 2008. It allows curved and samurai swords which are handmade using traditional forging/production methods to be sold without a license.
Apparently the Japanese did use straight swords for a while.
Maybe the issue here is that importers avoided their previous restrictions by selling straight swords, and they’re making a new class to catch those and for God-knows-what-reason are calling it a “Ninja sword”.
- Comment on Ninja sword owners will be paid to surrender weapons before ban 4 days ago:
- Comment on I hate the modern web 1 week ago:
It was the only search result relevant to my query.
Paste it into archive.org’s Wayback Machine. Good odds that they’ve stored a copy. I’d do it for you, but you don’t list the URL…
- Comment on HP are interested in making a SteamOS handheld as the Windows experience sucks 1 week ago:
A point made by HP’s SVP and Division President of Gaming Solutions Josephine Tan when talking to XDA Developers, Tan mentioned “If you look at Windows, I struggle with the experience myself. If I don’t like it, I don’t know how to do a product for it.”. Tan continued “If I’m buying a handheld, I want a very simple setup. The minute I turn on my handheld, it will remember the last game I played. In the Windows environment, it doesn’t”.
Okay, I’m not saying that HP shouldn’t do a SteamOS handheld, but…this seems like such a bad rationale. Surely, surely it is possible to write a relatively-trivial piece of software for Windows that simply remembers the last game played? Especially if we’re just talking stuff running out of Steam?
- Comment on Assassin’s Creed Shadows devs roast Elon Musk amid feud with Hasan 1 week ago:
remember when social media CEOs weren’t like… this?
I think that that’s just Elon.
- Comment on What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists? 1 week ago:
I got through the original NWN multiple times, as well as various mods.
I got bored partway through BG3, never finished. Barely touched NWN 2.
- Comment on Can't solve the captcha because I don't know what `undefined` is 1 week ago:
Click the headphones button.
- Comment on Meta considering subscription option for UK Facebook users 1 week ago:
Probably not possible for what we have in 2025.
- Comment on OnlyOffice every single time I flip between it and another app 1 week ago:
Ah, gotcha. Hmm.
I’ve no familiarity with it, but it looks like this runs on iOS, might also be an option:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora
Collabora’s department Collabora Productivity is the main developer of LibreOffice.[3][4][5][6]
apps.apple.com/us/app/…/id1440482071
It looks to be open-source and on GitHub.
- Comment on OnlyOffice every single time I flip between it and another app 1 week ago:
Just run LibreOffice locally?
- Comment on Steam pulls game demo infecting Windows with info-stealing malware 1 week ago:
The larger issue is that anyone who controls a Steam developer account has the right to install unsandboxed software on any user’s computer who owns a game from that developer.
And you have to remember that the party in control of the account doesn’t even need to be the people who originally developed the thing. Publishers go under and get purchased all the time. It’d also be possible to compromise the build systems of a publisher.
This one apparently was caught by users after acting in a particularly-incautious fashion. But it’d be pretty easy to have code that doesn’t do that. An example would be putting, say, an intentional buffer overflow in a game that phones home. That’s pretty hard to catch, and deniable if it is. Then the game reports enough information to indicate whether a user is a desirable target.
There hasn’t been a “big disaster” yet, or at least not one we know about, but I don’t think that there’s going to be a real fix other than having Steam switch to having games run in some form of isolated sandbox.
- Comment on "There comes a time when we all declare the war is over": Former PlayStation Studios boss Shawn Layden on the future of video game consoles 2 weeks ago:
We’re losing the next generation to TikTok. The competition for gaming isn’t Xbox and Nintendo. It’s everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.
Round two: the television strikes back.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
I’m aware.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Are you familiar with the Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it’s a way to add some new life to the thing.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less.
Just to comment further, if you’re not a big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 (or the Paths of Exile series), I wouldn’t recommend the Avadon series in the Spiderweb Software bundle, as it has the same sort of streamlined “move you through the world to the right places” thing. The Exile/Avernum series has the Realmz-style “go wherever and stumble onto stuff” model that you’re referring to.
Kind of reminds me of the difference between Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Like, both are…technically open world games, but there’s very little reason to ever backtrack in The Outer Worlds, and not much placed content to stumble on outside of cities, whereas in Fallout: New Vegas, I’m running all over the place and running into all sorts of stuff, without having the game really drive me in one direction.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Much as I like C:DDA, it does not perform terribly well battery-wise relative to what it should and looks like it should use. The game re-renders frames even without keypresses, and on top of that, each frame displayed recomputes the world state.
NetHack and Angband don’t do that.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I’ll grant the completeness point. Internet access everywhere has kind of lessened what it means to “release”.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Caveblazers
Thanks, purchased.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works might be of interest, if you don’t follow it.
But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
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Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
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There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.
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The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.
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If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.
There are some downsides, though:
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With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.
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The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.
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- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
I’m 30 hours into playing Noita
I kind of want more there. There isn’t DLC, and there aren’t clones.
I mean, yes, the game is large and very replayable, but it’s also kind of the only game in town.
I also play it modded with health regeneration, because the difficulty level on the vanilla game is very high, and encourages very cautious play.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Old games were also typically steaming piles of shit. It’s just that the ones people still remember are the worthwhile ones, because the bad ones have gone into the dustbin of history.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not.
There were so many bad platformers for the Super Nintendo, but nobody is ever going to go back and play those or dredge them up.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
I like the game (as well as the similar Starbound) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Apparently I’m old.
Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:
old.reddit.com/…/assorted_realmz_files_codes_real…
These are codes that were reissued by Skip (Aka. SpoonLard). He and my grandfather were the original two collaborators when Skip attempted to carbonize Realmz in 2005.
Nothing like a comment about someone’s grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you’ve played in its original form.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
I’m stretching my memory too far. I remember the City of Bywater world map, but I can’t even remember the world maps for the other scenarios, if I indeed played them.
This abandonware site appears to have a Windows release:
www.myabandonware.com/game/realmz-bce
I have no idea what scenarios might be included, and I’m always a little leery about running binaries from random sites outside of a VM, so I don’t know if I should recommend using it, but it’s there. There are serial numbers to activate what looks like all the listed scenarios in a comment there, so maybe it comes with all of them.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
It looks like there were also a bunch of scenarios released for Realmz. I’m trying to remember…I definitely remember playing City of Bywater. I don’t know if I’ve played the other scenarios, though.
If you haven’t played them and can round them up, might be that you’ve only played about 7% of the content out for Realmz, if what you’re after is Realmz-like stuff. :-)
While new scenarios were released throughout the game’s history, also typically packed along with the game in the next Realmz release, the game ultimately ended up with 13 official scenarios:
- City Of Bywater (developed alongside Realmz by Tim Phillips)
I’ve definitely played this.
- Prelude To Pestilence (1995, Sean Sayrs)
- Assault On Giant Mountain (1995, Tim Phillips)
- Castle in The Clouds (1995, Jim Foley)
I seem to recall the above names, though I don’t remember the scenario content, if I did play them. Nothing after this rings a bell at all.
- Destroy The Necronomicon (1995, Tim Phillips)
- White Dragon (1996, Jim Foley)
- Grilochs Revenge (1997, Sean Sayrs)
- Twin Sands of Time (1999, Sean Sayrs)
- Trouble in the Sword Lands (1999, Pierre H. Vachon)
- Mithril Vault (1999, Tim Phillips)
- Half Truth (2000, Nicholas T. Tyacke)
- War in the Sword Lands (2000, Pierre H. Vachon)
- Wrath of the Mind Lords (2002, Pierre H. Vachon)
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Me and my friends, we would play together by each getting a character and then taking turns during combat moving each of our characters.
Hah! That’s some hardcore effort to make that game multiplayer!
I never tried those but if its vaguely like Realmz, I want to try it,
I mean, there were a bunch of RPGs in roughly that genre out in those years; IMHO, Realmz and the Exile series were the best out on the Mac.
goes poking around
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasoft
Hah! I didn’t know this. Back when Jeff Vogel — the Spiderweb Software guy — was just starting out, Fantasoft, the company that did Realmz, published the first three Exile games too.
goes through the rest of the list
I don’t think that anything else they published were RPGs, though I’ve played some of them.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, Dwarf Fortress too, but at least Dwarf Fortress has an extensive, well-documented wiki. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead had a not-very-up-to-date wiki at one point, but then whoever maintained it had it go down at some point in the past year, and I’d say that the game has also been constantly updated and more-dramatically-rebalanced than Dwarf Fortress, so learning to how to play involves scouring Reddit, YouTube, and Discord to try to figure out what information is current. I think that the current recommended route on the subreddit to learn how to play is to watch recent YouTube videos of some streamers playing, which is…kinda nuts. It’s not uncommon that a question on the subreddit as to an authoritative answer on game mechanics is “go check the code”…
There are also some military sims I’ve played that are probably reasonably approachable to players who are familiar with the military hardware involved from prior to the game, but for players who aren’t, they’re probably in for a lot of reading and understanding mechanics, and some milsims don’t bother to document that, so you really need to do outside reading beyond whatever the game documentation has.
