That makes absolutely no sense. Nintendo does enough shit that you don’t need to invent some.

Console wars have never been about doing the exact same shit. Game boy Vs Game Gear? N64 Vs Playstation Vs Saturn? Even SNES and Megadrive/Genesis had very different designs, and that’s enough to be noticeable in the games if you are familiar enough with them.

They sell video game systems and games, they’re competitors. So is Valve. So was freaking Ouya.

The fact they’re doing thing differently enough that they’re not completely interchangeable is the competition.

Must be reassuring when your government announces they won’t label you a traitor and throw you in a cell for playing a random video game.

Uh. I was aware of Dinosaur Planet and how Nintendo had Rare rework it into a Star Fox game, but I had no idea that an almost complete beta version of it had been found.

It’s lacking the ending and it was already on the way to starfoxization though it seems.

It’s the game that was already said to be overflowing with shitty abandoned player bases even though it was in closed beta, right? And their answer was like, “be responsible, players, destroy your own base when you don’t want it anymore”.

This is going to be… interesting.

I think it’s a funny way to point out how absurd that monetisation is.

Made me think of an old James Stephanie Sterling review of Dungeon Keeper (not the real one, the shitty mobile game made 20 years later by EA). It made you wait forever for the basic action of digging rooms to add to your dungeon, in order to sell you speed boosts of course.

The comparison Sterling made was something like, for the same price right now, you could dig up 20 squares in this pseudo-game, or buy several copies of the actual Dungeon Keeper .

It’s a bit awkward, because I liked HZD, I completed it, DLC and all, but I don’t consider it a good open world. I learned after a few hours that exploring is almost never rewarded, and you’d way better follow the few very obvious threads the game is setting up for you.

Going into a hidden path before you’re sent there by a quest is just wasting time, you’re going to struggle a lot, you’ll get nothing at the end and you’ll often even have to go back the way you came. Going outright off-road, even a little, spams you with “turn back now or I reload your save” messages. Which is baffling, I’ve never seen a game trying such a bad way to keep you inside the playing area. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game border that’s such a mess to begin with.

Great story, great characters, fun battle mechanics. But as an open-world game, I don’t think it works.

A map made of blue rectangles with white outlines joking, saw quite enough of those already.

A pet peeve of mine : a new ability should not be used to just go through one or two obstacles and never again. Best case is it has potential uses outside the ability gates, for example it gives you new moves or options you can exploit in combat and such. Because if not it may as well be just an ordinary key, and though it’s okay to have a couple locks and keys in your game, your new “power” being reduced to that is frustrating.

As an example of what not to do IMO, there’s an item called the Spinner, a cogwheel machine you can ride in The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess. It looks crazy and cool as fuck… And you use it 3 times in the whole game, because it works on rails, there are very few rails and it’s completely useless everywhere else. Boo.

It could happen, but especially if the game has at least some popularity on a platform like Steam I expect someone more tech savvy than average would smell a rat and start looking, or ask around, and it’d be found out.

I don’t know exactly how those work, but I imagine on top of weird CPU usage it would make very suspicious network calls too. There’s always a guy that sees stuff like that and goes “where the fuck are my cycles and packets going?”

They certainly don’t review code, but on those there must be at least a scan for the most obvious malicious stuff. I am not sure it’d detect something hidden like in the article though. After all even on the guy’s PC it was only detected once it tried to actually download stuff.

The good thing about workshop is visibility, if someone notices something shady it’ll be known fast. Not perfect, but probably better than getting your mods from random sites nobody knows.

If someone builds a base on freaking sand instead of rock they deserve to be eaten by a worm.

I literally have a Rimworld mod that calls an external python script as a feature.

It’s a special case, of course said script is not part of the mod package, it has to be installed manually. What it does is allowing generating portraits for characters externally.

I even rewrote the script to use local generation, but the one provided as an example calls an online API.

If you want extended mod support, you kinda need it though. Stuff like Minecraft and Rimworld come to mind.

Rimworld has very good official mod support that lets you do quite a lot with completely safe XML configuration files. But as soon as you want to deviate a bit from what the vanilla game allows, you’d have to code that and embed it as a DLL in your mod.

Almost all gameplay or UI mods are DLL mods or depend on one. Quick survey : I have about 250 DLLs from my active mod list.

This made me think, okay, this particular exploit uses malicious code in a mod that targets an old embedded chromium vulnerability, and can be fixed by updating the game’s dependencies. This game started a dozen years ago, but it’s still being worked on.

How many retro games that are not still in development could have vulnerabilities like that? Especially moddable games.

Infamously Dead or Alive did that with character hair colours. That is, not paying to unlock the option, not even paying to unlock individual colours to swap them when you want : you’d have to pay every time you wanted to change a character’s hair.

Back in the 00s I strongly associated Havok with Oblivion, because… Well, it was in your face all the time, with clutter flying all over the place, physics-based traps, ragdoll bodies and skeletons exploding in a dozen pieces.

And it was very, very broken, especially in crowded spaces. Still happened in Skyrim by the way. I used to joke about how “Havok” was a perfect name for that mess… But that’s probably Bethesda doing Bethesda stuff with it.

I was aware it still is in use, spotted it on many credits. The fact it’s been used as a base (even with another custom physics system on top of it) in Tears of the Kingdom tells me the stuff must still be quite solid.

Oh, it’s about that. It’s just leftover from an old base 20 counting system really. Kind of like how time is still using base 60 (though it’s kinda convenient for dividing), stuff like that.

Really, English is not completely safe from that. Ask yourself why eleven to nineteen instead of, you know, ten-one, ten-two…

Is that a French stereotype I am not aware of?

Because, I’ve got a bit of experience in teaching math, and I wish most kids in that class could speak math naturally.

Do you often formulate math problems spontaneously?

Thinking about those I’ve played, I don’t think remakes have ever detracted from the original to me.

The first time I finally completed Metroid 1 was shortly after Zero Mission (which had the cool effect that the locations of some power ups was still fresh in my mind).

I also enjoyed Samus Returns despite it missing the point of Metroid 2, and that didn’t make Metroid 2 worse in retrospect.

Kind of similar with Majora’s Mask 3D, Mario 64 DS…

I’ve never hold up a first play because of a potential remaster, especially not if it was not announced.

I have hold up a few replays when rumours of a remake are floating around though (like I did with Skyward Sword). I stopped a halfway through replay of Xenoblade Chronicles when they announced Definitive Edition. With how long XC games get if you try to do everything… Yeah.