Sands of Time is straight-up one of the best games of all time, and that’s even including the not-great combat which makes up a lot of it, and a few puzzles which just grind the whole thing to a complete stop. Its quality is not completely representative of its era.

What is representative of its era, is that it’s a complete bastard to run nowadays. Requires a GPU with hardware transform and lighting, but also a single-core CPU, which means you need a very specific age of computer to run it. Even patched up, there’s some things that just don’t look right - I’ve never managed to get it running with the portals to secret areas looking the way they should.

I am quite envious of you being able to replay it, tho. Think I gave up the last time I tried.

Well, the good news is that they made a lot of coinage. Random bronze or silver coins, especially if they’re not in the best of condition and with dubious provenance, are kind of cheap. The museum-grade stuff, that collectors really want to have, is quite fiercely bid over when it comes to market. And they never made a lot of gold coins - the value was impractical compared to the cost of goods and labour - so that shit’s expensive, yo. But if you’re wanting a few denarius to call your own, then ebay’s full of them.

Azure’s documentation is the worst fucking bullshit that I’ve ever read in all my days, and just about every single page or tool (including the CLI) has an integrated slopbot that routinely recommends commands and REST endpoints that don’t exist; it’s slow as fuck, and to do even the simplest things is agonising. But to give them their dues, their recent uptime has been pretty good.

Truth be told, I’ve even come round to thinking that I prefer using Azure to Google Cloud Platform. Using any of Azure’s features is a pleasure akin to cutting yourself with a rusty nail and then falling in a sewer, but at least it has some features. GCP is like they implemented a quarter of the very basic functionality and then got fed up, decided to call it a day.

Ah, but no-one would question Mac support when you’re developing new software. If you can support Mac, which is certified UNIX, then the jump to supporting Linux isn’t all that much extra, and we can prove there’s a growing install base.

Started the ball rolling, and it just keeps going faster.

The fluorescent green hi-vis is usually reserved for first-aiders, but there are exceptions. I was working on a site in the middle of some rapeseed fields once, and we all got issued green - anyone wearing yellow or orange was swarmed with insects in moments.

Got a properly great singing voice, too.

I didn’t mean it negatively, really - I much prefer that devs add features to polishing them, and the fact that the quests and the world are so interesting makes up for a lot.

Yes, you can see through the level geometry in places. Yes, the enemies repeat the same barks again and again. But hell yes, it’s a lot of fun to play.

Bethesda have been on a serious downhill slide lately. Fallout 4 wasn’t an rpg imho, Fallout 76 wasn’t in anyone’s opinion, and Starfield was a bit of a disaster. I’m whatever the opposite of ‘hyped’ is for ES6. It’s good to play an RPG in this style that’s so blatantly a labour of love.

Sway window manager? Discerning choice. I see you have good taste.

Enjoyed the first few hours of it. If you’re on the mood for a much more ambitious, Eurojank take on Oblivion, then it’s probably right up your alley. Highlight of the Steam sales for me so far.

Still wishlisted from the time you posted before! Good luck, FirsTimeDev, hope it goes well, and looking forward to it.

Would have posted the same, but this exactly. Don’t know whether it’s a good or a bad thing really. Enthusiasm for niche topics is awesome, but you need to maintain that enthusiasm to have a community, and that’s easier with fewer, larger groups.

We also used to have a lot of ‘porn on the front page’, but that’s gone too. Have no objection to a bit of nudity, but there’s plenty of internet for that elsewhere.

Don’t want to dig out the XKCD about competing standards, but there are a lot of these applications and they don’t quite do what they could. I’ve got No Thanks! on my phone, which lets you scan barcodes to identify companies that support Israel to avoid them, but really what I want is:

• scan a barcode, or look them up in a list
• describes the thing (to make sure that it’s the correct barcode) and gives you the list of the list of company ownerships, and their associated country, and any problematic statements by owners etc.
• have a user-defined list of countries and companies that I’d like to avoid, for a quick yes-no on a given scan.

Personally, I want to avoid anything sourced from imperial war-mongers (USA, Russia, Israel, …), anything from ‘Brexit Bastards’ (Dyson et al) and anything from Fucking Nestle (who make it really difficult to responsibly buy cat food, which is a problem for me); but I appreciate that other people other criteria. Maybe you’d like to boycott any company or owners that have expressed support for the far right, for instance? (I do too, of course.) But none of the existing apps quite seem to cover every use case; need to develop an additional standard that covers everyone.

Unreal and Unreal Tournament, sure. I feel like all of their many sequels saw a continuous decline in quality, but the originals were great games. Can’t deny that Gears of War has been influential. Epic Pinball and One Must Fall 2097 were good for a laugh for ten minutes, but I can’t help but feel that they’ll have aged badly.

Seems crazy to think that Jill of the Jungle, which is an awful game, is what lined their pockets enough to develop the Unreal engine, and they were riding on the success of that all the way up to Fortnite.

Yes, it’s painful as an environmentalist to see the infrastructure burning, but if it had reached its destination then it would have been burned just the same. Probably more cleanly than this mess, and the fine soot particles contribute more to global heating than ‘complete combustion’, but the carbon would still have been released to atmosphere. Doing it this way will at least halt the flow for a good long while, which has real environmental benefits.

I do hope the wind isn’t blowing that shit over our friends in Estonia and Finland; that stuff looks like cancer.

Managed to snag free tickets to see them and Buckcherry warming up for Steel Panther a while back.

Bowling for Soup were absolutely superb; charismatic crowd-pleasers, loads of energy, top songs, great to watch. Buckcherry played for about twenty minutes and then fucked off, which is gutting because it was them that I really wanted to see. And then Steel Panther played for about two hours, faaaar too long for a one-joke band, and went past ‘satirically sleazy’ into just ‘sleazy’, which is not the same.

Take home message is really ‘go see Bowling for Soup’, I suppose.

The very last level, rendezvous at the mountain, isn’t all that difficult. Lots of pausing and scrolling to either end of the map, but as long as you can multitask then it’s doable. Playing through all the Mayhem levels to get there? Man alive. Managed it when I was a young teen, couldn’t do it for the life of me now.

The ‘win’ screen - a static picture of the devs, with a sampled sound of them applauding your efforts - is still one of the most rewarding endings to any game, I think. If you can get there, you deserve that.

I wrote one of my own from scratch, back in the day. More to practice my algorithm coding skills than anything else, make sure that I could. Not very difficult - easier than barcodes, in a way.

The thing that I found most interesting was that it uses the same Reed-Solomon error correcting code as CDs and DVDs, and for the same reason. Those codes guarantee that you don’t get too many 1s or 0s in a row. That would cause difficulties with laser tracking in a disc player, or big confusing areas of white or black in a QR code.

The on-off-on-off pattern that joins the inside edge of the three squares isn’t usually that obvious either, but when reading it, makes it quite easy to decide how ‘big the boxes’ are. You can store a very long piece of text in a QR code, although the pattern gets very finely detailed after a while.

Or in the case of UK users, provide an absolutely absurd amount of PII to demonstrate that you’re of age.

I have Monster Girl Island: Prologue from back in the day, that’s fine. Sits in my games list causing no trouble. Can I look at the release notes for updates? Not without entering credit card details. Makes perfect sense.

Another Crab’s Treasure might scratch that itch for you? Be warned that it is bastard hard despite how it looks - first couple of bosses are okay, but it quickly ramps up to be much more unforgiving than From’s output.

Digital scoreboards? No-one will have the cash for that kind of RAM in future, Kolanaki. Going to have to go old-school for keeping our pinball scores.