I propose we call Microsoft’s portable Xbox a “Xune.”

LLMs are going to replace some developers, the companies that do that will fold because their product doesn’t work, the developers will get jobs elsewhere.

That question is the thesis statement of a 2 hour long video essay if ever I heard one.

Most games involve random chance somehow to make the game feel more alive and less deterministic, like in an early Zelda game, should the Octorok run 3, 4, 5, or 6 tiles forward? Should it turn left or right? Should it drop a rupee or a heard when killed? These I’m fine with.

In an RPG, things like monster encounter rates might use the RNG to simulate the behavior of a dungeon master, both “roll for initiative” and “I’ll have them encounter 4 groups of low level monsters on their way through the creepy forest.” Using an RNG and lookup table for that is a reasonable low overhead way to add some unpredictability and adventure to the game. Note: I don’t really play RPGs that much.

The term roguelike has started to be overused to mean any game that features procedural generation and permadeath. By that definition I think Tetris qualifies as a roguelike. The original Rogue kind of worked like a virtual dungeonmaster, it would create an RPG campaign for you to play in, and then it played like any RPG where you have to explore a dungeon, learn the mechanics etc. with permadeath and the consequence of having to relearn everything you’ve learned thusfar generating stakes and pressuring the player to survive, no “whatever, I’ll just die and respawn.” So that’s an innovative use of a computer random number generator. Most things that call themselves “roguelikes” are more “We designed a cool primary gameplay loop but can’t really be bothered with level design so here’s some procedural generation to beat your head against over and over again, maybe hoping to find a scenario you can possibly win.” Quite often, it’s not that the game randomly re-engineers itself, it throws the same pre-scripted things at you in a somewhat different order, so they end up playing more like old arcade games than an actual adventure.

A “roguelike” I’ve spent the most time with is FTL: Faster Than Light, and its roguelike structure is by far my least favorite feature. I don’t really like beating my head against the RNG hoping a permutation of combats, 50/50 “do you help with the giant spiders” encounters goes my way so that I have enough scrap, and that it gives me a shop with a useful array of weapons so that I have a chance at the end encounter.

Blue Prince takes the randomization to a whole other level. It might be compelling if it procedurally randomized the house for each playthrough such that you do have to learn YOUR way through it, and you have limited stamina so that each day you can only explore so far, but you can get upgrades to your stamina so that you can stay in the house longer and explore deeper, but…I can’t see the way they implemented the game’s RNG as anything other than flagrant disrespect of the player’s time.

The “AHA!” moment in a puzzle game is what you’re after. That hapens in the player’s mind. If the player thinks up the solution, but the mechanics of the game make it take a long time to implement, all you’re doing is grinding the player’s teeth together. And Blue Prince seems designed to maximize teeth grinding, because the player may know the solution to a puzzle, but contriving the circumstance necessary to implement that solution requires several unlikely rolls back to back to back to back to back.

Sorry, I’m just convinced it’s bad game design pretending to be novel.

Increasingly, the software published on disc or cartridge is incomplete or unfinished, because there is pressure from management to ship retail products on time, but game development is hard, so the dev team will use the time during manufacturing and distribution of discs or cartridges to write patches, which will be automatically downloaded when the game runs. And it’s getting to the point that the cartridge or disc just functions as a license key. Maybe some of the game’s assets will be stored there but not the complete game, as they’ll still require large downloads to function.

I’ve been a Nintendo + PC gamer my entire life; basically anything I’ve ever wanted to play was available with that combo…and I’m ditching Nintendo.

Well, I’m kinda curious how much longer home consoles are going to hang on.

Nintendo is releasing their second generation handheld. The Steam Deck is quite popular, and the rest of the PC gaming industry has been scrabbling to match it. Meanwhile, the PS5…exists and what’s an Xbox even for anymore?

People like to say consoles will continue to exist because they’re so much simpler than PCs to “just play” on, but that’s not really true anymore. My parents’ Switch has a multi-page settings menu, an online account and subscription, even games that come on cartridge often require downloads and updates before you start playing. We’re in a different world than when I was a kid, when I could really get a game, plug it in the SNES, flip the switch and it runs.

I could see Microsoft and Sony having an Atari or Sega moment. Exiting the hardware market, shutting down their platform, becoming a relatively minor game studio occasionally remembering to make a game in a property they haven’t published in awhile, like Atari putting out an Alone In The Dark game every 1.5 decades or so.

My mother got into it. I’m not going to.

A puzzle game that puts RNG in between the player and the ability to attempt a solution is something I’m not willing to tolerate.

how is it different from playing Riven with one of your sticks of RAM poorly seated so the computer crashes on a semi-regular basis resetting your progress?

No. Not for me. I’d be more interested in wearing the corner fire hydrant in my ass than playing that.

Ehh, I think it’s more fair to say we had our turn at making up abbreviations that made sense in our world as it briefly existed.

That commercial “IDK, my BFF Jill?” Was targeted at us, but 100 years ago telegraphers and ham radio operators were inventing abbreviations and slang in Morse code. 73 OM

Haven’t ever done that with anything as big as a Kennedy50 cent commemorative dinner plate, but I could do it with a quarter once upon a time.

are they trying to say the whole is less than the sum of its parts?

Compared to whatever the Switch 2 runs…yeah 100%.

Controlled Flight Into Terrain, or CFIT, is the case of being extremely specific. It’s not a mid-air collision with another aircraft, in-flight breakup or fire, flight control failure, crew incapacitation or anything like that. CFIT means the crew was present and alert, the aircraft was functioning correctly and hadn’t departed controlled flight, they’re flying along and all of a sudden the ground happens.

It’s almost always a case of egregious amounts of pilot error. Failures in judgement such as deciding to fly down a canyon because it looked so cool when Luke Skywalker did it, and then being unable to climb out and slamming into a wall. Failure of navigation in the mountains. Failure to maintain minimum altitude on an instrument approach (Look up that Cross Air flight that killed the German pop band Passion Fruit) Failure to compute takeoff and climb performance and flying an airplane straight into the mountain off the end of the runway because you needed 900 feet per mile and at this density altitude you could only manage 750. Or, one of my favorites, the Korean Air Cargo 747 captain that chased a broken ADI straight into a forest outside London.

We put the fear of death in the music industry with Pentium 2 computers running Windows 98 and 56k dial up modems. They try to pull too much shit and we WILL do without them.

On a similar vein, there’s indicated airspeed, calibrated airspeed, true airspeed, and ground speed. Aviation comes with a hard requirement of 5th grade math.

4chan is still down right?

“Going out” means go somewhere very loud.

No.

Flight instructor here: There are several definitions of altitude that pilots are taught about and must consider during a flight. These include:

True altitude: The aircraft’s actual height above mean sea level. Nowadays you’d probably get this from a GPS receiver. Most of the time we don’t really care about this.

Absolute altitude: The aircraft’s instantaneous altitude above the surface directly below it. This might be measured by a radar altimeter if the aircraft is carrying one, or possibly calculated comparing the aircraft’s GPS position and a topographical map, a lot of moving map systems can do that these days. Fairly important to keep in mind for avoiding controlled flight into terrain.

Indicated altitude: The reading of a barometric altimeter set to the local barometric pressure. Below 18,000 feet, this is used for vertical separation of aircraft. Air Traffic Control tells you to climb and maintain 8,500, you climb until the altimeter points to that number. This is still above mean sea level so when flying over land your absolute altitude is almost certainly less than your indicated altitude.

Pressure altitude: The reading of a barometric altimeter set to 29.92 inches of mercury. Above 18,000 feet, used for vertical separation of aircraft. 18,000 feet is the floor of Class A airspace: en route IFR-only airspace, it’s where airliners cruise. They’re not worried about where they are in relation to the surface so much, they’re mostly concerned with avoiding other aircraft, and they don’t want to have to constantly adjust for local settings, so they sit it to match a standard day. This might mean they’re hundreds of feet off from their true altitude, but who cares? This is part of the reason we refer to altitudes up there as “flight levels”. 22,000 feet is called Flight Level 220.

Density altitude: This one is going to bend your brain a little. Density altitude is indicated altitude corrected for non-standard temperature. It is used for predicting aircraft performance. Aircraft work by interacting with air molecules. When the air is dense, the engine can generate more power, the propeller can generate more thrust, and the wings can generate more lift. When the air is less dense, you get less thrust and lift. Doesn’t matter why the air is less dense; air decreases in density as you climb, and the air becomes less dense as you heat it. It makes sense in a pilot’s head to think of this in terms of altitude on a standard day. The most average weather is 15 degrees C and 29.92 in. Hg, so we compare all weather to those conditions and calculate aircraft performance based on those conditions. On a very hot day, we’ll do a calculation which tells us what altitude it feels like we’re at on a standard day, and that makes intuitive sense to pilots. “Normally this runway is at 1,000 feet, but today it feels like it’s at 3,000 feet.” Takeoff and landing performance, ability to climb, and true airspeed are calculated from density altitude.

Conrail?

The tweenagers hosing on Axe in coastal cities will take care of that I think.

That was my first thought, a tide pod also rapidly dissolves in sea water, we shouldn’t be dumping those in the ocean though.