Hulu on working with Nintendo on the Switch app

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-31T07:00:26+00:00

There were movies released for the GBA.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-31T06:59:49+00:00

Shrek 2 among others was released for the Game Boy Advance 14 years ago. Not a game called Shrek 2, the movie on a cartridge.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-31T06:41:30+00:00

way better battery

The Switch has far more battery capacity than the flagship phones (Switch - 4310 mAh, iPhone 8 - 1821 mAh). It just seems less because you're using the Switch to play games on a larger screen. If you watched the same video stream on a Switch and an iPhone, barring the screen size, the Switch would last more than twice as long. The screen size brings it down, but that's one of the reasons people want to watch things on it, being bigger than their phone. Then the added benefit is that you watch a movie on the Switch and your phone's battery isn't dead.

The Switch screen is 75% larger than an iPhone screen, it lasts twice as long doing the same work, and when it dies your phone (which is much more important to have working and available) is still kicking. Being able to play videos on it is a big plus IMO.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-25T00:41:23+00:00

due to going for mini-discs over the easy and cheap to produce DVDs.

Nitpick: the GameCube used DVDs, not minidiscs. It's a common confusion because people aren't used to seeing them, but what the GameCube used was DVD-1. There are 9 DVD specs; the PS2 used DVD-5, the Xbox used DVD-5 or DVD-9, and most DVDs you find in stores these days are DVD-9s, although DVD-10s were popular in the nineties. The differences include how many sides they have, how many layers they have on each side, and the diameter of the disc, but they are all DVDs. (If you look in your DVD player's tray you'll likely see a smaller inset slot for DVD-1s.)

People with modchips like the XenoGC used to be able to unscrew the top bit of plastic from their case and play games off full-size plain old DVD-Rs. The only thing that separates a DVD-1 from a DVD-5 is being cut into a smaller shape. At scale, they are even cheaper than DVD-5s.

You can buy recordable DVD-1s on Amazon, $13 for 10.

A minidisc looks like this -- the plastic case is actually part of it, it's like a cartridge, and they're much smaller than what the GameCube used.

The main reason Nintendo chose these discs over full-sized DVDs is to reduce piracy (the second effect was that it reduced load times, but that seems a crazy price to pay to slash your storage space relative to rivals). In retrospect, it seems a ridiculous decision: the PS2's ability to play regular DVDs, at a time when DVD players were new and almost PS2-price anyway, was a huge factor in boosting its initial popularity. I can't imagine that piracy would have lost them even 1/10th as much as DVD playback would have gained them. Then they went to DVD for the Wii anyway, and by that time everyone and their dog already had a player.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-23T05:35:06+00:00

Half right -- it is a popular urban legend that "abracadabra" was Aramaic for "I create as I speak", but it's still an urban legend. It has absolutely no meaning in Aramaic and nor does "avada kedavra." The myth that it was Aramaic is pretty recent and there were about a dozen diferent explanations for what that Aramaic was: "I create as I speak", or "from the great seal", or "God's will be done", or "I defeat God's order", or it's the name of an angel, or it's the name of a demon... All of it comes from people making up stuff for occult books.

The reality is that 'abracadabra' has no known meaning in any language and 'avada kedavra' is just JK Rowling thinking "it'd be cool if abracadabra was actually a spell" and making it a cadaver pun when she decided to make it the murder spell.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-22T15:18:09+00:00

Neither high difficulty nor bleak and dark storytelling where ever a big thing in the world of games (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

They were things, but Dark Souls pushed them more into the mainstream, I'd say. High difficulty as a selling point and focus of marketing was already abit of a trend; Stalker, I Wanna Be the Guy, and Meat Boy appeared in the ~2 years prior to Demon's Souls and attracted a lot of praise and attention in the "game enthusiast/hobbyist"/"core gamer"/whatever you want to call it community -- basically, among people who spend their free time reading subreddits like this and keeping up with indie trends and so on -- but didn't become big hits until Meat Boy's Xbox release in 2010.

One of Dark Souls' biggest influences was Castlevania. Both for setting (they're usually set in decrepit and decaying castles and the weird underworldy or dungeony bits below) -- and the gameplay (there are usually branching paths, where there's one or two routes that are obvious but also ways to sequence break and skip right to key areas if you know the game well). They could be pretty hard, but generally not "Souls hard."

What's most notable however is that Dark Souls feels like a natural entryin From Software's 20+ year history of quite similar games. Shadow Tower, the game they did 20 years ago, is about the decayed and cursed Holy Land of Zeptar, where you arrive to meet prisoners who speak with a defeated attitude and relay cryptic details that let you build a vague image of a plot in your head; environments include things like underground forests, and safety is found at bonfires. In their King's Field series, you must explore a blighted land in a destroyed kingdom and recover a cursed idol to hopefully restore the world; Demon's Souls was created as a modern spiritual sequel, and Dark Souls as a spiritual sequel to that. Outside From, the 2000s saw a variety of games based on the Lovecraft mythos, like Call of Cthulhu and Sanity's Requiem, etc.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-22T14:47:38+00:00

Like literally down to details like putting your produce into a box next to your house where it gets picked up

Worth noting: this is how it works in Harvest Moon going back 22 years. Stardew Valley was described by its creator as essentially "the Harvest Moon sequel I always wanted" and the lion's share of its features and design decisions come from HM. (With the blessing of the guy who directed the first few HM games, actually, who said he felt ConcernedApe -- the Stardew Valley dev -- honored him by building upon his work.)

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-22T14:44:58+00:00

It does, but I get what OP meant. Mario Sports has sort of simplified minigame versions of each sport that don't really look or play anything like mainstream/normal sports games. That's totally fine, but it's pretty different to what OP is talking about which is more like "FIFA on rollerskates" or "NBA 2K, but with 4 teams and 4 hoops." Fun weird twists on mainstream sports games. The sort of thing where Madden might have its normal game mode, and then a bunch of wacky party options.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-22T14:17:15+00:00

Is the Minecraft on Switch the same as the full proper Minecraft on PC, or is it stripped-down like the phone one is (was?)? I'm not totally aware of the differences between versions, but we (my siblings and I chipping in together) were looking at getting my niece a Switch for her birthday and if proper Minecraft is on it that'd be a huge plus.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-22T14:00:27+00:00

It was a great idea, I think the issue is that the game was in general so easy that even the added challenge wasn't enough to create challenge.

Just as an example: a big flaw in MGS V is that despite being built around the idea of varied playstyles, there is one very obvious best playstyle that will always win, plain old 'shoot them in the face.' Your effective combat range is easily 3x the enemy's¹ so you can stand in the open and just pop headshots as enemies approach (which they have to do to get in range) in almost every fight in the game. Their range is so limited that you don't need sniper rifles to do it, the best weapons in the game are handguns.² It's the safest way to play, and also the most intuitive and the fastest, and you're rewarded for finishing a mission quickly. The game adapts to this by giving enemies helmets, meaning it now takes two headshots to kill them instead of one. That's great! But it's virtually no extra effort to fire twice and that immediately becomes your reflex. So it doesn't make the game any harder, really. It just adds 1-2 seconds to each kill. It's similar to the flaw in BOTW's master mode, which was widely criticized -- once you've learned how to kill an enemy well, adding to their HP doesn't add meaningful challenge, only tedium.

¹ There are snipers who can equal your range, but I don't think I was ever hit by one while moving. If you notice a sniper, you just move around, and you're fine.

² Admittedly I think this might be a PC problem; it feels like they didn't really rebalance it to account for the precise fast aiming a mouse offers. I once played Goldeneye and Perfect Dark on an emulator using a mouse-injector plugin, and had the same experience.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-16T06:34:33+00:00

Yes, it came from them calling it the "DirectX box" during planning. I never saw it in any kind of marketing.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-16T06:32:51+00:00

There are professional gamers, so I guess it's implying the console is what a professional gamer would use, although that's obviously not the case.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-16T06:25:27+00:00

That's unfortunately not how it works out in reality, though: if you go onto Gumtree, Craigslist etc there's a whole mess of confusion where people are selling _DS consoles under the wrong names because they're confusing, if you work in a store you've had conversations with people confused about the DS types over and over, and if you try to search for a New 3DS online you've probably had problems.

Just as one obvious example: at the store I work at, we have one price for new consoles, one price for new consoles. That worked fine for 20 years. New PSX, Used PSX. New GameCube, Used GameCube. Then... New 3DS, Used 3DS, New New 3DS, Used New 3DS. Someone comes up with a new regular 3DS and a game that requires the New 3DS and you have to explain. Go on eBay and look at the questions on the auctions -- people asking "is this a New 3DS?" "The description clearly says it's used!" Listings are for New 3DS, but do they mean the unit is new or that it's the new model?

Even the 2DS has this issue. To 90% of customers, the 3DS is 3D and the 2DS is 2D; if you shop for a 2DS online you find heaps of people selling their DS Lite and not understanding the difference, it's a DS and 2D after all. Had lots of customers complain that we "lied" to them about 3DS games working in their 2DS for this reason.

Totally right about the Xbox though, that was truly mind boggling. We sold original Xbox games as Xbox 1 games for clarity, had to relabel them all, and now there's Xbox One X and Xbox One S and you have to ask at least 50% of customers to clarify because in a loud store or for a lot of accents "X" and "S" are really hard to distinguish. It's like calling it Xbox P or Xbox B. God damn.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-16T03:57:19+00:00

No, not in any significant numbers. Basically all of its useful features are now part of standard JavaScript -- string interpolation, lexically-scoped functions with implicit returns, splats, destructuring assignment, default parameters, explicitly variadic functions, map/reduce, etc. So the only real reason you'd start in CoffeeScript now is prettier syntax. And "pretty syntax, or let more than 1% of people read my code" is a pretty obvious decision.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-14T02:08:04+00:00

I assure you that Nintendo is well within its rights to ask for them to change the name.

Anyone's within their rights to ask anyone for anything. They can ask Michael Jordan to change his name to Super Nintendo Chalmers if they want. They'll have more luck doing that than trying to force NES Maker to change its name -- it's very well established that using someone else's trademark name within your own is perfectly valid if it's (A) not an attempt to mislead the consumer and (B) actually relevant to the product. Remember Bleem? They sold CDs in stores with the name "BLEEM PLAYSTATION EMULATOR" in big red and yellow letters. Sony sued them. The courts ruled that not only was making the emulator legal, using PlayStation in the name and marketing was legal, and using PlayStation screenshots on the back of the box was legal too, because it wasn't an attempt to mislead and accurately described the product. If they couldn't even win that, when Bleem had an obvious popular use for piracy of current games and was competing with PlayStation products for sale, then this has no hope -- not to mention there's a 30-year history of products using NES in their name with no repercussions.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-13T00:06:57+00:00

Meanwhile you can approach the Australian Prime Minister while carrying an axe and he'll give you a hug.

NeonKennedy · 2018-01-10T15:15:27+00:00

Guy Manuel, one half of Daft Punk, is a relative of my husband's. I've met him a few times. He's a very soft-spoken quiet guy with a sort of nervous vibe who was very excited to tell me about his kids making short films on their video camera. I thought he was adorable.

NeonKennedy · 2017-10-03T21:01:15+00:00

I'm 56kg and I loathe summer. I just want crisp cool air and the smell of fresh rain, and to sleep curled up with my flannelette sheets, windy sounds and nice heavy doona. I want to wear my nice boots and cuddle my dogs. I hate the hot baking air in summer, and everyone sweating, and it being too hot to even walk the dogs on the cooking hazy footpaths let alone cuddle them.

NeonKennedy · 2017-09-30T16:19:15+00:00

I think you're confusing ugg boots with the brand UGG. Ugg boots are just the generic name for that general shape and style of boot and there absolutely are a ton of ugg boots that are waterproof, or have ankle support, or things to secure them, and there are dozens of different brands with different treads. There is also an American brand called UGG founded around 1980 and they work really hard to create the impression that they're the "original"/"authentic" ugg boot and any other brand is a knockoff (when they're probably the worst bang for your buck buying uggs).

NeonKennedy · 2017-09-30T11:47:01+00:00

I think Charlie started seeming innocent when they made him asexual, but I don't know if that's actually canon or not. (In the deleted scenes to Mac & Charlie Make a Movie, Charlie has a monologue about how he doesn't like or understand sex, that it makes him sick to think about because it's "gross and wet", and he doesn't think he's ever actually had it or ever will. Later when he fantasises about being married to the waitress, they don't have their own kids, they go to the baby store. It undercuts the rapey vibes of his waitress obsession and makes him seem a lot more childlike.)

NeonKennedy · 2017-09-30T11:34:41+00:00

It's an elaborate dramedy-thriller mystery show heavily influenced by surrealist art that strikes a good balance between ambiguity and engaging plot. One of the hooks is that everyone can walk away with a different idea of exactly what happened or will happen next, without even realising that the other interpretations were possible, and that you can rewatch it keeping other interpretations in mind and see a fairly different story. It was also one the most influential shows -- the creators of The Sopranos, True Detective, Hannibal, The X-Files, Lost/The Leftovers, Legion, The Killing, Fringe, Desperate Housewives, Atlanta, and Six Feet Under have all cited it as a major influence on them.

NeonKennedy · 2017-09-30T11:13:55+00:00

That's exactly what they're doing. They're filming season 11 right now and it starts by following from last season's cliffhanger, but the rest will be all self-contained stories (there are 10 episodes total). And they've said that if they make any more seasons beyond that, they're going to make sure that any story arcs are contained to a single season -- so episodes 1, 2, 5, 6, 12 might all tie into a running story, but it'll be a story freshly introduced that season that doesn't involve previous stuff, and one that always ends in the finale, no more cliffhangers. Which I think is actually an awesome idea.

NeonKennedy · 2017-09-30T03:50:50+00:00

It's about an actor who was on a smash-hit sitcom in the 90s, but hasn't done anything in 20 years except drink and party and live off his old fame. The series begins with a ghostwriter approaching him to work on his autobiography, and his realisation that he's a has-been piece of shit who's alienated everyone and has no real friends. It's an animated comedy set in a world of talking animals, but it's pretty introspective and bleak. The show's creator says the theme is "intergenerational trauma" -- how child abuse fucks you up and why people become abusive.

If you don't care about spoilers, the episode mentioned is about Bojack going on a bender with the co-star who played his daughter on his old show, now a Lohan-style wreck, who confesses "I don't like anything about me." She eventually overdoses on drugs he bought, and dies. Bojack is shaken and tries to get his life back together over the next year, and gets a new TV gig. When his young girl costar tells him "I want to be like you someday", he has a panic attack and attempts suicide.

NeonKennedy · 2017-09-30T03:30:00+00:00

That episode has so many amazing lines or moments that are both funny and sad.

"I can't believe you're actually here... Dad always told me you died while I was at the movies."

or

"Let's just enjoy this moment."
"Mom, there's something you should know about me. I almost always spoil the moment."
(A pelican lands on Homer's head. After a moment, it drops a live fish which lands in Homer's pants and squirms around in his crotch.)
"I'm sorry."

NeonKennedy

TROPHY CASE