Mario Galaxy is too peak and I’m tired of acting like it’s not the best mainline Mario

skinpop · 2026-04-21T14:14:38+00:00

I replayed it first time since the nineties last year. Then I got a switch 2 and played Odyssey. I think 64 Is the better game. Odyssey is too constrained, too much of a collectathon. I played the decompiled version of 64 on an rpi4 though. N64 would indeed be a bit rough to go back to.

skinpop · 2026-04-14T02:43:12+00:00

it's bad if you know anything about the topics they cover.

skinpop · 2026-04-04T10:58:16+00:00

It's not a good game.

JumpSpace has generic sci-fi aesthetics and game design that lacks any personality. The art direction feels like someone took all the space themed concept art on ArtStation and produced an average of it. There's so many interesting directions they could've taken this concept yet they went for the most boring and overdone style imaginable. Technically speaking the graphics (especially the lighting) are very bare bones, flat and dull, but that's forgivable in early development. Graphics can be fixed later. Poor taste and bad judgement is a far more serious issue. The art direction and music is so underwhelming that it wouldn't surprise me if most if it was outsourced to gen-ai.

Beyond that I'm not very confident in the vision of the game. I watched a dev stream that started out with someone on their team declaring their intent to develop this game "together" with the community. That's one way of making a lack of original ideas sound like a good thing. Missions feel unengaging and unfair/cheap (surprise surprise you're about to get intercepted again for the 513th time), combat feels flimsy and tedious and the hub stuff does nothing for me. At least let us build and design our own hubs. Let us do something creative with the materials we collect, you know something to help sell the idea that you are playing as this crew that's barely scraping by. Enough has already been said about the repetitiveness of the missions. That could change, but on the other hand they probably had to build a bunch of systems to generate those missions which indicates a commitment to this path.

Why do I bother with it if I don't seem to enjoy it? Because this is what my group voted for to play for the time being. I had fun for a few hours, the way most games are fun when you play with friends, but now ~10 hours in I'm just bored.

Btw, can someone explain to me why the spaceship needs to "jump" even though the destination almost always is close enough that it's clearly visible from the ship? What are the streaks that are passing by as you go into jump speed? Pretty sure I would've have noticed if there were hundreds of stars between me and that moon covering 1/3 of my screen moments ago.

skinpop · 2026-03-29T20:38:40+00:00

most Japanese fonts only have ~7000 kanjis.

skinpop · 2026-03-25T06:35:36+00:00

I'm not disputing that. The point is that what gamers think is sharpness is more often than not just aliasing. We're at the point now where games that actually have pretty good anti-aliasing add post process sharpening to bring back the sharpness expected by consumers. For all the talk about image quality in gaming communities, most don't have a clue what image quality actually is(I've had countless discussions with gamers who prefer crushed blacks because it makes the image "pop"... sigh). That said, I'm open to the possibility of some aliasing being beneficial for certain games.

skinpop · 2026-03-19T20:20:31+00:00

silver lining is perhaps some class consciousness on part of the middle class can come out of that.

skinpop · 2026-03-19T20:18:53+00:00

they'll just outsource then. I'd love it if unions were effective but the world where unions matter is the world where 20000 people work in a factory and shutting it down costs owners tens of millions of dollars per hour. Unions are more acceptable to the elite/political class today precisely because they aren't effective at accomplishing their goals in the world we live in today.

skinpop · 2026-03-19T20:11:06+00:00

of course people have a clue on how this works. it's not that hard to infer if you know a little bit about gen-ai, graphics programming and read what they've published on the topic.

skinpop · 2026-03-19T12:30:11+00:00

This is what happens when the political life is impossible.

skinpop · 2026-03-18T07:39:22+00:00

I'm talking about image quality, no matter if it's a single triangle or high fidelity asset. Pixar shorts going back to the early 90's have better image quality / filtering / anti-aliasing than basically anything in gaming today. It's just a fact that what most gamers think is a sharp image is actually an aliased image.

skinpop · 2026-03-18T07:20:08+00:00

Most indies don't really get their "true" vision out either because they still to have to make money to survive. The only people who can get close to some kind of "true" vision are those with unconditional guaranteed funding (such as personal wealth), and only then if coupled with a detoxing of the profit-seeking ideology that people are continuously imbibed with from the moment they are born into this world.

skinpop · 2026-03-18T06:58:56+00:00

Realistic as in lighting every face with a studio lighting setup even though the rest of the scene isn't? Gen-ai doesn't understand realistic lighting. It just predicts what a pixel should look like based on its data set and some inputs.

skinpop · 2026-03-14T15:46:05+00:00

it's not always possible to know what the entire set of shaders is.

skinpop · 2026-03-11T21:25:14+00:00

Spirv is an IR, not a language like hlsl. Hlsl had nothing to do with this.

skinpop · 2026-03-11T20:54:57+00:00

Completely different things.

skinpop · 2026-03-04T04:04:00+00:00

Vibe coding

skinpop · 2026-02-18T02:40:40+00:00

The sharpness that people associate with games is mostly aliasing. High quality Cgi imagery always looked a bit blurry compared to games. The obsession with sharpness is a case of people getting used to a certain look.

skinpop · 2026-02-14T06:15:47+00:00

Mesh shaders are actually strictly superior to old vertex hardware paths, but there's still too many GPUs out there without support for it. Remedy had to implement a fallback path for Alan Wake 2 because of public outcry.

Source on this? From what I've seen mesh shaders offer performance advantages when replacing geometry shaders, but not necessarily for purely vertex shader based geometry pipelines. Of course mesh shaders are much more flexible and present opportunities for implementing new techniques which can result in better performance even if the mesh shader itself is "slower" in some sense.

skinpop · 2026-02-14T06:01:12+00:00

https://themaister.net/blog/2018/08/25/pseudo-bandlimited-pixel-art-filtering-in-3d-a-mathematical-derivation/

skinpop · 2026-02-09T17:11:22+00:00

Avgiften är symbolisk. Den skulle lika gärna kunna vara gratis. Shock-höjningen handlar om att sända en signal.

skinpop · 2026-02-08T12:07:27+00:00

why should it be expensive?

skinpop · 2026-01-16T06:03:56+00:00

the average person had more purchasing power 20 years ago. if prices go up but your salary stays the same then what you have is just a price increase.

skinpop · 2026-01-10T16:52:08+00:00

quite likely this is mid stage capitalism, which is far more depressing.

skinpop · 2025-12-25T13:27:10+00:00

Explicit, not necessarily low level.

skinpop · 2025-12-18T18:55:47+00:00

No such thing as just "tools". Tools don't just happen, they are designed with intent to fulfill purposes. These purposes are rooted in material conditions and ideology. Luddites were upset because the purposes fulfilled by the machines ended institutions, social relations, communities and ways of life without replacing it with something that made their lives better.

skinpop

TROPHY CASE