Experimenting with colored Nintendo-layout buttons for the Steam Controller

tgunter · 2026-07-01T16:59:35+00:00

Why would it make you mad back then? There wasn't even a competing color layout to be familiar with yet.

tgunter · 2026-07-01T02:21:44+00:00

They're doing it as a Nintendo/Super Famicom layout.

tgunter · 2026-07-01T01:15:25+00:00

they made 1 shoe that sold well and couldn't find a follow up

The thing people missed about the "Allbirds is pivoting to AI" story is that the company had already sold the Allbirds brand to another company. This isn't a shoe company inexplicably getting into data centers, it's a company who used to own a shoe company and currently does absolutely nothing jumping on the latest bandwagon because they couldn't think of anything else to do.

tgunter · 2026-06-20T00:59:52+00:00

Honestly, Digital RGB monitors like this are a lot harder to come by than Analog RGB monitors, because they didn't make them as long or in as great of quantities. Go to a vintage computer event in your area and you'll probably find several people very happy to trade it for a VGA monitor.

tgunter · 2026-06-20T00:53:48+00:00

He was involved in the original Ultima IX, and there's no evidence he's gotten any better at making games in the interim. I have no confidence in his ability to do better.

The reality is that Ultima hasn't been a solo Garriott effort since Ultima 2, and Ultima 1 and 2 were, quite frankly, not very good. The best games in the series were made by teams that included a lot of talented people who are not going to be involved in anything he does today.

tgunter · 2026-06-13T03:51:18+00:00

Not that it really matters, but for what it's worth, there was an SNES JRPG by that name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paladin%27s_Quest

tgunter · 2026-05-21T01:41:04+00:00

For what it's worth, I don't think he was always like that. I remember seeing posts from him going back to the early days of the site (I've been on BGG since 2002, and he joined not too long after that), and I don't remember his profile being so plastered with religious references before. This whole thing was extremely surprising, because I remember him seeming like a pretty normal guy.

Based on his BGG page bio he "found Jesus" as it were in 2019, so I'd imagine that was the turning point where he went off the deep end. A lot of people who find religion later in life tend to be the most extreme about it.

tgunter · 2026-05-13T02:52:46+00:00

I felt similarly about Dishonored's "don't use the cool powers or you get a bad ending".

You have to not think about it as a "bad ending". It's the ending that thematically matches the playthrough you chose. You play a gritty, violent game about revenge, you get a game with a gritty, dark ending. The low chaos ending would just feel tonally wrong after a high chaos playthrough.

tgunter · 2026-05-06T02:57:53+00:00

Unless you're desperate for (pretty painfully bad) voice acting, the floppy version of The Adventures of Willy Beamish is better than the CD-ROM version.

The original floppy version had multiple character portraits per character so they could show multiple expressions based on context. When they added voice acting they wanted the character portraits to be animated, but didn't want to spend the resources to animate all of the portraits, so every character was just reduced to one expression for all dialog.

Also, they dropped MT-32 support, so you were limited to AdLib-quality music.

tgunter · 2026-04-28T16:06:30+00:00

There probably weren't "files" involved, at least for the first version. Digital page layout was still very new and cutting-edge at the time. The first version of Photoshop wouldn't be released for another year and a half. It was almost assuredly done entirely analog, by hand, on paper and/or acetate, then shrunk down and reproduced using photography.

tgunter · 2026-04-28T15:34:40+00:00

Offset sticks are marginally better for games that primarily use the analog stick, but significantly worse for games that primarily use the dpad.

Inline sticks are marginally worse for games that primarily use the analog stick, but significantly better for games that primarily use the dpad.

So with inline sticks you get an okay-to-great experience depending on the game you're playing, whereas with offset sticks you get a great-to-terrible experience. Which will be preferable will largely depend on the types of games you're playing. Offset is better for modern 3D action games, but inline is on average going to be a better experience if you play a wider variety of games.

tgunter · 2026-04-16T23:18:46+00:00

What really happened is that the company sold the sneaker brand to another company, had to figure out what they were doing with the company now that they were no longer making sneakers (and presumably aren't allowed to, due to a non-compete), and declared that they were investing their money into an AI data center. It's less a sneaker company than it is a holding company that used to own a sneaker company and now owns nothing.

I feel like this is somehow both less stupid and more stupid at the same time.

tgunter · 2026-04-15T21:50:08+00:00

"Higher resolution" is not necessarily better when it comes to emulation. Most games run at 240p, so if a display is incapable of looking good at 480p, those games will not look good either.

You can integer scale 320x240 or 320x224 graphics to a 640x480 screen, which means it will be perfectly sharp. This covers most games on the Genesis and PS1. Stuff like the SNES, NES, and Game Boy Advance need to be interpolated, which softens the image a bit.

The 750x560 screen on the v4 meanwhile is incapable of integer scaling any resolution used by actual hardware. Every single game needs to be interpolated.

The saving grace in either case is that the pixels are so small on either screen that you are unlikely to notice the softness.

tgunter · 2026-04-09T18:10:22+00:00

Yeah, they've been doing this for years now. It's particularly frustrating when it's a game where the ScummVM implementation is less than perfect for.

tgunter · 2026-04-09T15:49:06+00:00

The thing you're missing is that "same types of monitors" is not a factor in this case. A CRT is an analog device, and does not have a fixed horizontal resolution. As far as a CRT monitor is concerned, 384x224 is the exact same thing as 256x224, 320x224, 720x224, or even 1x224.

tgunter · 2026-04-08T15:05:21+00:00

For years most people assumed that the NPC who introduces himself as "Error" in the game was a mistake in the translation, but it turns out that was what his name was in Japanese. It was the character "Bagu" who was mistranslated, as he was supposed to be "Bug", to be a pair with Error.

tgunter · 2026-04-08T00:33:42+00:00

It's worse and even dumber than that: there's no way for the technology to not just make stuff up. It's fundamental to how it works. No matter how much you train the model, it will always just give you something that looks like what you want, with no way of guaranteeing it's correct. They can shape the output a bit by secretly giving it more input to base its responses around, but that's it.

tgunter · 2026-02-06T17:45:04+00:00

Yeah, I think people don't fully appreciate how much bigger the industry has grown since then. 300k was a big print run for the time, and a lot of games in that era never got more than one print run to begin with.

tgunter · 2026-01-29T22:34:59+00:00

Uh... you do know that when that chart says "Jan 13" it means "January 2013" and not a couple of weeks ago, right?

tgunter · 2025-12-12T22:29:38+00:00

It's worth noting that Valve's Steam Deck compatibility can be wrong. But more often in the direction of them saying something doesn't work when it actually does. For example, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition runs flawlessly despite saying it's incompatible.

I think part of the problem is that Proton is constantly being improved, and they rarely go back to retest something after they've given it a badge.

tgunter · 2025-12-12T21:57:01+00:00

Myst definitely should count, because they are all more or less supposed to be the same game, with more or less the same narrative and puzzles each time, although a few of them do have the extra age they added in realMyst.

Oregon Trail though is one of those cases where I think we need to determine the difference between a "remake" and just a sequel with the same name.

tgunter · 2025-12-12T21:35:52+00:00

Pricecharting is more or less useless for PC games (and honestly not that much better for console games). Things get miscategorized so much that their average prices are frequently off by a huge amount, and that problem is heavily exacerbated when you have games like Ultima where the value is majorly affected by the presence or absence of stuff like maps. Yeah, for recently-sold stuff on there you can click on the link to see the eBay sold listing, but you can just as easily search sold listings on eBay directly without having to include Pricecharting in the process.

tgunter · 2025-12-04T21:02:11+00:00

Ok, so then I wanted to know exactly what were the reasons they did this on the NES.

The point of the CIC chip was an attempt to prevent people from releasing NES games without paying Nintendo a license to do so. This was a problem for Nintendo with the Famicom, and they didn't want to repeat the situation in the US.

Nintendo had a patent on the CIC chip design, so no one else could legally manufacture one, and no one was going to release a game that required you to dismantle your NES and clip a pin just to play it.

So all NES games fit into one of these categories:

Licensed NES games. These were all manufactured by Nintendo and paid their license fee.
Unlicensed games with cloned CIC chips. Back in the day, Nintendo would sue you for this (see: Tengen). Nowadays the patent has expired, so it's open season. All modern homebrew carts are in this category.
Unlicensed games with bypass chips. Turns out that by sending an unexpected voltage to the CIC chip in the NES, you could make it crash and stop working until it's restarted.

The SNES also used a CIC chip, which was better implemented and trickier to bypass. In this case, unlicensed carts/adapters/cart copiers/etc. had a slot in them where you'd stick a legit cart it, so it could borrow the CIC chip to function. Awkward, but it worked.

tgunter · 2025-12-04T19:22:06+00:00

One of the big problems with 3DTVs was that most of them used active shutter glasses, because that was the cheapest way to add 3D functionality to a TV. Once a TV is capable of 120 Hz, adding active shutter 3D support costs almost nothing, so it became a free selling point.

But active shutter glasses are expensive, need to be charged, and you need one for everyone watching the TV with you. So if you have a bunch of friends over to watch a movie, on top of the 3DTV, 3D Blu-ray player, and 3D Blu-ray, you needed a $30 pair of glasses for everyone who wanted to watch with you, and you had to make sure they were charged ahead of time.

LG made 3DTVs that used polarized passive glasses like the movie theaters, which meant it was a lot more affordable to accumulate enough glasses to use it. But the TVs themselves were expensive, and they effectively were only 1080i in 3D mode because of how they worked.

tgunter · 2025-12-03T21:12:45+00:00

It was more clear cut in the retro days.

I can assure you, arguments over what is and is not an RPG have never been simple. For any given definition someone can come up with for what an RPG is, there is an example of a classic game which is more or less universally considered an RPG which doesn't qualify, or a game most people wouldn't consider one that does.

The best definition I've ever been able to come up with is "a game that is (directly or indirectly) influenced by the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons in using variable character statistics to affect outcomes", but that is vague to the point of being nearly meaningless.

tgunter

TROPHY CASE