JDPoZ

In the long run Metal Gear certainly outshined them, but I think the Syphon Filter games were ultimately very different and so it wasn’t like one was just a better execution and you had to ignore the other.

One of my favorite little bits of goofy trivia between both series though was the joke in the dialog of MGS 3 : Subsistence where Snake asks the Colonel why “Sam” (presumably Sam Fisher of the Splinter Cell series) or “Gabe” (presumably Syphon Filter’s protagonist) couldn’t do the Ape Escape side mission instead since Snake said it wasn’t really his “thing.”

GameCube³

Is this the non-American cover? As an old Yankee, I may be forgetting a few things, but I remember the corner art (specifically the “only for” bit) looking different.

Edit: yep this is the one I remember :

https://images.nintendolife.com/b056f83e2b311/us.900x.jpg

Touch some grass, please.

I would suggest the same to you, but you’re a libertarian, so that means you probably like to only play on fields that are too young to have yet to grow any grass. 🤣

Heheh “statism” - this guy is spitting takes so brain dead that it’s almost entertaining to read.

I thought the alt-right tech bro libertarians all were back on Daddy Musk’s platform - paying their lord his $8 per month to ride his 🍆 and for a ✅.

Wtf are they doing here on the fediverse - a platform that was designed to usurp any private industry’s hold on social media?

Isn’t that a little too anti-business for their tastes?

Or is there some sort of “freedom to have child brides” community here they holed up into that the instance runners have not caught wind of yet and shut down?

Leisure suit Larry is not really a parody like Conker was though, was it? I thought it was just a point and click adventure game with dirty jokes.

Forgive me, if I’m wrong on that. I actually have not really played the leisure suit Larry games. 

I think, Conker not only makes fun of platformer games and game mechanics in general, but directly references movies like Saving Private Ryan, the Alien franchise, and the Matrix. 

I guess it should have qualified it as a “major console release.”

A lot of early 3D console games - whether platformers or FPS games, have aged pretty poorly. Go try to play GoldenEye again and see how it feels compared to modern shooters. Really Super Mario 64 is kind of the outlier.

Conker and Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 are all cut from the same cloth at mid-90s Rare. The Xbox release version fixed a few things with Conker but broke others. Honestly Conker was one of the first “parody” type games (at least as major console releases went anyway) and it only works well if you have the nostalgia goggles to appreciate it as it existed in an era where if you wanted to play 3D platformers, you were mostly limited to baby games like Croc, Spyro, or the other Rare platformers.

Heh, sorry. Fixed. Was kind of just seeing red and naming all the places that came to mind with robust public transit.

Corporate media sanitizes raw information for the masses to redirect the public’s collective anger and diffuse the otherwise clear responsibility that is nearly always a direct result of the oligarchs’ own actions driven purely by abject unchecked greed.

Individual journalists (who usually don’t get paid millions like the pundits who help “manufacture consent” from the public) usually barely can make ends meet are the ones who do the incredibly hard, thankless, and sometimes even dangerous job of actually attempting to inform the public through an unfiltered lens are few and far between.

In fact, even a large number of the supposed “independent” ones are astroturfed and just pretending to be genuine… but are in fact financed by dark money from groups propped up by billionaire libertarian shitheads like the Kochs in an attempt to muddy the waters and further disingenuously reframe issues by scapegoating minorities and the marginalized for problems - again - caused almost exclusively by the absurdly rich.

Yeah the “over-consumption” bit rubs me a bit wrong as it generally provides “neutral framing” for an otherwise EXCLUSIVELY greedy massive capitalist-driven issue. Families aren’t “overconsuming” drinking water or taking too long a shower, nor are our toilets not being a low-volume flushing devices the primary cause of our issues.

Instead things like like Nestle claiming aquifers for themselves, companies fracking using all available ground water in their proprietary chemical mixes and then dumping the waste water into surface pools that not only are deadly, flammable, and completely impossible to separate from water except via high-energy-cost processes like distillation… but that also slowly seep down into the ground water for places that then become permanent wastelands where clean water is no longer available in the ground.

The framing here is always like the fucking paper straws :

• “Littering is something we all have to combat” attempts to distract from the fact that the overwhelming majority of pollution comes from a handful of multi-billion dollar companies who dump garbage everywhere with little to no consequences.
• “Americans drive big cars too much.” Mother-fucker, we don’t have bullet trains or even safe bridges in this country. The problem is that our government is bought and paid for by private industries that basically write the legislation that controls how public transit never becomes viable. Me driving a 2005 vehicle that happens to the be the old SUV I could afford from a friend doesn’t make me someone anyone should spend any energy blaming. The fact that I can’t afford a new car while countries like Norway pass massive subsidies for buying a new electric car isn’t even the thing people should be angry about. It’s that countries like Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Japan, and China all have massive multi-billion-dollar high-speed trains operated by well-paid, well-trained, adequately staffed teams of subsidized workers who make cars seem stupid by comparison.

How about you stop saying “overconsumption” and instead tell the truth and say "a handful of massive multi-conglomerate companies are completely decimating all clean drinking water sources and their CEOs should be put in prison, have their personal and companies’ assets liquidated and re-declared public goods.”

I remember being angry at people saying it was “too on the nose.”

Alright buddy. I get it. My last response sounded patronizing. We can stop pretending to “bless your heart” each other now. I sincerely apologize.

Glad to finally have an actual discussion again online! :)

I do actually want to know though - do you really think the iPhone has had that much innovation over the past decade?

Also, on the subject of tech, I fucking hate that Facebook of all companies got a foothold on VR on the consumer-facing side.

Yes, they injected fuck ton of cash to make it more viable main stream VR headset product, but they also fucking stuck their Facebook tendrils and every part of it and ruined what might’ve otherwise been a really exciting new space that now feels stagnant and stalling and artificial and shitty.

Edit 2 :

Hey - sorry to stalk, but you seem to have a knack for writing smut! My S.O. likes doing the same. I will say she doesn’t tend to work using historical figures as her characters - but hey maybe in the future she could try!

Calm down. No one is shifting goalposts. You’re the one who brought up the ridiculous idea of making a comparison between pictures of different types of swords.

My original “implied point” was that there is not the same level of innovation that occurred 20 years ago when we shifted from things like Nokias with tiny screens and not enough space to even hold a midi file to BlackBerry and then iPhone.

The entire tech industry has consolidated over the last couple of decades to the point that every major startup these days ends up being a grift, or quickly gobbled up by one of the FAANG type companies and enshittified to avoid competition and market share erosion.

I didn’t say a handful of rich people did anything. I actually believe the opposite.

Passion drives innovation… not money. Money helps pay passionate people to innovate, but it also sometimes will stifle innovation when seeking profit first.

I was saying with my shitpost pic showing the visual similarity between all the different models of iPhone from the last decade that - at least from a base standpoint, Apple is not really innovating much anymore. No different shapes, bezels, no thickness increases for better battery life… Hell the fucking LIGHTNING port is ancient now and only still there so Apple can keep getting their bridge troll toll for people making iPhone accessories.

For the last 10 iPhone iterations the major features we can easily see are slightly bigger brighter screens, more lenses (and consequently better pictures) and trading fingerprint recognition for facial recognition.

As far as points though, please - by all means, make a better point for me.

Yeah photos don’t encompass the entirety of evolving technology… but come on… it’s not like Apple has put the iPhone through a literal evolution of metallurgy or material science like the hundreds of years time difference from going between the bronze to steel age.

• before the display - “until you can figure out how to make a faster printer, there’s only so much you can do to get your calculation results from the ENIAC system.”

• before the keyboard - “until you figure out a way to create punch-cards faster, there’s only so much you can do to enter data into a computer.”

• before the mouse - “until you figure out a way to make people tap the arrow keys faster, there’s only so much you can do to navigate a screen array of interactive elements.”

• before GUI operating systems - “until people get faster at typing in “DIR /P” on their keyboards and read the list of possible applications quicker than other folks, there’s only so much you can do to navigate and access a computer’s installed software.”

• before the iPhone - “Until you figure out a way to make a better keyboard there’s only so much you can do with these Blackberry devices where half of the device is a screen and the other half is a full-size QWERTY keyboard.”

There is room for innovation.

Just because you cannot imagine it, does not mean we have reached some sort of “pinnacle” of design for these stupid little glass screens.

Apple has not innovated since Jobs died. Not because Jobs was some sort of genius engineer or even a great innovator, but because as Apple’s head, Jobs was an asshole tyrant that terrified those below him into doing crazy things he suggested on a whim… and sometimes that meant they came up with dumb shit like the 20th Anniversary Mac and the Newton… and other times it meant they came up with a couple of new good ideas like the iPod, and the iPhone.

Yeah dude, just look at all the innovations Apple has made to their phones for like the last 10 years…

They got bigger… and the screens are brighter… and there are like 4 more cameras.

So much innovation. :|

My man. Now THIS person knows about CRT gaming. I’m merely an old man with limited time to research all this. Anyone talking about phosphor strips and halation and magnetic interference /gaussing probably knows their 💩.

I just know I like wearing the nostalgia goggles that add those artifacts my old eyes still hazily remember and weirdly prefer.

Man I’m such an old fart I prefer my emulated games appear using different era CRT shaders to accurately reflect the sort of TV connection I had access to when playing. Like emulating shittier RF for older NES games, S-Video for SNES - N64, and then component for PS1 - PS2 era.

Like… I enjoy playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out using a shader that makes it look like a shitty RF connection with inaccurate desaturated colors bleeding, interlace jitter, etc. I’m actually kinda wistful when I can’t see the preview channel 3 TV guide blending through the crappy connection. I almost want to see if someone has made a shader that could render in a YouTube stream of retro late 80s to early 90s TV at like 5% opacity to get the same effect I saw as a kid sitting 2 ft away from my old 16” Magnavox.

To be fair, that probably is a REALLY nice broadcast-grade CRT like a SONY BVM-20F1U or something… which most people did NOT have access to back in the day.

Hell, my wealthy buddy’s family had a “flat screen” (meaning the CRT didn’t have a curved face) SONY WEGA CRT in the mid-90s and I know it had S-Video, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t even have a component connection, let alone the quality aperture grille/shadow masking, or the contrast ratio that the BVMs did (because those things were at local TV news stations running 24/7).

In reality, there’s a bunch of differences with connection types providing various levels of quality and CRT display technology , but the accessibility that new TVs give us all to astoundingly good picture quality at a pretty reasonable price means we are living in a golden era for retro gaming if you know what you’re doing.

I’ll take my gigantic 4K OLED hooked up to a MiSTer with some great shaders rendering the sub-pixel effects a real CRT has to emulate this visual effect with run-ahead to minimize the latency + input lag over anything except a BVM-20F1U in near mint condition almost any other day of the week.

TL;DR - you can emulate those sub-pixel CRT era display technology display artifacts with a decent shader on a good 4K OLED, and probably spend less than you’d need to get almost the exact same visual effect with pretty much none of the pitfalls you get with old CRTs like massive electricity use, having to carry a 150-250lb CRT, hope it has no burn-in, decent remaining bulb life, etc.