Communick News

I recently started a game of Pirates! When I sat down to play today, the pirates were no longer the only ones spicing up their speech with arrs and ahoys. The nobles were doing it. The barmaids were doing it. Even the user interface was doing it.

I thought at first that it might have always been that way, and just escaped my notice, but that seemed unlikely. Next I thought I might have accidentally enabled a game option for it, but I didn't remember reconfiguring anything.

Then another possibility came to mind. It seemed like a long shot, but just in case, I looked up today's date. Sure enough, today is International Talk Like a Pirate day. This 20-year-old game apparently knows this, and switched every bit of its dialogue and writing into pirate speak to honour the occasion.

I love it.

While the much lower fuel cost has to be a bit of a shocker (we all know EVs are more efficient and cheaper to operate, but not 95% cheaper), the bigger surprise has to be how much more convenient the electric boat was in a certain key way. “We actually had range anxiety, but not for the Candela. The irony is that the photographer’s gasoline-powered chase boat had to refuel six times during the trip, while we only charged three times,” said Gustav Hasselskog.

The worst is when you wipe out in the barrel and you're trapped for several million years until erosion frees you.

https://explainxkcd.com/2987/

Send to me by someone i know. They are not really into photography but they know i am a bit. I have permission to post it. Made using iphone se

Welcome back to another update. Some short housekeeping notes: Last Week in Fediverse will now release every Wednesday. Furthermore, I’ve split all news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere into it’s own separate newsletter, Last Week in the ATmosphere. I originally wanted to keep them together, but the newsletters were simply getting too big, so it was time to split them. Lots of news this week with FediForum, a Fediverse Discovery Project, and mozilla.social shutting down, so lets dive in.

Eternal Darkness is a game for the GameCube and was the first Nintendo published game to receive a Mature rating by the ESRB. If you play the game today, I think most will agree that that rating was a bit too much. But the damage was already done, the game didn't sell enough copies and was a commercial failure. A decade later, two attempts by the game director to finance a successor via kickstarter failed, so it seems the game is as cursed as its protagonists.

But why do I recommend it here to you?

Because it has a great story and atmosphere (two big criteria for me in games) and it also has a fascinating (but sadly underused) magic system. The magic system is based on runes, which you can freely combine to try and cast a spell. You will also find translations of a rune and the recipes for spells, but in principle you could cast every spell if you have access to the runes and want to try things. The runes correspond to either a verb or a noun. If you combine Protect with Self, you will cast a shield on you. If you instead combine Protect with Area, you will place an enemy damaging area on the ground. Sadly they did not utilize this magic system to do many interesting things, as you can only combine one verb with one noun and that's it. You will find greater magic circles where you can put in more runes and in principle could cast more complex spells. But alas, they only allow you to put more Pargon runes, which just increase the power of the normal spell. Since every rune is voiced after you cast a spell, I think the last memory of my dying brain will be pargon, pargon, pargon...

The game is horror themed but doesn't include jump scares (with one exception), but instead tries to unnerve the player via sanity effects, as befits its name. Sanity is one of the resources next to health and mana and when it gets low, the chance increases that something will happen, maybe while changing the rooms you will enter an upside down room or your controls will be mirrored. They even included some meta fourth wall breaking stuff like decreasing sound. But nowadays those will not work on you any longer, as the interface looks different today. But still, the goal was to fuck with the players mind and that they achieved. You often question yourself while playing: is that real or not? Which is a masterfully done mechanic for a cosmic horror game.

And did I mention that they patented this and thereby hindered other developers from doing fun stuff like that? Maybe it was deserved karma that the game failed...

But now onto the story and atmosphere: in the game you don't fight against a cosmic horror, but instead three. They each keep one other in balance, so that no one can get the upper hand without being overpowered by the third one. But there are plans in motion to topple this delicate balance. And you are only able to interfere with these plans, because you are the pawn of anotger ancient one yourself. The binding element throughout the story is the Tome of Eternal Darkness, which binds the wearer to it in a nice little ritual with a floor of eternal damned souls and architecture made of bones, oh and did I mention the suspiciously agonized looking statues of the former hosts? Oh and did I mention that the book is bound in human leather and bones? Yeah, your patron isn't exactly nice either. Armed with this good book you fight and puzzle your way through different places around the world which you visit multiple times at different epochs from antiquity to our modern era.

This cosmic horror atmosphere of never really being totally in control is in my opinion wonderfully captured in this game. And due to time shenanigans, it is also made clear, that the power scale is so far outside of humans reach, that cosmic horror insanity is the only sane response.

The controls aren't exactly the strength of the game, but it is functional after getting used to them. If you want to play it nowadays, emulation is probably the easiest way to do that. I used that and was glad for the additional save states and higher resolution.

Fed up with school shooting threats in his community, Chitwood pledged to publicly identify students accused of making such threats.

Insta Death, a homebrew game originally released using the PlayStation 1's Net Yaroze development system, has been successfully ported to the NUON platform. This marks the first homebrew release on NUON in ten years. The original title was coded by Noel Rojas Oliveras and has now been adapted for the NUON console with the assistance of ScarPixel / DragonShadow Industries' Yaroze Wrapper tool.

Homebrew coder gwald has taken charge, fixing bugs while adding analogue control functionality, a high score feature, an attract mode, and even a button combo to exit the game. The final product can be downloaded for free from this link.

Do you own a NUON? Have you seen one? What's it like to use for gaming?

Clock Tower: Rewind - The Timeless Horror Returns

In a little over a month, fans of classic survival horror will be able to experience Clock Tower: Rewind, a remastered version of the game originally released in 1995. Set to launch on October 29th, 2024 for consoles and PC platforms such as Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows.

Key Features

• Updated Experience: This enhanced version retains the game's original charm while offering improved controls, additional features like motion comic cutscenes, and a new theme song by Mary McGlynn. The remaster aims to preserve the essence of survival horror in its atmospheric gameplay, yet offer a fresh experience for players.
• Gameplay Modes: Players can enjoy both Original Mode - adhering closely to the original gameplay mechanics on SNES - and Rewind Mode, which provides an updated version with faster healing times, extra items, better hiding spots, and dynamic enemy behavior.

What aspects of Clock Tower do you believe have influenced or are similar to modern survival horror games?

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17621283

According to The Numbers, The Crow debuted in 2,752 North American venues on August 23 and ended its theatrical run on September 12 with a gross of $9,528 from 297 locations. During its domestic run, The Crow grossed nearly $9.3 million domestically and $6.2 million internationally for a worldwide tally of $15.5 million.

According to Variety, The Crow had a $50 million production budget before prints and advertising.

The Crow made its digital streaming debut via premium video on demand on September 13, a day after the film ended its theatrical run.

The old "leather" was falling of my polaroid sx-70 camera. So I printed some new skins.

I'm not sure about the colour yet. Thinking more about some kind of red or turquoise. But the test worked.

National Geographic-style macro photograph of a tiny bipedal crocodile t-rex bug insect alligator raptor with many rows of razor sharp teeth jumping out a black nike air max sneaker, insect dinosaur bug, funny

Steps: 20, Sampler: Euler, Schedule type: Simple, CFG scale: 1, Distilled CFG Scale: 3.5, Seed: 109768246, Size: 896x1152, Model hash: f8cb79dd8f, Model: fluxunchainedArtfulNSFW_fuT516xfp8E4m3fnV11, Hashes: {"model": "f8cb79dd8f"}, Version: f2.0.1v1.10.1-previous-534-g93bcfd30

So this week is the European Mobolity Week. This year the topic is sharing of public space, but in this community it's all about bike commuting!

How is your commute?

Mine is pure urban area (Milan, Italy), 12 km, some 50% on cycle lanes/path, the rest in the traffic.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/42676060