As well as being able to 'rent' disk games, the Disk System could also connect to a couple of inputs on the system to play audio, which means the FDS versions of eg. Zelda and Castlevania have another track available for sound, so their tunes are particularly banging on this system.
In the west, those inputs were repurposed for the 10NES anti-piracy system, so we got worse music and a console that was less reliable, particularly with age. Yay.
Yeah. Being able to 'rent' games like this makes more sense if you live in a very compact house and having access to stuff that you don't need to store seems like a good deal. Having a higher population density such that each of these kiosks serves a larger number of customers makes them viable if the margins were quite thin in the first place.
Vim is my preferred 'IDE' for C++, Python, Bash, and general configuration file editing. It's got some big pluses:
its text editing is superb once you've mastered it, but that's a small part of its benefits when used as an IDE, and 'Vim mode' in other environments kind of undersells what else it can do
Vim has some great plugins for development. YouCompleteMe is awesome for predictive completion and showing docs, but NerdTree for file management and TagBar for showing structure are amazing as well. They're all very configurable and they get out of your way.
Vim lives in your terminal window, so you can do splits and tabs using whichever terminal you like. Kitty is very fast and configurable and keeps out your way. Being able to have multiple tabs of Vim open, a tab for compilation, a tab for debugging, a tab for version control, a tab for man pages, and being able to flip between them without taking your fingers off the keyboard makes for a very fast workflow
Vim makes it very easy to edit binary files and be precise about whitespace changes, so it's easy to make a minimal change for raising a PR.
If you assign a hotkey to run a macro in Vim, then that can be made very flexible - saving and formatting all open windows, then invoking CMake to do a build and CTest to run all your unit tests can be put on a function key if you like. Trying to tell Eclipse to "just run CMake to do the build" seems to be an exercise in frustration; so many IDEs are terrible at "just getting out of the way".
Work pays for an IntelliJ licence for using Java. Java is so unwieldy without a proper IDE that it's hard to code in it without it. I certainly don't love it, though, and they seem determined to make every new version worse with bizarre new features. Flexible minimalist editing with configurable plugins is all that you really need, and on that basis Geany looks pretty good - will give it a try.
Allows the very important 'overwrite files while they're open' functionality used during update. Write all the new files for a service then restart it. No need to reboot the whole machine for that.
Looking at you, Windows, and your bullshit scheduled reboots.
I had one of the Macintosh iBook G4s with the notoriously shitty graphics card soldering. Early days of lead-free soldering. Mine started to fail just outside of warranty. The 'fix' was to put a lot of pressure on the chip so that all the connections were held in place, but that was quite difficult to do while it was still a laptop.
Dismantled the damn thing, yeeted the plastic shell, and screwed the remains onto a sheet of plywood. Looked a lot like pizza-box PC in the corner there. Got another couple of years out of it. Made it a lot more convenient for watching videos, since you could just prop the whole thing against a wall or whatever. Couple of USB extension leads meant that you could still use a mouse and keyboard in comfort.
And having to buy shoes and trousers from specialists, and having your feet hang off the end of the bed in hotels, and wandering into spiderwebs that no-one else has disturbed yet, and not being able to adjust the shower high enough away from home. Gift that keeps on giving.
InXile did Wasteland 2/3 and Torment: Numenara. All fine RPGs.
Completely agree that the talent needs to go elsewhere - this deal is the death knell for creative works at EA. I'd be careful about what you promise on Kickstarter, though. Signing up to lots of stretch goals is likely to burden your game with lots of tickbox features that don't make any sense.
In fact, I'd say that Bloodstained (while generally excellent) would be improved by cropping out some stuff. The crafting, cooking and crop farming could just be chopped out whole, and put all the upgraded gear in the place where you find items. Would swap out some of the enemy and boss count for a bit more variety. And 'hard mode' could have done with some playtesting and a general rebalance, or just be renamed 'infrequent crazy difficulty spike' mode. But someone paid for those tickboxes and so we've got them.
Letting RPG designers run completely free from publishers can be a recipe for disaster, too. Pillars of Eternity? Excellent. PoE2? Unbelievably unfocussed and sprawling, disrespectful of your time, goes nowhere fast. Could possibly have made two games out of it if someone had told them to chop it in half and then polish the bits, but was a bit of a studio killer instead, could never sell enough to cover the costs.
Don't you mean a jift?
Also no way that they're going to build that thing for $200M. That won't even cover the first round of grifting before a spade hits the ground.
Can't help but laugh at all the steps in front of it too, when that fat fuck was complaining about the escalator at the UN being broken. How you going to get into that building, Taco? Someone have to carry you?
I didn't ask for this.
The original looks fine; it's gone from 'okay for 2000', through to 'dated' and back to 'retro charm' again. Plus you can turn up the resolution and fps to silly levels, which wasn't the originally intended effect but is pretty nice.
All early 3D games look so bad that the slight year-on-year improvements are nearly irrelevant now. A hideous AI texture 'upgrade' doesn't bring it to to modern standards, and distracts from the truly amazing game behind it all.
Yeah. I've got MangoHud throttling it down to 36 fps for that reason - if it tries to run 4K @ 144 fps then my graphics card sounds like a Spitfire getting ready for launch. It's not a game that needs twitch response for any reason, so it's not harmed by that.
It's an amazing game but the graphics are a small part of that, which makes the fact it runs inexplicably badly a bit of a mystery. Complicated lighting and long view distances in the underdark? No probs. Just a row of houses in act 3? Enjoy your stutters and framerate dips.
Mark Z. Danielewski for the win. House of Leaves is superb; 50 Year Sword is interesting, but doesn't quite scratch the itch. I see he's got something new out this year as well, will need to check it out.