lazygecko.bsky.social
142 posts
233 followers
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If I had to start over I would probably just pick Ko-Fi instead. To my knowledge they haven't gotten themselves mired in venture capital like Patreon did.
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Not my favorite movie by a long shot but my favorite moment is probably the intro to Jason Goes To Hell where the feds ambush him and they're doing all this dramatic ziplining and tacticool combat rolls while he's just standing there helplessly getting sprayed with bullets.
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I'm no programmer but from what I've heard (mainly from RTS devs) having multiple overlapping planes of traversal like this in a 2D isometric engine is pretty tricky, hence why you rarely ever saw it. It didn't even occur to me that Solstice featured this until I saw this video.
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I find the overall character designs in X to be kinda unappealingly garish. I guess it was just part of Inafune trying to channel some sort of 70s childhood influence in the art direction?
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The freakin doves at the end. Of course it's John Woo
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Feels like most long running studios catapulted into mainstream success at some point have to learn the hard way that you can't simply go on working the same way you did in the old scrappy days once you're at blockbuster levels of scope spanning many years of development.
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He also went on a long rant against common industry practices with textures in that era commenting on that oily/plastic look from badly handled normals especially on stuff like grass. Struck me as being very self aware over the tackiness of certain technical novelties from that period.
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Remember reading an interview with the texture artist for this game. They managed to achieve unusually high fidelity textures for that era of consoles with the art direction putting much less focus on diffuse texture detail and instead budgeted way detail and resolution to the normal textures.
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This movie was a huge flop but became popular in Japan. I guess they're just really into that heightened Americana vibe in general.
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I think it's one of the few ways left with which people can exercise some agency when corporations seem set on obfuscating hard sales data from the public. Weaponizing kinda goes both ways when corpos love these black boxes letting them spin whatever metric that looks better to their shareholders.
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I'm wondering if we're seeing an early sign of this with Doom TDA as the numbers suggest it is significantly underperforming. I suspect we'll see a heavy stratification on what people are willing to spend money on in that price range as they're getting increasingly squeezed on every other front.
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Hardware accelerated audio had some potential when EAX was getting standardized but IIRC Microsoft basically killed that whole market overnight because they decided the way sound cards interfaced with DirectX or Windows was a security risk.
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It's also the first ever game (AFAIK) with normal mapping. Before there even was GPU support for it! I saw a video marveling over how the entire underside of an office chair was fully textured with normals. You must have really liked seeing the normals interact with objects from different angles.
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If I had nothing better to do I'd love to put together crusty mockup screens of Amiga ports of various games looking like they were made by lone British bedroom coders in the 80s. Complete with transcribed tracker music that gets the syncopations wrong. It's an underappreciated lost art form.
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Then you have the third game which is an ultra-widescreen brawler with an extreme amount of branching paths (and a curious mix of English and German voice lines)
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Accidental synergy that this was published on the same day as the anniversary of the US premiere for Conan the Barbarian?
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It's not just about using colder tones for all shadows of course. More about nuances in how everything is colored, both in terms of naturalism and stylized choices to make things pop better.
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Daz3D owns Bryce and still sells version 7 on their website. It's from 2011 but is still pretty much the same as it's been since the 90s. Renders have the authentic old school look, and it still takes forever to render with the antiquated code.
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It better have the uncensored Japanese version showing the winning team beating the shit out of the losing team
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Like, even the video titles themselves are very overtly SEO tailored around this kind of stuff rather than simply listing the artist and track title.
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I just think the music in a vacuum is really cool (and an obvious source of inspiration for a lot of JRPG composers), but it's really hard to separate from the exploitative intersection with wellness culture which has morphed into a particularly malicious kind of grifting nowadays.
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As you can see, when the filtering is enabled the sprites are much more stable. At least filtering alongside 480p rendering doesn't look quite as egregious.
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It might not happen as much in higher resolutions. Haven't checked. But I also refuse to play this game with razor sharp HD geometry against the lower res sprites. The default 480p is as low as the ported engine allows and the DX config allows for integer scaling, so that's what I went with.
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Not sure there's any game quite as visually marred by emulation and upscaling as BoF4. You really have to dig to find media of how it was supposed to look. On a real PS1 it is jaw-droppingly gorgeous and the artistic blend between sprites and polygons is virtually seamless.
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The "town square" analogy for Twitter was apt as a centralized gathering to enact social change, because this is how modern authoritarians have figured out how to mitigate popular uprisings by getting rid of actual town squares and systematically keeping the population dispersed.
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Also add dialogue where they get mad and call you bad if you ask them to not stand in the fire
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I remember reading an interview with him in the early 2000s when he was at the height of his film career and he was talking about the kind of off-kilter game ideas he had that were far removed from the kind of "cinematic" games others were desperately striving for.
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There's like layers of irony to this since Josef Fares started out as an acclaimed film director, and I think he's fascinating in that he got into games seeing it for the unique medium that it is without carrying the inferiority complex baggage so he could do stuff you couldn't do in the film medium
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Some parts of the internet should really just be considered a utility.
It used to be in the 20th century that society accepted the nature of certain services being unprofitable since it was still a net benefit to society, like air travel. Theyve since made damn sure to stamp that entire mindset out.
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It was really sobering that one time I saw a complaint about the strange graphics of Mega Man 8 because they were looking at really badly configured emulation with no frame of reference for what the game was actually supposed to look like.
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The sharp edges of otherwise blurry low res billboard sprites in 3D environments has always aggravated my aesthetic senses ever since the proliferation of higher res emulation buried the internet with misleading screenshots and footage to the point where it got completely normalized.
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There's also the over the top remake by Jerry LoFaro used for the DVD cover of The Official Keith Emerson Tribute Concert
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Kinda miss that style of skeumorphic interfaces in RPGs.
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I actually refunded Avowed after finding out you could only play as a human with a fungal infection (which I found mildly triggering TBH). Went in mostly blind and assumed there'd be more fantastical races to choose given the blue fella in the preview footage and having played PoE before.