I was personally put off by the fact that the MegaDrive limitations actually negatively impact the gameplay, while there are little gains that I see in that "limited space fostering creativity" that you would expect from the pitch.
In particular, there are bullet visibility issues (see the Electric Underground's review [0] for a more detailed analysis) which I think show how the console limitations would need a much deeper mastery to properly support such modern game design thinking.
However, "a Mega Drive game!" is a great sales point to the majority of people invested in the nostalgia market, with only a surface-level interest of what these games are.
It's why it made it to the font page of hn, and not it's perfect 'traditional' sprite art, or its Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack.
I like shmups because they are pretty much "pure game design"; games are such a complete package of story, interactive experience, etc that it's hard to separate what comes from where. This is what makes design experimentation so interesting and rich.
I cannot comment because why this made it to the front page, but new releases are still common for retro consoles. In fact you’d be surprised just how many games are still released for the 8 and 16 bit era machines.
I don't know I liked how each video game console at the time had its own audio and graphical signature. We were a Sega house but we enjoyed swapping our console for a few months with the SNES or PC Engine of friends/cousins and I think they liked it too.
It might have more to do with the game studios ecosystem more than technicalities given some games were ported on all 3 consoles with only minor differencies though.
I would describe both the audio and graphical signature of the megadrive as "Metalic" (a bit amiga 500 like but with FM sounds instead of samples) while the SNES one was more childish/cartoony (same as subsequent consoles from the brand really) and the pc engine one had more flat[1] graphics but more saturated/rock'n'roll sound signature.
[1] probably because it was halfway inbetween the sega master system and megadrive/snes in term of gfx capabilities.
Are you judging by experiencing them on a CRT, or from modern displays? The range of colours was certainty broad enough, but I agree that the screenshots tend to look a bit bland. I wonder how much this came down to variance of the video signal at the analog stage. You had knobs for brightness, contrast, and saturation instead of the digital tweaking you have now. Perhaps it is that the color representation of live video has improved so that the knob level adjustment isn't needed anymore, but the output of the old consoles were tuned that level of adjustment people used to use to make the original video look nomal.
Specifically the SMD global palette had limitations around desaturated/pastel colours, with choice in saturated colours. And with no sprite blending, opportunities for subtle tones are further limited.
Exceptions mean few people manage to work well with the constraints of the system. This issue is not found on the SNES where a lot of games look nicer.
Just looking at the "analog desk" picture, it almost hurts to see the bad posture reading the book. Hunched forward, bent neck... Shouldn't you invest in a book stand, or something that would not cause such discomfort?
I was thinking about this recently in order to solve the problem of RPG fights. Deterministic combat is not super exciting, but dice throwing is even worse. What if instead you quickly printed a puzzle that you can do on a timer, and your score determines whether you miss or hit a critical.
Also instead of meta-progression through stats you have increased difficulties through the puzzles, but you improve your puzzle-solving skills.
Years of re-enactment combat got me thinking along the same lines.
The core of hand-to-hand combat is feinting - persuading you are going to hit your opponent in one place, so they move their defences to that place, and then hitting them in another place. That's a simple mechanic that could be translated easily into cards or any other bluffing format.
It gets more interesting with animals (who don't feint much) and large monsters (who don't need to feint because their attacks will overwhelm your defences), so dodging and armour come into it then.
But that brings up hit points, which are a ridiculous mechanic for modelling all of this. Stabbing someone in the arm or in the gut is completely different, it has very different effects, and should be modelled differently.
And this is where the rabbit-hole takes over and it gets too complicated ;)
> And this is where the rabbit-hole takes over and it gets too complicated ;)
What do you want from your experience?
I see a TTRPG as a story telling game and the fights have a probability of outcome. Most of the time, the fights in the story goes as you'd expect. Sometimes it doesn't. Kinda like life. And keeping it simple means you get on with your overall story telling.
But I would never stoop so low as to tell you how to enjoy your time. A different approach to fighting could be cool!
- Combat is a stupid thing to do or get involved in. The chance of getting permanently injured is really high. It would be good if our games reflected that. That fight with the kobold back at level 1 where it shoved a rusty dagger into your thigh and the priest only just saved your leg - it still hurts on cold days, and you still can't run properly. These are more interesting stories than "you take 3 points of damage". In my ideal system every point of damage is an actual injury, at a specific location on the body, and has effects. You cannot shoot a bow if you've just been stabbed in the arm. If you get shot in the leg with a goblin arrow then you're not going to run anywhere. Or do much except swear, scream, and try and deal with the dirty lump of wood sticking out of you. If you cut a giant rat in half with a longaxe then there's going to be blood and half-digested shit spread over the area and most of the player. Make combat more visceral, make the players more acutely aware of what they're actually doing and risking.
- It's not random. There's an element of luck involved, in that everything has to go the way you thought it would go, like most things. But you get the chance to react when things go wrong, too. If injuries have more consequences, then getting injured needs to be a multi-stage process. Like "the orc swings at your shoulder! You move your shield to block it! The orc twists their wrist and the cleaver is heading down towards your leg! You move your leg! Not quite fast enough! The cleaver hits your knee! Your knee explodes in pain and you see stars for a second but you manage to stay upright! The orc grins and growls but doesn't take advantage of your agony. You try to stab it in the neck with your sword! It reacts badly, tries to block with the cleaver, knocks the blade up and you slice most of its left ear off! Green orc-blood drips down its face. It howls and tries to use it's free hand to hold its face, obviously in a lot of pain. You do take advantage of its agony and stab it in the stomach. It doesn't react, too busy trying to keep its ear on. Your thrust goes deep into its stomach, perforating intestines and grating off its spine. The orc screams and drops its cleaver, clutching itself in agony as ruptured intestines spill from the open wound. The smell is unbelievable, you gag but hold your breakfast. It's clearly out of the fight. You turn to check on the rest of the group, but your knee is not working properly and something is definitely wrong with it."
- You're right, it's about stories and outcomes. But I think the mechanism should help tell the actual story rather than the story being subsumed by the mechanism. Getting players to roll to hit - what are they actually trying to do? How are you going to hit the orc? Where? What's the effect of that going to be if you roll well? How does the orc react to that? What's the effect of that reaction going to be? Rather than abstract "you roll a 14, which overcomes its AC of 10, and then you roll a 4 for damage, so it takes 4 points of damage. It rolls to hit you..." which doesn't really tell any story at all.
- There are/were systems (ICE comes to mind) that modelled this better, usually with endless tables of hit locations, but still it was all about the system not the story.
- I keep thinking of cards as a system. Players have cards, which represent moves or attacks, and they play a card as an attack. The DM plays a card for the monster. The cards interact and produce a result (or non-result). The cards play out a story like the one above. As the players get different weapons, they get different cards. As they go up levels and get better at combat, they get different cards. Just a very crude idea at the moment, but I keep thinking about it.
More than you meant, but I thought it was awesome.
I know some people who get squeamish about confrontation and so the detailed description you provided may put them off.
But they like a good comic book story where the hero and henchmen/villain tussle and the hero effects range from battered to outright death depending on risk and cleverness in approach.
As a player I enjoyed the use of descriptive elements to elaborate on the effect of a dice roll. I had a scifi character where it was a running gag to be gutshot, leading to cyberware etc.
I wouldn't have every nick and cut possibly develop into life threatening infection or complications; most RPGs are not based in an E.R...
And I'd probably skip the kobold knife attack lingering effects UNLESS that battle was a real highlight of the story at that time. Maybe make it more a mental thing than physiological.
To use D&D, the idea a level 20 fighter looks clean and shiny, almost fresh off the boat, is disappointing. My view is more "don't bet on the knight in shining armour. They haven't used it."
But it all depends on the setting and the level of woowoo magic/scifi-nanotech-forcefields and - most of all - the people you're playing with. Maybe the magic potion really DOES erase the bad wounds as though they never happened.
Your card based play is interesting. It represents - and forces - the choice in action. Captain America can punch or throw the shield again - but he doesn't "roll to attack... and do 4 damage".
I have concerns that the card based play would be hard to balance and would be huge if it has to contend with all the creatures and equipment variations. And then to make it not so huge you end up simplifying it. Unless the cognitive automation agents (they are not AI) can help you out here with descriptions, perhaps on the fly with a quick GM review-and-approve stamp.
Maybe you could card-enhance current playstyles.[snipped my rambling thoughts when...] ... a websearch has revealed such things as The GameMasters Apprentice. [0] What you describe however seems very much more combat focused.
I should playtest some of this and see if I can knock it into more of an actual shape.
Thanks for listening :)
Edit: no, I couldn't leave it there ;)
Kinda the point of the kobold thing is that it's those meaningless fights that weren't important or significant that can leave you with a permanent injury. Combat is dangerous!
Agree completely about the lvl 20 shiny. What was he doing to get all that xp? Because it wasn't combat for sure.
I think a possible side-effect of making combat more "real" is that players stop wanting to do it so much, because it's more risky. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
OK, I see your point about "incidental combat" not really being incidental.
And your point about violence being a first resort solution in many story telling RPGs hits home as feeling quintessentially true - although that does depend on the group. But anything to incentivise exploring violence free options is good!
If monetization is at odds with open-source, why wouldn't potential customers just wouldn't go to VueScan, as someone posted? I was recently looking at scanners, and saw some brands directly advertise Linux support through this... which means you now have to pay subscription each year to access the expensive hardware you bought.
Thankfully the Avision FB5100 states native Linux support (AFAIK, this is the only flatbed A3 scanner that does), so I'm certainly going to buy this one. I know implementing device support for companies that don't make any effort is hard and thankless, but then we need to divest/invest in the right companies and solutions.
My recent experience shows that eSCL is way behind in terms of functionality. If I want lossless scanning from by Brother scanner, I need the proprietary drivers.
Not sure about the use for it, is it supposed to be design or painting?
I've thought about making this for a long time to help me with painting, but in that case I think to be useful you need a bit more ways to see the data -- mostly, the thing that is the most important is value. So to get something useful out of it you need a distribution of the hues conditioned value.
And for design, the problem is a bit different. You may have a good looking palette, but 'inverting it' for dark mode is not trivial, and neither are gradients, getting intermediate colors, or getting a shifted hue.
It's called inspiration so it's fulfilling its promise, I'm just curious what are your thoughts on these since you obviously thought a lot about it.
I see these palettes shown everywhere and see no value in them whatsoever. As a designer or painter, one needs to develop their own palette for what they are trying to create. So what difference does it make what someone else used no matter how famous? I just don't get it.
Kind of a stupid comment tbh. Taste requires breadth of experience. "As a creative, one needs to develop their own <creative thing/technique> for what they are trying to create. So what is the value in looking at how other creative things were made?"
I don't think the question is stupid, because I kind of consider that to make use of a palette like this, you still need a lot of skills that if you do have, you can probably as easily do your own palette directly from a painting by yourself.
>As a creative, one needs to develop their own <creative thing/technique> for what they are trying to create. So what is the value in looking at how other creative things were made?
That's not the how of the process at all, that's the end result. The "how" for traditional art is completely different; it is taking pigments as a base rather than light, and the algebra of composition is not the same either.
The intention of this site is to showcase time tested palettes (with empirical evidence) of greatest visual artists instead of listing endless sea of neon bright color palettes we see everywhere in popular palette sites like coolors or colorhunt. Consider it using like a color grading tool for you art/design project similar to cinematographers who use contain color combinations to bring emotions, mood to the movie shots to tell the story in more visually captivating fashion.
I did wonder, reading such a comment, whether it would be a hyperbole, but not only is it documented, it is way worse than that. The free market is only ever enforced in the direction that suits the US, and the vassal states get screwed.
Yeah, the demo where they showed multiple videos being played in separate windows on an 80186 was _amazing_ --- I _really_ wish that using TRON-OS for desktop use on commodity hardware was well-documented --- in particular, it would be _awesome_ for an rPi.
> The free market is only ever enforced in the direction that suits the US
I mean, come on. If it was free in both directions, the US might lose sometimes!!
Sigh. It's so sad. Stuff like this is why free-marketeers (and in particular libertarians) earn my ire. There is not a single economy in the world that is an actually free market. Capital can move fairly freely and labor not at all.
Is that true? I think for it to he true we'd have to overly abstract the definition of technology to the point of uselessness.
You can draw images in the sand. Is a stick "technology"? What about using your finger?
Do we need paints? There are natural dyes. I don't mean in the sense of extracting things but some are as simple as "smash this berry". I believe the answer to this is rather critical since you specifically mention cave paintings. Many of those were done by hand, not by brush.
What about things like rock balancing? Sand sculptures? Singing/vocal instruments? Poetry (spoken, not written)? Story telling (ditto)? And so on
There is so much we consider art that can be done by any human with no tool use nor any external objects. I won't even mention how people call a sunset a work of art, and I do think we should avoid that as it has the same problem I bring up with defining technology. But I do not think most people would consider speech or vocal sounds technology, though certainly we would include things like writing.
It takes a considerable amount of development before you can make the distinction at all between separate concepts of art and technology. For a long time there wasn't a split because it was difficult to conceptualize how to split the two.
KDE's hard-switch to Wayland broke so many things in my workflows, from what used to be a perfect system.
For keyboard expansions espansso/ydotools crash bi-hourly and I couldn't pinpoint the source, clipboard sharing between applications doesn't work anymore, global shortcuts have been limited... The essence is the same, but it is so broken that it has a real productivity impact that will require a lot of effort to correct, and would depend on upstream fixes...
On that matter, wouldn't an AI flag for submissions help hn? I wouldn't flag a submission for LLM style as it is too harsh, but I don't want to read them -- if only because I don't like LLM prose.
There are so many submissions where most of the discussion is about whether the content has any human effort behind, or the LLM was just a purely assistive role like translating. It's really devaluing hn, IMO.
Not sure how much an AI flag would help, or introduce new issues, given how difficult the problem is, though.
>talkie is a 13-billion-parameter language model trained on pre-1931 text
>It can produce outputs that are inaccurate or offensive
>but moderation is [only] applied
I don't think you can get even a moderate version of a person's opinion from the 30's.
What even is the point of this? Open any book from the time and you will get far more "current day offensive" stuff.
Given how hard it is to believe that there was no temporal leaking, and how inaccurate the results are, what use is there to it?
Moderation also seems to silently hang up the chat.
However, "a Mega Drive game!" is a great sales point to the majority of people invested in the nostalgia market, with only a surface-level interest of what these games are. It's why it made it to the font page of hn, and not it's perfect 'traditional' sprite art, or its Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack.
I like shmups because they are pretty much "pure game design"; games are such a complete package of story, interactive experience, etc that it's hard to separate what comes from where. This is what makes design experimentation so interesting and rich.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELcS_IyXygs&t=2788s
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