MudMan

Hah. Shocked that you didn’t just take the easy way out and wrote “salt to taste”.

…

Please do not use recipes from AI summaries without clicking through to the correct amounts.

I mean, hell, I won’t use a recipe I find on a recipe site without cross-referencing at least a couple other recipes from other sites, because some of those are janky as hell. But the best-guess of a summarization LLM on what all those numbers and ratios are meant to be? Yeah, no. Not by itself at all, unless you’re just trying to jog your memory on something you already know and can recognize the correct values if you see them.

Eden/Azahar seem to be the current meta replacement for the newer Nintendo platforms. I wonder how much of that is a crowdfunded assessment of quality and how much is a result of modern emu communities being driven by preinstalled bundles in launchers, handhelds and install scripts (think ES-DE standards or Retrodeck/Emudeck defaults).

Either way, hey, they work fine, so… yay?

I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.

After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?

The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.

Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.

I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?

I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?

Well, yeah, but those principles don’t typically relate to videogame companies nor to purchase habits regarding 30 year old videogames.

Voting with your wallet is ultracapitalist, self-serving non-activism people deploy performatively to make themselves feel better about stuff they don’t care that much about, not “principles”. No offense.

“Principles”? Man, is that self-indulgent.

It’s been EA since a different millenium. I think it’s time to get over it.

FWIW, the remake itself was made by an external studio including members of the original team and they apparently collaborated closely with some sort of consulting group of modders and preservation-focused community people.

It’s pretty good. Comes with both C&C and Red Alert, plus a bunch of extras. Definitely worth it.

I mean, they published Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzera this year and their Star Wars games were more than decent (let’s hear it for the atrociously underrated X-Wing revival they made with Squadrons). They also published the C&C Remaster that same year, which I feel doesn’t get enough credit despite getting a lot of credit. Probably one of the best examples of one of those in recent memory.

Let’s not be disingenuous, none of that is their bread and butter, but it’s not like they were entirely dormant.

My Windows machines seem to be just fine with the couple of NFS shares I use for easier cross-platform mounting on boot. It comes at the cost of some security, though, so I use it to share unimportant stuff I want to mount very freely, like some media libraries. I use SMB for the rest.

I’m curious, what’s the issue with NFS on Windows for you?

Ah. That’s more of an accessibility issue than an advertising issue, then. I imagine even without ads a bunch of modern websites expecting higher resolutions and smaller scaling factors will look cramped.

I was not kidding before, if you have vision problems that don’t play well with desktop views, mobile versions of websites tend to be a LOT friendlier to large text sizes. Have you tried setting your browser to a vertical window and calling up the phone version? On Firefox at least you can set the resolution of the phone you’re emulating and zoom it all the way up. The setting is buried in the developer tools, but there are tons of tutorials out there (TLDR, press F12, look for the button that looks like a tablet/phone). I’ll try to add an image of what it looks like on my device for the site you shared.

What resolution are you browsing at? I have a hard time showing that ad at all in my setup, but I’m not even at 4K and I get a HUGE picture of the rocket in question and still see more text than you show in the screenshot. That’s what? 720p?

I man, don’t get me wrong, ads are annoying, there’s a reason why I have so many layers of blocking I couldn’t even shut them all off to test this, but you seem to be browsing at what I’d call… legacy resolutions. You’d almost be better off twisting that screen 90 degrees and asking for the mobile version. Or, you know, you could lower the UI scaling in your display settings.

I don’t have much to disagree with there, frankly. I mean, I like GoW 3 less than you do. I’d genuinely play the Ninja Theory DMC, if I’m honest, but at that point we’re splitting hairs.

To be clear, I don’t hate these games, I just don’t like them much and generally don’t play them on purpose. We’re coming at it from different angles but meeting pretty much halfway.

They definitely moved towards… I’m gonna say better references later in the franchise.

Still, there’s also a reason they moved to a whole different genre.

GoW’s core combat premise is that you have absurd range and can deal damage in a wide arc. It was REALLY hard to tighten that all the way via iteration while keeping the way the game plays.

GoW 3 was a huge step above its predecessors in setting up big standout setpieces, and it played… I’m gonna say “better”, but it was still limited by the core framework of the series so far, and my argument is that framework was fundamentally flawed.

I don’t particularly love the floaty, sloppy “just put some damage in this 180 degree arc” basis of the combat system much. I am also not at all on board with most of the early teenage edgelord narrative stuff in there. Maybe I was a bit too old by the time these came out.

The Harryhausen references are neat and some of the boss fights are cool set pieces that did set some of the groundwork for later AAA action games, but I would much rather spend time in the more expressive, free-flowing Devil May Cry side of things if I’m going for snappy, precise combat… or all the way into Musou slop, I suppose, although I’m not much into that, either.

Frankly, I don’t think any of the originals are particularly good, and I was done with the new one just before the first one was over. They aren’t terrible, but I’ve always found the praise and hype for the series entirely disproportionate to the content.

Yeah, I’m gonna say this person doesn’t hate to keep knocking on Veilguard, because that seems to be the one example they can bring up. I mean, there’s a cursory name check of Dawntrail, but otherwise… yeah, not sure what games this is talking about other than Dragon Age.

Clair Obscur didn’t do that. It went to absolute pains to not do that, in fact, to the point where I find the deceptive twist-building a bit over the top, in retrospect. I wouldn’t accuse the CDPR games of going that route. Baldur’s Gate does overexplain often, but in their defense the game has a million characters, plot points you go through out of order and a runtime in the hundreds of hours, so I wouldn’t change that.

What else is even doing this? I feel like we’re back in “AAA sucks” territory where AAA stands in for “this one game I didn’t like”. Writing in games runs the gamut. I would struggle to find a single defining thing to praise or criticise across the board.

I’m struggling with this question, because these days I almost do that backwards. I will get a game and ask “what’s the device I’d like to use for this”?

I mean, I’ve been playing a fair amount of Monster Train 2. I have no interest in sitting at a desk for that, or to put it up on a massive screen. Been playing a bunch of Tetris the Grand Master, which is not a great fit for a heavy handheld. Donkey Kong Bananza? Mostly TV, felt off on the handheld screen.

I think when you go back to emulation there’s a bunch of games that are deceptively better on the go. That was the Switch’s original party tirck, right? Hey, turns out Mario 64’s short star runs are a great fit for sitting on the toilet. Who knew? Random JRPG being played one-handed on a tiny Android device? Surprisingly decent.

But at this point software is just this weird blob, I just pick a controller/device combo that fits for each game.