I know it was all simple tricks and nonsense covering up a fairly generic dungeon crawler, and that most people preferred the direction the franchise went afterwards, but as a kid I fell in love with the original Shining in the Darkness. Those sprites were friggin’ HUGE!
Like I said. Perfect!
That one tends to prefer under the bed or behind the recliner, anywhere he can have something between him and the mean ol’ world, so seeing him relax in the sunbeam is nice.
Voyager has been working well for me.
Fair, and maybe I’m stepping in it a bit, but thought a post about a 4-switch Vader 2600 might attract a lively crowd.
I wouldn’t presume to have even 20% of the 2600 games that bring something different and good to the table, it’s just (to misquote Samuel Johnson), for so many of them the good parts are not different and the different parts are not good.
And again, that’s completely apart from a personal nostalgia (god knows I indulge in that) or to propose that they’re simply not fun in a binary sense. If I’m 12 and I get 2600 Venture I enjoy the hell out of it, but if I’m a middle aged man in 2024, at the bare minimum I’m going for this.
So, real talk? Most 2600 games are rough, and barring personal nostalgia, there’s little reason to play most of them in the age of emulation, especially arcade conversions, which sometimes nail the gameplay (but often don’t), and generally have to perform acts of violence on the visuals to make them work with the system and the business realities around their development (i.e. staffing, timeline, budget for ROM chips, etc.).
Some worthwhile ones that come to mind:
It’s not that so many more weren’t fun, or even still aren’t in isolation, but it’s like we’re all the rich fat kid from Pee-Wee’s big adventure and have access to every single game on every single system, at least up until the end of the 90s. There’s no reason to play the nice port of Berzerk that looks like it does, or play the flickery Pac-Man mess, or even (I’ll say it) fight with the groundbreaking but still primitive and abstracted gameplay of Adventure.
It’s like Mad Cow Disease, except most of the Christians around here have no brains.
THE STARS AT NIGHT!
Only degreed meteorologists are allowed to control the weather, Jimmy!
I’d kill for some fresh, virginal blood right about now.
ISWYDT. Congratulations to you for your dark cleverness, fellow leftist devil!
Unfortunately, it’s not much better here. The annoyingly heroic Governor Abbott has heroically deployed the heroic Texas Military Department and is disrupting our usual channels along the Rio Grande, both for commodity Catholics, and for nefarious agents to procure high-end evangelical targets in Sugar Land and Southlake. On the plus side, the lack of fresh victims is stressing our natural rivals the Chupacabras, so once we stuff the ballot box and then eliminate all those who stand in our way, Stanley in logistics says things will be back to normal fairly soon, as the extraction facilities in the Planned Parenthood clinics have not yet been seized. Remember to keep an eye out for the distribution points marked out with the “Y’all means All” Pride flags!
Oof. I checked mine three times this cycle to be sure. Never know when some awful mistake, like voting in a Democratic primary, will get your TX Voter info deleted.
You know, though, since we’re mostly left-leaning around these parts, just tell me the secret code and I’ll meet you at a basement in the People’s Republic of Austin and we’ll discuss getting three non-citizens to vote however you’d like, and then we can dine on the flesh of Christians to celebrate!
It’s okay guys. You can just call it a Tempest 2000 emulator. Don’t feel bad.
So, he modded a GBA either to accept control input from modded controllers, or he stuffed a SBC emulator with two USB-C ports into a GBA case.
Pretty cool, and a clever concept to work towards, but hardly revolutionary. I wouldn’t be “drooling” until it was past prototype stage and didn’t look like a it was stuck together with a piece of tape or that a single bump on the train would snap the ports right off those control pads.
He has a little German Shepherd in his DNA, so that’s where we think the tri-color/saddle came from but I absolutely see the beagle resemblance.
“If it works for the humans, it’ll work for me!”
I’m sure he would say think you by cheeping sweetly, then hissing like an asthmatic snake.
I should make him pay rent!
Yes, I work from home, but he’s been to workplaces before, and nothing so boring as a simple office. My wife got him as a chick in college, and he still needed a little bit of syringe feeding, so for a week or two she took him to the restaurant where she was a server and got her manager to put him in the business office away from any food prep areas. I’ve known him since he was around 5, and I’m not entirely sure whether my being able to get him to fly to me made her jealous or made her love me more. Maybe both. :-)
He’s finally, in the last year or so, visually showing his age just a bit, though he’s still got the energy to molt and grow new feathers, and he’s also still loud and an active climber, although he doesn’t like to come out of his cage anymore, even when the door is open. “Flying” is also more “falling with style” these days, but he gets quite the attitude when he needs help to get back to the cage. I feel pretty good that we’ve still got a year or more with him, though you never really know with birds. I’m just glad his vain little self has decided to grace us with his presence for so long.
The best moment in our current house was the day a local hawk caught sight/ear of him through the cracked-open window, then perched on that black fence you can just see in the background, and finally lazily swooped in for an easy meal, only to thump into the “force field” of glass. Hawky boi was fine after a few minutes resting back on the fence, but I wouldn’t have thought you could identify “WTF” as a bird emotion before that day. He’s returned once, though he didn’t try the swoop again.
I’m not much of a coder, but even if they’re doing something procedural, it can and should still have a blacklist.
It’s a little pricy, but we absolutely love this Cuisinart Air Fryer/Toaster Over thing for anything that was properly cooked elsewhere, though I’ve used it for halfway decent roasted potato wedges straight from the knife. Basket Air Fryers hold so little as to be more frustrating than anything, and stacking deep defeats the purpose half the time. I have no idea if the grill setting works well, though.
Bake setting, 325, 2-3 minutes is all you need for most pizza reheatings.