Midlife Time Crisis

[alfred]

Arcade pcb collecting and learning small repairs. Which leads to opening an arcade? Although I wonder what the market will look like in 15 years.

I wish I could find that edit of that Kelly/Onion comic of the guy showing off his DVD shelf

[km]

@OneSecondBefore

obsessing over a perfect MiSTer setup

This one is a good choice, just make sure you don’t actually play a game by accident

[thecatamites]

trying to play my cards right so that when it hits i just spend the next 30 years getting obsessively into Go By Train

[Tulpa]

I played through Descent and its sequel 5 or 10 years ago, when I was trying out streaming. the game’s aren’t impossible but they are extremely unfair! There’s bullshit hitscan enemies hiding around every corner in later levels and you basically have to know where they are and destroy them before they can take aim at you or else you’ll die within seconds.

Patrick O’Brian’s books are truly delightful. The Dan Brown of naval adventure books is C.S. Forester (creator of Horatio Hornblower) not Patrick O’Brian

[muaad]

every time I open a retro game under dosbox, I will search how to rebuild the highest performance retro pc for running windows ME.

happens every month.

[rasterradio]

- YouTube

[parker]

I feel like reading the master and commander novels now

[Mothra]

Boy you ain’t kiddin’:

Class 1 (Vulcan) Driller

These lil’ bastards genuinely break the game.

Thankfully it doesn’t look like there’s any other hitscan enemies (in D1 at least). Also wouldn’t mind if there was a way to effectively dodge homing missiles beyond going through tunnels. A little boost you could use to dip to the side would be fun.

The Dan Brown of naval adventure books is C.S. Forester (creator of Horatio Hornblower) not Patrick O’Brian

[muaad]

another Midlife Time Crisis which happen a lot: I like to invite friend to play co-op games offline and very hype before play it. But we always feel not in mood after half an hour or an hour mostly.

And 30-60 days, we will repeat it.

[Brooks]

i started the first one recently, it is fun!
caveat: i am british

[Rudie]

Getting cancer and writing a top 100 seems like enough. Now if I can get the motivation to capture 200 hours of footage so I can release a video version of the top 100.

[tt_zop]

lumping hacky ole dan brown in with actual good writer patrick o’brian has got my feathers ruffled a bit, i’ll admit

anyways since i hit 40 i’ve gone down the fpga rabbit hole, funneling money into mister and mister accessories in an attempt to capture that 90s misspent youth. sometimes it works! no regrets (on the mister front at least)

i get more of a thrill out of playing Neo Geo and Sega CD on a CRT than just about anything in gaming rn, feels like i’m one of the rich kids. or have divorced parents

[Mothra]

Descent update: I have abandoned this fucking game after reaching a level that was, to Tulpa’s prophecy, truly nothing but giant rooms where homing-missiles were launched at you from all angles, and any exposure to the outside world resulted in four hitscan enemies instantly killing you. I played that level for about 30 minutes, creeping around corners to snipe away enemies, before realizing that this is absolutely not what makes Descent fun and I will not sanction this buffoonery further.

I feel good about it! Maybe I stopped playing the game as a kid because it genuinely stops being fun at this point! Closure!

I’ve now jumped to Descent II, which I’m so far enjoying greatly. It’s very fun to blowing the fuck through these levels, being as aggressive as possible. The improvements to the bombs, the shield transfer, and the afterburners are going a long way. Plus, Guide Bot!

[Mothra]

Inspired by the recent Bomberman thread, I’ve decided to revisit and finally get closure on the Nintendo 64 trio Bomberman 64, Bomberman Hero, and Bomberman 64: The Second Attack.

I’d played these when I was a teen and never got close to beating any of them, but I remember liking them a lot. Why didn’t I ever finish them?

Well, having just beaten Bomberman 64, I can say that this is due to the fact that a whole bunch of levels keep going and going, stringing together 7 or 8 sections and becoming a massive pain in the balls as you wander about, bombing everything and everyone, trying to parse what is interactable and what isn’t. Lot of stretching of the taffy. Hudson Soft is not particularly good at level design, turns out.

I ended up starting to use save states due to the fairly punishing 3-lives-then-game-over setup they have, where you end up doing and re-doing long-ass sequences over and over where taking a single hit kills you, or having the camera shift around drops you off a ledge, losing all of your upgrades. It gets real old real quick.

That said, there’s fun to be had. The music rips, the graphics are super charming, and I really really liked the moveset you have - you can pick up and toss bombs, you can kick em and clink bombs off each other like it’s bocce ball, and you can pump em up to make little platforms. I think if the sequels can improve on the level design, this thing can really start coming together.

Another highlight were the boss fights, all of which I really had a ball with. You’re either facing another Bomberman in 1v1 multiplayer-style combat, kicking bombs and tossing them back and forth, or you’re doing big crazy set pieces with giant sea monsters or mechs or crystal spiders. This to me is the meat of the game.

I’m a bit taken aback by the design of the bad guys, who, like Max from the later GBC games, is this series of sentai-looking edgelord O.C.s that share no design philosophy with Bomberman himself. An example is Sirius, who like transforms into a plane likeeeeee Jetstorm from Beast Machines or something.

I honestly overall loved this guy because he’s a huge asshole and Bomberman takes the Mario approach of never saying a goddamned thing one way or the other. It makes this shit incredibly funny to me:

So, I enjoyed playing B64 but it definitely has too much tedious wandering to be all that great. I definitely understand why I never made it through as a kid. Looking forward to Hero next, chances seem decent the layouts will improve.

[Mothra]

I have now played through one full world of Bomberman Hero and it absoooooolutely sucks the dick off a dog, just completely braindead, feels bad to play, and looks even blurrier and shittier than your average N64 title, which is saying something. Levels are these strange flat sandboxes you wander about, blowing up mostly stationary enemies, often with very little sound. The music is good, but this makes it all the more noticeable when a level will simply not have a soundtrack.

I suspect maybe the idea with this game was to make something very young kids could get through, since B64 had its share of convoluted solutions. It often feels like it’s trying to do Mario 64, but the most it can imagine you doing is shooting things with bombs like a shmup.

What happened to the idea from B64 of using all your abilities to solve puzzles?

Here’s what it looks like:

Looking into it the development:

Bomberman Hero was originally planned as an entry in the Bonk/PC Kid series known as Ultra Genjin, before being cancelled and repurposed as a Bomberman game.

I’m genuinely very surprised to find this was made by Hudson Soft. I would not consider them great game developers but B64 felt a lot better than this.

Now, did I get closure? It didn’t feel familiar to me at all, playing it, so I think maybe the only Bomberman N64 game I played back then was the original B64. My video store must not have actually had this one. Glad to have tried it and flushed the lingering doubt from my mind that this was something great I’d missed.

[meauxdal]

@Mothra

blurrier and shittier than your average N64 title

usually means VI scaling, I’ll have to investigate this one!

some N64 games used internal scaling. something like:
draw to arbitrary size framebuffer →
VI (Video Interface) scales frame to 320x237 (given NTSC progressive) →
interpolate horizontal to 640 →
pad 3 lines to 240 (“240p”)

given the non-integer scale and small canvas, most games that used this internal VI upscaling look like hot dogshit. notable examples: mrc multi-racing championship, body harvest, donald duck goin quackers. some games also downscaled (like i said, arbitrary size framebuffer). goldeneye’s menu looks extra crispy because it is actually a bigger image being downsampled to ~240p