Presence

I was thinking of the Arcade America video today. I just wanted to say if you can get to Hell in Super Meat Boy, (ie, you beat the salt factory) you've definitely got enough skill potential to beat the whole normal mode game. Maybe even the game to total completion. Some of the "no death" achievements are beyond some people (including me), but I don't think any of the others are. I find the game's design is pretty brilliant in coaxing even an average gamer like me along. There's always some sense of progress, even if you play in 5 minute bursts. Always another bandage to grab, level you can A+, or a time you can better as you go for the speedrun achievements. Then you can go back to a harder level and your incremental gains in skill will really have a noticeable difference. There's also no shame or crime in using Jill or Ogmo, where applicable.

I think we're both wrong; the article I liked to points to another article talking about Quake 2, and says he 'was still' using the monitor while that video about Doom 3 was being made. Certainly the best CRTs still had superior characteristics compared to LCDs when Doom 3 was being made. The monitor's manual looks like it has a date of 97 on it, so that would lead me to believe that claims of him using it in 1995 were indeed false. In my defense, I don't think it's totally crazy to believe an article that has something as specific as a model number and a valid link to a specs page. Also that video was tagged by Happypuppy. Now there's some nostalgia.

Quake 3, not Quake. (that's where the picture was actually from) [citation needed]

The refresh flicker from CRT monitors is very different from what I'm seeing. Not to mention that kind of flicker is constant no matter what's being displayed. PS, if you're still using a crt screen, replace it; the drop in your power bill alone will pay for it after about 5 years. The only CRT in my house is the one built into my Vectrex, so that'll be the only place I'll see crt flicker again outside of Funspot. I've seen this effect on two lcd laptop screens. It shows up a lot in the Strife video, since there's a lot of cutaways to screens with 'pure white' backgrounds. One screen is on a medium quality Toshiba, the other is a Dell xps 15z I got refurbished for a song. I do not observe it on the LG television I use as a monitor on my main computer. The television and Dell are broadly similar in their specs with 60hz refreshes and 1080p resolutions. I'd guess it was something to do with the screen backlighting, except this effect doesn't take place when I just cut to a white screen during normal computer use. I know this kind of thing isn't even that interesting to most people, but I do like knowing why stuff happens, and I'm quite perplexed. Fun fact, Quake was designed on a truly giaganic 1080 resolotion CRT monitor.

It's very subtle, but I notice a pulsating flicker for about 2 seconds about 80% of the time when you cut to a mostly white screen. It's most noticeable when I'm watching one of your videos in the dark on my laptop; I can see the flicker on my keyboard. I noticed it on part 3 when you cut to the creative labs logo, and on most of the freemans mind episodes when the logo comes up. It's too subtle to hurt the video quality in any way, I'm just curious as to what causes it, be it a compression artifact or something else.

That "Third Base" line is kind of brilliant writing. It riffs off of some some fairly lame puns and makes a rather clever Abbot and Costello reference that you could easily miss if you weren't paying attention. One thing I don't get is why the end song is so awful. It's just a terribly distorted Star Spangled Banner. Say what you will about the other songs in the game, they are of vastly better musical quality than THAT.

Damn "Creative" Labs. You should talk about Aureal at some point. They were the last serious competitor Creative Labs had in the consumer sound card market, back when there was such a thing. They were actually starting to innovate and add cool new features that games were supporting. Then Creative Labs sued them, lost, but destroyed them with legal fees and then got to buy all their patents. Creative labs is the gaming industry's Monsanto. Now you've got me all cheesed off. I'm gonna play some Temple of Apshai.

I remember Ascendancy as having a wonderfully lush and crisp sound to its music tracks...each of which lasted about 40 seconds while you were on any given faction's description screen. The main gameplay track I recall was pretty bland spacey music. I've often wondered if there were any games with a similar sound that actually delivered throughout the entire game. Maybe I should try Tone Rebellion, it being by the same people.

I feel like the Doom engine has a map marking and or overlay feature, although it has been many years since I've played it. I might be imagining things. I know Diablo has an overlay-able minimap. This is definitely a game I'm interested in trying out. Very good episode, was worth the wait.

Just got Guacamelee Gold (steam version) to 100%.

Those were just some of the questions that got me to reading about it. You think you have free will when sleeping, or you think it's irrelevant you sometimes don't have free will and don't have control when you get it back?

Definitely don't believe in it. I'm a hard determinist. It wasn't pleasant becoming one. Atheism wasn't hard, but I struggled for years to find some excuse to believe in free will. It got to be kind of a painful joke. Philosophers who defended 'free will' used such watered down interpretations I wondered why they bothered. "You have free will! I mean, you feel free, and that's what free will is! Feeling a sense of agency!" Those types were annoying but at least they had some logical consistency. Some of the others were...just goddamn idiots. I think the spark that got me fully on the path came from the thought that there were definitely times when I didn't have free will, such as when I was asleep. Further, I clearly didn't have choice over when those periods of time ended. So I couldn't choose to choose. I'd think of other questions from time to time. I could imagine drinking myself into a stupor. In other words, choosing to give up choice. Where in the gradual process of going blotto does this magical ability vanish? I figure I either have free will or I do not, one can't 'kind of' have it. When in my childhood did it develop? Do some people die without ever getting it? Can brain damage be inflicted which removes it but doesn't noticeably affect someone? It can't arise from non-random forces, and it can't arise from random forces, so where might it come from? Free will, in any satisfying sense of the term, is just too magical an idea to defend. Free will in the watered down sense of the term isn't very much fun to talk about. Certainly it's less productive to discuss than, say, whether or not clam chowder should have tomato in it. (It should not.)

The utilitarian principle is stupid simple to remember and won't steer anyone wrong in real life situations. For reference, whatever causes the most happiness for the most people is good. Yes, you can talk about when the ends justify the means, the difficulty of predicting outcomes, and you can even get into thought experiments about organ harvesting and unpleasant sexual advances on the comatose. But outside of fantasy scenario land, in real life day to day stuff, utilitarianism is very easy and very reliable.

Ironically, in about 20 years it'll probably be feasible to blow up the video frames into images and run them through a stitching program of some kind and assemble a topographical image that way. Technically one could do it right now, but it'd require thousands of hours of labor; kind of cost prohibitive even if one hires someone from a poverty stricken nation.

I've personally seen a ps/2 device short motherboards. About six years ago I took a job as a low grade repair technician. One of our ps/2 keyboards burned out no less than two computers brought in for repair, and some systems wouldn't boot with that particular keyboard plugged in. This was all happening from cold boots too. Problem was, about 80% of computers worked fine with it, so it took a while to conclude that it was the keyboard that was responsible. I'm not an electrical engineer, so I can only guess that some motherboards had better diodes or something. Anyway, just buy a usb hub. Or usb addon card. Or get a keyboard+mouse combo that only uses 1 port for the transmitter. You want to talk about older hardware being better, try finding a good cheap capture card for atari 2600 footage. You'll start having lots of fun discovering that many capture cards have impossible to disable ultra low grade compression and don't mention this clearly in the specs.

Thank you very much for attempting a search, it was kind of you. Just to make you aware though, one of the links in that site was pretty sketchy. If you're using a windows pc, MBAM and TDSSkiller are both reputable programs I'd suggest just about anyone run once in a while. Stuff slips past us all. They're by no means perfect, but they're a good place to start and are decent enough malware scanners. Don't install the pro trial of MBAM though.

I'd love to get ahold of a copy of Compile's Blitz Runner. I don't know if it founded the idea of asynchronous racing, but it was definitely a very early example. Alas, it's hard to even Google the name and get useful results. The publisher has folded, blitz is the name of a language you can compile programs in, and most of the websites that even talk about it think it's named "Blitz Try" because the shareware's dos 8.3 filename was something like 'blitztry.rar'

Roberta Williams claimed it was because computers became cheap enough for riff-raff to buy. I'm paraphrasing a little. I think the real question should simply be what you want out of a game. If you want to click around pretty environments, there's still games being made. Anything by Amanita Design is usually good looking and sounding, if lacking in substance. There's others too, with more or less pixel hunting depending on the developer. If you want story but don't care about looks or gameplay, there's always IF games. The development cost on them is essentially zero, so you can find some fantastic writing and truly branching stories. Or so I hear. I keep meaning to play some, but all these Steam sales hinder me. Anyway, the interactive fiction community might not be hip with the young crowd, but it's definitely enjoying a vigorous retirement with lots of softball and daily walks. If you want a great looking linear story, that's a comic book. Or Homestuck. God I love Homestuck. If you want great writing, looks, AND great gameplay...that's not a point and click and rub soap on the doorknob game you're asking for.