21–30 of 47 posts
> Tape backups are still a thing in some places, but they are generally considered a relic of the past. Well that's utter BS. Tape is still a dominant backup form, particularly for archival purposes. The market is big and still growing year on year. You can't get the same data density and portability out of any other form of backup, and it is a format still under heavy development and refreshes, with LTO-9 due out th…
> Tape backups are still a thing in some places, but they are generally considered a relic of the past. Well that's utter BS. Tape is still a dominant backup form, particularly for archival purposes. The market is big and still growing year on year. You can't get the same data density and portability out of any other form of backup, and it is a format still under heavy development and refreshes, with LTO-9 due out th…
I know for one company in the pharma industry we looked at optical storage and for some uses it was fine, but for the long-term archival aspect in your store and 99.999999% forget about storage backups/archives it just didn't tick enough box's due to being unproven and when you get down to use X and if it fails you can say you did all the right things and if you use something that technically may be better and it fails, your head and massive fines and fallout can ensure much more easily. So tape for many been one of those - it works, why change.
> Tape backups are still a thing in some places, but they are generally considered a relic of the past. Well that's utter BS. Tape is still a dominant backup form, particularly for archival purposes. The market is big and still growing year on year. You can't get the same data density and portability out of any other form of backup, and it is a format still under heavy development and refreshes, with LTO-9 due out th…
These are audio cassette backups, Commodore 64 style.
The ultimate experience would be loading an entire program and running it straight out the tape instead of converting wav files back and forth. Sadly the IBM PC tape port is an obscure extension and is totally nonexistent on emulators.
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You should try to finish it, it's pretty satisfying. Do note some mysteries have more than one solution. It makes sense, when you think that "who" did "what" to "whom" has more than one possible interpretation, and the game tends to accept most of them as valid!
My recollection is that most of the multiple solutions are actually just cases where you're supposed to identify one correct solution, but how that solution actually maps to the very limited possible choices is ambiguous. This is most annoying in (I think) chapter 5, which is where you get some of the more difficult characters to identify, dying deaths that are somewhat ambiguous, involving some of the supernatural a…
As for the other ambiguous situation I mentioned, I found it hilarious in the "guns don't kill people, other people do" sense ;)
At this point I have blind faith in anything Lukas Pope creates.
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I can't tell if this is a joke or an actual game, but I find this blurring of the lines interesting. Another game that blurred the lines that is actually one of my all-time favorites is Papers, Please. This is a game about being an immigration officer, a bureaucrat stamping papers and examining work permits... and it's brilliant and tremendously engaging. It can only exist as an indie game, of course -- imagine EA sa…
I feel just about anything by Zachtronics fits this category. Spacechem was the title that got me back into indie gaming in 2012, but almost every single one of their games is essentially programming for fun. They really dropped the facade with Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. The beautiful part about those games is how much story and narrative is pushed through design docs and specs and hidden man pages. I feel Factorio al…
In the end I stoppped playing though. It felt like too much work, and rang too close to my day job. Fortunately, I'm neither an immigrations bureaucrat nor a 19th century insurance investigator, so those themes seem more fascinating to me!
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I feel just about anything by Zachtronics fits this category. Spacechem was the title that got me back into indie gaming in 2012, but almost every single one of their games is essentially programming for fun. They really dropped the facade with Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. The beautiful part about those games is how much story and narrative is pushed through design docs and specs and hidden man pages. I feel Factorio al…
Factorio is amazing and for a brief time I got really addicted to it. Like you said, you're debugging an giant circuit. In the end I stoppped playing though. It felt like too much work, and rang too close to my day job. Fortunately, I'm neither an immigrations bureaucrat nor a 19th century insurance investigator, so those themes seem more fascinating to me!
I understand what you mean about the day job thing. I got about 60% of the way through Shenzhen before walking away. Fortunately, I'm not a chip-designer, so hopefully that horizon is farther away with Factorio.
Feel these are the details and the vibe that make Zachtronics so successful. They give you an atmosphere, aesthetic and world to be immersed into.
So instead of "Virtual tape player" windows and virtual tapes it should be like an actual tape player on the screen and people are posting you actually tapes you drag into the player and stuff along with written letters etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Factorio is amazing and for a brief time I got really addicted to it. Like you said, you're debugging an giant circuit. In the end I stoppped playing though. It felt like too much work, and rang too close to my day job. Fortunately, I'm neither an immigrations bureaucrat nor a 19th century insurance investigator, so those themes seem more fascinating to me!
I've been playing the demo for a few hours a week over the past month. Any game that gets me to restart on the second level not because I'm dieing but because I think to myself, "No, I can do better than this," is a winner in my book. Also, if I've derived more fun from this demo than I have from many other $30 and $60 games, so I'm already leaving towards paying for the full game. I understand what you mean about th…
I commend its creators, I just avoid the game now. Who knows, in a couple of years I may get hooked again.