The local arcade/bar has two Mario Kart GP 2 cabinets (so you can play linked head to head). I'll have to go check it out after reading this.
Rise of the Triforce
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: Rise of the Triforce
#62Incredible the pace gaming companies in Japan did innovate with chips and boards and everything during this era. While PCs were following a somewhat slow pace, guys at SEGA, Nintendo, Namco, Capcom and similar were literally making innovation by the hour, and commercializing it. A lot to learn from their stories.
Sadly, like everything, the arcades are now commodity hardware. Everyone just started putting out industrial PC based systems and shipping the games on hard drives
I think it's also a benefit in someways though. Preservation should be much easier and more accessible this way. Also maintainability.
Re: Rise of the Triforce
#63Incredible the pace gaming companies in Japan did innovate with chips and boards and everything during this era. While PCs were following a somewhat slow pace, guys at SEGA, Nintendo, Namco, Capcom and similar were literally making innovation by the hour, and commercializing it. A lot to learn from their stories.
Wild to see how far they've fallen. Although I think this was basically the turning point for Nintendo. The GC intentionally avoided competing(at least on graphics) and was still a financial success. From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP. I guess sega was a few years ahead of them on their own timeline.
> From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP.
I think you're underselling the role of their game design expertise. They figured out that there's more to games than high fidelity graphics, a concept which has somehow alluded most AAA game studios.
Re: Rise of the Triforce
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
>there is an explicit carve-out in the Copyright Act to allow for backups of computer programs But there is not a carve out for breaking DRM to do so. It's not the backup part that is the problem with dumping them. It's that these games are encrypted and decrypting them requires breaking the DRM scheme which is illegal.
There is a separate carve-out for breaking DRM for the purposes of "interoperability"[1], which (as far as I understand) is generally believed to include emulators. I also disagree more broadly with the initial moral indignation over a perceived violation of copyright law -- legality and morality are two different things, copyright law is meant to be a balanced trade-off between the public and creators but modern cop…
>will be done for the sole purpose of achieving interoperability
It's for solely achieving interoperability. It only covers the development of the emulator. Using it to get a picture for explaining what a game is in the blog post is not DRM being broken for solely achieving interoperability.
>What ever happened to the hacker ethos behind DeCSS and the anti-"illegal numbers" movement?
In practice the idea that you can't break laws if you are doing things via a computer is fundamentally flawed.
Re: Rise of the Triforce
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wild to see how far they've fallen. Although I think this was basically the turning point for Nintendo. The GC intentionally avoided competing(at least on graphics) and was still a financial success. From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP. I guess sega was a few years ahead of them on their own timeline.
The Gamecube was competitive on graphics with PS2 and Xbox. It was the Wii where there console side moved away from keeping up in the cutting edge graphics race. I’m not sure how successful it was, it was outsold by Xbox and PS2. Although the Xbox was a massive money pit for Microsoft. At least in Europe the Gamecube began to disappear from retail a fair bit before the Wii was out as well. Still, got things like a Wa…
I think the big thing that held gamecube back was the lack of other 'utility', at least as someone who was in college at the time.
Can't play DVDs (PS2, or XBox with the remote accessory,) can't even play audio CDs. Let's remember that this was also an era where half or less of the on campus freshmen had a desktop computer for their dorm, let alone something like a laptop.
That said one could also argue that Nintendo was more focused on mobile at the time, between the GBA and DS, both of which certainly carried them through that era.
I think one could argue that the DS's success alongside the challenges Gamecube had for adoption, led to the philosophy involved in the Wii's design.
Re: Rise of the Triforce
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Codona's Amusement Park in Aberdeen in the late 90s, there was a Ridge Racer "cabinet" with three massive rear projection screens and an ACTUAL REAL MAZDA MX5 TO SIT IN. WHAAAAAAAAAT Seriously insane levels of money-no-object zero-fucks-given design.
This is painful to me on three levels: 1. Real estate costs have gone up so much it’s prohibitively expensive to do something this grand. 2. Advertising is now a race to the bottom where showing car ads on websites has almost zero cost with all return compared to something novel like this. 3. It’s impossible to find a car like a 90s Miata these days because manual transmissions are almost dead and every car had to ge…
Agree on the rest, but thankfully for #3 a modern base ND Miata with the 1.5 is pretty close to in weight to a NA due to a lot of weight saving work by Mazda.
Re: Rise of the Triforce
#67What I think is truly amazing is how truly rare it is to see a home console move into an arcade platform, instead of the other way around. Almost always, the home system was derived from lessons learned from more expensive, rugged, and elaborate arcade hardware.
Sometimes, this overlap was quite profound but not 100%. NeoGeo home consoles famously use the same hardware and software as their arcade counterparts, but the game cartridges were not pin-compatible. The Nintendo VS line were technically the same as a Famicom/NES, but not the same build; the software has subtle differences. Perhaps the Nintendo PlayChoice would count but again, it's not like they used NES mainboards to build those.
So, the idea of taking a Nintendo console mainboard and grafting it to SEGA-designed components so it can run in a dedicated arcade cabinet, is just wild to me.
Re: Rise of the Triforce
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does "heckin" mean? I associate it with redditors' impersonation of dogs and I was surprised to see it here.
In context in this case, “hell of a lot of.” Seems we English speakers come up with myriad grammatical constructions to seem less offensive in certain forums.
Well, mostly I realized my first sentence was likely to come off more negative than funny (I just like, really enjoyed F-Zero GX back in the day!), so I decided to add a folksy salute to the effort to dilute that. And a smiley face, people heckin' love those =)
Re: Rise of the Triforce
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
In context in this case, “hell of a lot of.” Seems we English speakers come up with myriad grammatical constructions to seem less offensive in certain forums.
Well, mostly I realized my first sentence was likely to come off more negative than funny (I just like, really enjoyed F-Zero GX back in the day!), so I decided to add a folksy salute to the effort to dilute that. And a smiley face, people heckin' love those =)
Interesting. I associate the term with reddit, not being folksy. I think the folksy term would be "fuckin lot" or "very lot" or "hella".
I think maybe you were trying to cater to the "christians" or snowflake conservatives
Re: Rise of the Triforce
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, mostly I realized my first sentence was likely to come off more negative than funny (I just like, really enjoyed F-Zero GX back in the day!), so I decided to add a folksy salute to the effort to dilute that. And a smiley face, people heckin' love those =)
Interesting. I associate the term with reddit, not being folksy. I think the folksy term would be "fuckin lot" or "very lot" or "hella". I think maybe you were trying to cater to the "christians" or snowflake conservatives
It's linguistically a minced oath[1], and they're pretty common in all manner of online contexts.