finally, an NEC PC-108

my corneas are still scarred from the end of Picard when they’re back on the brightly-lit Enterprise after three seasons of candlelit ships. at this rate starfleet officers are going to need eyepatches like pirates for when they turn away from a screen

metaverse 3 will use ai 2 which is on the blockchain

clone wars and farscape teach us that oceanic (oceaniac?) accents come from space so it’s probably a character option in one of the spelljammer books

for me it’s the other way around. i do like Adventure but it’s a game full of compromises, with most areas needing to work for multiple characters and the Adventure fields ultimately limiting the scope of the game to three relativey-close locales. then comes Sonic Adventure 2, a game with purpose-built stages for each playstyle spanning multiple continents and even space. while the treasure hunt stages were arguably worse, the mech stages were ten times better without the timer and the random tranaformations. and the speed stages, oh man. without the spam dash you really have to learn how the physics and movement options work, but when you do you’re tearing through the stages rolling on walls and making gravity-defying leaps. it’s amazing. 3D Sonic does have a trend of turning things that were challenges in 2D loops into just breather setpieces, but SA2’s introduction of rails is the one time they bucked that trend- get enough momentum going before you hop on or you’re not going anywhere! shame every game since has locked your speed once you’re on them. the extra power-ups and chao boxes scattered throughout the levels give you extra places to explore and reason to do so. to me Sonic Adventure 2 really finally delivers on everything Sonic Adventure wanted to be. it does lose points for it’s rocky voice acting and overreliance on automation- although in both cases to a degree less than Adventure 1- but it’s a great game and the only 3D Sonic i can say that about, as close as Adventure 1 and Frontiers may have came

the 2600 and the coleco telstar are the first that come to mind. it’s a shame wood grain fell out of fashion right as game consoles fell into fashion! i also love the the grey variant of the Saturn. Panasonic got two hits in a row with the 3DO and their GameCube-compatible DVD player thing.

honorable mention goes to the Daewoo CPG-120 which I only just learned about today. it’s a consolized MSX2 that looks like a cross between the Enterprise and a Roomba. i can’t decide if it looks magnificent or awful and it’s arguably not a console to begin with but hey

edit: oh, and sharp’s twin famicom! in general companies that made other kinds of electronic appliances had a way of bringing a certain class to console design without eliminating the fun

do you have any examples? i can’t think of any Coromon that resemble Pokemon aside from sharing a base animal, whereas a number of Pokemon look closer to specific Pals than they do to their own regional or gender variants

Coromon is only a ripoff in the same way that any scrolling platformer is a ripoff of Super Mario Bros. building off the basic chassis of existing games to make new ones is a practice as old as videogames itself and why genres exist. the difference is that Palworld is full to the brim with monsters that can be difficult to tell at a glance from existing Pokémon- look at this article’s embedded image, that’s just a Wooloo with horns on it’s hind legs- whereas Coromon, Digimon, Dragon Quest Tamers, Yokoi Watch, Cassette Beasts, and anything else in the genre aren’t ripoffs and are even available on Nintendo consoles

i know that’s not the angle Nintendo is using in court, but it’s certainly the reason why they’re in court in the first place while ignoring the plethora of older games that would also clearly violate those patents

the two Who rock operas are chock full of stuff that went over my head because i heard them when i was younger than i probably should have been. in this case the songs are written from character POVs so i wouldn’t say they make me think less of the band because of the content, but jeez, 10 year old me never would’ve figured Love Reign O’er Me for example was about a suicide attempt as opposed to, you know, feeling loved

in theory voting through mail would be easier, but in practice it’s a nightmare. i needed absentee ballots for two elections when i was away for school- one arrived late and one didn’t arrive at all! much easier to just do in-person voting in my experience

everyone is quick to takes sides here but to me this just feels like a sad situation all around. i can see why the original translators thought that closing the repo was essentially revoking permission. i can also see why eadmaster saw the GPL license as explicit permission, and that closing the repo meant they weren’t working on it anymore. i hope cooler heads prevail because it would be a loss to the community if anyone involved were to take their ball and leave

gus is the chief medical officer partially so he can cover up that shawn isn’t from betazed

“Andorian women are far more aggressive than Earth females. She made a… an overture. I had a choice - charge her with assaulting a superior or… marry her for 32 years and counting.”

we here are bluesky are thrilled to accept Series A funding for Face-Eating Leopards, Inc. despite this we ensure that Leopards will not eat your face

oooo baby i love your wayouns, every dayoun…

the ultimate lifeform does not do “simple”

the article is more about AAA games than consoles, and i agree with the article’s takeaway. graphical improvements have been an Emperor’s New Clothes situation for about a decade for me now. the reason we have those hundred hour AAA games is because with today’s technology, the only advantage big studios have over indies is sheer volume of content. people are starting to wise up to that more and more and those studios will have to find a different way to justify those massive budgets and price tags or simply go under

as for consoles, though? i think the average PC gamer underestimates the value of things Just Working to the vast majority of customers. PCs themselves are having a tough time against smartphones and chromebooks and computer literacy is decreasing from gen z to gen alpha as a result. the seeming failure of the newer xbox and playstation has more to do with the aforementioned dying AAA market and the fact that they’ve become dumbed-down gaming PCs themselves instead of Just Working. the Switch successor will probably not be great but still sell gangbusters because Nintendo is monopolizing the market on Just Works, even if just barely!

if it’s just a phase, we can simply modulate the frequency of the subharmonic phase generator. and reverse the polarity of the deflector dish if that doesn’t work

i’m really interested to see where this goes. i feel like a lot of the dorks (i say affectionately as a dork) who use the fediverse and people who do this kinda shortform video are two circles that don’t touch, so this could very well die on the vine- no pun intended- or it could give the fedi the jolt it needs to enter the mainstream