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@GlennMagusHarvey@mander.xyz avatar

GlennMagusHarvey

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A person interested in nature, science, sustainability, music, and videogames. I’m also on Mastodon: @glennmagusharvey and @glennmagusharvey

My avatar is a snapping turtle swimming in the water.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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Yeah, N64/PS1 era was when the industry started pushing 3D games hard, and it really feels like the beginning of the modern era to me too.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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Yep. I heard they’re actually being fined, sadly only for $250 because old city laws limit how much they can be fined.

If any of these trees dies, I hope Universal is on the hook for replacing it.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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This is horrible and obnoxious tree trimming. Bad for the trees, bad for urban tree canopy, bad for urban heat management, bad for carbon sequestration, and done as an insult to labor.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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Wasn’t done by the city. Universal is getting fined for this.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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Yeah I saw this and while I’m not a tree management expert I’m like “they basically left no leaves on these poor things”. With the insane heat we’ve been seeing, this can’t be good.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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nods Fair enough.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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Well, $250, but yeah. The law wasn’t prepared for people being this obnoxious.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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Honestly I don’t think an algorithm needs to work very hard to “be mean” like that. Sure, you can purposely put people with clashing views in each other sight on a place where people go to hang out and have fun. But you don’t even need to go do that on purpose. To some extent, people naturally produce more “engagement” with stuff that’s controversial/argumentative.

Imagine if I were to walk past you and say some completely innocent comment. Now imagine I were to walk past you and insult your favorite movie/show/song/game/whatever. You’d be far more likely to respond in the latter case.

So, as people respond, more activity is generated, and that makes the post “hotter”. Simply boost what’s hot, and you have a veritable litany of controversy.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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On one hand downvotes are an expression of negativity, but on the other hand downvotes are an outlet for negativity.

Meanwhile, I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why a bunch of the top comments here got like one downvote each, lol.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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It’s arguably so easy to “farm karma” that I accidentally did it for a while. Just kept posting silly puns to reply to stuff people post on the Florida Man subreddit.

Reddit karma ain’t worth much at all.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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I’ve generally found that avoiding the biggest crowds seems to also avoid some (though not all) of the worst behavior. More specialized subreddits, communities, and magazines tend to be more chill, and also more focused on their topics.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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Wait…is this Felix the Cat??

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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Egads! An error SSL occurred. Secure connect to server be not here.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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So that means that programmers are being replaced with debuggers. Human debuggers.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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A keyboard. Any standard computer keyboard.

This post was originally written as a reply to a comment by @redsol2. But it got kinda long and it’s basically my answer to the thread topic. So yeah, lemme tell y’all a story.

I started out playing 2D platformers for DOS, where the default – or more like, only – control scheme was arrow keys to move and Ctrl and Alt to do things (commonly Ctrl to jump and Alt to shoot). I also grew up on NES, GB, and SNES games, and a handful of PC games. Notably, though, I never picked up FPS games as a child, and also never really got anything from the 32-bit era and beyond until much later in life.

With emulators being more integrated into Windows (meaning Ctrl and Alt do important things), I shifted the action buttons to the lower left corner of the keyboard. Emulating an SNES gamepad, for example, I generally map the action buttons in a mirror-image fashion to ZXCS (respectively, ABYX). (A friend of mine maps them in a similar fashion, using ZXAS instead.) This then lets me map the L and R buttons to A and D respectively. And I move this whole ensemble of six buttons up a row if I have ghosting issues. (The Sega Genesis gamepad can be mapped similarly easily.)

This works brilliantly well (at least for me) for 2D platformers, top-down action games, JRPGs, and more. Notably, though, this excludes pretty much anything that requires analog controls of some sort, e.g. FPS games, N64 games, etc… But between a lack of hardware capable of playing 3D stuff (whether natively or by emulation), a lack of a familiar control scheme, and a lack of personal interest (due to just not having ever gotten into them), I pretty much just stuck with emulating up through the 16-bit era, with a little PS1 emulation thrown in. It’s not like I ever had a shortage of excellent games.

And curiously, it turns out my control scheme (arrow keys + ZXC(V)ASD(F)) is the favored scheme for a number of Japanese indie developers who made things like action games and RPGs using 2D sidescrolling and top-down views. So I ended up having even more to play! In contrast, it seems western devs often prefer WASD, even for stuff like 2D platformer Flash games (to my chagrin). And I see (English-speaking) PC gamers these days regarding my sort of control scheme as a “left-handed” setup (which is amusing since I’m not left-handed).

I only learned to WASD as an adult. At first I even tried to use the mouse with my left hand, and tried putting my left hand on the arrow keys, but eventually I gave in and learned to WASD. I still only use this when I need to use mouse aim though, e.g. Terraria (which I played a lot).

For games that actually require console-style analog controls, though, I nowadays have a wired XB360 gamepad that connects via USB. I’ve tried mapping things like the N64 gamepad to a keyboard before but with no success. But now that I have this, funny thing is this means I’m only recently getting into a number of classics from that era.

I’ve considered getting an 8BitDo SN30 or SN30 Pro(?)…whichever basically looks like an SNES pad with added analog sticks. I specifically want a gamepad without “legs” – the two stubs that seem to be meant as palm grips on each side of the gamepad. That’s because I held my SNES pad from the side so that I could press A, B, and Y at the same time with my right thumb. (This was highly useful when playing Mega Man X.) Controllers with “legs” basically make it way harder for me to do this, as I found out when I tried to play MMX4 on my PS1. It felt so awkward, I just went straight back to emulating it, despite having the disc and hardware.

But, for now, I only pull out my XB360 gamepad for stuff that needs analog stick functionality. Everything else is keyboard. (And mouse, if needed.)

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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I think there’s something to be said that there’s a certain level of intellectual maturity that’s needed to truly enjoy these games.

I grew up with NES Metroid, and despite having read the manual many times over, as a kid I never made sense of the game. I could play it, I could insert the Justin Bailey code, I could move around and do stuff, but I never truly understood what I was meant to do. I stumbled into Tourian one day and promptly got pwned by metroids, and then I never found my way back until I was an adult.

The second metroidvania game I played was Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. Maybe it’s an easier game – it’s certainly less confusingly open-ended than Metroid 1 – but I absolutely loved the experience. I deeply appreciated the narrative journey of being trapped in this castle, full of weirdness and twisty passages that were slightly off from each other, having the mid-game bombshell dropped on me, and piecing together a mystery until I was able to find out what was going on. I played it all night, and in a story I like to tell people, the morning after I beat it (and finally got the best ending), as the sun came out, I put on the Aloha de Chocobo music from Final Fantasy IX and it was the most glorious feeling. But this depended on me understanding that I was immersed in a maze, and understanding what I needed to do to find my way out of the maze.

And I’ve been enjoying this genre since.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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The first time played Super Metroid, it was after I played Fusion and Zero Mission, and I was actually rather unimpressed by it, despite it being basically a platinum standard for 2D metroidvanias.

It was only later, after playing various romhacks including randomizers and getting much more accustomed to the game engine and the sheer number of possibilities afforded by various speed tricks and sequence-breaking techniques, that I gradually realized why it’s held in such high regard. The game is…neat, if you simply play through it once. But the more you learn about it the more you can do with it and the more fascinating it becomes. There is a seemingly infinite depth to it, which is not at all obvious on a first playthrough.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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My friend lent me his copy of FF7 PC, and I tried playing it – albeit after I played earlier FF games.

There were two problems. First, it was…kinda weird compared to earlier games. Sure, the steampunk vibes began in FF6, but we didn’t have Literally An Evil Megacorp and Literally Eco-Terrorists fighting over Something That Feels A Lot Like An Analogy For Nuclear Power. That was a whole nother level. Nothing wrong with this per se, but it just felt like something quite different. Neat, but just not the same FF I was used to.

But, perhaps more importantly, the game just kept crashing. I kept going as far as I could, but the game just wouldn’t progress past the introduction to the Gold Saucer.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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I wish someone had shown me the ropes to get into WRPGs (and other genres that I have yet to really familiarize myself with) back in the day.

There’s a lot of really neat stuff in the genre that seems hard to get into without taking the time to learn how to make the most of it. Maybe it’s that I’m now an adult and I know a bit too much, but I’ve had problems like sitting down with Neverwinter Nights 2 and then realizing that I should go research character builds before I start playing the game. And then, of course, that just means I forget about playing the game for another year or two.

And this isn’t even anywhere near the most obtuse game to learn. There are very complex games (particularly some sim games) that really seem like they’d be great fun if only I actually knew how to play them, but I don’t.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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For whatever reason, I’m scratching my brain and can only come up with three urban fantasy games plus a franchise I’m not too personally familiar with. The three games are Underrail (an indie game from some years back, which I bought back when it wasn’t even fully released yet, but still have yet to play), Operation Abyss (a dungeon crawler with modern-ish graphics but gameplay that definitely takes after old Wizardry games; the theming leans somewhat more on the science-fantasy side), and Tokyo Xanadu eX+ (an action JRPG that’s something of a cross between Trails of Cold Steel and modern Ys games). The franchise is the Persona series, none of which I’ve played, and which Tokyo Xanadu gets compared to despite not being all that similar under the hood.

I don’t think any of these are what you’re looking for, but I hope they may help you on your search.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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I wasn’t part of the original but I subscribed anyway. Thanks for creating the community!

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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I’ve used Lemuroid for Game Boy emulation before but it had trouble remembering my saves for some reason. It’d sometimes forget that I’d saved recently, and so I’d load and find myself in an earlier save. Also on a Samsung phone, albeit an A-series. Do you know what might have caused this?

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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Oh, I actually meant “real” saves, done from in-game. It’s like Lemuroid had some chance of not updating the save file. I never figured out why this might happen. (Maybe it has something to do with not properly generating a new state on exit and having old states wipe newer saves?)

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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I’m usually playing older games of some sort. There’s retro games, like those from the 32-bit era and before, but I also play…old-ish games, ones that were released within the last decade or two. Just last year I began playing Tokyo Xanadu eX+, which was released in 2017 (albeit as the definitive version of a 2015 game).

I think a number of the indie games I play are generally newer. Though, given my tastes, many of them tend to be games designed to evoke some sort of similarity to those older styles of games. So I guess it’s an interesting question whether they count as “retro” or not.

That said, given that I pretty much only use store-bought laptops (and not of the “gaming” variety), my hardware means that I’m much better off playing older games anyway. “Newer old” games can probably still run, depending on the game, but some may be choppy and I can probably wait on those.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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I’ve heard that the official app was initially thrown together at some point around the time Mastodon first blew up due to Twitter…uh, blowing up, in a different sense. Basically, “it would really help onboarding if people had an obvious choice of official app to use”. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. Never verified this myself.

Tusky is definitely decent though.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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One way is to just follow hashtags and see whoposts to them. Since hashtags are basically the de facto way to find relevant content on Mastodon, not just a marketing tool like on Twitter. And then once you see who posts interesting stuff, you can then add them to your follows.

There’s also some sites that list users by topics of interesting such as fedi.directory and communitywiki.org/trunk .

Another way is to check out instances that talk about things you’re interested in. There are several websites that list them but here is a shorter list: fedi.gardenCheck out their feeds and see who posts things you’re interested in.

Furthermore, you can follow a.gup.pe accounts, called “groups”, which work similarly to hashtags. Each a.gup.pe account is basically a repeater that boosts (i.e. “retweets”) every post that pings it, so that anyone following it gets that post. For example, I follow @climate, and every time someone pings that (it’s like including a hashtag), it’ll boost that post and I’ll see it too.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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You’ll sorta have to pick based on your tastes, but here’s a quick rundown from what I know. I don’t know all of them equally well (I know the older ones better), but here goes anyway. IMPORTANT: Games are not connected story-wise unless otherwise noted.

  • FF1 - The beginning of the series. Barebones and open-ended by modern standards. You can think of this like a rudimentary videogame implementation of a D&D campaign, where you choose a party based on character classes and then go do quests to save the world.
  • FF2 - The series’s first attempt at telling a significant story. Gameplay got weird though. Not recommended.
  • FF3 - Character classes are back, but now there are more, and you can switch between them. Also there’s still something of a story too. The most polished NES release.
  • FF4 - First SNES FF game. They tried telling a story, but it’s more complex and has more twists and turns (maybe too many? lol), and the gameplay is much better than before. Characters have fixed character classes and well-defined, plot-integrated roles. Your party can change frequently as the story progresses! Also introduces some other innovations like Active Time Battle. Has a ton of different versions, even more so than the other retro games.
  • FF5 - A more straightforward (but definitely still solid) plot, but with an even more expanded character class system that you can switch around. And now you can combine abilities from different classes! Definitely recommended if you want to mess with creative combinations of abilities.
  • FF6 - Much more complex and involved plot. Characters have somewhat fixed classes but the magic system is now more flexibly accessible. The first time the series went more steampunk/sci-fi instead of only doing traditional fantasy. (Contrast the Dragon Quest series which has kept on doing the usual Medieval European High Fantasy thing since forever.) Definitely recommended.
  • FF7 - First 3D installment, with full-motion video cutscenes and all. Lots of steampunk/sci-fi and other influences. Character ability systems are still a hybrid of class-like features and complex customizability. This was many people’s first FF game, though fans of older games like to make fun of it for being overrated. The remake apparently changes the story somewhat (and might even secretly be a sequel or something?).
  • FF8 - Went more heavily into the storytelling department. I don’t know much about this but for some reason fans of older games tend to dislike it. (Maybe the gameplay isn’t as great?)
  • FF9 - Seems like a “neoclassical” FF in that it went back to its more fantasy-based roots. But it’s still 3D and you still get those prettyboys and such.
  • FF10 - I don’t know this one that well but it seems to be solidly regarded. Also the first game to get a direct sequel, “FFX-2”. First PS2 FF game. Minigames and complex skill systems galore, from what I’ve heard.
  • FF11 - An MMORPG, surprisingly. Something of a weird turn for the franchise, but it has its fans and apparently it’s still active.
  • FF12 - I think this is the first mainline (and non-MMO) FF game to have real-time action for battles.
  • FF13 - A massive three-part thing that’s very story-intensive. Apparently some people love the lead character while others hate her.
  • FF14 - Another MMORPG. Initially it was a flop. Then they scrapped the game and brought it back significantly better and it’s now quite popular.
  • FF15 - Apparently some dudes go on a roadtrip or something. I remember when the reveal was notable because holy crap you’re driving a car in an FF game. Besides this, I dunno much.
  • FF16 - I even more dunno lol. If I recall correctly it may have something to do with being something of a prequel to FF1 but I’m not sure if I’m remembering the right thing.

Other FF games:

  • FF Legend (1, 2, and 3) - Actually from the SaGa series but rebranded to sell better. Choose your species, and then there’s turn-based battles. For Game Boy. May be a bit arcane by modern standards.
  • FF Adventure - Actually the first Seiken Densetsu game (Secret of Mana is the second). Action RPG for Game Boy.
  • FF Tactics - Strategy RPG on PS1 with a quite complex story (lots of political intrigue and more). Very well-regarded. Original version has a somewhat iffy translation (leading to some unintentionally hilarious lines); PSP remake “War of the Lions” cleans it up. Character class system is here too.
  • FF Tactics Advance - Strategy RPG on GBA. Somewhat similar gameplay but the story is totally different and more lighthearted.
  • FF Tactics A2 - Strategy RPG on DS. Again, a different story.
  • FF: the Four Heroes of Light - I don’t know much but I’ve heard this is a spiritual predecessor to the Bravely Default series.
  • Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon - A game in the Mystery Dungeon franchise.
  • Dissidia - Apparently it’s an FF fighting game.
  • World of FF - Apparently it’s like a Pokémon game?
  • Kingdom Hearts - this franchise is FF-style characters (and sometimes actual FF characters?) crossed with Disney IPs. Somehow this is popular.
  • Chrono Trigger - I’m including this since it once shared a disc release with an FF game. Very well-regarded first game in the unrelated Chrono franchise.

If I didn’t mention anything, I probably don’t know anything about it.

Also, sadly, none of them are available DRM-free (legally, anyway), but what can ya do.

GlennMagusHarvey ,
@GlennMagusHarvey@mander.xyz avatar

mood

What system is this, by the way?

Ruins & Riches - a single-player Ultima Online experience. (kbin.dk)

Over the last years I been thoroughly enjoying playing a mod of Ultima Online called Ruins & Riches. Ruins & Riches (formerly called UO Odyssey) is designed to provide a rewarding single-player RPG experience. Players of old Ultima games will find the world familiar, and a lot of the quests and lore draw upon the old games. The...

GlennMagusHarvey ,
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The idea of an MMORPG experience but in single-player makes me think of a game I found out about years ago but have yet to pick up (maybe I’ll get it next time it goes on sale on DLsite), called Tkl Online, which is also an implementation of this concept. And I guess there’s also things like the .hack// games and the Sword Art Online games.

I haven’t really played MMORPGs myself but I’ve been curious what it’s like. Well, I have played one MMORPG, but didn’t really enjoy it that much, so I’m curious what an idealized MMORPG experience is like.

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