Notices by atomicpoet (atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org)

Obscurity is in the eye of the beholder – and I very much see things through the eyes of a Canadian man who grew up in the 80s and 90s.

Everything on ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC is obscure to me. Same with PC-88 and MSX. Those computers barely showed up in Canada, and even when they did, we didn’t see any of the games.

After 1989, everything on the SEGA Master System is obscure. Sonic the Hedgehog barely got a release. I’ve never seen the North American cartridge in the wild, and when I do, it’s crazy expensive. For awhile, the only (legal) way for me to play that game was on the Wii’s Virtual Console.

Lots of DOS games are popular here and well known. But a good many of them aren’t simply because there was such a volume of stuff available, you couldn’t keep up with everything. And generally, there was no resale market for DOS games – once they were used, they were tossed.

I remember buying a Nokia feature phone specifically to play Mega Man. It was a Pay-As-You-Go phone, and cost me $100. Mega Man is not obscure, but that specific feature phone version – I can’t find it anywhere.

The same year Serious Sam came out for PC, they also made a mobile version for Palm PDAs. And believe it or not, it was a full-fledged FPS in both greyscale and colour. While I’m aware of this game, few people are – and I suspect many folks would buy an old Palm device just to try it out.

A week ago, I discovered a freeware Crazy Taxi clone where the cars are replaced by lawn mowers. It is basically an advertisement for Home Depot. The crass capitalism turns me off, but now that we’re decades away from when that game was made – the fact it’s obscure fascinates me.

Bottom line is, while this stuff may not be obscure to everyone, it’s obscure to me and thus an object of fascination.

Hey, liberal Americans, stop trying to move to Canada each time you lose an election.

If you knew anything about what’s going on in Canada right now, you’d realize Canada is on the verge of electing a far right government. So we’re not your answer.

Face it, the world is screwed and the only way things get fixed is if you stop being defeatist and fight at home.

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/how-to-move-to-canada-surges-on-google-as-u-s-wakes-up-to-donald-trump-win-1.7100547

In 2015, I got laid off from Hootsuite. That was a tough pill to swallow.

I thought that was going to be the most important project I ever worked on. Suddenly it was gone, and I didn’t know what else I could do that would ever be significant.

But nearly a decade later, you know what? I’ve done well for myself.

I work for myself, I make whatever I want, and I spend time with family.

I am not hopeful. I am quite sad.

Elon Musk essentially bought the election when he bought Twitter.

Journalists could have left Twitter, and had it go the way of MySpace. Instead, they continued to legitimize it, thereby giving it life.

For the next four years, decentralized social media will be needed – if only as an alternative to the faux-progressive media that seek to control the public square.

The world is becoming more and more authoritarian, and we need an antidote.

The Steam Deck is the best console of all time because it’s a PC disguised as a console.

Which means it gives you access to the largest—and best—game library of all time, the PC gaming library.

If that’s not enough for you, it can emulate most other platforms—most assuredly, every platform made before 2010. Even some current ones.

As it turns out, the best console is the one that can be all consoles.

This pho is A+ stuff.

@goatsarah That would have saved young-me so much time.

@goatsarah I didn’t have that cartridge. Didn’t even know it existed until now.

There’s many “real hardware” purists who look down their nose at emulation.

They seem to think “real hardware” is more authentic.

But if you’re into computer gaming, you’ll get cured of that notion real quick.

I don’t want to run things on a real Commodore 64. It takes too much space, and the real loading times are brutal. Plus, I don’t want to deal with 5.25” floppies.

You know I have to admit that there are certain beloved games that don’t appeal to me. Lure of the Temptress is one of them.

Yes, yes, I see the appeal. The art style is cool, it has a nice story, and I totally enjoy watching someone else bang their head against it.

But for me to play it myself? Hard pass.

My first beef with this game is that it’s just too easy to not see objects. In the opening scene there’s a knife in the dungeon. You wouldn’t know that because it’s so hard to see that it might as well be in the witness protection program. Miss it, and congrats. You’re not getting out of the dungeon. Enjoy your stay.

And that leads my to another frustration. This game is simply too linear for my liking. You have to do everything in order, like a recipe – except there’s no delicious meal. There are no creative solutions here, no room for improvisation. There’s only one path, and it’s become overgrown with weeds.

All this would be forgivable if the commands were a little more flexible. However, they seem too arcane for my liking, almost like mystical incantations. It expects you to find the right verb-noun combination, and if you don’t know it, it practically stares blankly at you – wondering why you haven’t figured it out.

But isn’t this just the way of DOS adventure games back in the day? Not always.

I enjoy the likes of The Secret of Monkey Island. It had a certain levity that made the problem solving worth it. And Flight of the Amazon Queen felt interactive enough to feel like a game and not just fighting with menus.

But Lure of the Temptress just leaves me cold.

Part of the problem is that the controls just haven’t aged well. Often when I’m trying to go one place, the game goes, “Nah, how about you bump into a stranger instead?”. The conversations with NPCs are rough – I’d rather talk to my toaster instead.

What makes the whole thing more frustrating is that there’s very little in the way of a soundtrack, and the sound effects are sparse. I can’t even nod my head to some tunes while solving puzzles. All I got to hear is the sound of my dwindling patience.

The story does interest me. But I think I’d rather just watch a YouTube playthrough than suffer through this myself.

Maybe hardcore adventure fans will like. For the rest of us? Thank you, but nope.

@Christopher They didn’t use the Doom engine. This game was actually released the same month as Doom.

Bethesda has the balls to say it inspired the development of Doom, and I doubt that very much.

In 1993, a Terminator FPS was released. And it was garbage.

I’m not joking here. The Terminator: Rampage is not only the worst Terminator game ever made. It might be the worst FPS made too.

Over the years, I’ve played a lot of crap. But oh boy, I was not prepared for how crappy this game was going to be.

The frame rate sucks. I tried speeding up the CPU and adding more RAM. No dice. Then I read old forum posts from the 90s to see if this was just my own tech incompetence but, nope, the animation was always jittery and choppy.

Moving is a chore. Just the act of moving your mouse left or right is slow as molasses.

What’s even worse? There’s little ammo, hardly any health packs, and enemies are bullet spunges.

You’d think some obscure developers would be responsible for this mess. But no, it’s Bethesda. That right, the same Bethesda who gave use the Elder Scrolls. And the same guy who designed The Terminator: Rampage also designed The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

And you know what? In a weird way, that makes sense because Arena also controls and plays like crap.

You can’t buy this on Steam or GOG.com. But if you see it out there in the wild, sitting in a box at some retro gaming expo, avoid it. This game will only give you misery!

I need to sell my theremin because I haven’t touched it in ages.

@goatsarah You’re entirely right about this because the GBA had some good 3D titles – yet I always felt they were held back by something I couldn’t put my finger on. And I’m glad you confirmed my suspicions!

@goatsarah Oh wow! I’d love to hear more about this story!

Here’s all my controversial opinions about video games in one post.

First let’s start with Nintendo:

• Nintendo didn’t “save” gaming
• Nintendo was—and still is—a predatory company that sought to monopolize video games
• The Nintendo “Seal of Quality” never guaranteed quality, and junk still arrived
• The Nintendo 64 was the peak of Nintendo arrogance, and it’s a good thing Sony put them in their place
• Nintendo is good now but only because the rest of the video game industry put a leash on them—but even now they’re litigious assholes

Now on to Atari:

• The original Atari stopped existing in 1976, when Nolan Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications
• Nolan Bushnell was right—Ray Kassar was an asshole who killed Atari because he disrespected his employees and nearly killed the brand because he overproduced Atari products
• Atari Corporation was not the “real” Atari because Atari was originally an arcade company, and they didn’t own Atari Games
• Even though Atari Corporation wasn’t the “real” Atari, that doesn’t matter because the Tramiel family kept the home division alive and made the excellent Atari ST
• Infrogrames was as much Atari as Atari Corporation, and they made better games than Atari Corporation
• Modern Atari is not Infogrames—that company is dead—but they’re a stealth takeover by Tommo
• Ziggurat Interactive is practically Atari, it’s owned by Atari’s CEO, and will likely merge with Atari—and by the way, they own the rights to 3DO
• Warner Bros. Games owns a lot of Atari IP, including Gauntlet and Paperboy, and they’re being bastards for not re-releasing those Atari games

Now for SEGA:

• SEGA was essentially an American company until Gulf+Western sold it off
• In fact, the best early SEGA arcade titles were made by Americans (Gremlin Industries)
• SEGA started to suck when SEGA of Japan started to disrespect SEGA of America
• SEGA of Japan only got better when that pachinko company bought it
• Modern SEGA is better than modern Nintendo because that pachinko company is using the video game industry to whitewash the fact they make most of their money from gambling

Now for Sony:

• Sony was right, Nintendo screwed them—and they were right for walking into the video game industry and destroying Nintendo’s dominance
• What’s always held Sony back was their addiction to weird proprietary formats
• Crash Bandicoot was a better 3D platformer than Super Mario 64
• The PlayStation controller was better than the N64 controller
• If Sony stopped trying to compete with Microsoft, they’d have better PlayStations

Now Microsoft:

• Even in the 90s, Microsoft published the best games of all time
• Microsoft Flight Simulator was always amazing
• Age of Empires was a better RTS than Command & Conquer
• Bill Gates was right, Xbox should have run Windows and played Windows games
• Microsoft could have been Valve but instead they let Valve eat their lunch

Now PC in general:

• A game is not better just because it lacks a console port
• Most games are better with keyboard and mouse, although gamepads could have been better if they had a trackpad
• Trip Hawkins was right about the 3DO model, that should have been how console gaming worked but he fucked up by creating a new platform entirely instead of piggybacking on PC—which already had the userbase—and consolizing that
• Along with better hardware, PC has always had the better and superior games library, and the inability to consolize PC gaming lead to decades of walled garden wankery
• Commodore had the right idea with the Amiga32 but no chunky graphics mode for Amigas meant it died too soon
• Subpar DOS emulation is what’s keeping people from realizing how good retro PC gaming actually is
• Half-Life is a better FPS than Goldeneye in every way, and you’re on crack if you try to argue otherwise

Finally:

• The need to “celebrate” everything retro is prevents people from thinking about video games in a critical manner, and keeps the world from respecting video games as an artform
• Having strong opinions about video games is ultimately a good thing because it means someone gives a damn
• There’s nothing fun or interesting about a hivemind consensus where everyone parrots the same talking points over and over again

I grew up around very religious folks. To them, the worst thing you could be was weird. Being weird meant you were a degenerate.

What’s funny, though, is that they were always trying to prove their religion was “real” and “relevant”—and to do that, they always tried to make religion appeal to mainstream culture.

But by the time they adapted for mainstream culture, the mainstream passed them by. They were always playing catch-up and they didn’t know why.

It turns out it’s the weirdos—with all their degeneracy—that creates culture.

I’m in Nanaimo and I’m eating a Nanaimo bar.

Technically, all Best Westerns are also Worst Easterns.

@ajlanes @goatsarah God damn it. More rabbit holes.