Nuclear Monster

  • John Romero posted this video today to Vimeo in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Commander Keen. it’s the first publicly available footage of the Super Mario Bros. 3 demo that id software pitched to Nintendo. You might have heard about it from the David Kushner’s Masters of Doom book (Amazon, iBooks, Wikipedia) which is well worth reading if you haven’t already.

  • A few weeks ago there was a rumor that Sony would soon announce some kind of software support for the Playstation 4 to emulate the Playstation 2. It would be a nice favor to players since Sony very quickly dropped Playstation 2 compatibility from the Playstation 3 in order to lower the price of that console’s guts.

    The rumor was based on the special edition of the Playstation 4 bundled with Star Wars Battlefront. That bundle also included a code for four older Star Wars games. Star Wars: Racer Revenge, Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter, Super Star Wars, and Star Wars: Bounty Hunter. Super Star Wars originally hails from the Super Nintendo and was actually ported to the Playstation 4, the other three are Playstation 2 games running under emulation.

    This was very promising. The emulator appeared to be robust in taking advantage of modern amenities like trophies and upscaling, and generic enough in its implementation by virtually mapping the Dual Shock 4 and virtual PS2-era memory cards to support a range of games instead of just the three in the bundle. The Digital Foundry article analyzing the emulator for the Star Wars games was simply titled “Hands-on with PS4’s PlayStation 2 emulation.”

    Why would Sony go to all of this trouble just for three Playstation 2 games? They wouldn’t. Surely it would be for more than just those. A Sony representative vaguely confirmed the coming emulator to Wired.

    Surely, surely, surely there would be a generic Playstation 2 emulator coming along any day now where you could just insert a Playstation 2 disc and receive most of these features, maybe trophies would be limited to especially popular games.

    Nope.

    Instead of attempting to compete with Microsoft’s recent addition of Xbox 360 emulation on the Xbox One, Sony announced that they were simply offering a short list of games for download at $10 or $15. Here’s the list:

    $15 Games:
    Dark Cloud
    Grand Theft Auto III
    Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
    Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
    Rogue Galaxy
    The Mark of Kri

    $10 Games:
    Twisted Metal: Black
    War of the Monsters

    People who had already purchased those games can’t just pop in a disc and play them, they have to be repurchased and more games are promised be added for download regularly.

    It’s not completely unreasonable to charge that price for a download version of the game, and clearly it would require work per-game to support trophies, but it is incredibly boneheaded to not just drop a generic Playstation 2 emulator and leave out trophy support for games unless they are purchased again.

    Almost more boneheaded is that some of these games had already been available for download on the Playstation 3 with an emulator running there, but they’ll still need to be repurchased even for people who bought those versions. I just don’t understand this strategy. Sony has been great with allowing people to purchase games online for the Vita, Playstation 4 or 3 and get the other platforms for free. They even have a goofy marketing name for it, Crossbuy. It should extend to emulated Playstation 2 games.

    The only place you can still get a generic Playstation 2 emulator is on a computer with PCSX2. Using this kind of emulator is still finicky enough that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the experience. Unlike emulators for 16-bit consoles like the Genesis and Super Nintendo where you kind of just choose an emulator, find a ROM image of the game and go, Playstation 1 and 2 emulators are highly dependent upon selecting the right group of plugins to provide support for things like reading the disc, USB input, audio, and video. Sometimes this process has to change depending on the game.

    Getting PCSX2 to work for your games is more complicated than sticking a disc into a Playstation 4, but Wes Fenlon has a nice introductory guide up if you’re willing to battle with the open source software and move past the disappointment of Sony’s business decision to not release Playstation 2 emulation to the public on the Playstation 4.

  • If you owned a retail store, would you let a customer start cursing and yelling at your customers or would you kick that customer out?

    Steam’s curator program was implemented a little over a year ago. This program allowed individuals and groups of users to put together a selection of recommendations with a brief text component that appears on everyone’s Steam store page when enough people are following that curator.

    Some curators are what you would expect. Publications like Cheap Ass Gamer, PC Gamer, Giant Bomb, Gaming On Linux, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun, have groups and recommendations. It’s nice to see that a publication you like is recommending a game, and it says a lot when none of them are. Then there are community action groups dedicated to specific causes, like one that is a group of made up of non-developers highlighting games that lack features that they feel should be available on every computer game regardless of what era it was developed in or if the lack of such a feature would even be an issue for this type of game.

    Finally, there are curators on Steam that are beyond hyperbole. For example, Waifu Hunter. Normally this name would just imply that the group is operated by anime fans who will never know how to speak with actual women. Their disgusting motto is “I will tell you if a videogame has attractive anime ladies in it.” Here’s a sample recommendation from Waifu Hunter:

    This game is a matryoshka doll of cancer, furries, and Tumblr. Play this if you hate good writing, loathe functional game design, and want to get AIDS.

    Valve allows this to exist in their store, why? This negative recommendation is for a point-and-click adventure that has very positive overall user reviews. 103 positive and 10 negative reviews are shown directly on the store page for the game. Destructoid gave the game an 8 out of 10. This system is intended for positive recommendations, not rants from 8chan users. It is time to kick this customer out of the store.

  • Eric S. Raymond

    Eric S. Raymond:

    The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.

    ESR’s blog post goes on to back up this conclusion with IRC logs from one anonymized source that nasty women are all around trying to destroy him and other self-aggrandizing free software/open source shitlords through false claims of sexual assault. The comment thread on the post is an amazing cavalcade of other mens rights assholes who followed through links from terrible websites such as Phoronix and Breitbart. Surprisingly, the comment thread is a little bit better on the Phoronix post where people call out Michael Larabel on linking to ESR’s garbage as if it were fact.

    ESR calls this an attempt by women to “… smear and de-legitimize the Linux community (and, by extension, the entire open-source community) in order to render it politically pliable.” ESR is the one who has smeared the Linux community. He has threatened harm to other developers, by all accounts is a terrible developer, and a racist who takes credit for coining the term open source when it was actually invented by Christine Peterson.