Nuclear Monster

  • Todd Van Luling has an article for the Huffington Post about the sad garbage people who got too caught up in Sega’s marketing to recognize that Sonic gameplay was awful and their sad hunt for finding the hidden connection in Sonic 3’s soundtrack to Michael Jackson.

    Spoiler, Jackson didn’t even want to be associated with the crap Genesis sound processing:

    Jackson and the team wrote the music “high-profile,” Grigsby said, meaning that although replicating the music on the Sega console would eventually require massive compression and simplification of the audio, they started out sounding like typical Jackson songs.

    Sometimes, Grigsby remembers, Sega developers would drop by to hang out or help the team compress the songs — which, according to Grigsby, were recorded aiming for a “cinematic type of sound” Jackson sought at the time — into Sega-ready versions. “It all had to be squashed down for the game and they made more room for the graphics,” Grigsby says. “They had more data happening with the graphics and they had very little allocated for audio.”

    […]

    Buxer, Grigsby and Jones say Jackson pulled his name from the game – but not his music – because he was disappointed by how different the music sounded on Sega’s console when compressed from that “high profile” sound to bleeps and bloops.

    “Michael wanted his name taken off the credits if they couldn’t get it to sound better,” Buxer claimed.

    Even the sad garbage people now recognize that the gameplay was terrible:

    “Someone would track down someone who originally worked on Sonic 2, like a level artist,” said James Hansen, a Sonic fan from the Forest of Dean, near Gloucester. “Then they’d just get bombarded with a million emails and then you’d never hear from them ever again.”

    […]

    As a teenager, Hansen was more interested in the “secrets in the Sonic games” than the games themselves, he says now.

  • Turns out, we’re up to 1,800 games on Steam that run under Linux. It’d be great to know how many of those are vegan, charlotte/georgia-based, handcrafted, locally-sourced, artisanal, native ports and how many are pretendulated, factory-farmed, gmo-enhanced, toxic garbage from Virtual Programming.

  • Christopher Livingston has become obsessed with safety in a new game, INFRA:

    I began walking around, exploring the terrain, looking inside power plants, dams, and other structures, and solving the occasional puzzle. I quickly found, however, that I wanted to my job–that of a structural analyst–more than I wanted to solve puzzles or investigate a mystery. Yes, I found some suspicious documents and figured out how to power up a generator to allow me to open a door… but what I really wanted to do was photograph safety issues. All the safety issues. Screw mysteries, I wanted to tally up infractions and write a detailed report and issue fines. That’s what putting a camera in my hand does to me. It makes me want to do my job. If a ghost had floated out of a service tunnel, I’d probably only have photographed it if it hadn’t been wearing a hard hat. Safety first!

  • TheThrillness reviews the HD60 Pro, the first pci-express HDMI capture card from Elgato:

    I was pretty sceptical about a card that only accepted HDMI. I found it very weird that they dropped Composite/S-Video/Component support from the original Game Capture HD design.

    After having time to reflect on it, I think Elgato has chosen wisely. The future is HDMI and this card is meant to cater to that. Recently I’ve been getting into PC and PS4 gaming so keeping around older consoles like a Super Nintendo doesn’t mean much any more. Time to move on and embrace the new! Eventually some hardware based solution that doesn’t suck (Retron 5 etc) will come out and we can all enjoy the glory of HDMI even with our older games.

    TheThrillness’ reviews of other capture devices are the most definitive and thorough reviews out there. I didn’t buy the HD60 Pro due to the lack of input options, and one of the things I had been hoping to capture with a device like this was Windows and Linux gameplay captured to my Mac which isn’t possible as the HD60 Pro is an internal pci-express card which won’t connect to a Mac laptop. Turns out, Elgato’s Mac support for game capture with their Game Capture HD I bought is abysmal anyway (doesn’t work with OBS on a Mac), and capturing Windows games with OBS is usually fine. After reading this review, I know now that I should have gotten the HD60 Pro, upscaled older gaming devices, and put together another machine for capture. My one question is how resource-intensive capturing would be with the HD60 Pro, as cards like this should offload most of the CPU burden.

  • Speaking of VR, the two leading virtual reality head-mounted displays (HMD) are very different in how they’re intended to be used.

    Although the Oculus Rift has head-tracking, it is intended more for playing games in a seated or standing position with extremely limited amounts of head movement. You can think of this as being limited to a cockpit in a jet or the passenger area of a car or mech. The player can look out, and control movement of the vehicle they’re in with a gamepad, but if they get up and walk around they’re still trapped inside that vehicle or cockpit. This is perfect for games like Elite: Dangerous and the Eve: Valkyrie game that will be included with the Rift.

    You can also display something with a more traditional third-person camera viewpoint outside of the avatar and have player movement bound to analog sticks on a gamepad or some other controller. That is what you have with Lucky’s Tale:

    Many traditional 3D games involve a lot of player movement and a first-person perspective, so being limited to one position in the physical world isn’t quite as immersive as being able to move in a physical space and have that movement be reflected in the virtual world. This is more of the holodeck, or room-scale style of VR. I received a brief demo of this at Valve a few years ago. It is amazing when experienced in action. Valve’s SteamVR system offers this in addition to the ability to play cockpit-style games in a seated or standing position. It’s the main difference between the two headsets. Some games can work on both types.

    Holodeck experiences have their downsides. Players need a fairly large space that is empty of obstructions in which to move. You’ll also need to install devices that Valve and HTC are calling lighthouses to define the physical space in which you’ll move and track your physical movement in that space. It’s not something everyone has space for, and although you can adjust the amount of physical space for use with this system you basically need a multi-room house or office to set up that experience. Valve had a few dedicated rooms for it.

    It’s been almost impossible to demonstrate that room-scale experience without using it. The Northways, Colin and Sarah, have a video up that demonstrates the perspective of a player in the HTC/SteamVR Vive HMD while playing their Fantastic Contraption:

    That’s a clip from a longer stream that you can watch here. The only difference between this and the real thing is that she can’t see the people on the couch while playing, and it’s way more fun to play in-person than watch on a stream.