“capitalism leads to innovation”
unpaid devs at home: hold my beer
WHO THE FUCK PUT RAY-TRACING IN THIS AFFRONT TO GOD
Superman 64 still blows my mind, because they nailed the Timmverse vibe with the N64’s typical untextured polygons - while the character was so damn popular that the box art has no text. And then it’s a series of unforgiving time-trials. Just a heaping plate of green-fogged frustration. It came out in 1999! It wasn’t some launch title. Blast Corps had nonviolent property destruction two years earlier. The system was lousy with collectathons. Replacing bad guys with robots was infamously A Thing for at least the Turok games.
The game should have been a GTA prototype where you’re only capable of doing good things, contextually. A power fantasy where of course flying toward a crowd swoops over them, and of course you can only throw cars at locked-on evil robots, and of course there’s no possible way your character, who literally Superman, needs a god-damn HP bar.
How is the first character to properly explore the mechanics of an invincible protagonist… Wario?
The clever workaround for players being trying to be dicks is to say Bizarro’s on Earth, and obviously thinks he’s Superman. So any time you go completely over the line or fuck around beyond excuse, you get a soft game-over where you catch your reflection and it’s not Kal-El.
What I’d pitch is a fairly short game with replay value in optimization. It’s a day in the life. Superman has the ability to solve every problem in the city, that day. Superman has the ability to solve several major natural disasters happening around the globe… and still solve every problem in the city, that day. You, the player, are going to jump through your ass trying to schedule or predict more than about half. It has to be fair. There has to be a way, on every single playthrough, without memorization or guesswork. But it can be obscenely hard. It can be controller-through-television levels of difficult, both intellectually and mechanically, because that’s in-theme. It underlines how good the man himself must be, in order to stop every mugging in Metropolis, instead of just the ones he comes across. And it lets you feel his frustration when even one slips through the cracks.
Anyway, escalate through a few specific “heavy” days, spread across a month or so. At first you’re handling petty crime across town, with an invitation to rescue people from rooftops when a dam bursts in another state. By the end you’re fighting Brainiac atop the Daily Planet, and while he limps away from having all three of his dicks twisted, you find a quiet moment to help a child climb out of a tree. High-level play involves hearing about a disaster before it happens, so you can stop the dam bursting in the first place. Or throw a tornado back into the clouds, or redirect the faultline from an earthquake, or whatever the problem is on this playthrough. It’s variable enough that you can’t just fly somewhere pre-emptively (most times) but frank enough that you might prevent it the first time.
Knowing what’s right to do isn’t easy, but it’s simple. Knowing how to do all of it at once is neither.
Bravo. You took the unique thing about the setting and character and made it into unique gameplay elements that fit the theme and sounds like fun. Superman’s dilemma is not being able to stop everything despite his power and the rules of the game tell that story. I think you’d be a good game designer if you aren’t already. The only thing I can think to add is maybe Kryptonite makes him have a health bar and diminished powers for a while, so he has to turn from the cat into the mouse for a little while until it wears off, kind of like stars in GTA.
What Wario game are you referring to? I haven’t owned a Nintendo system in a long time.
IIRC, Wario Land 3 has no health or lives. Enemies can only modify your state. Wario Land 4 walked it back a bit by adding hearts, but most of the game is still a movement puzzle, where you have to get flattened to walk under narrow passages, lit on fire to turn to ash and fall through gratings, stung by bees to swell up and fly like a balloon, et very cetera. And then every level ends with a timed dash back to the entrance.
DC fucked Titus over. Just look at the unreleased beta. It’s more polished and finished than the actual product. Oh and brainaic was actually going to be the bad guy not some virtural reality ring shit. This was before WB made them scrap all progress with the same timeline.
Because of this, the PS1 version which was a separate game in itself was canceled as well since WB refused to push the release window back or the license agreement because …they had to start over.
Very well written…this reminded me of Astro City.
The AVGN videos on this game were classic.
Inb4 big N takedown and lawsuit.
I don’t think it’s possible to takedown a project that doesn’t use any proprietary code. You have to supply your own rom.
For this instance, before unique identifiers were baked into games like switch games use.
Does it have legal ground tk stand on? no. Is it possible? yeah definitely
That’s what happened to yuzu
What happened to Yuzu was that they were making $20,000-$30,000 in monthly revenue, for an emulator that would “technically” be competing with the current hardware.
Thats where they fucked up, in my opinion.
I mean, yes the yuzu team did have problems with the money scheme and openly playing games before their release, but the fact that even forks by people who had no connection to the devs got taken down shows that Nintendo can take down any project they want, regardless of if it contains proprietary code
Yes. I see your point. :/
You can’t take down a project you’re not trying to control.
Imagine I post a pic of Scarlett Johanson’s lovely bits and Nintendo doesn’t like that. Nintendo doesn’t know me and Nintendo can’t take it out of everyone’s computers. Now imagine I do the same with some software. What’s Nintendo gonna do?
They can still force platforms to delete the stuff or go to a judge and get them to force platforms to take down stuff. They can’t get it from your computer, but itlf its posted online it can be taken down.
Not exactly. A big reason for them being sued is for circumventing Switch’s encryption.
Which is still legal. It’s just the flimsy excuse they used to file the lawsuit, and the Yuzu debs didn’t have the energy/money to fight it
*in some jurisdictions.
That doesn’t mean they used proprietary code. The keys were supplied by the users
In case you want to skip the article and see the GitHub page: https://github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/N64Recomp
Let me git clone it first
Selfhosting my own git server, partially to mirror repos like this.
enjoy the CVEs
What does that mean?
oh you sweet summer child
Gonna explain or just continue to mock me?
Security vulnerabilities are usually tagged as CVE and then some number. So the other dude is basically saying enjoy the security vulnerabilities.
Oh I thought there was some other CVE acronym I was unaware of. I don’t think periodically git cloning a repo every few days would be something to worry about. Ever since the Yuzu take down I got in the habit of mirroring a bunch of repos that I’d be very sad to lose, just as a precaution, it probably won’t matter, but it’s a tiny peace of mind knowing I could at the very least compile it myself if it was lost.
I, quite bluntly, see no good reason to advise an internet stranger on their security practices when they can learn for themselves.
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. But I’ve no time to teach strangers the beginnings of fishing, let alone what they need know in order to fish safely.
You’re not even giving him a fish let alone teaching him how to fish. Just bitching and moaning about kids these days not knowing how to fish
Super Mario 64K gonna be lit
That’s. Fucking. Sexy.
Nintendo gonna sue
Does anyone have a guide to get this (or something similar) working on steam deck? Complete PC/Linux noob after years of Mac use, go easy on me
Check out emudeck: https://www.emudeck.com/ Installation process was easy, but haven’t tried any ROMs yet
Haven’t read the article but it says “recompiled into native PC ports” so these aren’t ROMs, they’re actual Windows .exes and Linux binaries.
As I understand it, they’re bring your own ROM. Like a standardized scaffold to put upgrades like widescreen and RTX and mods onto the building that Nintendo sells or rather sold.
Screw ray tracing, can it do Body Harvest with a decent draw distance?
How is this not blowing up? It seems like a BIG deal!
It has been blowing up. Every N64 Youtube channel I watch has talked about it so far.
Removed by mod
