I haven’t kept up with anime much for many years now, but I can easily imagine that this is the case. There had been mecha anime with angsty pilots and behind-the-scenes politics before, but Evangelion pushed it all to a whole new level by adding mysticism, massively flawed characters, and existential dread into the mix. I know that almost immediately following the initial release of Evangelion we got Gasaraki and RahXephon, both of which bear obvious influences from Evangelion.
I didn’t know that generative AI could do things like this now.
I had a mini movie night with two colleagues, one is around middle age like me, and the other in their twenties. We were going through some DVDs and Blurays, and Die Hard came up. We two older folks said we liked it but the younger said that they’d never seen it. Well obviously we had to watch it right then.
Afterward, the young colleague said they found the movie boring and unoriginal. Talking it over, we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.
Although I haven’t played it myself, to read someone saying that Ultima 4 is derivative and lacking in originality feels a lot like that experience with Die Hard. Additionally, I think that the real old games usually expect a level of imagination and willingness to put up with discomfort that even I sometimes find a little offputting in 2025, despite the fact that I grew up with many of those games and had no issues with them at the time. If I don’t remind myself of it, it can be easy to forget that old hardware wasn’t limited only in audio-visual power, but also storage size and processing power.
I still search through old games, but I’m looking for ideas that maybe didn’t work well or hit the market right the first time, but still deserve further consideration, especially in light of technological advances that have happened in the intervening years.
Node =/= JavaScript
I played this on PS2 and I remember thinking at the time that it was extremely adequate. As you say, the reviews at the time were lukewarm but I think it’s worth a look for anyone trying scratch that itch who’s already finished the bigger names in the genre.
I’ve never played the GBA games, and I still found Super Metroid bland.
I didn’t have an NES or SNES growing up, so I came to those games a little later on. However, Super Metroid was still the most recent game in the franchise when I played it. There were plenty of rave reviews even then, so I looked forward to playing it once I got my hands on a copy. I even bought a new controller for it.
Initially I actually found the game somewhat frustrating, but once I got used to Samus’ momentum and how the game had been designed to be played, I found it to be very well balanced. But I never felt like there was any real reason for me to go on other than to open new areas. Since it wasn’t referenced in any way (that I noticed) outside of the manual, “The Mission” didn’t seem important. And while the graphics were gorgeous for the time (and still are), that wasn’t enough for me. People often talk about the haunting and creepy feeling of the game’s world, but I didn’t get that. I felt that way about the Prime games, but Super Metroid just seemed empty and abandoned to me, not atmospheric.
A few years ago I was able to play AM2R and stuck to it all the way to the end, even 100-percenting it, and enjoying it thoroughly. But I don’t think I ever finished Super Metroid. I just put it down one day and never got back to it. And I don’t feel like it’s something I need to tick off some gaming bucket list. If you’re not really enjoying it, stop playing and don’t feel bad about it. There are already more good games in the world than anyone can complete before they die. You can’t play them all, so stick to the ones that resonate with you personally.
I’ve been trying to research the various glitches and variations between versions because I’m working on something that uses some undocumented features and precise timing. Unfortunately, I don’t have one good link that explains it well.
The issue stems from how player objects (the 2600 equivalent to sprites) are placed horizontally. For good and interesting reasons which are also technically involved and complicated, programmers can’t just send an X value to the graphics chip. Instead there’s a two-step process. First, the program sends a signal to the graphics chip when the TV raster is at approximately the desired horizontal position on the screen. Then, because it’s often not possible to nail the timing of that signal to the exact pixel position, the graphics chip has a facility to “jog” the various graphical objects left or right by a very small amount at a time.
According to the official programmers’ documentation, this final “jog” should only be done at one specific time during each video scanline. If we only do it this way, it works correctly on pretty much every version of the console. However, doing it “correctly” also introduces a short black line at the left side of that scanline. If we instead send the “jog” signal at certain other times, no black line appears. Additionally, the exact distances moved change depending on when we send the signal, which can be worked around or are sometimes even beneficial.
Kool-Aid Man uses these undocumented “jog” timings, as several games did. But it displays a score counter at the top of the screen by using the player objects placed very close together. It seems that the console versions in question (later 2600 Juniors and some 7800s) are more sensitive to the timing being used, as you can sometimes see the parts of the score flicking left or right by one pixel.
The Atari 2600 also has a hardware collision detection system, which reports when any two moving screen objects overlap with each other or the background. Once a collision occurs, the relevant flag will stay set until the program clears it. Kool-Aid Man uses this system to detect when the player character touches enemies. But the program only clears the collision flags once, at the bottom of each frame, and the same player objects are used to draw the score. So when the two parts of the score flicker into each other, it registers as a collision between player objects, which the game interprets as a collision between Kool-Aid Man and a Thirsty.
As you mentioned, I’ve read that setting the console switches a certain way can prevent this issue, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that setting some switches one way rather than another causes a conditional branch instruction that checks the switches to branch rather than fall through, which takes one extra instruction cycle (or vice versa), which is then enough to stabilize the score display and stop the parts from colliding.
There’s a… not exactly a bug, but an unannounced change, in the graphics chip in some later versions of the Atari 2600, which has been named after this game by the fan/homebrew community. On most 2600 console versions, it’s possible for a game to perform a particular graphics operation at an unintended time and get an undocumented but consistent and useful result.
On the differing consoles, the result is slightly different, and because of the way this game is written, it often causes a chain of actions that end up making Kool-Aid Man bounce around continuously as if being hit by enemies, even though nothing is touching him.
“Hopefully it will help with shit. Let’s talk to the originating author, Aasish Pokhrel.”
I once saw a documentary about Bedouin tribes that were dying out. The problem was very simple, from the outside; they were killing virtually all of their female children.
The team interviewed an elder of one tribe, asking him about this practice. As expected, the elder said that parents wanted sons to continue their family names.
“If no-one in the tribe has any daughters, where will these sons find wives?” asked the interviewer. The elder confidently replied without hesitation, “They will get wives from other tribes.” “But what if the other tribes kill their female babies just like your tribe does?” the interviewer persisted (In fact, they had met people from several tribes, and indeed they all followed this terrifying practice). The elder looked at the interviewer like he was a slow child. “They will get wives from other tribes.”
When all you have (or you try to convince others that all they need) is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I guess this shows that it isn’t.
As a handheld console, the GBA hardware was explicitly designed to support exactly one player. To play multiplayer GBA games on real hardware, either the game must have some kind of “hotseat” mode, or you need to have multiple consoles connected via link cables.
A “hotseat” game should run just fine on an emulator without any tweaking, so I’m guessing that’s not what you want.
That means you’re wanting to emulate multiple GBAs at once. But RetroArch is designed to run only one instance of one emulator at a time. I’m somewhat surprised to learn (although I suppose I shouldn’t have been) that someone has created a RetroArch core that emulates two Gameboys/Gameboy Colors at once. But it doesn’t look like anyone’s done the same for the GBA. So AFAIK your only option is to have two separate Batocera devices (one for each GBA) connected over a network (if that’s possible with your Pi and the emulator supports it).
“NPM install” isn’t going to be the direct result of a race condition in JavaScript. And while I’m not familiar with Python, I’d guess that an “Indentation error” wouldn’t be one either. A missing library or syntax error that’s only discovered by executing a particular branch is still just a missing library or syntax error, not a race condition.
Also, while Node.js is popular, it isn’t an integral part of JavaScript in the way that the other errors are integral to their respective languages.
For 2, one of the few pieces of Windows software that I haven’t been able to replace in Linux is GetRight. Many HTTP servers support downloads starting at an offset from the beginning of the file, and GetRight uses that to allow download pausing and resumption.
It was a real life saver back when I had an extremely flaky Internet connection.
EDIT: Thanks for all the suggestions, I’ll definitely take a look at them. Simply resuming downloads is why I initally started using GetRight, but it also came with a bunch of other useful tools that I came to rely on. While I’ve been able to replicate some of the basic functionality with individual browser plugins or programs, I haven’t seen anything that integrates it all so well, with such a smooth interface. I haven’t looked for a long time, though, so maybe one of your suggestions will be the one!
Who else remembers seeing images like this – that would’ve taken a few seconds to a few minutes to render even on high-end graphics workstations of the time – presented in gaming rags as examples of what PS1/N64/Saturn and later PS2/GameCube/DreamCast/XBox were “going to be capable of producing”?
A potential ley line blockage that’s cleared by a ritual performed every winter solstice by a hobbyist spellcaster who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere?
Before everyone had Internet at home? Well, there were bulletin boards, but even without those? Yeah, swapping floppies was how they got around. I got hit a few times as a teen, but the worst one actually came from a legitimate copy of a game I bought secondhand. It got into the boot sector and I had to nuke the HDD from orbit to get rid of that one. I’m just glad that software BIOS updates weren’t a thing yet.
“… [it] isn’t actually necessary… the whole spell falls apart without it for some reason.”
That’s peak cargo cult programming spellcasting right there.
Apparently the original game and Brood War expansion are free to install through the Battle.Net launcher these days.
If you have the original discs, the later official patches added the ability to copy the “mpq” files from the CD into the game’s directory, so you no longer need the disc in the drive. Of course, you’re still going to need a drive for the initial installation. That should work for single player (it’s been a few years since I last did it) but I don’t know about online multiplayer.