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Post by Ex on Sept 16, 2021 22:25:23 GMT -5
Weren't SNES ROMs encrypted though? Somewhere along the line cartrdige games started being encrypted... right?
Maybe I'm conflating encryption with obfuscated compression techniques. I'm not an expert on this sort of stuff.
Been a while since I've agreed with anything Kotaku-related, but yeah I do there.
A forum is only as good as its guests decide to be active members and consistently participate. If you find a forum boring it's because you aren't pulling your weight as a member.
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Post by Sarge on Sept 16, 2021 22:27:41 GMT -5
That's probably more what you run into - a lot of games used various compression algorithms and you had to figure out which one they used to even get at the code. And yeah, I don't visit Kotaku often, but I saw this one come up on Twitter and I completely agree with it.
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Post by toei on Sept 16, 2021 23:10:12 GMT -5
I agree with the article, but realistically, forums aren't dying, they're mostly dead already, and have been for years. People abandoned them and moved to the next thing. I tried getting into larger Discord channels a couple times, but it felt like a bunch of people in a room shouting at no one in particular. The closest thing to forums is probably reddit now, but I'm not interested in it for various reasons.
He makes a good point about the archiving value of forums. I found a ton of great information on old ass forum posts from 2004 or whatever that wasn't available anywhere else.
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Post by Ex on Sept 16, 2021 23:20:22 GMT -5
Discord is very much like shouting randomly into a room, and the conversations that do form are gone into the digital ether soon enough. Reddit sucks for many reasons, but its lack of meaningful organization for thread presentation is a big one.
I have found nothing yet better than traditional forums, for the purpose of facilitating in-depth, locationally organized, logically flowing conversations.
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Post by Sarge on Sept 16, 2021 23:22:48 GMT -5
Discord is basically IRC. Got to wonder how much we lost to chat rooms and such back in the day, too.
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Post by toei on Sept 23, 2021 10:55:07 GMT -5
Really interesting interview about Golden Sun on shmuplations. The series eventually got dragged down by its incredibly redundant and repetitious writing, where everything has to be stated 5 different times with slightly different wording because apparently the target audience was incredibly slow people, but the first game was a big deal in the days of the GBA. It was ambitious, unlike many handheld games, it pushed the GBA technically, it has one of the best OSTs on a system usually known for bad music (seriously, there's a link to the OST at the bottom of the interview - some of it is Chrono Trigger level, and it has to be top 5 among Motoi Sakuruba's work), and the whole concept of Psynergy and being able to use powers outside of battle to do things like read minds and move heavy objects was very novel for a turn-based RPG. It also gets a bit into the Takahashi brothers' history with Enix, Shining Force, etc. Apparently they were developing a N64 RPG at one point. That system had more cancelled RPGs than RPGs that actually came out. This makes me want to play RPGs again. I just wish I could freeze time at will so I could actually do it without a care.
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Post by Xeogred on Sept 23, 2021 11:42:35 GMT -5
This makes me want to play RPGs again. I just wish I could freeze time at will so I could actually do it without a care. What's the dilemma?
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Post by Ex on Sept 23, 2021 12:09:01 GMT -5
incredibly redundant and repetitious writing That is the issue which caused me to quit playing the original Golden Sun twice. I'm sure the games are interesting and probably fun, if you can stomach the narrative over-exposition.
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Post by toei on Sept 23, 2021 16:57:43 GMT -5
This makes me want to play RPGs again. I just wish I could freeze time at will so I could actually do it without a care. What's the dilemma? Time and focus. I've got too many things to do, so when I have free time, I'll watch a movie cause it's a one-time thing that takes an hour and a half to two hours. The only reason I played Mirrors recently was because I was sick and it seemed like a good way to kill time in the circumstances. But once my life is closer to where I want it to be, I'd like to start playing RPGs again now and then.
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Post by Sarge on Sept 23, 2021 21:11:02 GMT -5
RPGs really are a big time sink. It's why I'm reticent to play a ton of them these days. I get it, especially when you're trying to get other life stuff in order.
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