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Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Atari in the 80's, Sega in the 90's and Nokia in the 00's all had very good ideas on where the games industry will go in the future, but they all failed in one way or another.

Nokia did a double-whammy with their gently caress-ups, since they also managed to be completely annihilated on the smartphone business, which they more or less invented.

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Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

twistedmentat posted:


What's the current one? Motion controls? VR?


I'd say that controllerless motion controls by Microsoft is the 2010 thing, and home VR consoles (Oculus etc.) will become the 2020's.

With all these failures (Atari, Sega, Nokia, Microsoft, Oculus) it was not that the concept itself was bad, its just way ahead of the consumer trends, and based on the technology that existed but was not sophisticated or cheap enough that they can make attractive consumer products.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Neddy Seagoon posted:

That's not quite right with VR. It's actually found a viable footing outside the home market with professional training and product design as-is, and the only real holdup in the home market is the price. And that's only going to get lower. The technology's not going anywhere, if only because a lot of companies have invested heavily in it.

Yes, but like I said, the _home_ VR systems are still expensive, awkward to use and offer only little extra over the much more convenient traditional setup of TV-system-controller. There also is the problem that you really cannot do social interaction with the VR setup on, so it cuts down the casual users quite dramatically after the initial interest towards new stuff.

The tech isn't going anywhere, yes. It has been around since the 80's actually, but I'd still say that the home VR, whatever the "everybody has one" -solution is, is not going to be the "helmet and gloves"-option.

Professional training and specialist tools are absolutely different beast from the entertainment software, with much more refined software systems, better sensor hardware and most importantly, its job-related so nobody expects you to be able to shoot poo poo while doing your thing. Hardware-wise its almost quality vs. quantity.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

KakerMix posted:

You uh, VR lately? You talk like someone who hasn't.

I've tried Oculus and Vive, and developed stuff for Oculus, but they both are basically a bucket in your head, which is also very uncomfortable if you have to wear glasses underneath them. Yes they are very immersive but I still fail to see how you could actually pay attention to anything else since it takes your full attention? People also like to do other stuff while playing, because for example for adults with kids the games are a way to kill some time while the kids are playing or taking a nap. You really cannot leave, but you do not have anything else to do. This is actually also why King with its Candy/Pop/ etc Saga-games is so freakishly popular.

Also how many people in the long run would actually keep using them, especially if they have guests over, to arrange something like NHL match on local multiplayer with several VR sets instead of you know, just regularly playing the game with TV and controllers?

I know that this is fully anecdotal, but last Christmas many stores (at least on this part of Europe) sold out on the console systems, but the VR kits didn't move even with several discounts. Its as if people like to play games, but are not interested in expensive extra features.

My opinion still is that they are only an UI upgrade to the games, with a new controller scheme which allows some new types of gameplay options, but this time you have to strap yourself into the system and cannot do anything else, while being in the game.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

FilthyImp posted:

You also have those soft-reboots or revisions done to keep things fresh.

See: Jefferson D'Arcy v Steve Rhoades, adding unnecessary kids, or transitioning to new employment (Drew Carrey).

The hoops they jump through are fun sometimes, too.


I'm just unreasonably happy that Ed O'Neill got a break on doing something else than Al Bundy. The guy was clearly talented playing cops and stuff, but got horribly typecast as Al which always ruined it. But goddamn if he didn't nail that middle age, low income -angst two decades before it became the new normal.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Caroline in the City was the first time I saw someone in the American TV to acknowledge my home country. The guy who went to play Monk said something to the degree "WTF that corpse in the coffin is Finnish!" and someone else responded "He sure is."

Not exactly an interesting fact, but still.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

ElwoodCuse posted:

Also, re: parody--Weird Al gets permission simply because it's easier. He, nor anyone else, doesn't *need to*.


He has said that he does it to not generate feuds or reputation as an rear end in a top hat, or to check that the song isn't too personally involved for the artist he targets.

I know I know, "stupid rear end in a top hat for actually trying to be nice to other people.".

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Mu Zeta posted:

Liam Gallagher said nobody buys albums anymore so he can't go off buying planes and stuff right now. For some reason that makes me sad.

Imagine that. 25 years of aggressive lobbying causing playing a record in a house party, or listening radio in a taxi, to count as a public presentation and not being allowed, and earmarking bought music to a one particular device, and people stop to give poo poo about buying records and listen free"ish" streaming services. How unforeseeable.

These same people considered the Steam-approach to game sales to tank the industry because why would anyone want to buy anything, if they can get one friend to buy the game for a reasonable price, and rip that copy to their friends.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

burial posted:

That keyboard is so awesome.

And probably still fully functional even today, even if it was used as an hammer for the last decade.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

twistedmentat posted:

There was Stark Raving Mad in 2000 that features Tony Shalub as a horror writer and NPH as his new editor. Mostly it was about how wacky this guy was and that was about it.

The ads were pretty funny.

"Yea why don't you tell me your best friends with Will Smith again"
"sure thing Doogie!"
"shut up!"

The only memory I have of this show is one painfully unfunny scene about a Finnish guy in a coffin.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

ryonguy posted:

I feel like the odd person out in society because I never got into SNL in the 90's. I liked MadTv as a kid/teen, but
could be used to describe just about every part of SNL to me at the time, that and Jimmy Fallon being completely unable to finish a bit without loving up.

What, how can you besmirch Jimmy "Forget the line, look straight into camera, and break character laughing" Fallon like that?

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Laura-4-Lyfe posted:

In a house this is true. In a car there is more going on. You remember hitting a bump and the CD skipping? The CD either got far enough from the laser not to read or it smacked right into it. There is also a ton more dust and dirt along with trying to change disks while you are driving.

On CDs the glues and lacquers used to keep the layers together oxidize and get dimmer, making the CD harder to read.

Usually this becomes a problem with CDR/W -disks within 5-10 years, and album grade CDs in 15-20 years.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Phanatic posted:

Also the shareware version of Doom was something you could download from a BBS. The full version came on a stack of floppies. No way you could just distribute the full version hidden in the shareware release to be unlocked with a code or a hack.

Yes, the wad-file containing rest of the game levels was more than what one floppy could have handled. But IIRC otherwise all of the assets were the same, so switching out the level file, or using editor to make your own, was possible with just the shareware version.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

ToxicSlurpee posted:

The concept of delineating between generations at all is also a pretty new idea. Then again massive world changes every freaking decade is also a pretty new phenomenon. For pretty much the entirety of human history it was "95% of people born have a 99.99% chance of being a hunter gatherer or a farmer." The next generation might be slightly different from the previous one but probably not.

100 years ago it was a loving huge thing if someone was accepted to study in an university because our country used to basically only have just one. It was also perfectly normal to never go more than 200 km away from your birthplace except if drafted for military or joining the merchant navy. Even if you lived in a place with a railway connection.

only just 60 years ago it was a news item, if someone went to "not neighboring county" as a researcher for period longer than 1 month to visit their labs or library.

40 years ago it was new and exiting concept to go to the Spain or Canary Islands to spend your vacation, since it had just become affordable to the normal middle class worker family to go abroad for a vacation. You needed to save cash to do that even with 2 full incomes family, but it was possible.

And as recent as 30 years ago fresh grapes, grapefruits, kiwis, oranges, plumbs and such simply were not available during the off-season periods. And this is from someone not from the Soviet satellite countries.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

ryonguy posted:

If a better actor had been found for Arnie's role it would have been the perfect action comedy and people would still be talking about it. It really was a fantastic movie except for him trying to act, which kinda made Hamlet 2 a good probably unintentional dig at the movie itself (inception_sound.mid).

Also The Nostalgia Critic, being the massive tool he turned out to be, took the movie at face value and mocked it for being a "middling action movie with over-the-top scenes, with annoying kid and too many attempts at humor". At no point did he come across the idea that the movie was trying to do parody at the cheesy 80's and Arnie movies in general.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Frankston posted:

I used to watch that guy years ago, what did he do?

Retired the character when he ran out of material, which was a clever more, then overextended, and then restarted the NC franchise because why not.

I used to watch their stuff because of early NC was actually quite funny and insightful, and other performers who were very good, but after restart it became apparent that he really did not have any clue on how to run his business.

Someone who actually cared enough to watch it after the NC reboot can give more insight, but NC was not really popular here to begin with.

But as far as I know, his massive tool-moment was not milkshake ducking or anything like that, just that he ran his franchise to the ground and as it turned out, was not very good at understanding anything beyond face value.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

The McD chat in obsolete tech reminded me of something; were the "special themed McDonald's restaurants" a global thing in the late 80's/90's/early 2000?

I remember seeing pictures of sit-down versions of McD in pictures although we did not get one, they came with table service and normal cutlery, plates and glasses and stuff, I think they also served pizza. I know these existed because one goon mentioned being in one, and the general concept was also mentioned in the book "Fast Food Nation" I read ages ago.

We, well Helsinki at least, had one 50's themed (think Pulp Fiction) and other sports themed (baseball and motorsports which sort of translates to pesäpallo and Formula 1 for Finnish consumers) McDonald's... Or were these just bastardized versions by the local franchise owners in the era when the oversight was not completely airtight?

Der Kyhe has a new favorite as of 18:56 on Jul 2, 2019

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

twistedmentat posted:

Conan was always upset they didn't ask him to be in the South Park movie as himself, he would have more than happily made fun of himself.

But isn't that the South Park policy or have they also gone the Simpsons way? No celebrity voices, or uncredited, or at best credited but without actual lines? (Dog etc).

I also remember that the guy who played Worf in Star Trek would have loved to do South Park but was not asked.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

dialhforhero posted:

Tiffany Amber Thiessen

I never was a blonde-chasing guy and even then the balloon boobs of Anderson were too much.

That name brings up the memories.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Iron Crowned posted:

Doom was pretty shocking back then considering that up to that point, games were basically 8 and 16 bit side scrollers. There pretty much has always been pearl clutching surrounding video games, but that was a significant jump in style.


It's my understanding that the hellscape of NYC peaked in the early-mid 80's, and there was a concerted effort to clean it up starting in the late 80's. Of course when somewhere has been a shithole for 20+ years, it also takes a while to get public perception to change.

Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk

You see the "lovely York" in its prime in movies like The Warriors, Taxi Driver or Mean Streets, the less lovely last horraah in Seinfeld, and the new "nice place" in Friends and thereafter. It definitely cleaned up after 90's and 9/11 for various reasons social and political.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Neito posted:

Tangent: The new DuckTales is loving awesome, and if you liked the old one, watch the new one.

I have asked this before but didn't get a clear answer; Is it based on Barks-Rosa-canon or Old Ducktales-canon?

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Neito posted:

It's a weird mix. Like, Webby's there, and Duckworth (kinda) as well as Beakley, Scrooge wears his red jacket, and is more of a jerk/adventurer than a kindly uncle. Not screwing them, at least not nearly as much as he does is the comics, but he's not the fun kindly perfect uncle he was in 87. It also adds some of it's own stuff, and stuff from the other Disney Afternoon cartoons, and it adds it's own spin on things and the canon (for example, the boys have very different personalities from each other, their mom is a known character that turns into a regular in the second season, Gizmoduck and Darkwing appear regularly (kinda). It does a really good job of being a tribute to the older media whilst not being a slave to nostalgia. If you wanna give it a try, the hour-long premier is on Youtube for free (it's called Woo-Hoo!).

A lot of the changes are really for the better (Beakley is a former secret agent who is as much a part of the adventures as Scrooge, Webby's an All Purpose Action Chick that works really well, the boys actually being different rather than three of the same character) and some are meh but work out (like Lin Manuel Miranda as Gizmoduck was clearly a deep pander, but they work it well).

Is Donald in the navy/court-mandated to anger therapy/Away working/just non-existant? Because Barks-Rosa is not only a huge thing here, it is the only accepted canon in my country, seriously. Anything not-that is set up for failure because Barks-Rosa was something beyond children's entertainment, it was a thing that got the attention of the entire generation, adults involved. At one time (I think still) the Library of the Parliament of Finland subscribes to the "Donald Duck" weekly magazine, and at one point it was subscribed like every fifth household in the country. When Don Rosa visited for the first time, the visit got ministerial greeting at the airport, and signing session grinded the entire Helsinki to a halt.

My understanding is that same happened in Stockholm and also in Copenhagen.

We are a Donald country. You give us the Mouse or some stupid poo poo and we will loving hate you.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Randaconda posted:

Looney Tunes is better than any Disney cartoon.

i will not be accepting questions at this time

Will you accept a trip to the Northern Europe? We will show you such things as Northern lights, reindeer sleight runs, visit to the Santa's workshop, and finally the mass grave we put all the people who think that the Mouse or the Gray Rabbit is the better one.

For the Daffy Duck people we offer a nice re-education camp. Although that is mostly just getting gently caress-all blind drunk. Because you are OK.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008


I can smell this picture.

I had a friend who bought his first car and a cell phone in High School with bootlegged movies and pirated games.

Due to copyright and right-to-backup laws at that time, he was investigated by the local police after someone snitched, and since he wasn't selling moonshine or drugs, they just dropped the case.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

mind the walrus posted:

It is really hard to properly appreciate how loving futuristic that z-axis and pseudo-fidelity was. MYST and DOOM were like goddamn bombs getting dropped on our eyes.

I've said it before but getting a 3D graphics card, and using it to run stuff in the glorious 640x480 HD-textured mode smoothly around mid-90's was one of the only "holy poo poo"-moments I have truly had with PC hardware.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Volcott posted:

Significantly higher upfront cost was a big reason, you'd also probably want a charger box thing and a tester too. New they were more or less as good as an out of the pack energizer, but they'd lose capacity as you went through charge/discharge cycles, moreso than with modern stock.

Ni–Cd batteries were also hugely annoying hassle to maintain, since you could ruin them by recharging them improperly and it took ages to recharge them with the home charger thingies which were also always completely broken, missing or did not connect properly and cooked the battery.

Also, when they die they also are highly toxic waste and should go to special collection bins... which weren't everywhere during the 90's because recycling was a thing for the hippies back then and why bother.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

The thing was to buy Pentium 75 instead of 486/DX4, pray that you didn't get the miscast one, and then a couple of years later to upgrade to the first Pentium2 (and then to the first 3 or the revised Celeron which overcloked to near-gigahertz with a reasonable air cooling). This cost like motherfucker but was probably the cheapest way of not getting electronic garbage delivered to you as a home computer.

And yes, there was a PC gaming culture in the early 90's or so, but unless you really liked PC Speaker and games that looked great on EGA, you went Amiga.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

I still mentally classify dual-core P4 as "usable if necessary".

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

mostlygray posted:

The 486/DX4 was actually a good chip. The P75 was junk. The Pentium Pro was really good. Came out in '95 or so. The P133 wasn't terrible. The regular Pentium series didn't get good until P3s. That would have been in about '02 to my memory though.

Even a P133 worked well though if you dropped an Open GL card in it. A lot of games ran Open GL at the time and it was really fast with a FireGL card. I used my FireGL card all the way until about 2002.

Technically P54C and later (which used socket 5 or newer) were better for new systems but upgrading stuff this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am5x86 used 486 sockets and was better than Pentium 75.

Pentium 2 wasn't terrible if you uncased it so it cooled properly. However, the "budget model" Celeron-A was better in almost every way, and even with the basic air cooling it could run 33, even 66 MHz above its retail speed without any changes besides shorting the lockout pins, since most cases were designed for the boxed-in Slot 1 processors.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

I can confirm that the "Pringles with bellpepper/paprika" are in fact a superior form of Pringles.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Ok Comboomer posted:

oh that really sucks dude

I had the ugly baby stegosaurus one, which was hella lame

I even politely asked the Burger King lady if they had literally any other one, and she checked for me but they didn’t :(

same Burger King would go on to screw me again four years later when they had those glass LoTR goblets with the plastic LED bases. Motherfuckers only had Frodo staring like a doofus at the ring

like who the gently caress wants Frodo when you could have Gandalf or Aragorn?

Maybe they just used you to dump off all their lame collectibles?

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Wacky Delly posted:

A lot more thought was put into that than I realized.

I don't recall if I found this account from this thread, but it is relevant to this discussion: https://twitter.com/ruuupu1

https://twitter.com/ruuupu1/status/1365618659851345921?s=20

I wouldn't always say the CRT output looks better, but it does illustrate why the sprites look like they do.

The limitations of the systems has always been incorporated into the designs. Take a look at SMB3; the clouds and bushes are the same sprite with different color because it saves on the memory. Likewise sprites were designed in a way that CRT technology smooths them because the system lacked resolution and memory to handle larger image maps.

But saying that you aren't playing the same game or "getting the real experience" goes right into the gatekeeping crazies-territory.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

I hated the fact that in Finland Nintendo-magazine switched to SUPER Nintendo/POWER magazine even before the SNES was launched here.

I also hated the fact that my parents decided to buy 486SX/25 with 8 Mbit of RAM and 400Mb hard drive instead of SNES. I was later proved wrong.

The computer was tax-exempt *and* heavily compensated because my father was an government employee and he used that same computer to do his work stuff at home.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

Splint Chesthair posted:

It goes back further than the 80s. In the 60s there was a perception that Swedish society was a lot more sexually liberated than America. This had a lot to do with the success of the Swedish art film "I Am Curious (Yellow)," which came out in the late 60s and featured more explicit sexual content than audiences at the time were used to. "Swedish" became a term applied to all kinds of sexually-oriented content and products.

All of that stuff was probably still rattling around in the average beer drinker's head in the mid-80s. They're no ordinary bikini team - they're SWEDISH, nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more!

Swedish laws regarding obscenity, and actual porn, were also very much more relaxed than everyone else in the Western Europe. They even did not have to thinly masquerade risque stuff as art or documentaries, so the name stuck.

Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

KHLAV KALASHNIKOV posted:

I wish Superdisk had become more widely adopted, holy hell. While I’d never experienced the click of death firsthand (though I have seen it happen), about a third of my Zip disks lost their data and became unusable when I was in art school. For how much those goddamned things cost, that was intolerable.

edit: yes, ugh, art school, I know it was a huge waste of time. That’s where I saw the click-death happen too

Not going to bother checking the exact dates since during 90's the regional availability of tech was a thing. Here the superdisks were too little too late; the zipdisks had similar capacity and larger market share with similar costs of entry, and CD-RW burners were becoming a thing and they also covered that "I need a CD-drive" thing when you upgraded to Pentium-level stuff.

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Der Kyhe
Jun 25, 2008

If that one piece is roughly 1/4th feet wide and 1/2 long, 12 pieces is about 1350 square centimeters, more or less the same than one 40 cm in diameter. (40 cm is 15.5 inches, a bit larger than a normal dinner plate.)

Der Kyhe has a new favorite as of 22:28 on Dec 19, 2021

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