I am certainly not pro-CCP, but I am pro-PRC mostly in that I fancy some of the silly knives they manufacture. Does that count?

Maybe we just ought not to freak out about somebody carrying mankind’s oldest tool like a bunch of sissy babies, hmm?

And it’s tough to remember just how fast computing was changing in the '90s, improving by leaps and bounds all the time with seemingly no ceiling in sight. Consumer computing power was doubling every one and a half years. And in, say, 1994 it wasn’t unreasonable at all to assume that all of that crusty old tech from the '80s and even early '90s surely would have been replaced by the year 2000 anyway without anyone having to do anything special about it. Probably more than once… right?

The crucial disconnect there was that tech people are not necessarily business people and I think a lot of folks grossly underestimated management’s recalcitrance in spending money until it was more than clear they were facing a crisis.

Current “classic” Doom is generally played at a much faster pace overall than in the DOS era anyway, now that auto-run is a thing and the assumed default for many WADs and maps, and the majority of people are at minimum using mouse aiming and also probably mouselook.

2016 felt pretty spot-on by comparison. Eternal and its restrictive ammo capacities and “you must defeat this kind of monster exactly this way” bullshit got tiresome very quickly. Evidently nobody was brave enough at the time to tell id that if the discoverability of your gameplay mechanics is such that you feel you have to yank the player away into a dream-sequence arena to tutorialize at them with the One Approved Way to defeat that type of monster, your design is bad.

I could feel the block and parry thing in Dark Ages getting old before the trailer was even over.

2016 is the superior game of the three. If you only had to play only one of them, I think you wound up making the correct choice.

Eternal had some highly questionable gameplay design choices made about it and I have no idea what the fuck Dark Ages is supposed to be doing or what anyone thinks it’s got to do with Doom. It’s begging to have a new setting and IP made for it. And in fact I suspect (with zero evidence) that this was the original intent before some suits got involved and insisted on slapping the Doom trademark on it for the brand recognition, or whatever the hell.

But it’s Bethesda, and now they’re owned by goddamn Microslop of all people. So I’m not buying Dark Ages at any price, DLC or not, and not especially how they did Mick Gordon dirty the way they did during the development of Eternal, and et cetera and so on and so forth. Fuck 'em.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I can think of few stewards worse for Doom and it’s legacy than Bethesda and fucking Microslop.

Another sequel of something called “Revelations?” Doom has officially jumped the shark, hasn’t it?

When Sony was suing George Hotz over his PS3 jailbreak video, they also tried to bully Youtube (or possibly Google, I forget if this was post-Google acquisition) into revealing the IPs and identities of everyone who watched the video so they could attempt to sue them for “piracy” also. Obviously they did not succeed, but the fact that they tried says a lot.

For me it was the music CD rootkit thing, and trying to sue people for watching a particular Youtube video. Sony has already been on my no fly list for a very long time.

Likewise, Nintendo has now joined Sony for me in my Never Another Red Cent category. I’ve got an entire bookcase full of Nintendo games and systems ranging from the NES all the way up to the OG Switch but it ends there. It’s guaranteed that they will never shape up, so I’ll never give them any more money.

Nintendo did that first. Not just with the Super Nintendo, but the original NES vs. the Famicom.

There was kinda-sorta a justifiable reason for that in the sense that different countries at that time had different television standards with frame rates and vertical line counts which the systems of the era were inherently tied to, and sticking an NTSC game in a PAL system or vise-versa even if it fit and would play would not produce an optimal result. (Sometimes it still didn’t — ask people about the Street Fighter games in PAL regions, for instance.)

Now that the world is all on the same digital TV standards, region locking can be done in software.

Maintaining two product lines simply out of spite really is just such a Nintendo thing to do.

Not how it’s phrased, but we’ll play along. 25 of what?

25mm?

▓█████

25cm?

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

Or Maybe 25"…

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

Pop quiz! How does your client render that? Anyway, longs are so marketed as “100s” because they’re supposed to be 100mm long. Kings are around 84mm.

(Although if you’re referring to the Marlboros, I have no idea.)

So I see, now that I’ve gone searching for it. I’ve never seen these in person in my life. But purportedly you can still buy them. Weird.

Apparently I had either consumed too little or too much coffee for my brain to be functioning correctly yesterday. My main hangup was that I was trying to figure out how the heck an odd and indivisible by 3 number of cigarettes would be packaged in a rectangular carton like that. Today I’m a little smarter; The answer is a row of 8, a row of 9, and another row of 8. This puts the wide row in the middle which is the opposite of how a typical 20 pack is arranged. I wonder if these are less popular because the two stragglers on the ends tend to get flattened.

25 cigs in a pack, though?

It does. It also works over RDP connections where Windows “helpfully” hides the shutdown and reboot options in the start menu from the remote user.

Which part of the triumvirate, though?

Agreed. I have a Hero 10 Black and basically every time I go to use it I wind up wanting to hurl it into the sun by the time I’m done. My wife bought it for me as a birthday present a couple of years ago because I asked for one specifically (I didn’t know any better, apparently) so it would probably be rude to do so, though.

It overheats, it randomly shuts off, it routinely experiences a firmware crash that renders all of its buttons inoperable and requires pulling the battery to cure. Oh, and it also has a battery life best measured in seconds so you need to keep it plugged in to external power all the time which requires an aftermarket accessory. Brilliant.

With any luck mine will get taken out in some spectacular and marketable fashion, preferably while recording at top quality so I can post it and use the video revenue to buy an Insta Ace or something.

I guarantee you there’s no plate in it, for a start. It’d be too heavy for him. And probably too expensive, too.

There is (was) rather infamously a mod for Morrowind which removes the fog. Said fog was required to conceal the render distance limitations of the hardware of its time, but these days basically any random computer can render the entire Morrowind map in one go which reveals that in fact it’s smaller than Disney World. Morrowind has the smallest map out of any of the Elder Scrolls titles to my knowledge, and it’s surreal to see all the towns and landmarks all nestling practically shoulder to shoulder like that.

Skyrim does an excellent job of making its lands look vast, but the geography is similarly compressed. The climb from lush valleys to frozen windswept peaks is only something like the equivalent of two thousand real world feet, which wouldn’t even qualify as anything more than a foothill to the Rockies here in reality. The Throat of the World which is canonically supposed to be the tallest mountain is actually only 766.5 meters or 2514 feet tall in map scale terms, which isn’t even a third of the way to breaking the treeline in most places.

My father’s house still gets junk mail and allegedly “preapproved” credit card offers addressed to my cat.