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Estil

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Posts posted by Estil

    Obligatory "Cat" thread

    in Everything Else

    Posted · Edited by Estil

    4 hours ago, OptOut said:

    Huh? How could you! You look Tiddles in the eyes and tell him he's not a cat! My kids are crying now, and not JUST because of the cat wounds, but because you've insulted our poor little kitty cat Tiddles!

    Look Tiddles in his beady little eyes and tell him you're sorry! 😢

    [removed pic so that I wouldn't end up with nightmares later O_O ]

    The only thing I'm sorry about was being forced to Google search and find out those are really naked mole-rats...Usually I love trivia and fun facts and such but that is one of the most UNfun facts ever and this one learning something new I seriously could've done without!!  I don't know if you could even pay me to go anywhere near those hideous things *shudders*  If somehow, God forbid, any of those ugly things showed up in my apartment I would be totally standing on a chair screaming just like on TV O_O

    Now, let's just forget all about that and get back to our regularly scheduled program:

     

    Wow they really are man's REAL best friend aren't they? 😄 

    • Sad 1

    Revival of the Music Cassette

    in Everything Else

    Posted

    5 hours ago, themisfit138 said:

    My 94 Vette had a factory Bose cd player.

    What the hell is wrong with people. Cassettes are a terrible format. I had tapes as a young kid, by middle school I had saved up and bought a Sony discman. When they were still big and square. Side note the first cd I bought with the discman was a longbox copy of Metallica black album.

    The key word here is "Vette".

    WITH POLL: Black Friday Switch/3DS games

    in Everything Else

    Posted · Edited by Estil

    This is from a couple of years ago but it's not gotten any better; in fact when playing cards with my grandma like I do every Sunday I saw an add for Wallie World that, sure enough, opens on 6PM on generic Thursday. 😛  It's not very often I agree with liberal sorts of places but for this issue and for this website's take on it I'm more than happy to make an exception:

    https://thinkprogress.org/war-on-thanksgiving-2017-16993c25f1bf/

    Look if you guys wanna do the Black Friday thing, go nuts...when it's actually Black Friday.  It just saddens me that way too many retail employees are needlessly forced to work on what I guess to these big box retailers is now just "generic Thursday".  Heck even Scrooge of all people gave Bob Cratchet Christmas off with pay.  Go figure!

    • Like 1

    I'm constantly mis-gendered on the phone (called "ma'am") and it drives me CRAZY!!!!

    in Everything Else

    Posted

    You know, I was kinda guilty of misgendering myself here...I heard this on the radio (back in the olden days when you didn't have YouTube and such) many times and I only just recently found out this was sung by a chick!  And quite a hot one I might add!  When SHE sings it live though it's considerably less "male sounding"

     

    Oh yeah and who could forget MegaGirl from MegaMan 8, not to mention Dr. Fudd? 🙂

    Dr. Fudd: Now when you go to Dr. Wily's tw'er, you got to be berry berry quiet!  Huh huh huh huh huh! (sorry I don't know how to word Elmer Fudd's laugh) 😄

    Why don't 8th gen games look THAT much better than 7th gen? Will this also be true for 9th gen in 2020?

    in The Gauntlet

    Posted · Edited by Estil

    1 hour ago, MachineCode said:

    I honestly think that we’ve reached a point where the clever programming is no longer the star of the show. Hardware is cheap, powerful, and plentiful. Gone are the days where guys like John Carmack are dipping into Assembly to streamline routines in order to get Doom to run on our lowly 3 and 486s. The modern mentality is to just throw hardware at it and move on.

    That's precisely what I miss most.  That you had to be really creative to get the most out of the console; the first really notable example I can think of what when Atari 2600 had to figure out how to make a chess game for the console when they were threatened with a lawsuit for false advertising if they don't.  That's just silly though, I mean the Atari 2600 is such a basic primitive system, where would someone looking at one on the shelf to purchase get such a crazy idea that it could play chess?

    post-3562-1203154154.jpg

     

    And for the NES/SNES they even used several different kinds of "helper chips" in the cartridge to get far more than what was originally thought possible with just the console alone.  BTW these chip helpers are not to be confused with Hamburger Helper obviously! 😄 

     

     

    • Like 2

    Why don't 8th gen games look THAT much better than 7th gen? Will this also be true for 9th gen in 2020?

    in The Gauntlet

    Posted

    9 minutes ago, fox said:

    Think you need to adjust your bifocals 🤓 

    Higher quality models and assets, better particle effects, better lighting systems like ray tracing, jump in overall resolution and performance, better draw distances with less pop in, faster loading with ssd.  These improvements make an impact.

    Go back and play some of those games on older systems.  You are going janky looking characters and environments and some the fakest fire and explosion effects.  They look a lot worse than you remember.

    Exactly how far you want me to go back?  I mean I've been a 3rd-6th gen gamer my whole life so I'd like to think I'm a pretty fair judge of older systems; for the most part.  Then again I have always played mostly the top blue chip games so yeah if you go further down to at least the middle of the pack of the line up, then YES I most definitely can see how you'd run into those "janky looking characters and environments and some of the fakest fire and explosion effects".  I guess i expect that for a console's top blue chip games I expect for the game's developers to make the best use of the console they can given that point in time.  Sure the characters in Final Fantasy 7 do look rather funny/blocky/pointed but back in 1997 could they have in fact made them better?

    Why don't 8th gen games look THAT much better than 7th gen? Will this also be true for 9th gen in 2020?

    in The Gauntlet

    Posted

    31 minutes ago, DoctorEncore said:

    We saw a nice bump in graphical quality and resolution when widescreen aspect ratio became standard and games went from 480i to 720p. Unfortunately, the bump to 1080p wasn't particularly notable to consumers and the industry responded by ignoring framerate and shooting for another resolution bump (4K).

    We've certainly seen some improvements in graphical quality in the interim, but I don't think you'll really see anything remarkable until games standardize to 4K/60FPS. That should happen at the start of the next generation, so hopefully we'll see some truly amazing, photorealistic stuff in 2023 and beyond.

    Oh yes indeed, I did in fact at the time view the transition to HDTV in the early-mid 2000s as well as the transition from dial-up to cable internet as like the difference between black and white and color TV back in the day.  Thing is though, even though 4K TV's have been quite affordable all things considered, there's still hardly any 4K programs!  Unless I haven't been looking through my digital cable lineup closely enough or something.

    Now to put that in perspective, you guys remember the Wonder Years episode from 1988 (takes place in 1968) called "Christmas" where the family hopes Jack (the father) would splurge on a new color TV for Christmas (which he did two years later)?  Well the reason for his hesitation and putting it off was classic sticker shock...$470 for what looks like about a 20"-ish screen.  Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $3500!!!  And by this point color TVs were around for a little over ten years already...as you can see here, thusly (a 1958 RCA Victor Color TV would've set you back about $800 or about $7000!!!! in today's money and before 1962 only NBC did color programming (hence the colorful peacock) and only once in awhile!)...

    So please think about all that for those of you hoping to score a nice new 4K TV this Black Friday or Cyber Monday or whatever.

    Open Debate: Are "cheat devices" really cheating?

    in The Gauntlet

    Posted · Edited by Estil

    This is more the old fashioned kind of cheating but YES, if you use a cheating device or in game cheat codes or save states then NO it doesn't count as truly "winning the game".  Just like how back in the day if you wanted to be featured in Nintendo Power for breaking game records or something you had to take a picture of BOTH your monitor and the game console in the same picture to prove you do NOT have a cheating device attached...or nooooooooo Power Stamps for you!!!

    Why don't 8th gen games look THAT much better than 7th gen? Will this also be true for 9th gen in 2020?

    in The Gauntlet

    Posted · Edited by Estil

    Here's another way of looking at it...you know how with the PS1 (the first disc based console that really caught on) there's a lot more room for things and such it was no trouble at all to have real voices and cutscenes and such (yes I was in fact blown away in my college days seeing those on MegaMan games, especially the Legends Trilogy)?  So it wasn't just transitioning from mostly 2D to mostly 3D gaming...but also from "silent games" (you might a few seconds of spoken dialogue at most; cartridge couldn't fit much more) to "talkies" (with CD-ROM you'd have lots of room for things like voice acting)?

    Thank God we had the good sense to preserve all those "silent" games as opposed to how most silent films (according to wikipedia it is guesstimated that around 90%ish of silent and 50%ish of pre-1950 "talkies" are forever lost 😞 ) were either thrown away or ruined (the nitrate film used back then was very flammable and gradually deteriorated quite easily) because in terms of any sort of saving for future posterity, their 'tude for the most part was:

    PS: As for "that far ahead", James Avery was just under 45 at the time of this episode...Will Smith reached that age back in 2013.  So yes "that far ahead" has in fact come and gone!

    • Like 1
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