MudMan

It'd be like a modern day executive wearing cufflinks.

We've had buttons for a long time, some people are just hipsters.

But also, Star Trek has a long history of justifying contemporary-looking people as a fashion choice. I've always remembered this one thing from one of the novels where they imply that they can easily keep everybody thin and fit indefinitely, but admirals like to get a bit pudgy on purpose because it makes them look stately.

And also makes casting and wardrobe choices a lot simpler, but I don't think the book said that.

Meh, it depends on which of the issues you're flagging. Games are large for understandable reasons, both technical and practical. The optimization problem is... complicated, and my thoughts on it get really into the weeds, but it's not as simple as people would think. And I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the "can't fix our game" panel, because at best it makes no sense.

The always-online thing is maybe the most controversial, and you'd definitely find the most developers who agree with you on that unconditionally. But also, tons of offline games get made on all types of scopes.

Oh, no. It was not.

The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB. For most of the life of the medium you'd mostly get the 74 min, 650MB one. The stretch 700 and up standards were fairly late-day. I tend to default to 500 in my head because it was a decent way to figure out how many discs you'd need to store a few gigs of data back in the day, though, not because I spent more time with the 63 min CDs.

Bloat is out of control because games are HUGE and you can often trade size for performance if you have enough memory to do so.

Also, memory used to be extremely expensive, especially catridge ROMs. Outside of the Switch this is less of a concern now, that's true, but the tradeoff is you get to have pin-sharp high resolution assets and tons of performance optimizations instead of... you know, just chopping enough frames of animation to fit your sprites in 16 megabits then charge a hundred bucks for the extra-sized cart. You can buy a terabyte of extremely fast storage now for the money it used to cost to buy a single game shipped on a cartridge.

And in fairness a lot of microcomputers at the time were closed specs. Even on PC for a while you were theoretically aiming at a 4Mhz XT or, at worst, also wanted to account for a 8MHz AT. By the time IBM clones had become... you know, just PCs, a lot of devs either didn't get the memo or chose to ignore it for the reasons you list.

Most of the time "lazy devs" are just "overworked and underfunded devs", but the point is, that didn't start this century.

Hah. In fairness, sound cards weren't "minimum requirements". It's just that depending on the hardware you had the game would just have a completely different soundtrack, 75% of which sounded completely broken. If you were lucky the "minimum spec" was silence. If you were unlucky it was making your beeper sound like somebody had tripped a car alarm.

People these days are out there emulating Roland MT-32s on Raspberry Pis. I didn't have a sound card until the Pentium era. Every DOS game in my memory sounds like a Furby got a bad case of hiccups.

I leave this as an example, but please understand this is the absolute best case scenario. Michael Land and the rest of the Lucas guys were wizards and actually cared to tune things for multiple options, including really impressive beeper music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr-84mjV3CI

Right. That was common, too. Games were tiny and very expensive, so broken balance was often used to pad out length. And yeah, it got crazy once Americans started popularizing rental and publishers got desperate to make the games less economical to beat without purchasing them.

I did finish Ecco 1 legit, though. Once.

I've tried the last couple of stages a few times. I still don't understand how tween me managed that. Even on a CRT with original hardware and zero lag that's a stupid thing to try to do.

Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.

I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.

Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.

Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.

Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.

Again, you're looking at it wrong. Or weird, at least. It's like asking why I'd be mad that the brand of cookies a member of my family eats gets a price hike if I don't like them myself. They're still in my shopping cart every week.

I don't have a concept of a "primary sub holder". It's stuff a group of people gets for the group, and who is paying for which specific parts of the fixed expenses is lost to the mists of time.

I get that US and anglo cultures in general are less collectivist, but this seems more extreme than that. Surely the concept of a close-knit group of people sharing costs without much precise bookkeeping is not completely alien to you. Do you split grocery shopping with the rest of your household? I mean, I did that when I was sharing an apartment during university, so maybe it's an age thing?

Hah. This is me respectfully nodding in your general direction.

Although I'll admit that in my case this mostly manifests as me buying literally any food I haven't eaten before and putting super gross stuff in my mouth, no matter how transparent of a marketing scheme it is. I bought that coke they asked ChatGPT to formulate. This is a real problem.

Also, if anybody is curious I put a pinch of salt in my tea today. It was fine, not noticeable. I'll try a bigger pinch next time.

I appreciate the sheer gumption. They should have doubled down and just called it "money". Plural "moneys". How much is it? Seven moneys.

Actually, now that I think about it I know at least two countries that arguably already do that, so... you know what? Euro is dumber. Love it.

Honestly, people pointing this out should have called it quits the moment they named the currency "euro". I mean, at that point the way this was gonna go was both obvious and inevitable.

Just think, in Cyberpunk they went and called the currency "EuroDollar" because it sounded like a fun sci-fi joke. "Hold my beer" memes may be a bit old at this point, but man, they're appropriate here.