So in high school in the late 90s we had these “ZapMe” computers in the library, which some corporation offered, crippled to a few programs and showing ads in the browser
We also had the Channel 1 TVs and Taco Bell in the cafeteria
Anyway some student eventually realized you could open the file directory and other apps from PowerPoint or something so for my last two years we essentially had a bank of Zombies Ate My Neighbors emulators in the middle of the library
Saw a bunch of early 2000s-ass character models in early 2000s-ass goth style and before scrolling to the text was like “was this that Vampire: The Masquerade game?”
Do you ever think how weird it is that in modern days a form of art can appear, rise to glory, and then go extinct all in a time frame of just about a decade?
Java mobile games made that path in the span from early 2000s to early 2010s. By 2010, Java mobile game could have had graphics and gameplay comparable with 1990s console games, decent plot and great (adjusting for weak hardware ofc) music... Just a few years later, everyone forgot about them because of transition from keypad phones and Java to touchscreen phones and Android/iOS... And then that market niche was filled by sudokus, Candy Crushes, and hyper-casual ad-filled "games". That's honestly sad.
if you’re running a taxi service you can’t just charge for driving someone from A to B, you have to charge for driving from A to B to C, where you pick up the next available passenger.
if more people take taxis then there are more passengers to pick up so the distance from B to C will decrease, allowing you to charge less for the drive from A to B, increasing the number of people willing to take taxis in a virtuous cycle.
however, trips are not random and at any given time there is a net flow of passengers in a particular direction: into the city, out of the city, from north to south, or whatever.
this is bad news as in the worst case it doubles the trip length: if every passenger gets picked up in the city and dropped off in the suburbs 10km away, then the fare must reflect the total round trip for that passenger of 20km.
Uber’s subsidies do not solve this problem as they cannot manufacture demand for trips that no one wants to take.
one can postulate some kind of nanotech self-driving car that simply dissolves into its constituent atoms at the end of the journey instead of making a round trip but absent some technological break through the fundamental problem still remains weighing the convenience of being able to travel somewhere no one else is going against the cost of travelling somewhere no one else is going.
someone has to pay for the return trip and it is either the passenger in the form of higher fares, or the driver in the form of lower pay, or the Uber investors in the form of subsidies.
there is an upper limit on the fare that passengers are willing to pay for a trip before they consider alternative arrangements, and a lower limit on the pay that drivers are willing to accept before they consider alternative employment, so the only unknown quantity is exactly how much capital can be ploughed into subsidies before the investors baulk.
Downstream of how the one Blockbuster Video store left in the world is in Oregon, our local retro gaming expo’s tournament is now officially the Blockbuster World Video Game Championship III
Every time I go by PSU I’m reminded how well Infamous: Second Sun got Seattle, that’s just what the juxtaposition of Victorian PNW, Prewar PNW, ‘60s-'70s PNW, and '90s-'00s PNW architecture looks like
Realizing now Final Fantasy X-2 probably wasn’t from-scratch an idea to make a sequel, playing enough of the smaller-name Square games in the PS1/2 era and seeing how like, systems were iterated across various series in combination with others (for example, Parasite Eve makes “upgrading your weapon” the key to equipment in terms of allocating finite resources to customize, then Vagrant Story goes absolutely nuts with it as part of a “randomized loot has very many variables and attributes” thing, then FF8 does it in terms of gating power boosts to progression and encouraging off-rails exploration)–
It just seems like one of Square’s staff designers was like “well, we have an idea for a job system game” and someone was like “eh, this doesn’t really feel rich enough for a real numbered entry in our flagship series, but you could reuse the characters from the last one and make it girl power dress-up themed, LOL”
“the falador massacre”, an infamous runescape event in which a player was able to pvp kill in non-pvp areas, resulting in thousands of player items and gold being looted from corpses with no possibility of rollback
Falling down a wiki hole about video game adaptations of The Name of the Rose, and particularly La Abadia del Crimen (a 1987 Spanish-language adventure game based on the novel; a redux version is available for free on Steam, including translations into English, French, and Italian), which has yielded what is certainly one of the better paragraphs written about a video game:
If the player disobeys any orders, or are late for services or meals, then their obsequium level, indicated on the bottom right-hand-side of the screen, will drop (obsequium is Latin for subservience or obedience). If the player’s obsequium
level drops to zero, the abbot will not tolerate their disrespect any
longer, and the player is asked to leave the abbey, while missing a
prayer office or being caught wandering around at night results in
immediate expulsion - both mean that the game is over.
There is also a form of copy protection:
if an illegal copy of the game was detected, then once the player
entered the church, instead of “Ave Maria” playing, a voice would cry “¡Pirata!” (Spanish for “pirate”) ten times in descending tones before the game crashed.
The game had a modest commercial success and was never officially
released outside of Spain, a country where it came to achieve a cult following. The game is considered one of the perfect ten games for the Spectrum 128 according to Retro Gamer.
The game was referenced on a Spanish postal stamp.
Other gimmicks might overshadow that Bridget Guilty Gear joins Ness from Earthbound and Mike from StarTropics in the rare fellowship of yo-yo-equipped vidya characters
joins? Bridget’s been whacking people with yoyos since 2002.
I’ve seen a lot of nun dick without knowing this
In any case, Bridget was the most voted character on basically every Guilty Gear fan poll out of Japan, and (not coincidentally) was the poster boy (girl?) for the Unsettling Gender Reveal trope. I chalk up her (his?) exclusion from the Xrd trilogy to the, er, volatile gender politics throughout the mid ‘10s.
Oh yeah, like I’ve been seeing a lot of nun dick the whole time, for decades, since before e-hentai when you had to make do with mangakan.net’s 3/5 doujins daily
And that aside, Guilty Gear was King Of Fighters-level obscure in America. At least some people had played Darkstalkers cabinets
Other gimmicks might overshadow that Bridget Guilty Gear joins Ness from Earthbound and Mike from StarTropics in the rare fellowship of yo-yo-equipped vidya characters
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