Rock’n’roll racing got a pretty solid GBA port, it’s a fantastic little isometric battle racer from the 90’s

It’s extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there’s very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!

The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that’s quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn’t infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.

H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I’ve played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I’m not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.

It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.

No worries! :D

Ah! quite right, thanks for the correction :)

JPEG is getting old long in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.

However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google’s decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.

This is a summary from @Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world:

TL;DW:

• Patrick Breyer and Niklas Nienaß submitted questions to the European Commission on the topic of killing games (the latter in contact with Ross and two EU based lawyers).
• EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
• EULA are probably unfair due to imbalance of rights and obligations between the parties.
• Such terminations should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis (preferably by countries rather than EU).
• Existing laws don’t seem to cover this issue.
• Campaign in France seems to be gaining some traction. Case went to “the highest level where most commercial disputes submitted to DGCCRF never go”.
• UK petition was suppose to get a revised response after the initial one was found lacking. Due to upcoming elections all petitions were closed and it might have to be resubmitted.
• Also in UK, there’s a plan to report games killed in the last few years to the Competition and Markets Authority starting in August (CMA will get some additional power by then apparently).
• No real news from Germany, Canada or Brazil.
• Australian petition is over and waiting for a reply. Ross also hired a law firm to represent the issue.

This is a simplified version of simplified version.

The National Post is a right leaning publication, and this article uses quotes from a Republican appearing on Fox News to provide context for figures sourced from the Daily Mail, which is owned by immigrant hating Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News.

The article also mentions some lawyer telling Voice of America something, but the source link only takes you to Voice of America’s website, not to any specific article. It’s possible this was done intentionally to hide when that event occurred, because VOA was a mouthpiece for the Trump presidency when he was in office after installing loyal right wing followers in leading positions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America

Look under ‘Controversies’

I think it’s safe to say this article is attempting to send a certain message, and is clearly biased, so bear that in mind, dear reader.

Cheers man! :D

Appreciate your help. :)

For those who can’t watch the video:

Across the globe, companies can simply say you DO NOT own your games as long as they have a EULA, and it even gives them the power to destroy your ability to play a game!

Ross Scott (of Freeman’s Mind and Game Dungeon fame) has done the leg-work of researching how much power these companies have in various countries, and what he found was that, as a gamer, you effectively have the same amount of rights as a squirrel.

The only way to stop this practice would take millions of dollars to fight it legally in court, and uh… I don’t really see any millionaire gamers willing to take up that cause. So, in any realistic sense, the corps have won here. There’s nothing we can realistically do, short of boycotting.

BUT, that doesn’t count for the EU, Scandinavian countries, Canada, UK, or Australia. Unlike the US, they actually have functional consumer protection laws, and ways for consumers to fight back against corporate overreach without needing to have a few million in the bank.

If you live in any of those countries, we could use your help! It would help even further if you’ve purchased and own The Crew at any point in time, but you can help even if you haven’t!

If you live anywhere else, you can STILL help by helping sign a French consumer petition, which has real weight to do something, it isn’t like one of those pointless change(dot)org ones! But to participate, you must have owned the game.

You’re on the front lines of consumer protection for gamers across the globe! Your actions (if we’re ultimately successful) would likely have ramifications even in the US and Canada!

How can you help? If you can’t watch the video, here’s the website with a step-by-step guide on what you can do to help: StopKillingGames.com

This is likely going to be the biggest push for consumer protection for gamers there has ever been, so… Like, it’s kind’ve a big deal. Let’s make this count, guys.

You’re not missing much. I would honestly just stick with the order in which they were released, starting with Metal Gear Solid 1 on the ps1. It holds up well.

I personally disliked mgs2 a lot, but found 3 to be fantastic. 4 I also disliked for story which just draaaags, and 5 has the most fluid gameplay, which I did find fun, but the story was pretty meh on that one, and it ends pretty jarringly since they fired the creator mid production.

If you want just the highlights, play 1, 3, and 5.

The two PSP games are chronologically after mgs3, so I’d recommend playing that first to get the most out of them.

Mgs5 is basically a direct sequel to peacewalker on the PSP.

Drew DeVault went on to make his own alternative as well, with Sourcehut.

As others have said, you’re in that pocket of time where the game wants more than DOS, but less than modern windows, which isn’t well catered to. Your best option is a windows 98 or 95 virtual machine, which is doable, but not trivial or quick to set up.

Personally I use a Kobo Libra, as it supports sideloading books manually, supports various formats (epub, pdf, etc), has a nice backlit e-ink display, and physical buttons for page turns in addition to the touch screen.

Also doesn’t support Amazon, which is always a plus. Nice bit of kit.

Mastodon will hopefully naturally grow as twitter continues to destroy itself. Lemmy might be a bit harder get people to stick with.

If they can find an instance that really fits them, or most of their communities are here, then it should be an easy transition. But if they’re missing their favorites, it’ll be tough to get them to stick with it.

Love the idea of this. I believe slowly building up these alternative, open-source and decentralized platforms will be pay off long term as the centralized platforms bloat and die via enshittification.

That’s scary, it sounds like Youtube is following Facebook’s model of engagement.

The Godot developers created a new business entity that will facilitate porting games to closed platforms.

I used to play this as a kid before I could read, so I never got far. I’ll definitely be checking this out!