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Cake day: September 3rd, 2023

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  • I never went very far into SimEarth (I remember getting a bunch of maxis’s simstuff in the 90s, and not having the patience to really get into some of them back then).

    However, I did play Spore during its prime. It’s very shallow, on all levels. Don’t expect any kind of simulation in there, especially not physics or even basic biology and evolution really.

    Its whole gameplay loop : design a beast, eat or make friends, be a tribe, fight or make friends, design a town and vehicles, fight or make friends, design a spaceship, fight or make friends and try to reach the center of the galaxy because I don’t know.

    You can manipulate planet atmospheres in the space phase, but there are no variations : you can basically make planets “suitable” for life, and all life in the game needs the exact same parameters. There is zero room for experimentation and everything is basically just as efficient as everything else.


  • Absolutely. I bought two kits (first VR, then variety) just to see what the deal was with them. It was a while after release, got them for a bit cheaper. I didn’t expect it to be that smart, to be honest. For a curious 10-12 year old or so, it’s fantastic.

    Just the piano toy touches stuff like optics and IR, waveforms, frequency, and of course there’s the satisfaction of building that thing with all those moving parts.

    I’ve seen so many people missing the point completely and calling it “expensive cardboard”. It’s like seeing one of these kits for kids letting them assemble a simple radio, with instructions and an introduction to electronics, and complaining that you could buy an actual radio for a quarter of the price.





  • Both screens were also just awful about blurring during fast movement. Nintendo wisely avoided it altogether,

    While mostly true, they should have told Rare too. Between blurring and bad contrast, Donkey Kong Land was almost unplayable.

    (By the way, screens with bad blurring from fast moving stuff were still a thing for a long time after that. Dracula X Chronicles for PSP had the original PC-Engine Rondo of Blood in it. Small, fast black bats on a bright background were almost perfectly invisible)





  • A good score can definitely change a game to me, but yeah if you’re going to claim “staff” from legendary games I’d assume more than one guy, and people who had a hand in design.

    I know and like lots of games scored by Sakuraba, and not that I don’t like his music but… I don’t know, it tends to sound very same-y and almost random at times. Especially in that 00’s era. There was a corny melody pattern he put in all of his big themes at the time, Tales of Symphonia, Baten Kaitos, Golden Sun all had it somewhere, and I couldn’t hear anything else when it happened.

    That said, when it works, it works and it’s pretty unique. True Mirror and Valedictory Elegy from Baten Kaitos are very good, and a perfect fit for their games.