Tons of the games were simple shmups, so I can understand people who might have the wrong idea about the library. Also, the library in Japan was way more impressive than what made it to the west. Gekisha Boy in particular still stands out as a fun and unique game (though you can play a translated version on your Mister). Fire Pro 3 is an incredible wrestling game that I still play today (no japanese required). There was another game, Zero4 Champ, which had unique drag racing gameplay (it was all about timing your gear shifts). It was hard to play without japanese knowledge, except for the 2 player head to head races. For CD games, of course, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is well known.
I actually really liked Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu. The NES version is pretty ok too, but I think the TurboGrafx version is a bit better. There's also the Bonk games, Air Zonk, Alien Crush, and Legendary Axe: all pretty fun games with good art style and decent controls.
Rondo of Blood was actually the only PC-Engine game I had actually played before the MiSTer, and of course it's a classic for a reason, it's great.
Something I find charming in how utterly incompetent it is is the Addams Family game on the CD. I have no idea how the hell it was even released, let alone made, because it is absurdly bad. You play as the lawyer from the movie (the absolute least interesting character in the movie) and apparently all the Addams' want you actively fucking dead. It's so unbelievably terrible that I sort of got obsessed with it and managed to actually beat it.
NEC made some great looking consoles, in Japan. The PC Engine, the PC Engine Shuttle, the IFU-30 unit "briefcase", and the SuperGrafx. I think console design peaked with the SuperGrafx.
In the back of my mind, I have the idea that US regulations required extra shielding that the Japanese model lacked. Maybe this isn't the case. Maybe some American marketer decided it was just too cute or too small.
I think the redesign of the NES shell for the North American market was largely for vanity reasons, wasn't it? Entertainment system instead of computer, grey plastic instead of beige, front loading instead of top, long cartridges that were supposed to look like VCR tapes instead of toys.
N also took the opportunity to remove the lockout chip, since the system came out so late in the lifecycle and they were largely successful at stamping out unlicensed releases.
The Japanese version of that redesign also got compatibility with existing SNES Multi-AV cables (at least the composite ones, the AV Famicom didn't output s-video) while the US version was RF-only (and AFAIK is worse for jailbars than any previous NES)
My understanding was that after American retailers were burned so hard by the Atari crash, Nintendo wanted to position the NES as far from a 2600 as possible.
If they had just let you remap the controls so you had fierce and round house, the two button controller would have been serviceable. All the ports of that game are good. I’ve compared them side by side (SNES, Genesis, PCE) and they’re frankly all fun.
I did have a PCB worked up that lets you convert anything to a PC Engine controller. Can’t give them away!
All ports by capcom are good :) which means all console ports (apart from the sega master system port, which is impressive just not by capcom). The Amiga, spectrum etc etc ports were god awful.
Though apparently the super street fighter port on the Amiga is rather decent.
I'd love to read something in depth about the capcom console ports. The snes, magadrive and pc engine ports all look like some minor miracles! I remember an interview with a snes developer at rare were he said sf2 is the most impressive game on the snes. (Think I read that in retro gamer UK mag in the last decade or so).
Proper layoffs require at least 60 days of notice or 60 days of pay. Maybe you weren't part of a proper layoff, but if you think you were, check out the WARN act.
The WARN Act is triggered if there is a mass layoff of at least 50 employees (excluding PT) and that number represents at least 33% of the active employees at a single employment site
OR, if RIFF means closes location (with 50+ employees affected).
Younger men are into gambling for a lot of reasons. It's just too easy to gamble when you can do it on your phone (especially when you're already on your phone). They don't think hard work will get them ahead in life (they are probably correct, given housing prices, etc.). They are bombarded with ads (during the games you can bet on!), influencers, etc. Gambling apps are gamified and give you a lot of incentives to keep coming back. Gambling is addictive enough...
It started as a joke, we used to laugh at the groups of guys who would gamble their food money doing "feast or famine"they knew it was dumb and so did we. Then the joke slowly moved over to my group of friends doing so and we knew it was dumb and treated it so. Fast forward 6 years and its so entrenched in daily life every single guy I know at least casually gambles weekly on their favorite sports and some do multiple bets per day on games they dont even watch. I bet $20-$50 on MMA which is like 5% of my income each week thats considered low.
Young man I’m going to give you a piece of life advice. You don’t throw your money away on something frivolous like that. You buy a long term, safe investment, like FartCoin.
You don’t buy FartCoin for the short term gains, you buy it for the long term. For example it’s down over the past hour, but if you look long term (past day) it’s up.
And yes of course I’m joking. If you’re spending money on these get rich quick schemes instead of dollar cost averaging into an index fund, you’re being irresponsible. That’s real advice.
$50/week at 10% compounding monthly for 10 years works out to ~$41k
Maybe that means a lot in 10 years, but... is it that impactful now? More impactful than gambling surely, and perhaps this is a bit myopic, but I feel like you wouldn't even be able to buy any new car with that amount 10 years from now. Hopefully it'll still count as an emergency fund.
We saw the value of money halve over like 4 years while everyone who had money made bank. It's tough to be hopeful that any amount saved is going to go far in the future tbh. $41k is about 1/10th of a down payment on a half-duplex, assuming you're keen to borrow the remaining $1.1m.
Definitely don't gamble though, that message I can get behind.
The median home price in the US right now is ~$400k[0], so that's a 10% down payment. While 20% is the traditional target, you can get loans with 3% down, so it seems pretty substantial to me. If you saved that $50/week starting at 18, you could be a decently confident home-buyer in your 20s. If you and a spouse each did that, there's your 20% target.
I agree. I find men in the 18-30 range being a prime target for targeted gambling ads.
In Australia, it is also not just in app/browser ads either. Gambling promotion is very normalised and entrenched.
The major sports on news and sports shows have the odds showing who is likely to win. Some sports analysis shows (especially on pay TV) even go as far as providing overs/unders for line betting or "possibly wins" from multi-bets (bet $100 and you can win $123,000 with this combination).
Around the sports grounds - all covered in ads. The scoreboards have odds. The team and competition mobile apps all have odds. Even commentary on the radio has ads inserted regularly during a call: "Player A runs up and kicks a goal, and they are now level with 10 points on the Elon-Musk SpaceX Scoreboard. An amazing goal, it's a candidate for the Anthropic goal of the week." During quarter/half breaks, they give more options to bet on. Due to this, I prefer mostly to listen to commentary on public broadcasters as they are not allowed to contain ads at all. I find commercial radio trying to insert brand names every second sentence rather than providing expert analysis.
Similar to loot boxes for teens. It's building up habits for future gambling addictions. Mostly FPS games - that are prominently targeted at teenage boys.
Remember that a lot of men in the 18-30 range have been using lootbox mechanics in games since their teens. Or at least similar game mechanics where you are rewarded for taking a risk or loyalty with a random reward (loot tables, daily login rewards etc.).
I think a lot of gambling related material is targeted at the ages below legal gambling age with the specific purpose to get people to start gambling from legal age, however that would be hidden of course. Similarly no one becomes an alcoholic or smoking addict overnight the day they become of legal age for that substance, there is a buildup period.
Gambling addiction is way more damaging the younger you get in touch with it.
Gambling and scalping (and the combo that comes from reselling things like pokemon cards and other blind box products). They really do seem like the only options for a lot of people to live the kind of life that they've been sold as the ideal.
And as much as I hate that this is what is happening, I feel like that's what I'm going to end up being forced to try after 15+ years in working software development jobs, given how badly the companies want to replace us with LLMs. Hasn't gotten to that point yet but I'm shocked every day we're not laid off.
You say "a lot of people" but there aren't many of those. The scalpers/pokemon resellers/... making bank and posting on Instagram are, if not outright fraud, at best the 1% to 0.1% of those trying to do it
You might be interested in the IBM PC compatible and Wintel wikipedia pages. This is a super high level timeline, but it is more interesting to get into the detail.
At a high level, the IBM PC platform were very well documented & sold well, to the effect of producing tons of software and peripherals add-ons ("PC Compatibles"). This led some other computer companies to reverse engineer the proprietary IBM BIOS, allowing them to run the same software and use the same peripherals. Because these were clean room reimplementations, IBM didn't have a legal case to prevent their sale.
Fast forward a bit, IBM's attempt at a new, closed platform, PS/2, flopped. People wanted their more open hardware. Windows became dominate enough that all the demand was for x86 based hardware that could run Windows. Microsoft was happy to work with many vendors.
The PC is very open today, but Apple survived. Atari ST and Amiga probably survived longer than you think as well.
AI slop is hurting my community in a different way. We have an internal viva engage community for quick development how to type questions at work. More frequently, instead of asking "how to" questions to the crowd to crowdsource answers, people are reaching out to me directly to ask me why the solution AI suggested doesn't work.
That people trust AI over an organizational knowledge is bad enough. I fear that AI is turning people generally antisocial.
Do they also say you're wrong, then proceed to "prove it" by pasting more AI slop that they don't understand?
The first time that happened, I had the courtesy to point out why the slop was incorrect... I don't know what that did for my social capital. I fear/suspect people are getting attached to their pet AI to the point of taking personal offence when called out.
This is happening at my workplace and it's incredibly annoying. We get support tickets asking us to troubleshoot AI written scripts. The funny thing is that most of the time, it would be faster for the customer to tell us what they want to do in plain english and have us make it for them. Hell, if they make an honest attempt, we can point them in the right direction and teach them.
It's frustrating because we're bundling this shitty AI with our product so we're just making more work for ourselves. Then there's the push from leadership to use more AI...
I don't think it's making people antisocial though, people just like easy solutions to their problems. We're giving them what seems like an easy solution. But it's easy for them, not easy for the reviewers.
Testing is expensive, subjective and favors people with resources to game the test. When thinking about stuff like this, we should aim for something more universal, with the understanding that this is not a moral judgement on a person.
In the context of the article and of controls, I think we should worry more about controls on those in power (i.e., politicians) than others (i.e., voters).
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