AtomicPurple

joined 2 years ago
[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I haven't bothered with any sort of NUS downloader in years because converting the content has always been a pain in the ass. In the past couple years there's been multiple WiiU rom collections uploaded to archive.org . Just recently, I set up my WiiU with a 4TB hard drive and used JDownloader to pull the entire North American WiiU library in USB installer format over the course of a couple days. Installing everything was a bit of a chore, but at least I didn't need to deal with any conversion on the PC side.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's a fundamental limitation of the technology. Anything wireless, when it comes to audio, requires a certain amount of fidelity loss in order maintain real-time transmission without using an astronomical amount of bandwidth. With landline telephones, you have an exclusive, end-to-end physical connection, so you're free to fully saturate the line with as much information as it can carry. It's possible to fit multiple analog audio transmissions onto a single copper line, but the signals need a hard frequency cutoff for it to work. This is why long distance and international calls used to sound worse than local ones. In a similar vein, terrestrial radio has to split airspace between multiple stations, which is why it sounds worse than records or reel-to-reel tape, despite each station using a massive amount of bandwidth by modern standards.

Moving into the digital realm, the same principles still apply, but you can push bandwidth requirements way down thanks to the inherent efficiency of digital encoding, plus the magic of digital compression algorithms and error correction. As a result, wireless digital audio transmissions can maintain a much higher level of fidelity than analog ones, compare Bluetooth audio to FM, for example. Quality still needs to be sacrificed somewhere when transmitting wirelessly though, which is why audiophiles bitch about Bluetooth headphones and wireless mics. Even the best digital audio compression can't compare to a copper cable carrying an unfiltered analog signal.

Digital audio compression is what makes it even remotely possible to have hundreds of real-time audio streams transmitting wirelessly to a cell tower, unfortunately you have to reduce the audio quality down to the absolute limits of usability in order to pull it off. Even if you still have a copper land line, the audio is always going to sound like crap if you talk to someone on a cellphone, it's just not possible to operate a large cell network with the same level of fidelity.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Second this. Just today, I was moving a couple terabytes from my work PC to my media server at gigabit speeds, and the transfer was absolutely hammering the poor quad core i5 I've got in it. Surfing the web was less than pleasant for an a hour to two there.

Edit: I didn't see OP's reply to this comment when I first wrote it. I agree decompression is the most likely culprit, as it can be CPU intensive and compression ratios vary quite a lot from game to game.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

If it's good, I have no reason to bring it up.

This describes my relationship with Dell perfectly. I never buy anything from Dell, and I always tell other people to avoid them. The best thing I can say about most of their products is "at least it's not HP", and the few decent things they sell tend to be massively overpriced.
Despite that, I have a ton of Dell products that I've either saved from the trash or have been given second hand over the years, and my experiences with many of them have been just fine, maybe even bordering on pleasant in some cases. The monitor I'm looking at right now is a Dell, and it's pretty good.
On the other hand, I've spent afternoons ripping my hair out trying to adapt power supplies for their stupid proprietary motherboards, or figuring out how to compile a fan controller driver for Linux, because their laptop fans won't fucking spin until a proprietary driver is loaded in the OS.
Guess which Dell products I tell people about when they ask me what computer to buy? It's sure not the ones that are decent, but otherwise unremarkable.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't think this is entirely accurate, as sites like Facebook and YouTube have had large mod teams on their payroll for years and still have safe harbor protections for user created content.
What I could see happening in this case, is safe harbor protections no longer applying to accounts with mod privileges, possibly even those who aren't being paid. If Reddit started paying mods, it could be reasonably argued that mod status constitutes an endorsement / publication by Reddit inc for anything a mod account posts. It would also give anyone working as a volunteer mod cause to sue for unpaid wages.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

I like it, but it's not as good as the original Soul Reaver or Defiance.
The biggest issue this game has is the save system. In the first game where you could save pretty much anywhere and just had to navigate back to the last area you were in after loading. In Soul Reaver 2 you can only save at preset points which can be few and far between. There are sections of the game that take multiple hours to complete on a first playthrough, where you don't have access to a save point and quitting means losing your progress.
The world design has also been downgraded somewhat IMO. The environments look much nicer and there's a wider variety of them, but the world as a whole is much less interconnected. The first game was a pseudo metroidvania, where completing an area would unlock shortcuts and everything linked back to a central hub. Soul Reaver 2 is much more linear, and the parts where you do have to backtrack are more tedious as a result.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That would have been the original Soul Reaver. Soul Reaver 2 was a PS2 exclusive

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 17 points 2 years ago

I think the implication is that no competent legal council would sign off on the messages sent by Reddit admin, therefore Reddit's legal department must have been sacked. As for the rest of it, I can't say.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

This is why I try to involve my 5 year old god daughter in whatever tech project I'm working on whenever she's over. I also have a bunch of edutainment games running on my Windows 98 PC that she plays. She knows how to use a keyboard and mouse, which puts her well ahead of her peers from what I understand.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm the exact opposite. I love metroidvainas, and will usually tear through them in a few sittings.
A well designed metroidvaina world acts like a single interconnected puzzle box, and unrevealing them is majorly addicting. I go out of my way to backtrack through previous areas whenever I can in order to get every item and find every secret. I very rarely get lost in these games and when I do, figuring out where to go next is usually a simple process of elimination. The real challenge / frustration tends to be figuring out where the last few secrets are hidden after already exploring the whole map map multiple times over.

I absolutely hated Metriod Dread for how linear and hand-holdy is was, and was shocked to find that people actually enjoyed it. Outside of the combat, I had a terrible time with that game. I felt like I was fighting against the level design up until the last 15% or so when it finally opens up and becomes an actual Metroidvaina, albeit not a very good one due to the aggressively linear map structure. Personally, I want to see more games like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, who's worlds are so massive and convoluted that I can't easily intuit exactly where to go and have huge areas that I managed to completely miss on my first play-through.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Personally, I'm interested in the GEX remasters. I'm kind of unclear on how this compares to bog standard emulation, but If they can fix the framerate issues and collision bugs in the 3D games I'll be sold.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

So can this thing actually duplicate the GameCube's video output? If so, this man's just created the best worst way to play Kirby Tilt 'n Tumble.

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