Remember how I played Bounty Bob without knowing that if you jumped straight up, ju could start a side-jump any time you were in the air (by wiggling left or right), making livel 23 finishable…
That one tile you had to walk on, I spent so much time trying to jump in the craziest patterns to get to it with no success of course 😅
I played probably around 100 hours of "a boy and his blob" on the gameboy. Never finished it, never understood it, couldn't read english (not that it would've helped but i didn't know) never even finished the first level if it even has levels.
Except sites deliberately break themselves if they can’t harvest your data. You can’t even browse reddit on Tor anymore.
Even merely using Fennec on my phone, I encounter shopping sites where I actually plan to spend money refuse to work because they can’t recognize “my device.” Or they refuse to sell me products where I live if I’m using a VPN. Creepy-ass behavior.
I suppose the only way out is through, and we should simply refuse to use sites that are designed in such a way, but it feels like a losing battle.
lol advance auto parts (one of the three major auto parts stores in the us) won't let u use their site with a VPN. so I just use the other two lol. like I can understand a government website blocking VPN traffic. but auto parts store?
Trying out Librewolf, I realized just how many sites (including Reddit!) use tricks like canvas fingerprinting to identify me up to 99% uniqueness. And here I thought just a VPN, uBO and no cookies would be enough!
There’s so many more tricks to identify you, check out browserleaks.com
It’s honestly scary how easy it is to fingerprint you. I’m using LibreWolf (PC) and Firefox Beta with Resist Fingerprinting and Strict Tracking Prevention turned on (Android) with uBlock Origin in Medium Mode, JShelter in Strict Mode and LocalCDN. That prevents much of it but sadly not everything
Edit: Didn’t click your link, sorry for recommending browserleaks “twice”. My Canvas Fingerprint is 100% unique, although it changes each time I refresh (thanks to JShelter iirc). You can also simply disable WebGL (I think LibreWolf does this by default)
It’s honestly scary how easy it is to fingerprint you
Yeah, 💯. Of course, if we resist fingerprinting too much, we make ourselves have a unique fingerprint again 😁 I assume some of the tools you’ve mentioned randomize the fingerprint instead of just hiding it?
Lots of ways to track besides cookies. There are many ways you can fingerprint a user. It’s actually pretty hard to not have a unique fingerprint on the Internet.
Yeah I had one and the battery life was not great, so you could not use it in all of those places unless you were rich and had an endless supply of AA batteries. I had the original B&W Gameboy and the added magnifier / light combo that took even more batteries.
It was good for a couple hours on one set of 4 AA batteries if I recall correctly. We did have rechargables back then but they were Ni-Cad and they sucked, took forever to recharge.
You’re right that it needed a light source, but the battery life was actually pretty decent if you didn’t have cheap batteries - around 15 hours, which is a hell of a lot better than a Switch.
Yeah I had the original B&W Gameboy and the battery life was not great, so you could not use it in all of those places unless you were rich and had an endless supply of AA batteries.
It was good for a couple hours on one set of 4 AA batteries if I recall correctly. We did have rechargables back then but they were Ni-Cad and they sucked, took forever to recharge.
I think its a bit different with the internet on all devices now, games and tv and stuff like that is fine after the age of 3 or so but those micro-transaction addictive games and social media is something else you have to keep an eye on
In post-USSR countries, those were definitely more prevalent. I had one of the “off brand” consoles and a bunch of cartridges, some without casing, even. Also had that light gun thing that you could point at a TV screen for the duck hunt game
The old old games - the arcade games - were made difficult on purpose to farm coins for continues, in fact. Then with video games, publishers gradually started flipping it over to encourage players to complete their games and buy new ones
Kinda. Publishers often found arcade difficulty spikes useful in home console games because it would mask how little content there was. Super Mario Bros could be beaten in an hour or two by most people if the lives system didn't send you all the way back to the beginning of the game when you ran out.
I remember buying a book with the secrets of Super Mario Bros (and other NES) games typed backwards so you had to use a mirror to know how to warp from 1-2 to 4-2 to get to 8-1.
I doubt I’d have finished…but I’ve got a TG-16 I can’t beat anything on.
I still have my Nintendo power guide book for all the super Mario Bros, The legend of Zelda 1, link, all the mega Man games… And a few others. I also have two original NES systems, a super Nintendo, N64, PS2, and a Wii.
Making the game harder also made a smaller game last longer. If you remove the difficulty factor of lots of most old games, either by tweaking it or mastering it, then it becomes possible to beat the game in a matter of minutes.
Yeah, I was surprised when I first started watching longplays and discovered that most 16-bit and under games took 20-30 minutes to beat if you knew what you were doing.
The real scams were games with countdown timers that went down constantly unless you were able to get a lucky object. Notably, Gauntlet. You had to keep putting in quarters or you would die even if you were really good.
Yeah I was never into arcade games as a kid. I realized right away that they were made to be difficult for that reason, so it felt like they were not worth it.
But games at home, at my commodore 64 or Amiga, were often difficult too. There was often no tutorials even. You just started playing and figured things out. I remember feeling like I had all the time in the world back then. As an adult, I often feel my time is limited and I should be doing something useful with it.
Well there’s a few things for early at home games, for one the instruction booklets were actually worth a damn, often containing the story, tutorial, and more. Also, size was at much more of a premium, so since instruction manuals were a thing, it was considered a waste to have all of that stuff in the game itself. I’m sure there are exceptions but that’s the general idea.
Much as I lament the loss of good instruction manuals, it’s understandable why they went away in light of why they were necessary before.
Yeah the best manual I ever read was for en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunship_(video_game), it was amazing. A thick manual explaining so much about the military helicopter and how it worked. Was thrilling to read as a kid.
I don’t remember the graphics being so bad though…:) But it’s pretty shit by today’s standards.
I swear I probably spent like 2 solid weeks after school just running into walls in the Water Temple because I couldn’t figure it out. And I used to 100% like everything I played. You’d find out every secret, every cheat, and spend hours. Especially once things like GTA came out, just hours and hours of doing functionally nothing. Fuck even games I didn’t really even like I was an expert in. These days, I’m lucky to get a few hours a week on a game, and I rarely finish anything that’s not exactly the type of game I’m extremely into, and 100% is a thing that basically never happens anymore.
Not as much as if there was no rental business. It was bad for them, Nintendo even tried to stop blockbuster from renting their games. They weren’t designing games thinking about the rentals.
But they sure did by selling extra copies, plus if the game was good we’d buy it. I’m convinced the TG-16 never took off because they didn’t let places rent games.
Plus game rentals made owning a console more attractive and that means perhaps more potential sales for all games you’ve produced.
Short view you’re right, long view I think rentals helped the industry much more than hurt it back then.
Arcade games were difficult because they were the microtransactions of the day, and console games were difficult because that’s how you made a simple game last longer.
Yeah … don’t needle around carefully jumping onto one block then spend half an hour positioning yourself right to the edge to give yourself enough room to run and jump … You have to learn to make a full on run over the pipe, just touch the far edge, land on the far block still running at full speed and time your jump at the last possible moment … It’s a skill that takes months to achieve … I know because I spent an entire summer one year doing that.
Trying to plug a DP cable in there with a hammer is about the only real explanation I can think of for this kind of damage. I’ve seen and repaired some gnarly receptacle damage before but never anything that deformed the metal and surrounding plastic like this.
It does, having all the humanity knowledge in your pocket is amazing and you can learn a lot which people do use to learn and get smarter. Sadly not everyone uses it that way and some just refuse to learn but that’s just loud minority (I hope).
I would argue that it’s contributed to the collective stupidity of humanity on a global scale. It’s had a lot of positive impacts as well, of course. I guess the negative ones just seem more palpable.
Yes, but now stupid people can easily collaborate with other stupid people, amplifying the echo-chamber-circle-jerk on a global, nearly instantaneous level. Furthering the stupid at a never before seen rate.
Has it, though? I grew up in the 80s, and I feel like I simply didn’t have a clue how ignorant people were or what batshit things people believed behind closed doors. Even when people disclosed to me their inner narrative, I feel like I just assumed they were joking or using extreme hyperbole.
The internet has made me realize … they weren’t joking. At all. They really believe that shit.
I’m approximately your age. I assumed the same thing. Hell, I thought crazy conspiracy theories were just people pretending “What if…” together.
In my younger days I would have been on a lot of bandwagons just to joke about the people who “didn’t get the joke”. It turns out I was the one that didn’t get it.
I would look at it from a different angle. Before the internet you had to have a lot of knowledge in different areas to be able to sound and behave smart, and also to make good choices.
Now you have knowledge readily available everywhere and there is much less incentive to learn things you don’t currently need, just to have it available in case you talk to someone about this topic.
This has become even more evident with AI, where you don’t have to skim through a lot of context to find your information, you just ask what you need and it is presented the way you need it right away.
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