And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.
Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)
I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself -- I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn't understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it's clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates... (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)
I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?
I hadn't played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn't great when you asked this question -- but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such -- and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It's got orange and white stripes. It's scratched up a little bit, but it's still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to "improve performance"... lol)
The game opens with a short animated splash screen -- a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game's logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off -- somewhat confusingly; it wasn't immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn't find it very helpful.
The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don't really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it's not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.
There's an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.
The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don't know well enough to name -- but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going "AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!" over and over.)
I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) -- and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it's also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a "boing-a-boing-oing-oing" failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.
The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there -- or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can "build" a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn't seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).
Unfortunately I don't have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:
By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.
which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I'm running it on has a 3.7GHz processor -- obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance -- but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p
Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print -- although I haven't tried it.
I've seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob's Ladder. That was a night well spent.
Out of the games, I've played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried -- never really made much sense out of that one though.
I don't know if it's that obscure... but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games -- do you remember the song with the lyrics "I'm just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life"?
Yeah; I also tried subbing in case that kicks off federation and searched a few titles to see if they ended up in random incorrectly as well (stuff like that happens sometimes with kbin). The magazine has seen a few microblogs mentioning the channel, and it clearly picked up the avatar/icon, description, etc. somehow, but doesn't seem to be getting any videos as threads/posts and I couldn't find any floating around disconnected either. I think kbin most likely doesn't understand what PeerTube is publishing through AP, but there could always be federation weirdness or something.
Still WTF, but at least the label matches the picture...
Edit: the lower left probably says something about black pepper and salt (ブラックペッパー＆ソルト) -- I can't tell what the rest of the characters are though through the JPG compression. Probably (<something> included) for the parenthesis bit?
I think they're specifically wondering if using @<username>@<instance> mention syntax will result in a notification popping up for the user on Lemmy.
I've been wondering that too (in the context of threads though) -- and if it does work, are there limitations regarding visibility between instances that people should be aware of. e.g. what happens if I @ someone in a post to a community on a lemmy server that is defederated from their home instance? Or, in a community that no one on their home server has subscribed to? Will they still get a notice?
I guess I don't really have a good mental model for how @ works on the Fediverse.
That's exactly how I wrote the community links in my original post on kbin though. i.e. the literal text I posted for the first sentence is: I was introduced to the boykisser/girlkisser meme over in !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone recently, and today the power of memes compelled me to make this. I think something is not getting translated correctly when sending the message from kbin to lemmy. Maybe kbin is converting it to a link first and then sending that to lemmy instead of the literal text of my comment?
Related to linking, is there a syntax for instance-relative post linking? (Or even just a good recommendation for how to link threads without driving people insane?)
CommunityLinkFixerBot replied to my first comment here, but (1) bot messages do not federate to kbin (I checked the post on ani.social manually to make sure it showed up the way I expected and saw an extra comment counted; if I hadn't done that I'd have never seen the message), and (2) I linked with the exclamation_mark-community-atsign-domain syntax as it recommended so I'm not sure what's going wrong or how to fix it. Maybe there's kbin/lemmy interoperability weirdness in how my post was conveyed?
I don't think kbin and lemmy support mutual direct messages, so at-ing you on this post since I'm not sure how else to get in contact with you to see what's going on with the bot.
I was introduced to the boykisser/girlkisser meme over in https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196 recently, and today the power of memes compelled me to make this.
I've tagged it as OC since I made this meme image for kbin/lemmy specifically -- i.e. it's not a repost from reddit or 4chan or wherever -- but the image is, of course, based on a screenshot from Karakai Jozu no Takagi-san. I asked recently on my "Shinobu Horror Story" post to https://reddthat.com/c/animepics about whether or not this is the right idea on how to use the OC flag, but didn't get feedback. (Actually, does that OC flag even get copied over to lemmy or is that just a kbin thing...?) Anyway, let me know if you have opinions on this.
A vote on kbin/lemmy is closer to a retweet than to a vote on reddit in terms of its potential impact on folks. You are publicly saying you support/do not support a post by voting on it (which might be taken as publicly thanking someone with an upvote or publicly saying fuck you with a downvote in some contexts); that can be a workable system, but it's surprising if you're coming from reddit where basically no one but the admins (and whoever they told/sold the data to) actually knows what you voted up/down.
Hell, consider all the drama around "YOU DOWNVOTED ME!!" / "No I didn't!" BS that was so common even when it was just suspected -- now it can be confirmed (again, for better or worse), for kbin users. I was on reddit for a long time and just thinking about that crap makes me feel tired... -.- Downvoting on kbin is potentially picking a fight every time. The end result is that I've basically never downvoted anything except some spam bots. I don't need that shit in my life again -- even for some of the posts that I think really should be downvoted, I'm just ignoring now. (Not getting into it further. Don't ask. I won't respond.)
If your IRL identity is associated with your account (or can be figured out eventually...), upvoting something really spicy could also end up causing you the same kind of drama IRL as retweeting or commenting strongly on the post -- e.g. job loss, loss of business, targeted harassment/violence campaigns, loss of friends/romantic partners, etc...
I really don't need more drama in my life, so I'm a bit more mindful of how I'm voting (for better or worse) and some stuff I probably would've voted on before, I am just leaving alone now.