I love TAS! I used to follow a bunch of SNES TASsers back in the day; haven’t really kept up with the more modern runs outside of the occasional GDQ event. There was a culture of “swag” that I enjoyed, where if something didn’t cost any time then the TAS was encouraged to show off with it, or chain-spam cool stunts during waiting periods.

I kinda wish they’d stop focusing so much on arbitrary code execution though. ACE setups are interesting to explain but tedious to watch, and the payoff is whatever payload the TAS authors write, not game content. It’s basically showing off a game mod, but since you’re writing assembly code in the least user-friendly manner imaginable, most (with a few rare, incredible exceptions) are simple skips to the credits so the video is just the bot running around performing random actions until the game suddenly ends.

That’ll be the tie-in interquel that’s critical to understanding the plot, but will only be available in Japan and… let’s go with Bolivia this time.

I miss when machine learning was getting big. Communities were sprouting everywhere and making so many interesting demonstrations using it, and I mean genuinely interesting, not tech bro delusions. These were AI that could actually learn and improve themselves (albeit over thousands to millions of randomized iterations; they were still dumb as rocks compared to even the simplest animals), and stuff like genetic algorithms could brute-force discoveries that humans hadn’t found even after decades of trying (for example, I believe a major hurdle in modeling protein folding was finally solved using these types of AI).

It was especially cool in the video game space. Hobbyists were doing crazy shit like getting an AI to reliably play a racing game while balancing vertically on the tip of the car the entire time, or setting up complicated mazes only for the AI to figure out how to cheat by launching onto the walls through physics engine exploits. AIs were making novel discoveries rather than just mimicking and piggybacking off of humanity like LLMs do.

You can’t spell ‘fun’ without ‘eff you’!

I’ll never be able to hear their name without getting upset that they were relegated to work in the Skylander mines for a decade instead of allowed to make another Star Control.

The new Sergeant Johnson voice isn’t giving me a great impression. They should have hired the guy who did a spot-on Johnson voice for InfernoPlus’ Cursed Halo mod.

Edit: Though looking into it that might be problematic, having a white guy taking the role of a black man.

Hey now, many of them read none of it and instead half-listen to sermons where a priest extrapolates a ridiculous amount from a few scant lines of text.

The memory surplus wouldn’t be immediate after the bubble pops; at least not for regular people. What they’re currently producing isn’t one-to-one compatible with desktop PCs - most of the secondhand stuff from decommissioned AI datacenters wouldn’t be usable outside of servers, and it’d take a while for the newly freed fabs to start churning out consumer-grade memory again, factories to install it on consumer chips, and for it to make its way to the market (mass shipping is much slower than people think). That delay would hit producers hard, possibly gumming up the works even further. Modern economics is not at all equipped for supply chain failures.

There’s a reason people are panicking about this bubble, and that’s not even going into the far more devastating stock market crash likely to happen when it pops. It’s a nightmare in both economic and technological terms, but a small group of people stand to make a ton of money from it so they’ve gutted the regulatory agencies that would have prevented things from getting this bad, or at least softened the blow.

The moment emulation began embracing mod support, it became peak gaming. You can now play your favorite old games with randomizers to mix things up, higher resolution models and textures to make them look more modern, patches to disable obnoxious elements (goodbye, low health alarms and lengthy animations for basic world actions), and even add entirely new content (this was extremely difficult in the past, but modern decompilation projects have made better tooling possible as a side effect).

There are even projects combining games so you need to swap between them to progress, so you can be playing Super Metroid and find a key item for your playthrough of A Link to the Past where a missile upgrade used to sit and vice versa.

Tony Hawk ain’t got nothing on this.

It’s a shame the series died. It managed all of this in an open-world city with hundreds of NPCs and vehicles while designed to run on an underpowered console with only 512 MB of RAM. Who knows what insanity would have been possible on modern machines?

Mercer is canonically multiple tons of biomass compressed into the shape of a regular human, and the game absolutely sells that. You leave craters in the ground when you sprint, crush hoods and windshields when parkouring over traffic, can knock attack choppers out of the sky by jump kicking them, and one of your best moves against tanks is to run up a nearby building and body-slam down onto said tank, crushing it in a single blow.

I can’t think of a single other game that does power fantasy better, and Prototype manages it even though Mercer is actually incredibly fragile and can die in seconds when you get into a bad spot.

Prototype devs: What if basic character movement sprayed blood everywhere?

For one, I believe Mystra (the goddess of magic) has been killed and replaced with a new version twice now to explain why the rules of magic changed between editions. If I recall correctly, cantrips (infinite use 0th-level spells) are explicitly called out as something only possible because of the effects of the Spellplague spawned by one of her deaths.

Sadly not as good as the original.

Apparently he’s an author, but yeah, mostly famous for his internet presence.

I wonder what ruleset they’ll use, given that the different D&D editions are firmly embedded in the Forgotten Realms lore and metaphysics. The original BG1+2 used 2e which is ancient and deeply flawed so I doubt they’ll stick with it, but a lot of the rule changes on the road to 5e (especially to magic) are tied to in-universe events that wouldn’t have happened yet.

or there’s something stressful going on in the world

That’s my secret, Cap. I’m always stressed.

The second image in your post seems broken.

Thanks, ants.

Thants.