It's interesting to me

[681137d629e1avoodoo47]

creepy facebook crap, 2025 edition - mentions the record number of babies one single woman had is above 50 during a RL discussion, fb 2 hours later "hey it's actually 69".

*paranoia intensifies*
[creep.JPG expired]

[681137d629fe2fox]

The trouble with tribbles. I guess with that many mouths to feed, you can completely forget about privacy. Just a hint, eh...

[681137d62a1f5Valet2]

Some cool guys who started making videos involving people who are obsessed with retro computers, games, collecting and stuff paid me a visit again. This time we invited our forum member dp_flint from a small but cozy group in vk. During an hour-long conversation we talked things about System Shock as a phenomenon.

Russian only, but there are great intro and outro, so check it out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvpacOtxiGI

[681137d62a3a4icemann]

And now for something a little different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAjwXFEtdc

I've been a massive fan of Samurai Pizza Cats since I was a kid. To see a game for the series 30 years later is wonderous news. Count me in.

[681137d62a4b5fox]

I don't think this ever aired on any of our TV/cable channels at the time. Looks like something I could've liked.

Edit: Well, according to Wikipedia it actually did air but I don't recall this at all.

[681137d62a5a4icemann]

Think Voltron or Power Rangers except Cats as the characters (rather than humans) and far more comedy.

[681137d62a6c0voodoo47]

so a bunch of C&C games got a source release. EA.. good now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezpzl6T6duY

[681137d62aa41icemann]

voodoo47
Its a great day for fans of the franchise. The remaster which covered C&C1 and Red Alert 1 (with all expansions included + heaps of bonus content) was excellent. Hope to see source ports for the entries that don't work well under modern Windows. Missing is source for Red Alert 2&3, C&C2 and 3, which really could use the same kind of love.

EA may not be the best, but where Command and Conquer is concerned its great to see stuff like this. Hope to see a proper new entry in the future someday. But not like C&C 4.

On the subject a new mod was released a short while ago, called "Command and Conquer: Combined Arms". Imcludes all factions from C&C and Red Alert (GDI, NOD, Allies, Soviets and Scrin. I had a play of it and really enjoyed it. Highly recommend it.

Link:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/command-conquer-combined-arms

[681137d62b8b8ModdedInstall2]

Y'all are pretty tech savvy, so I feel like you might find this interesting. Plus, it relates to something else I like a lot!

Over the past six months, a team of people have developed two tools, XenonRecomp and XenosRecomp, for static recompilations of Xbox 360 games. Last Saturday, they just shadow-dropped this in a livestream, as well as the first project to be completed with them - Unleashed Recompiled, a full PC port of 2008's Sonic Unleashed. It's actually an incredible port, and the recomp tools are also pretty cool.

https://github.com/hedge-dev/UnleashedRecomp
https://github.com/hedge-dev/XenonRecomp
https://github.com/hedge-dev/XenosRecomp

[681137d62ba28WhyHelloThere]

Also taking this opportunity to formally link my guest name with my account name, because I can't always sign in conveniently, but I know I'll forget if I wait until I can sign in.

[681137d62bba1notaavatar]

I was thinking about how system shock 3 would be after playing tomb raider 2, with the maria doria ship. A space wreck is not exactly a new concept, but I found this video interesting about the perils of real life  ship wreck exploring
 
Youtube:
The Andrea Doria Shipwreck Diving Disasters
Morbid Midnight
86.8K subscribers


I kept thinking that it might be too much like alien isolation, but ship wrecks are a deep topic. I think they are more popular now with that whole shtf situation with the titanic probe.

[681137d62bd6ffox]

Trailer for "Tron: Ares"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KVG_X_7Naw

Cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth. Certainly looks 'kewl' but most likely it'll be another case of style over substance. Looks like they are going for an update in the Matrix-sense, otherwise the digital creations invading "real life" would be the dumbest thing ever*.

Also, a Disney movie with a Nine Inch Nails-soundtrack...

* Yes, I know that this will realize an idea already presented in Tron: Legacy. I'm not happy about that one either.

[681137d62bef5voodoo47]

so uhh.. a certain Doom mod has been updated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJYuSQp2RwE

[681137d62c001voodoo47]

speaking of Doom, Doom 2016 is on sale on GOG, is there a mod that would make the Cacodemon look like an actual Cacodemon? no proper Cacodemon no purchase.

[681137d62c179fox]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

Let me correct that for you, Todd Howard: "Everytime we think about Oblivion, it's 'what if we could sell that moment to everybody again? What if that horse armor came in Ultra High Definition this time?'" Right on, aim for the stars, not for the knees.

[681137d62c2ccvoodoo47]

with a sprinkle of body type 1/body type 2 character creation buffoonery, or so I have heard. that ought to make everything better for sure!

but he wouldn't be getting my money either way, so don't really care. just play the original modded™

[681137d62c465fox]

I might get it on sale at a deep discount at some point, for the time when nothing fresh is in queue to scratch that Open World-FP-RPG itch anymore. I liked Oblivion enough to consider re-playing it with some modifications at some point but I really dislike the cash-cow death milking and the ubiquitous wave of remakes.

[681137d62cdb4icemann]

Been considering playing Daggerfall (via the Unity remake). Never played it before however, and from what I've read it has its issues. Love the 2D sprites and look to it all. I don't like that quests aren't flagged as main questline + you can't replay them (unless you have an earlier save) if you fail them, which puts you into an unwinnable game state. One of the negatives to retro gaming. Not something you come across in every game, but you do every now and then with some.

Only ES game I've played all the way through was Skyrim. Really enjoyed that. Tried Oblivion, but the level scaling + the fact that mages sucked in it, really put me off it. Morrowind never played. Several friends loved it.

In other topics: Ever since December, been taking on rom hacking for the first time ever. Translating a game (Nanatama - Chronicle of Dungeon Maker / Dungeon Maker 3) on the Sony PSP. Very steep learning curve, and for a long time I was getting nowhere. But then in December (I'd been trying on and off prior to that) I discovered about romanic-fonts (which take up 8-hex bits) compared to the standard English style fonts (which take up 4). Using those I was able to make progress.

As my knowledge on the subject was zero before starting, I've not done anything fancy. Most translation projects start off with the hacker (hacker as your rom-hacking) locating the text display function the game uses, and modify it to use standard English fonts / variable width fonts. I looked into that early on and got nowhere. The other common step is adding more space to expand the rom and adding in blank space, then slowly changing the pointers address for each text display, to the new space added (thus being able to do longer words and sentences). Again my knowledge there is zip, and got nowhere there either.

So just been directly editing the Japanese text, with the Romanic English letters. Via that made a lot of progress. The catch is being limited by however many Japanese letters were in each segment of text. Sometimes leads to having to use abbreviations (eg "STAT" rather than "STATUS") or in the case of sentences, only saying the key parts essential to it's overall intent, and not putting in the additional flavour text due to the space limitations.

Been fun to work on, and it gives me something to do, when not doing work stuff. Got roughly 1/4 of the game done and fully playable. It's meant doing a super slow (at times) play through of the game, and stopping each time some new text comes up. Been dealing with mental health issues for the past few months, which is something I'd never had at this level ever in my life, and having something to distract from that all helps.

Took on the project in the first place, as I'm a HUGE fan of the other 2 games in the series (Dungeon Maker) which got US English releases. Nanatama being the only entry not to get one. Good side is that with the other 2 to draw from, it's assisted in making sense of some words that Google translate and DeepL can't translate correctly.

If your curious on the project, I put up dev blogs every few weeks. Like this one

[681137d62e21ffox]

I have never played Daggerfall, so I can't say anything about it. The level scaling was indeed Oblivions' biggest issue. Apparently they have changed something about it for the remake, not sure what exactly. I seriously played Morrowind for longer stretches but it never fully grabbed me and I kept bouncing off it multiple times. Everything about the region and  lore seemed far more alien and less grounded than Oblivion or Skyrim (which overall was pretty great, too).

[681137d62ee78fox]

Spain, Portugal and parts of France are experiencing a blackout right now.

This comes three days after our local news (and only those) reported a temporary small scale blackout (a couple of surrounding villages were affected) after someone used an angle grinder to fell one of those huge metal electricity poles at 4:00 AM. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

[681137d62efbcicemann]

Wasn't that due to some rare space thing? Heard a mention about it on the news earlier today.

[681137d62fbd3fox]

They haven't determined a definitive cause yet. "Induced atmospheric vibration" caused by extreme heat and rapid temperature and/or wind changes in Spain and/or a "solar storm" is just one theory that one of the responsible grid providers came up with very early on yesterday. A (rumored) fire in the Pyrenees, where the Spanish part of the grid interconnects with France, is another.

I'm not sure what would be worse: multiple countries blacking out due to man-made attacks or due to fairly common weather in early spring.

Apparently this catastrophic situation didn't end up in the chaos and mayhem it easily could have but imagine what would've happened, if the gradual reboot of the grid had failed and the outage continued. This is the stuff for some serious nightmares right there. The signficance of the event can't be overstated.

Even as it stands, the financial damage alone is estimated to be in the billions.

Edit: theguardian.com

Reports on Monday initially blamed a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” for the outage, with news agencies citing REN. However, REN on Tuesday said the statement was falsely attributed to it.

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These are hopefully entirely unrelated to the recent incident but nontheless interesting in this context: 
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/01/could-hackers-use-new-attack-to-take-down-european-power-grid/
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-controlling-street-lamps-and-power-plants
https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7323-wie_man_einen_blackout_verursacht
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/10/power-grid-attacks-00114563