I just wanted to confirm from our meeting just now, did you want me to (some crazy shit that could cause problems)?
Haha I had exactly the same result. I tried kaizo Mario and couldn’t make it past the first 10-15 seconds.
This GDC talk about the level design for Celeste is a pretty fascinating look at how were the nuts and bolts of making it come out so polished + good
Yeah. SM64 you could say was just a normal game, after the exercise in deliberate punishment that was a lot of the NES library.
I greatly enjoyed James and Mike Mondays showing Metroid; in part 2 around 9:00 in, you can see the part where the real NES begins to set in. It’s a kind of unapologetic unbalanced hardness you don’t really see in mainstream games anymore; now it’s like a niche phenomenon if the game is just deliberately un-fun in sections to help you build character.
Super Mario World
It had by far the best tech and it finally opened up the format to the real potential and then the actual gameplay was for the first time in the series basically just a guided walking tour of all these different areas you could visit and then you got handed a trophy. Pure crap
Super Mario 64 had somewhat the same problem although with somewhat of a challenge from time to time, and with the added excuse that they were breaking new ground on the format and so it made sense for the difficulty curve not to be perfectly tuned and polished. SMW had no such reasons
I feel like it’s like sports; if you do the game then it’s interesting, but if you’re just observing it as an observer, then it’s sort of pointless.
I have observed live speedruns which are absolutely compelling though, too.
I sorta had that same reaction, yeah. His Super Mario video was endlessly fascinating and then from time to time I would go to watch one of the others and they didn’t seem all that different or exciting. Then yesterday I happened on this one, and for whatever reason, it absolutely hooked me.
Yes by roughly an order of magnitude
Not sure if it’s retro, but if you haven’t checked out Grand Poo World 2 check it out.
If you are looking to play as opposed to just binge, though, just be warned that it pushes by quite a bit the theoretical limits of how hard a game can even be, and still be fun for people who can get good at it.
Apologies if you know all this stuff already; I just like talking about it:
NES has more genre creating games than any console in history. PlayStation 1 was a similarly seminal thing, but NES was when the deep magic was written. A lot of its games simply had no predecessors; they were invented from first principles.
The exact choice of titles will depend on your enjoyment level for games that are pretty unpolished from today’s POV, but many of them are good enough to still hold up even now.
History factor: Metal Gear, SMB1, Double Dragon, Metroid, Castlevania
History factor but also still fun: Contra, Legend of Zelda, SMB3
Still fun but also hard as balls: Ninja Gaiden
Wild card: Bionic Commando
As somebody said, and im loosely paraphrasing here, most of the intelligent work done by ai is done by the person interpreting what the ai actually said.
This is an absolutely profound take that I hadn’t seen before; thank you.
This entire article is a treasure trove.
According to Air Canada, Moffatt never should have trusted the chatbot and the airline should not be liable for the chatbot’s misleading information because Air Canada essentially argued that “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,” a court order said.
Tribunal member Christopher Rivers, who decided the case in favor of Moffatt, called Air Canada’s defense “remarkable.” … Rivers found that Moffatt had “no reason” to believe that one part of Air Canada’s website would be accurate and another would not.
Last March, Air Canada’s chief information officer Mel Crocker told the Globe and Mail that the airline had launched the chatbot as an AI “experiment.” … Over time, Crocker said, Air Canada hoped the chatbot would “gain the ability to resolve even more complex customer service issues,” with the airline’s ultimate goal to automate every service that did not require a “human touch.”
Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt’s case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.
Mastodon, and just turn off federation and registration maybe, and wrap the whole thing in HTTP authentication or something so you don’t have to worry about random people finding random holes into read-only access to the content?
How could you pass up the opportunity man
Let me help:
“, and, in fact, was so well programmed that it was able to adapt and overcome some totally-not-its-fault hardware problems during the last few minutes of the landing sequence to keep the computer running, and land the spacecraft correctly.”
Short summary: A radar system on the first moon lander had an undiscovered design flaw that meant it flooded the computer with interrupts it wasn’t designed for, at the exact wrong time, all the way down from T minus 3 minutes to T minus 40 seconds before it actually had to touch down on the moon. That left the computer without enough processor time to keep up with all the real-time-sensitive duties it was tasked with – notably including flying the fucking spacecraft so it landed on the surface, right side up, in the right place, instead of, say, just falling down and slamming into the moon at a tenth of a mile per second.
So when this flood of interrupts happened, the guidance computer was programmed such that it was able to detect that it wasn’t keeping up with its stuff, for some reason unknown to it. When it realized, it had been programmed to save all its navigation data, reboot itself to a clean state, reload the nav data, and then signal to the astronauts hey I don’t know what’s going on but I got a problem guys I need some help. It happened a few times as those final 3 minutes clicked down, which gave enough time for the astronauts to talk to mission control and sort out some version of what was going on, and they were able to reduce the computational load on the computer by shutting down some stuff they didn’t need it to be doing, i.e. stuff other than flying the fucking spacecraft as I mentioned. And then, happy again, it landed them on the moon, having kept up with everything well enough in the interim to keep the lander doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing.
Basically, its hardware failed it, three minutes before landing, but it was unbothered and kept going and landed successfully on the moon. It is for that reason a legendary piece of engineering. To me at least. I like this stuff.
Here’s another article, also quite good, about another instance of the Apollo guidance computer being awesome beyond any type of reasonable expectation, a few missions later.