Here to talk about fighting games, self hosting web apps, and easy weeknight recipes.
My mastodon account: @tuckerm
My blog: https://tuckerm.us
Come to think of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.
Whoa, turns out to be a lot of them. 14,400 as of a few minutes ago! https://steamcharts.com/app/10
That’s as many as the two most recent Battlefield games have combined right now. Battlefield 2042 currently around 8,000 and Battlefield V at 6,000. I’m sure console players would boost the Battlefield numbers quite a bit, but still. That’s pretty cool.
I downloaded an ISO of it a while ago and played through maybe third of the game. I found it to be very playable. People always mention the long load times, but it’s worth mentioning that long load times were much more common back then. (Although Half-Life on DC was even longer than usual.)
Also, I hate to be nit picky, but the blog post linked here manages to be weirdly wrong about two things and it’s barely one paragraph long, lol.
Half-Life is one of the most successful video games of the early 2000s.
Ahhh, 1998. One of the best years of the early 2000s.
Half-Life was everywhere… except one notable place: Sega’s Dreamcast. It has been a mystery as to what happened with a game destined to have a port on every possible platform.
Half-Life was a PC exclusive until the PS2 port in November 2001, ten months after the Dreamcast was discontinued. The PC and PS2 versions are still the only official versions to this day. Half-Life is not known for being on every platform. Was the author thinking of Doom, one of the best games of the mid 70s?
Yes, recently! About two years ago I realized that I wanted more physical media in my house. I wanted stuff that I could put on a shelf, so that when someone came over, they could look at that shelf and say, “Hey, I like that album,” or “Oh, I’ve read that book.”
So I went a used bookstore near me (and immediately fell in love with it, why the hell was I not spending more time there before), and bought an extremely beat-up paperback copy of A Game of Thrones and a CD of Santana’s Greatest Hits.
When I got home I realized I had no way of listening to the CD. I didn’t own a CD player or a Blu-ray player, my computer didn’t have an optical drive, nothing. Then I remembered my old Dreamcast, which was in a box in the garage. So I got that out, set it up, and listened to Santana’s Greatest Hits on ye olde Dreamcast. CDs sound so much warmer on a Dreamcast…
That is also what renewed my interest in retro games. Wanting to listen to a music CD reminded me of how great that system was.
A homemade RISC-V fightstick? This is combining all of my favorite things! I bought a leverless controller recently (an SGF Bridget).
I’m only vaguely familiar with microcontrollers, but I know there are libraries out there for using an Arduino to make a mechanical keyboard or fightstick. Is there something similar for the CH32V305?
That is very cool, I hadn’t heard of that before. I have never done anything with a microcontroller, but I’m thinking about it for RISC-V. It sounds like that might be one of the better ways of getting a RISC-V device in practical use, until more software packages become available for a full Linux machine.
Wow, thanks! That’s fantastic. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Docker images will have to be recreated for RISC-V, but it sounds like some of the most important parts of the stack are useable already. Nice to see that nginx works – I was leaning towards moving my blog to a RISC-V SBC, and it’s just a static HTML site.
That looks so cool. I was completely unaware that there were desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs. I thought they were all still SBCs.
For sure. Plus, I’m a sucker for fighting games where the characters are 2D sprites instead of 3D models. The DC probably had the best lineup for that, ever.
I like the fact that there are games that are still best played on the Dreamcast, or only played on the Dreamcast, since there was no follow-up console after it, or because the ports were not great. Today there’s always a remaster, backwards compatibility with the next console, or at the very least a sequel, so games just move along with the hardware. But the Dreamcast had some games that just lived and died on that system.
Weirdly, most of these turned out to be fighting games. Probably because Capcom liked the Dreamcast.
My favorites that are still best (or only) played on that system:
Wasn’t Border Down the very last Dreamcast game? I think it might have been. (Well, the last official one, anyway. Homebrew games are still coming out.) I bet a lot of people missed it for that reason. I hadn’t heard of it until a couple years ago. I hear it’s good, though.
Still some of the best pixel art and animations ever, in my opinion.
I loved all of the Sega-related Easter eggs in the Shenmue games, it made them the perfect sendoff for Sega’s hardware.
Same, and that is still the way a d-pad should feel IMO.
This post made me realize just how few consoles had a CD flap. Is it just the Playstation, Dreamcast, Saturn, and Gamecube? Kind of weird how that was the default for CD players pretty much forever, but not many consoles went with that. PS2, Xbox, and everything after those had some kind of tray or slot. Maybe it was because they could visually stand apart from their competitors more that way.