opossumcarrion

6 Aug

Demake86 is a tiny, unforgiving, and legally-distinct homage to the original 1986 Metroid, developed over two years using absolutely no AI. Happy 40th, Samus! Play Demake86 for free in your browser: opossumcarrion.itch.io/demake86 #metroidvania #indiegaming #godot #gaming #noai #samus #metroid

opossumcarrion.itch.ioDemake86 is now open source!Demake86 is now open source on GitHub . Demake86 is not-a-remake and not-a-demake homage to the original NES Metroid. I promised to open source it on Codeberg on release, and it's been over two months...

Demake86 is now open source! More details here: opossumcarrion.itch.io/demake86/dev... GitHub link here: github.com/lynnpepin/de...

An #Obsidian CSS snippet I use with very very subtle editor bound lines, and line highlighting (both for where my text cursor is, and my mouse cursor). Actually a huge improvement in usability for me while adding almost no visual clutter

I do not usually enjoy horror or retro-adventure games, but I found myself enjoying Tenebris Somnia. With the option for "God Mode", I felt happy I could skip it if the survival-horror got beyond what I cared for. I didn't enjoy Prey until I turned on lowest difficulty, for example. So...

This is a very good game, but some of the emotional beats are softened by bugs, e.g. losing audio in cutscenes. Can't have the emotional heights of your game be lacking the audio portion. This is an incredible game but these (possibly Switch exclusive?) bugs destroy the experience :(

Also, hey, I'm, at the actual actual final boss. I think I have an alternate form (rot13) jvgu syvrf? Abg fher ubj V tbg guvf... (I had to search up a longplay to get the matching audio, but I have a different cutscene, wack)

I find the final boss(?) in Tenebris Somnia to be much more difficult than the rest of the game. I am done at this point, so I turn on God Mode. But that turns a forced-death encounter into a forced-death-but-you're-stuck-and-need-to-load-from-save encounter :(

In the end there is only one attack you need to avoid, and it's easy to avoid. But it does frustrate to get bumped into it when you're on your fifth try already. A few bugs mar the experience but I am still appreciating this game

I am largerly anti-AI, in large part because I spent 4+ years as a researcher in deep learning. Neural methods are very capable and in 2018, I would have imagined todays LLMs would be at least 40 years off. The incentives, the power, and who holds it are the big concerns here.

I was also a cybersec researcher, and the "anyone can destroy the world overnight by typing on a laptop" doomsday scenario is plausible, a bit moreso now with LLMs, sure. But this AI doomsday scenario serves as a distraction for more plausible, non-doomsday humanitarian catastrophes.

Billions of humans exist in a complex economic system, producing for one another. The poorest people consume little more than the minimum needed to live, to produce goods for wealthier people in our global economy. Worst case: If their labor can be automated away, what happens to these people?

A position of "LLMs can't do anything" will leave you unable to see how these are accelerating inequality and concentrating power. Labor displacement, surveillance, automated weapons, etc. These are huge force multipliers for the dynamical problems we understand as emergent from capitalism

Tenebris Somnia short review: For as much as I am enjoying this, the "confirm/interact" button is on the Switch port is B. This is proving to be problematic! I have too much muscle memory, I keep confirming when I don't mean to, and vice versa. This should be configurable in the control settings

Continue? Yes, A- wait, I mean B. Are you sure? No, B- wait, I mean A. :(

I am enjoying this game, it is very very good. But this B/A thing is just too much friction with this for me to get used to, after about 90 minutes of playtime. Can't imagine I am alone so I will wait for a patch

opossumcarrion reposted

House House

@househouse.com

An explanation on why Big Walk isn't available on Xbox. bigwalk.game/xbox

I'm watching "My Dinner with Andre", which was enthralling from the very start and I can't put my finger on why. I am probably becoming an annoying and pretentious person

I stopped playing Other M for emulation pains + unfun pacing, so I'm onto Samus Returns. I am in team "Mercury Steam took a lot from Other M". Right off the bat, you'll notice Samus' ship carries her name in Chozo lettering, as was introduced in Other M. Maybe I really ought to finish Other M

Fedora Linux thoughts: - I underappreciated how pampered I was with a Debian distro - 13 month support windows concerns me, I like the stability of the LTS - I am regrettably now familiar with Nvidia GPU troubleshooting woes. Took me 16+ years - I am indeed a Gnome Freak

Other M thoughts: - Japanese fan translation text is a lot better than the English text - This opening tutorial area is the worst in Metroid so far - The animations on Samus in combat are incredibly slick - MercurySteam really takes a lot from Other M and does it better, gotta say

The "Samus needs Adam's permission" is stupid. The thumbs down thing is silly. Adam as an unfailing moral paragon and authority figure is stupid. But then again I really dislike anime and this is anime to me. I forgot "father figure Adam" is just textual. Geez

It doesn't help that this is kind of laggy on my Dolphin set up, hurts the gameplay. Adam gives half guys free rein to do use their unique guns. Come on man

- Pixel hunts are going to be so much worse with this Dolphin config.... Oof - Choosing to believe "princess" as a nickname is the result of a misunderstanding of the specifics of Samus' Chozo heritage - I don't actually mind Samus' characterization as an under emotive undersocialized freak

- I do love Anthony. Shining part of this game - One of the first places you can enter is a women's restroom (the men's is closed off) and with no discernible purpose - I do love how serious this game is. - Adam, navigation booths, taking place on a space station... Many points for "it's 3D Fusion"

- 8 direction dpad movement is fine and good even - Samus taking orders from slimy men is important for her arc in Dread and (apparently) Ravenous. I sure hope all these dudes die later on! - Can't say Other M isn't as ambitious as a Metroid game should be

Metroid Zero Mission remains my favorite of the series by far. What a good Metroid game.

Widely discussed: Pixel art made for CRTs. Barely discussed: Pixel art made for non-backlit reflective displays. You need exaggerated contrast, usually dark-subjects on light-backgrounds, often with thick or double outlines. It tends to a more cartoony design for visibility

(Photo not mine) It helped to keep the player centered on the screen (so you can position them even with poor visibility). Now we have backlit displays, but the compute power to make a garbled visual mess, so the "center the player" tip still applies :o)

"We are bound by our experiences. They are the limits of our consciousness." For as linear and hand-holdy Fusion is, the navigation booths served the narrative well. This was a big thing to drop on me as a small child. It's sad how dumbed down the narrative and dialogue in Dread is.

Don't get me wrong, these are all games for children, and that's ok. But Metroid really benefited from the more serious themes in Fusion.

Ran into a bug in the Metroid Fusion penultimate boss... (Spoilers) The SA-X second form, instead of dying, just became invulnerable and kept dancing around. This was on the NSO version. Apparently this is just something that happens

I also appreciate when missiles "dink" and fall off things they don't affect. It might be the silliest thing in the Metroid series, it stands out in this otherwise very serious game, it's so funny to me.

I appreciate this as the most narratively dense game in the series. After the reactor meltdown, ADAM hypothesizes that the X might be willing to secure a pyrrhic victory against Samus, perceiving her as a threat to X elsewhere.

Playing through Fusion again. I enjoy it more, but the level and environment design is certainly a downgrade from Super. I appreciate the smaller and tighter levels.

(Metroid Spoilers) Did we ever get any more lore on why the Metroid Prime looked like an X parasite before its death? Not much to go on, probably nothing, but there's gotta be more to go on here

Just like Super Metroid revisits the environments and enemies from the original, Metroid Fusion does this for Metroid II. The game goes out of its way to tell you the BSL environments are based on those of SR388, and the creatures within are lifted from there too.

Metroid II reused the same few boss fights numerous times. But the second-phase X-parasite battles are very similar to the alpha and beta Metroid battles. They're floaty horrors you need to pump missiles into.

Every time I beat Super Metroid, it's around 1h50m. This time was 1h52m. And beating Metroid II recently clocked in at 1h52m as well. What the heck

Playing through the Metroid series again. I played through NES Troid recently and then again this weekend, and it was even rougher the second go around. I love Metroid so much, and I love the original for what it is, but I certainly can't say I am having fun when I play it

I am nearing the end of Metroid II. This holds up much better. Fewer (but not zero) sore Nintendo-hotline-bait spots, controls much better. The cramped screen and atmosphere were inspos for Demake86. I remember hating II when I last beat it as a kid in 2009, but I am having a blast.

I always thought "the Chozo engineered the Metroids to fight the X" was plot added-on to contrive a reason for Fusion. But, the final area departs from rocky-terrain and looks like a lab, replete with glass jars. Seems like worldbuilding. (Screenshot from OmegaMetroid.com)

"AI took the emdash away from me" well I used to write in dyslexia-friendly style guidelines in a formatted list with summaries at start and finish. I'd even ask people if they'd prefer a different tone or more details at the end. I didn't even write any tpyos

What was with the militant, almost fervently optimistic lyrics to the iCarly theme song? I WILL MAKE YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND. YOU KNOW YOU WON'T BE FREE UNTIL YOU WAKE UP, THE MEMBERS OF MY NATION. IT'S YOUR TIME TO BE. RAISE THE HAND THAT DRAWS THE LINE. THERE IS NO CHANCE UNLESS YOU TAKE ONE.

Idea for Activision's first Halo: Spinoff farming simulator set on Harvest before and during the events of Contact Harvest. Stakes are high, leading the breadbasket of the complicated war against other humans. Until winter of year 2, when the stakes get even higher and the gameplay changes entirely

Going to play through the mainline 2D Metroid series in release order, including notable fangames. NEStroid, II, Super, Fusion, Zero Mission, AM2R (2.0 by then hopefully), Samus Returns, Dread, Prime 2D, Prime Origins fangame, then M. Planets Anything big I'm missing?

KellyCrystal also has a few big fangames that I haven't played, and I'm excluding the many ROMhacks out there, but I'm mostly focusing on remake-style fangames.

March 28th 2025 I paid $186 for 64GB RAM. It goes for $1269 now, USED. (CORSAIR Vengeance DDR5 RAM 64GB (2x32GB) 6000MHz )

quadruple-entendre title for my scarlet letter modern-day adaptation, "Parish the Thot"