It’s just making a joke about the game being challenging (he’s only the hero if you win). Game media used to be a lot more playfully antagonistic back when many games weren’t necessarily designed to be won.

(And while I’m here, that manual has other odd stuff in it that predates Nintendo setting global standards. It has multiple uses of the word “kill”, and it has an “ask your parents” bit about the domino effect).

Like everyone else here, I’ve got no love for Nintendo’s business practices, but the owner of the software having officially endorsed ways of playing their stuff on modern devices (let alone replications of original hardware, like with their old controller releases) has basically always been a good thing, both for average Joe consumer that’s interested in game history and doesn’t know what a ROM is, and for the emulation community who wouldn’t ever pay for this stuff but can often build off the tech (or educate us on the problems with it). Is any of this the ideal? Of course not, locking ancient games being a subscription is typical megacorp horseshit. But a kid being able to pick up a brand new Switch 2 and play Game Boy Arkanoid and Virtual Boy Teleroboxer on it is something.

Art of all forms shouldn’t be virtually inaccessible to the masses outside of methods of questionable legality (although, make no mistake, I think those methods are good too, and these things can coexist).

Whether or not the games are objectively “good” or popular is totally beside the point. Just because I can easily download a pirated version of some forgotten 80’s b-movie doesn’t mean it’s not a good thing when it finds some form of new life through an overpriced official boutique blu-ray release.

Wario Land is still a really great game on it even today that doesn’t deserve to be locked on flawed hardware (the motherboard disconnects one of the lenses over time and it’s a pain to repair), and Red Alert is one of those games in which the limitations actually, probably accidentally, give it a really unique hypnotic style, and the dual gamepad controls (also used to nice effect in Teleroboxer) ensured it didn’t just feel like a regular Nintendo game of the time. I don’t doubt it inspired actual classics like Rez.

I get the hate for the Virtual Boy - most games on it barely feel complete, it was uncomfortable to use, it made your pupils dilate - but it is a fun and important piece of weird gaming history, and Nintendo acknowledging it as such and finally officially allowing people some way to play those games again (knowing full well it’s going to get a lot of hate) is still a good thing overall for classic game preservation.

It would be, if this wasn’t passing off old news from right after the Switch 2’s big reveal trailer as something new: https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-switch-games-free-switch-2-upgrade

(The games that weren’t free to upgrade then still aren’t now).

I know we hate Reddit here but this site is just taken from and rephrasing this post, which is more informative (which at least they were nice enough to link to): https://www.reddit.com/r/blackberry/comments/1jmalqp/a_startup_is_bringing_back_an_updated_blackberry/

(There’s also a pretty damn good chance this is total BS - the poster says he “used AI to cover up their actual design”).

I love VRR when it works but man it can look horrible when it doesn’t. Prince of Persia; The Lost Crown on the PS5 runs great at 120hz with VRR… if you don’t mind the entire screen flickering rhythmically every few seconds, just like this article describes.

Honestly, not having a new Xbox, the best I’ve seen VRR look in action on my TV is on my docked Steam Deck, but that has its own problems - the display drivers on the deck completely wig out if you leave VRR on when putting it into sleep, and if VRR is on on your TV the picture won’t even display after waking it if you have the resolution set to anything other than “automatic.” (You can sort of work around this by keeping the cursor on the VRR toggle and “blindly” toggling it in the quick menu on wake, but still… wonky stuff that really proves how many years it takes for things to catch up to display innovations.)

It’ll break saving books you bought from Amazon, but you’ll still be able to send books you got from other places to it from Calibre. Fortunately barely any of my ebooks on my kindle are from Amazon (though my next ereader isn’t going to be a kindle, that’s for sure).

I put my microfiber cloths in one of those delicates laundry bags and toss it in with a regular load on cold, then let them air dry. Never had any problem with them scratching lenses.

I actually just spent a year or so doing this during break times at work with EAC. I ripped everything to WAV because storage is cheap, it’s a bit faster, and you can tag WAV files now, so I saw little reason not to, though FLAC is usually just as good and has wider support, so it’s up to you (you can easily convert back and forth if you change your mind, since either is lossless).

The key factor with EAC is to use it with AccurateRip (which is built-in to the app, but you need to configure it with your drive properly for it to work). There’s a lot of info on configuring this online but like with anything that touches audiophile communities, there’s a lot of bullshit you have to sort through as well. You’ll see a lot of people saying to set it to the slowest option to ensure a perfect rip, but 99% of the time you don’t need to do this - AccurateRip will compare your CD to what other users have ripped and ensure a bit-perfect match. In the event you have a rare CD or it doesn’t match the database, that’s when you set EAC to run slowly (secure mode) and set it to test and verify the tracks. After ripping, I use MP3tag to search musicbrainz or Discogs to tag the tracks and it’s good to go. In the event you’ve got a slightly defective disc AccurateRip/EAC point out errors in, you can even use an app called CUEtools to scan the database and repair the files.

I was paranoid about getting everything right on my first try, since the last thing I wanted to do was rip every CD I had again (well over a thousand) due to some dumb configuration mistake, so feel free to send me a message if you’ve got any questions. I nerded out and took a stupid amount of step by step notes about what I did so if this post isn’t long and annoying enough for you, I got plenty more where that came from.

Uhhhh if someone is asking for a randomly generated authentication code you might want to double check who you’re talking to and make sure you’re not being scammed.

Edit: seems it might be normal? https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/customer-service/customer-service-asked-for-my-2fa-code-to-verify-my-account-over-the-phone-despite-the-text-saying-not-to-share-with-xfinity-reps-normal/6410d59641879c3c4d1c6128

Holy shit that’s bad practice. Great way to get less tech savvy people used to customer service reps asking for verification codes and trusting them without hesitation.

Oh yeah, 160ms is definitely brutal in that context. I’m surprised there’s not a game mode or something to cut that down.

And you’re totally right, VR is generally USB-C when wired. I was more commenting on where 8K and up is actually going to make a noticeable difference, which really has little to do with HDMI. It’s not such a bad thing for the cable standards to be ahead of the tech, but I think we’ve got a while before hardware that can really push that well is in the mainstream.

As for the barfing - I’ve found the better the tech (clearer visuals, higher refresh rate) the lower the barf rate! I definitely know the feeling

The one place where I think 8K and up is really gonna matter is VR, when you’ve got pixels inches away from your eyes, but that tech is still niche and a long-term work in progress (Apple jumped the gun trying to make it mainstream too soon). 4K and HDR are great, but 1080p really does still look good even on a big TV.

Also, I’m the biggest freak in the world about input latency but even in the craziest rhythm games, there is no possible way just over 0.1ms of lag is screwing you up unless you are an actual machine. That’s 1/10,000th of a second! Guessing you either meant .1 second or you’re Skynet.

Yeah, that’s weird. Like, I get the idea, but the tech just hasn’t caught up to it yet. It needs to be as convenient as just putting on a light pair of glasses - on top of not being especially light or comfortable, VR is still a “process” which requires a degree of effort and adjustment every time you use it, which really kills the whole concept of it being a convenient tool.

I think Apple is probably more likely than most to make something like this take off eventually (Google Glass’ biggest failing was also that it made you look like a total dork, whereas Apple somehow managed to make AirPods cool), but this seems more like a software proof of concept for hardware that doesn’t exist yet.

I don’t think Apple themselves marketed it this way, but viral photos of people being spotted on subways and walking down the street wearing one probably didn’t help sell the product.

No, but it’s the only reason for HDMI (along with AV receivers) because it’s all the manufacturers support, so all of us home theater nerds that do care about this stuff have no real* choice but to keep up with the HDMI world. Yes, you can set up a media server that streams 4K video, but you’re not going to find a DisplayPort 4K UHD player, or a 7.2 AVR that plugs into your 77” OLED and supports all of your game consoles. HDMI is just the unfortunate reality there.

That said, the tech that actually takes advantage of the new cable specs tends to lag behind significantly, and new gaming consoles that support HDMI 2.2 likely will in a limited (ultimately disappointing) capacity for years, just like previous versions.

(Also the top comment in this thread doesn’t really seem to reflect modern reality for most people I know. Most people are using their TV to stream at 1080p - 4K, not watching broadcast TV - in which case, yeah, get a $60 720p LCD or whatever, HDMI specs won’t matter to that kind of viewer. Still, subscription streaming quality definitely doesn’t take full advantage of your expensive shiny new TV the way physical media - or a media server - might, but that’s another conversation).

4K discs are so niche that this just isn’t really true, since they simply don’t bother to add that stuff anymore with the money all going to streaming. Almost every 4K disc I have just loads right into a bland generic menu with only a skippable logo for universal or whatever at the beginning. On top of that, they’re all region free. Odd that when the consumer base for physical media is smaller than it used to be, the consumer experience is better.

Now most of these 4K discs also come with a regular (often older) Blu-ray which contains the features from previous releases or whatever, and THAT’S where the bullshit you’re talking about is - lots of trailers (with it being a crapshoot whether you can skip straight to the menu, need to skip one at a time, or have to actually fast forward them), and, worst of all, defunct BD-Live stuff that in some cases you have no way to skip loading at all, even if you completely disable network connectivity in the player. None of this junk is in any of my 4Ks. Sometimes the features are even on the 4K too, if you’re really lucky.

But yeah, modern 4K discs are mostly great and still absolutely way better video and audio quality than any streaming service I’ve used - the worst thing you usually get is maybe one dumb copyright notice. (LG’s 4K players were terrible anyway though making the experience bad for consumers for a different reason, but that’s for another comment).

Yeah, I fully support protest votes against dysfunctional two-party systems in deep $COLOR states - that’s where a lot of people don’t vote because they think they “don’t make a difference” but that’s how little trends start to form over time. Just gotta do what we can with what we have.

Totally circumstantial (and admittedly not clear in my above post), but what I’ve seen is not originally from posts, but all targeted spam emails to a government institution (which I can’t share unfortunately, but I fully realize “trust me bro” is not useful on the internet - though if Lemmy was bigger, other people with similar jobs have definitely seen the same). I definitely have no evidence of someone specifically reading these emails (the vast majority of which were caught and filtered by the spam blocker) and reposting them to social media, just pointing out that I saw a lot of the same things. I have seen some of your links but not others and read every one of these, and it’s all encouraging to know that, hopefully, the foreign influencers are doing a really shitty job. The Dems run some really bad candidates, but we all collectively (myself included) need to work harder to fix this shit on years 1-3 and not just year 4. Personally, I’m voting for the best option we have at the moment, but like… I really do totally get it if you don’t.

I’m a pretty far left progressive and I get downvoted for saying this, but unfortunately I’ve seen firsthand the Russian propaganda (your vote doesn’t matter; both sides are terrible; protest vote to a third party; don’t vote for genocide) being basically indistinguishable from a lot of actual progressive social media posts. Of course, all these things are arguably or definitely true, depending on your circumstance, many things need to change ASAP, it feels like shit voting for someone who supports some horrible things, and yet following any of this advice (particularly in a swing state) supports Russian and conservative interests. It’s frustrating seeing a lot of friends posting things I technically agree with if we were discussing them privately, but post them in public social media posts which essentially make them mouthpieces for neocons who spread the exact same rhetoric to younger voters by appealing to their altruism. Most of them ARE still voting for Harris and understand the “lesser of two evils” thing, but who knows how many people they have convinced to not vote, or throw it away, by contributing to the “everything sucks” echo chamber.

Look, the train is heading full speed toward the edge of a cliff, but we can at least try to slow it down with what we have. We have the option of actually using the next four years to attempt to gradually unfuck things, or we can just give up and wait until things are even more fucked four years from now before getting angry again that the next person on whatever “the left” means then represents our interests even less than the previous candidate. Realistically, this is how it’s always going to be, because the majority of Americans don’t really care about this stuff until a few months before an election, but at the bare minimum it’s so important to make people realize we need to make the most out of even a small modicum of what we have that we can work with.

Some people can’t hear the dog whistles until they become bullhorns.