Mord

Unless there's something critical about getting these easter eggs beyond the actual finding of them, does it really matter?

Updated the rom, for the first time this year. Main details of the changes are here. No promises but I'll try to stick to it regularly here on out.

Rom updated in the first post. Fairly big update game-wise compared to the last version. 1. Title screen cleaned up. 2. Timer counts down as before but now it's displaying the remaining time on your suit before it runs out of power! Grazing enemies will slightly increase the timer to keep you going. 3. The Graze (G) powerup increases the damage you do per frame to enemies like before, but it also increases the amount of time restored. 4. Difficulty increases every 60 seconds of real time. You'll notice when it happens. 5. The game is over when you run out of lives, or the timer hits 0. Different death effects for both cases. 6. At game over, the total length of time for the game is displayed on the screen. 7. Don't mind the odd looking bar at the bottom/center of the screen. It's a place holder for now. There are of course bugs in the game still, so tread with care. The biggest bug right now is probably with how the enemy speeds are set. They're certainly going a lot faster than I anticipated, and have been for a while. Math hurts my head so I've been procrastinating on it. I'm in the process of removing the wave structure as shown above, but it's only partially done. Mainly with the setting enemy max/min speed limits and changing the enemy colors. The color setting is also looking unusual. It doesn't seem to be reading from the sdata structure I set up which should be a mirror of the levels in the previous rom. Not sure if it's actually random or if it's pulling data somewhere different in rom. I've seen some interesting color combinations all the same.

After a decade of companies deliberately degrading the quality of physical release discs (bug-ridden discs with large amounts of the game cut out for random DLC and "Expansions", etc), it's not too surprising more people think this way. I still don't see myself ever investing in a digital-only console however.

"sneak" is the correct word apparently. When the game did launch on steam originally there was no mention on the store page about the 3rd party DRM being in the game. It was added after customers found the DRM on their own and started complaining about it. Then Sega basically went "oops. it not being listed was an error, we'll get it fixed asap." Second time in recent memory for a dev to "forget" to list the 3rd party drm until players helpfully point it out to them. Not that I buy games on launch on steam much at all, but these "accidents" are becoming a bit more common, so I think I'll save myself potential headaches from here on out and wait at least a month after a game launches before I buy it. It only takes 1-3 days for players to call the dev on this anyway, so it should help make sure any "mistakes" about the drm are corrected on the store page before I buy, allowing me to safely check the "Not Interested" box on it.

Too late, you got me started! This here is the biggest reason the Vita didn't do nearly as well with me as it could have. Both between the memory cards being at times hard to find (Especially anything with more than 16gigs) but the cost per gigabyte was unforgivable. I managed to get a 16gig card - it was the only one available at the time and the 32+ versions were just too expensive, especially adding in tax. I have no idea if the Vita lets you swap cards or not, but given how tiny and fragile those things are I wouldn't want to. So being stuck with 16gigs of space, Sony found out that it was extremely difficult to keep me buying vita (And psp) titles digitally once that space ran out. There's about 1gig left I think at this point. I'm keeping most of that free for save files and the like. This is why I'm glad nintendo at least went with normal storage options. I got a 128gig microsd card cheaper than what I would have spent on a 32gig card for the vita back then. So at the very least Nintendo has a chance of selling me up to 120 odd gigs of digital content. (Although whether or not they do will depend on how many games they release that I'm both interested in and can get cheaply enough on their store.) My PS4 is in a similar situation even with a 500gig drive. I'm already close to 400gigs full, thanks to game installations even from disc, etc. While I can hook up external drives to expand that, the odds of me doing so are low. So Sony can expect PS4 purchases to drop in the near future for digital content unless I find and decide to install a 2tb drive into it. (I put a 1tb drive into my main ps3 and at least for that generation of games I've still got plenty of space)

Additionally if you're not in need of additional graphics but just need the space for level data and code, you can just make sure the graphics in each non-permanent bank is identical. At that point you can switch between the banks freely without corrupting the graphics being drawn. Another potential trick, if you're going to go with ram at 4k, is to try to compress the level data in the rom. Then when the level is loaded, you decompress the data and put it into the ram area.

Might be a case where most of the fun for both Arms and Splatoon 2 is in the multiplayer aspect. Out of the two, I'm most likely going to pick up Splatoon 2 since I hear it's single player is pretty good on it's own this time around. Where I'm in Canada it costs 79.99 instead of 60, so I'm a bit slower on buying up titles. Ultimately I'll probably pick up Mario Kart before either of them though.

For my part I'm probably going to be relatively conservative about how much I'll be buying due to the way they handle stuff, and be extra strict with price caps. I'm sure they're fine with that though, so they can continue playing catchup to Sony and Microsoft with respect to this. Simply hurts their bottomline oh so slightly.

The reason is explained in the article - by using Steam's free keys, you get to use Steam's bandwidth and resources for free while you reap the full price of the free keys you were given by Steam on other sites. I'm rather surprised they gave out unlimited keys for free at any rate. Would have made sense to make a small number automatically available for sending to potential reviewers and the like, then at most granting 1 free key per legit sale on steam. If you make enough of a turd of a game that it doesn't generate many sales on steam even after sending out a bunch of review copies, then you probably don't need a heck of a lot of additional keys to sell elsewhere. "This is why we can't have nice things" is another appropriate expression.

If they sold out instantly then more was added to production afterwards I'd guess at least some people bought it. I'm glad I didn't if it didn't have the cartridge, so I'll just keep an eye on the thrift stores later this year.

To be "fair" to microsoft, they never wanted you to do anything with the disc beyond install the game to the harddrive to begin with and just have you connected to the internet every 24hrs or they'd brick yer console. (Not very portable friendly! )

Oh I agree about those. I have Cave Story bought and plan on picking up Isaac eventually actually. My note was more about the bigger companies completely ignoring the Switch to even start serious development until after the public proved them and the critics wrong about how the Switch was going to fare.

Yeah, I noticed most of the games are the smaller games that never would have a physical release anyway unless it managed to do a limited release. That's why I'm not too surprised by the high percentage of digital only on the Switch for now - those digital types were likely very easy to port over, or were always planned for a release on the switch anyway. The big companies probably didn't even start considering Switch releases until April after seeing the Switch fly off the shelves - so that's going to take some time for them to actually get anything out. Regarding making physical releases not work after a time, there's definitely ways to go about it. I doubt any publisher would be retarded enough to do a games-played counter on a physical release (yet. We're still tumbling down this shitstain of a slope) but there are games out there on the other consoles that are essentially multiplayer only - once those servers go away, so do the game. Other tricks to employ (Which currently would be as much of a dickmove as a games played counter, would be a game-time counter or a date check (which the game keeping track of the last recorded date so you'd have limited success at resetting the clock offline) Then you have a game like Minecraft Story Mode which had a physical release that contained only 1/8th of the game (if you include the expanded chapters) on the disc. If you're getting that game after the servers go down, or even used prior to the game going down, you're getting just a demo disc. Additionally even if you bought it new, but had to get a new console after the console was removed from the marketplace, your full game physical purchase is now a demo as well. If they had the full game on disc I'd probably have considered picking it up, but with that kind of setup it can sit at the store.

Nintendo and publishers can do what they like for their digital-only tendency, however there are "consequences" for going digital only. Main one being that there are a lot of people that are not willing to pay full price for a digital game no matter how much they may want it. I have no problem buying the occasional digital title, but it has to be cheap. Meanwhile if the same game is on physical media I'll be willing to pay more for it. As an example, I bought Cave Story+ for 39.99 as a physical cart. It's the same price in the digital store - I would never even look at the game digitally even if it was 20 dollars. I picked up Blaster Master Zero a week or so ago digitally. It cost about 13-14 dollars. If it cost closer to 20+ I wouldn't have touched it. I just don't place as much value on digital only titles. Granted if the switch was Digital-Only entirely, I wouldn't have touched the switch at all, much like I refused to have anything to do with the PSP Go at any price. I was considering getting Sonic Blast for the switch but if it really is digital only then that's out the window. I doubt I'll be interested in it enough to get it on any of the other platforms either outside of a massive flash sale. I'm not -that- much of a sonic fan. I'll reconsider if I want it if it gets a physical release later.

Too hot to be gaming much right now. I plan on starting in on Utawarerumono whenever the heat and humidity start to give.

Go go google and do a search on one of the games with "<gamename> <bbs> image" Switch to the images tab and see what comes up. No idea if they'll be worthwhile but I ended up getting a huge list of bbs-lookin' screenshots.

If I see a SNES Classic in stores and have the money available at the time, yeah I'll likely pick one up. I don't need it for mega man games (Got MMX on cart) but there are several games on it I'd like to have. Can't say I want it badly enough to preorder though. If I get it, I get it. If not, oh well.

I came close to picking this up for the PS4 but when I think about it, MM7 is the only game I don't have access to currently in one shape or form. So I think I'll just let it sit for a while and either catch it digitally during a sale or if I see it cheap at gamestop later on. If they did do a 1-10 compilation for the switch though I'd probably scoop that up.

Unfortunately the doublewide parameter is set at compile time with the setdoublewide command and can't be changed - it physically changes some of the commands of 7800Basic that get baked into the rom for determining offset locations. So it'll be always on for everything, or always off for everything.

looks like you turned doublewide off since the previous version. This makes it grab half as much data per character, and likely alters where it's grabbing the data from. If you need doublewide turned off for the rest of the sprites, then I guess you'd have to re-think the offsets in the font used for your menu. (At the very least the string you get it to write would require twice as many character references, and the references would be different from when doublewide was on. "A" wouldn't be "A" anymore in the string so to speak.)