Fat Barry

I HATE COLLINGWOOD Wolfenstein 3D mod on floppy disk. This version doesn't work. :(

Australians, please raid your Uncle's old PC in his shed, and help me find a copy of this to archive.

#Australia #AFL #DOSGaming #Wolfenstein #RetroGaming #MSDOS #RetroComputing

Tracklisting for last night's #dj set. Hit me up if you'd like the recording!

Twitch Twitch is the world

GAVNO does SATURDAY NIGHT

9:30 PM AEST / 11:30 AM UTC
Live on Twitch.tv/TheFattestBarry

Come and get SWEATY with some techno, electro, house.

Tracklist will be posted here after the set.

Support #artists directly on @bandcamp.com... FCK DRM

#livestream #DJ #music #techno #electro #house

TheFattestBarry - Twitch I write about games and gaming history, and use 'research' as an excuse anytime someone says I play games too much. SUPERJUMP Writer | He/him

GAVNO does SATURDAY NIGHT

9:30 PM AEST / 11:30 AM UTC
Live on Twitch.tv/TheFattestBarry

Techno, electro and house classics and fresh tracks.

#livestream #DJ #techno #electro #house #bandcamp

TheFattestBarry - Twitch I write about games and gaming history, and use 'research' as an excuse anytime someone says I play games too much. SUPERJUMP Writer | He/him

GAVNO does FRIDAY NIGHT

Join me for some fresh and classic techno, house and electro, live on Twitch.

#dj #techno #house #electro #livestream

www.twitch.tv/thefattestba...

over 20% of the global game dev force was laid of on the last 3 years and absolutely none of it was because of piracy

There's so much digital history that is rapidly slipping away from us, and I feel an urgency to experience it before it's gone forever.

#gaming #gamehistory

tbh, most days I just want to abandon all my responsibilities and play #classicgames all day, whether its tinkering with DOSBox, emulators or old hardware. Especially if they're forgotten games.

These are incredible!

You can really get the sense of Dotcom Boom energy.

Graphical fidelity has become more of an aesthetic choice, and isn't the deal-breaker it used to be. I remember games like Arcanum being criticised for looking dated, but that sort of argument holds less sway now, as it's often a conscious choice. It also means older games get a look in now.

What is Progress? Exploring various interpretations and signs of "progress" in video games

I discussed this a little in a Superjump article. Graphical fidelity is sort of on a logarithmic scale, we're in the era of incremental updates rather than drastic leaps. On the plus side, I think it somewhat take graphics out of the equation.

www.superjumpmagazine.com/what-is-prog...

Sorry chooms - feeling a bit crook today, so will have to give this one a pass :(

The plan remains though! I shall stream again soon.

Hey chooms!

Tomorrow night (Friday 7:30ish Aust Eastern Time), I'll be live streaming Day of the Tentacle by LucasArts.

Come check it out, have a laugh and try to remember how to get through all the puzzles.

#gaming #livestream #dosbox #lucasarts #retrogaming

Call of Cthulhu TTRPG books - the first is the investigators handbook and the second is the keepers rule book

Call of Cthulhu is the first #TTRPG I ever ran as a game master and is still my most loved system.

It’s a horror game where players are “investigators” looking into some form of mystery.

If you’ve only ever played D&D, try it out. It’s a very different type of game, but quite easy to pick up.

IDKFA...

Wait, why didn't that give me all your artwork?

We'll see who makes more honey.

Beads?!?

I guarantee you’re a better writer than ChatGPT. Never butcher your own writing or relinquish your own voice to put your name on the dead-eyed, mechanical hallucinations of a bunch of 1s and 0s. People who know good writing and AI have no trouble recognizing AI-generated garbage.

truly iconic that machine games has made a legacy for themselves as the “we make games where you punch Nazis in the face a lot” studio, i love that for them

It's far from a disaster, but something to consider before investing full price. Best recommendation, wait for a sale. And if you can't wait, subscribe to Xbox Game Pass for a month and try it out before committing to AAA pricing.

#Oblivion #OblivionRemastered #CRPG #ElderScrolls #Gaming

Both options have their benefits and drawbacks, but both are showing commitment to a design philosophy.

Oblivion Remastered is just Oblivion with new graphics, and that's it. What little it adds for veterans will be short-lived, and its shortcomings will not win new lifelong fans.

2) Take the "remake" pathway. Expand the world, make it larger, more richly detailed, a new graphics engine, but retain the spiritual elements - plot, quests, etc. The Silent Hill remake route.

My gut feeling is there were two better paths to take here:

1) Take the "faithful remaster" pathway - keep the engine largely unchanged, just support higher resolutions, more advanced rendering (lighting, RT, etc.), but retain the aesthetic of the original game. The Nightdive route.

Oblivion Remastered lacks the deep RPG mechanics and more unique writing of Morrowind... But it also lacks the more expensive and immersive world of Skyrim (which by now is well and truly showing its age in scale and fidelity).

What we're left with is a game stranded between eras.

Here's the problem - mechanics were *never* that good. Oblivion was the first major step down the path to the neutered RPG experience of Skyrim. Fans of Morrowind and Daggerfall disliked how simplified Oblivion was at the time, but many at the time overlooked that due to a massive, immersive world.

We're marooned between modern rendering and 2006 design. That's fine, and admirably faithful. However, without the benefit of contemporary immersiveness, this puts a big spotlight on mechanics and design.

Oblivion was obviously a very influential game in 2006 - *at the time* the world was vast and immersive. But by today's standards, it's often jarring. Remaster looks great, but the world fidelity and game mechanics are still unchanged. There's a dissonance in graphics vs depth.

So my feelings are: Oblivion Remastered:

First up, poor performance optimisation. Outdoor areas get FPS drops quite a bit. But I imagine will be patched soon.

A tall, old brick building, where the top floor is set off with a ledge.

The same building, rendered in SimCity 2000.

The curse of being a Maxis fan who lives in the East Bay is seeing a building and thinking "I'm pretty sure that building is in SimCity 2000"

and then being RIGHT

oh god it's draft week