The Mundane Adventures of Max @freebabycola - Tumblr Blog

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teleportdash

Ein Panzer Bandit Fill-In Cafe 1997 PS1

Scanned By: teleportdash.tumblr.com

crashcarnival-deactivated201910

obscurevideogames

Last Armageddon (Yutaka - Famicom - 1990)

hardcore-gaming-101

West of Loathing

In 2003, Zack Johnson and his Asymmetric Productions launched the single greatest MMO ever created and ever will be – Kingdom of Loathing. It was a terrible looking game of stick figures and scribbles, where your classes of choice included “seal clubber” and “accordion thief.” Your main currency was “meat,” and enemy types included the likes of ASCII smileys and zombies but with the name misspelled because of magic. There’s a boss you can fight called Man Made of Bees and he is a man made of bees who says that he is bees and hates you. It’s still going to this day and shows no signs of stopping, the ultimate pisstake for the RPG world.

That makes West of Loathing, a 2017 spin-off taking place in the 1800s wild west, a bit odd. The attempt by Jick (Johnson’s name in Kingdom of Loathing) and team was to create a single player Loathing experience, but this did require a few tweaks to the tone and writing. While playing through a crude joke is hilarious when you’re doing it with countless strangers, the novelty would wear itself out in a single player narrative heavy experience, so West tried balancing a solid narrative framework with the humor of the MMO. This could have easily been a case of trying to entertain a wider audience and failing, but West of Loathing managed to strike the balance and made for an engrossing single player RPG with satisfying choices that just so happened to include ghost pickles that turn you into a ghost for a day and inheriting your grandmother’s briefcase filled with snakes.

freebabycola

I played this game and it was pretty good. I love a simple RPG with small numbers.

thevideogameartarchive

Concept artwork from @TreasureCoLtd’s ‘Gunstar Heroes’ on the Sega Genesis.

johnclaudielectronics

Nintendo Famicom Data Recorder - 198?

GAMOPAT

radicalhelmet

1984

I want this so bad

radicalhelmet

I dug this post up from January 2015 because I was going through my archive wondering how much I’ve changed over the last several years.

Evidently, some things never change. And in truth I love this image more now than then, because it speaks to me in ways it didn’t then.

Family BASIC was a program designed to help users make other programs in a Famicom implementation of the Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or B.A.S.I.C., a programming language—or rather, a type of programming language—used widely on other computers at the time. The complete package even included a keyboard, and user data was saved by cassette. That last part might seem strange today, but it wasn’t unheard of back then. For example, the Atari 800 could run programs via cassette, and it could even playback cassette quality music (Like this!)

Combine all of these into a single image, and you get the Family Computer at its most computerized. The only difference is that you play it on the TV, but—and this is important—many old computers were hooked up to televisions a long time ago, especially cheap ones. For all intents and purposes, the Fami might as well just be another home Com.

And in a sense, it was. What makes me scratch my head at the PC-console divide sometimes is the way people seem to treat game consoles like their own unique entity, separate from the rest of computing, when the truth is that they’re all computers. A game console is just a specialized computer. You can see it in old console names like the Atari Video Computer System and the Bally Home Library Computer. You can see it in all-purpose computers that are better remembered today as game machines, from the Commodore 64 to the PC-98.

There are pros and cons to both, of course, but it feels strange, the way we treat consoles like they play by different rules and then look at something like the Xbone S having backwards compatibility with its predecessors and lose our minds over it like it wasn’t something that they should’ve done from the start because could you imagine your ‘90s CD getting locked out of your Windows 10 PC because someone designed it to do so?

I feel like the idea that locking out backwards compatibility is normal, that entire libraries are supposed to get thrown out between generations, was something we allowed ourselves to believe because we thought consoles were different and played by different rules.

But they’re all just computers, in the end. I should never forget that.

Okay! To wrap this up, here’s a compilation of games made in Family BASIC:

The uploader has a whole playlist full of these games, which you can view here.

Somewhere, there is an alternate history where I am saving Zelda by cassette.

On the off chance this gets around, feel free to leave a tip! I have a Ko-fi here.

gaygamer

OK, some of these old Famicom Family BASIC games look *really* interesting! (Watch the video at the bottom of the post.)

anacrogames

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HOY en las #efeméridesanacrónicas @anacrogames : ¡Felices 35 añitos para Famicom! • El 15 de Julio de 1983, de la mano de Nintendo, llegaba a las tiendas japonesas la consola de 8 bits que no solo salvó a la industria de videojuegos, si no que además marcó un hito imborrable en la historia del entretenimiento hogareño. Felicidades a todos los modelos de Famicom y también a sus Famiclones, primos piratas como el Family Game que tanto nos ha divertido siempre. :) • #nintendo #famicom #nintendofamicom #familygame #videogames #videojuegos #retrogaming #8bits #japón #japan #1983 #pendodelespacio #任天堂株式会社

gaygamer

Celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Nintendo Famicom’s release by watching this lovely TV ad ^_^

chucklebot

obscurevideogames

action - Tech Romancer (Capcom - arcade - 1998)

obscurevideogames

arms - Tech Romancer (Capcom - arcade - 1998)

fuckyeah2000s

datarep

Name for Hamburger by U.S County

takahashikeita

I called Uber and then they came.

obscurevideogames

“ARMOR BROKEN” - Tech Romancer (Capcom - arcade - 1998)

obscurevideogames

Happy 4th of July!

Tech Romancer (Capcom - arcade - 1998)

aiweirdness

New paint colors invented by neural network

So if you’ve ever picked out paint, you know that every infinitesimally different shade of blue, beige, and gray has its own descriptive, attractive name. Tuscan sunrise, blushing pear, Tradewind, etc… There are in fact people who invent these names for a living. But given that the human eye can see millions of distinct colors, sooner or later we’re going to run out of good names. Can AI help?

For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?

One way I have of checking on the neural network’s progress during training is to ask it to produce some output using the lowest-creativity setting. Then the neural network plays it safe, and we can get an idea of what it has learned for sure.

By the first checkpoint, the neural network has learned to produce valid RGB values - these are colors, all right, and you could technically paint your walls with them. It’s a little farther behind the curve on the names, although it does seem to be attempting a combination of the colors brown, blue, and gray.

By the second checkpoint, the neural network can properly spell green and gray. It doesn’t seem to actually know what color they are, however.

Let’s check in with what the more-creative setting is producing.

…oh, okay.

Later in the training process, the neural network is about as well-trained as it’s going to be (perhaps with different parameters, it could have done a bit better - a lot of neural network training involves choosing the right training parameters). By this point, it’s able to figure out some of the basic colors, like white, red, and grey: