I don’t think Blackmist has a hot take here. The Ubisoft formula is: navigate to a tower. Tower gives you a checklist of things to do. You do the things, then look for a new tower.

Breath of the Wild is different. Yes, you start by navigating to a tower, but then… no checklist is given. You look around, you explore, you find things to do. Maybe you find everything, maybe you miss things, maybe you miss everything. You can always come back and explore more later… and when you’ve done everything, you can’t really be CERTAIN that you got it all. The lack of a checklist dramatically shifts the gameplay from doing a list of events, with little difference from selecting them from a menu, to actually having to explore the world and look around.

To call it the Ubisoft formula is to vastly misunderstand what the Ubisoft formula is. The formula is a list of things to do. BotW does not have that. Not even slightly. The towers are just something to aim for to get you started, and a place you can use your eyes to look around from, also to get you started.

So, once upon a time, the radio airwaves were free for anyone and everyone to use as they liked. There were incompatible protocols, congestion, crowding, and so on and so forth. One day, the Titanic sunk, and a major contributor of it was the fact that there were no standards for ships to be listening for distress signals on the radio.

So international regulations were established be treaty, the Radio Act if 1912 in The US, and the International Radiotelegraph Convention of 1912. These laws and treaties not only established mandatory radio watch for ships at sea, but also sought to reduce crosstalk and bandwidth hogging by people— you’d need to get a radio license to transmit on a specific frequency for a region.

A public spectrum was established for anyone to use, and another spectrum was reserved for dedicated amateurs to advance radio technology (requiring a test to prove dedication— HAM radio), another spectrum was dedicated for government use (such as police), another for hospitals, and another segment for commercial usage.

If you violate the licensing requirements, you are a pirate radio station… and this is actually taken quite seriously. Regulators will actually take measures to track you down. One thing that the HAM radio community does is something called a “fox hunt”… it’s basically like a region-wide game of hide and seek, where the hider is repeatedly broadcasting a radio signal, and the seekers use whatever technology they can muster to track the hider down. The hiders also use sophisticated means to hide their location, such as bouncing signals off of water towers to hide the origin and other even sneakier tactics. Fox hunts are a lot of fun, but always end up with the fox getting caught.

Pirate radio tends to end up the same way.

Maybe just a touch of cgi, like for the rippling wall when they cross dimensions, or morphing species when hit with the de-evolution ray. But that barely counts. The practical effects and set design were wonderful, and despite the weirdness of the mushroom king, definitely still hold up.

Super Mario Bros. No, not the new CGI one, the old live action one. I know I’m not alone in loving this movie, but man is it divisive— those that don’t like it, HATE it, and I think that’s the majority opinion.

I unironically love this movie. It’s not just nostalgia either, though I did watch it as a kid. I also watched the old Zelda cartoon as a kid when it first came out, and I loved it then but I can’t stand it now. No, I’ve watched this movie recently and it still rocks. It’s perfect for what it is, I think.

Possible, but super tricky. Good luck trying to sell a producer on minimizing dialog!

Live service means the content comes from the company’s servers, and likely changes rapidly. The quintessential example is Fortnite. Updates are expected, not merely necessary fixes. Duke Nukem 3D had all the content installed on your computer from day one, without expectation that it would change (unless you made your own maps, or downloaded maps other USERS made).

Interestingly enough, originally it WAS a Mario game, during initial development! Doki Doki Panic started as an engine test for a new Mario game with vertical scrolling in addition to horizontal scrolling. It was swapped to Fuji TV characters shortly after, mid development… and then ironically switched BACK to Mario for the US release!

Just let anyone scrape it all for any reason. It’s science. Let it be free.

I have fond memories of it too. Granted, those memories involved being utterly confused as to how to proceed, but also being utterly astonished by the graphics. I distinctly remember it being basically photorealistic to my 9 year old self— going back to play it with an emulator was a bit of a shock (and letdown) compared to my memories of it.

I did beat it as an adult. As a kid I may lot have been able to get anywhere, but it was magical all the same.

Let’s say they were organizing using telephones instead. Would you want the telephone providers to proactively listen in on their conversations and cut them off based on content? No. You get the police or FBI to investigate and hunt down the people, possibly with warrants obtaining information from the telephone companies, and target the people doing the crimes.

I feel it should be exactly the same with ISPs. The ISP shouldn’t be doing the policing, the police should be doing the policing. The ISP’s job should be passing bits from MAC address A to MAC address B, nothing more.

Found it! It was 3D Ultra Pinball, by Sierra. Here’s a YouTube video of someone playing it… https://youtu.be/6DX08v5orsY

Anyone remember a pinball game for windows that had three tables and I think the ball could swap between them during play, and the theme was building a space colony on mars or some other planet? Sorry my description is vague, but I was like 8 years old when I played it. I definitely remember that the tables were wider than they were tall, unusual for a pinball game, as it was designed for the computer screen not an arcade.