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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I never owned a NES, but had a SNES and my brother also borrowed his friend’s Mega Drive (Genesis for those of you in the US) from time-to-time. All of us would blow the connectors on the cartridges, regardless of console. If anything went wrong with a game, the first step to troubleshoot was to take the cartridge out and give it a good blow.

    It was never about how the console actually worked, a five year-old isn’t going to logically think about that. It was all about a perceived performance increase by doing it.


  • That’s an oversimplification. All works are derivative to some extent. There’s a huge difference between taking inspiration from something, to taking the characters and setting from something. Particularly if you’re intending to make a profit.

    If an author makes something that a large number of people enjoy, why shouldn’t they be able to make money off it for the rest of their life? Why exactly should an individual give up the rights to their creation simply so that someone else can use their characters and their worlds?

    To be clear, I’m talking solely on an individual level. I think the system we have where a corporation can own an idea is very broken. I’m also talking about this from a perspective of the world we currently live in. In an ideal world where money wasn’t the endgame for survival, ideas would flow more freely and nobody would need to care. But that’s not the world we live in.









  • Similar here, but the contract periods tend to be much longer. Like 50 to 100 years before they’ll go toll-free, which is just absurd really. And they’re not fully private ventures, taxpayer money is spent on these bits of infrastructure.

    And the worst part is they don’t really do anything to improve traffic long-term. During peak hour, it’s not unusual to jump in the tunnel only to be stuck in the same gridlock traffic as you’d be in anyway, only you just paid 6 bucks for the privilege.


  • Microsoft are no longer interested in selling consoles necessarily, otherwise they’d be holding stuff back from PC as well. They’re interested in getting people into their ecosystem through Game Pass.

    And while I agree with you that Sony and Nintendo have used plenty of anti-consumer practices, Microsoft has also done so in the past and I think the only reason they’ve been more pro-consumer of late is because they’ve been the underdog for a long time now. I would be anticipating a change in their behaviour the more people they get to subscribe to Game Pass, and this Activision-Blizzard deal is a huge step towards that.





  • What country? Here in Aus they show up regularly on eBay. I bought mine from a computer shop in Sydney, because they are registered as a proper business rather than some random on the internet. Paid slightly more for it, but I wanted to be covered by the standard 12 month warranty that all businesses must offer over here. Otherwise if anything goes wrong I’d be dealing directly with Valve.