Star Ocean: The Second Story R.

The PS1 original was good, but it had some noticeable flaws. The book writing skill was more or less useless, side quests were often too well hidden from view (which was especially bad when most of them were time-limited), the accessories that gave you items were a bit in-your-face, there was no in-game mini-map, the invisible random encounters and lack of fast travel didn’t age well, and the voice acting… What were they thinking when they released this…

The remake fixes most of what went wrong in the original game, including re-casting the English voice actors, and even adds some new content (like fishing) that wasn’t in the original. I’m enjoying it a lot.

Please ignore cloud; they have been posting inaccurate flamebait throughout this thread.

I would never not buy a laptop from Apple. Not only are they the last PC maker that hasn’t fallen to the Microsoft Monopoly Machine, but their laptops are well-built†, futuristic, and have incredible value and battery life for what you get. Especially since they migrated off of Intel.

† I know someone will inevitably come up with a counter-example, but the last time they had a widespread quality problem was a little more than ten years ago.

If Beehaw leaves Lemmy, then I leave Beehaw.

I came here because it is a nice alternative to Reddit that I can access using a third-party app. On Reddit, I constantly got buried for speaking the truth people didn’t want to hear, but the real deal-killer for me was when they killed Apollo. If I can’t access the site using Voyager or converse with users on other servers, then what’s the point?

Even though they got burned really badly on OpenGL? It would’ve been better if Apple never discontinued QuickDraw 3D.

Your understanding is not quite correct. The regulations are for App Store apps only, which wouldn’t affect CS2, and even if they did, they are not much different from other platforms’ store regulations (no strong adult content, no gambling aides, no games that encourage you to damage peoples’ hardware, you can’t make games that would put private citizens’ safety at risk, etc.). And the only money you have to pay is for a developer subscription, which gets you code signatures & anti-malware validation.

If it’s any consolation, the Windows version runs on macOS Sonoma, but you need to use Whisky to install Windows Steam & launch it from there. Also, you need to adjust some graphics settings that can only be adjusted using the command line, or the frame rate will be unplayably bad.

I feared that CS2 would use some kernel-level anti-cheat solution, which would prevent it from running on macOS, but it doesn’t.

The GPUs aren’t really a problem; the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra chips are much more powerful than Intel’s integrated GPUs, are very competitive with other mobile GPUs, and are competitive with all but the high end of desktop GPUs. The main thing holding them back is they consume less electricity, which is important in a laptop, but is not necessarily important in a desktop PC.

The problem is, game developers tend to pick the platforms that will make them the most money, and Microsoft has held an uncontested monopoly on the PC OS market for more than thirty years now. They have held onto their monopoly for so long because they have the high ground on GPUs (Apple has a grudge against Nvidia that probably won’t go away until Tim Cook retires), and they also hold a number of popular games that are exclusive to Windows (Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden, Final Fantasy, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, Diablo, Far Cry) whereas Apple’s highest profile exclusive macOS game at the moment is Hello Kitty.

It seems like each time Apple makes gains in the PC market (iPod/iPhone halo effect, keeping controversial UI changes to a minimum), Microsoft gains one and a half times that.

I’ve brought various apps, bundles, and frameworks from PowerPC to Intel to 64-bit to ARM ever since macOS 10.0 first launched. Usually the most difficult parts were:

1. During the PPC to Intel transition, converting code that expected all data to be big-endian over to handling little-endian data, and catching integer division by zero before sending such operations to the CPU
2. During the 64-bit transition, switching from all the APIs Apple removed over to newer APIs, if not already done, and converting all code that expected integers and pointers to be 32-bit over to 64-bit
3. During the ARM transition, converting code that abused variadic functions to code that used them properly, and converting all code that expected long doubles to be 128-bit over to 64-bit (I know some developers were burned by the VM page size change, but that didn’t affect anything I did)

But yeah, usually the most difficult part of the transition is managing the dependencies. Whenever Apple transitions CPU architectures, if your app depends on a closed-source third-party library or kernel extension made by developers that went out of business years ago, you’re more or less screwed unless you can find or build a replacement.

Not really, unless the game code was written in X86-64 assembly language, does low-level VM allocation for some reason, or otherwise has special dependencies on Intel CPU-isms. With a few exceptions, C/C++/Objective-C code written for X86-64 can be easily recompiled for ARM64.

The PowerPC to X86 transition was much rougher, because of the byte order change + PPC allowing integer division by zero while X86 disallowed it.

…except on macOS, apparently.

I wonder if the game works if I try playing it using the GPTK.

In the Final Fantasy Legend (or “Makaitoushi SaGa” as it was called in Japan), I somehow managed to make it to the game’s final boss without realizing the shops in the game sold more than three items per shop.

The game’s shopping interface presented you with a list of items, three at a time, but there was no indication on the screen that the list was scrollable, so I thought that the list presented were all they sold. That meant I missed out on about 75% of the items in the game, including a few that turned out to be kind of important for the last boss fight.

Of course, I couldn’t beat the last boss, and the only way to escape the last boss’s lair was to use an item that was sold in late game stores, but was buried in the list of items, so I had to start the game again from the top.

Good user experience design is important in games.

Sounds interesting, but I’ll have to wait until they port it to macOS before I buy it.

Because Activision is the single most important third-party game maker in the world outside of Japan. You wouldn’t believe how many tens of millions of people buy PlayStations only to play CoD to the exclusion of everything else. If Microsoft gets CoD as an exclusive, then Sony will lose half their audience outside of Japan.

And Microsoft is a two-bit company that can’t stand one bit of competition. Sony can’t eliminate Microsoft; a lot of their software was made for Windows.