Something's wrong when the SNES thread is the second least popular one in here

[Tanooki]

Discord isn't trash, it's the 2000s version of the 20th century IRC done with style.

I've noticed maybe if anything, having AA create a pretty well loaded discord channel may have created part of this bite.  That place seems to be pretty consistently trafficked and chatted within multiple areas.  That has to have a toll on here because people are choosing to go there and write, than write here where it's archived.  Don't kill the discord, but be aware it's taking a bite, and that would include even the Nintendo chatter.

 

And yeah NA ate it off a crooked deal, but the majority of non-toxic types went to video game sage, it has a discord too, and now it's gaming centric, not just nintendo centered with a bend towards the NES.

[Austin]

On 8/24/2022 at 10:32 PM, Steven Pendleton said:

Many things, including this:

That hardly makes it "trash", it's just different. You've clearly already been on the shmups forum for too long, heh. It's starting to rub off on you.

 

Discord has come a long way. They now have things like direct reply features that partially quote the topic being responded to, and it'll tag you/alert you if it's a response to something you wrote, which is handy. It's a lot like here where you get an alert if someone likes your post or quotes you in a thread.

 

It's still important to remember however that its primary focus is the live back and forth conversation, ala IRC, which is inherently different from a traditional messageboard. They are attempting to bridge that gap at least.

[Steven Pendleton]

25 minutes ago, Austin said:

That hardly makes it "trash", it's just different. You've clearly already been on the shmups forum for too long, heh. It's starting to rub off on you.

 

Discord has come a long way. They now have things like direct reply features that partially quote the topic being responded to, and it'll tag you/alert you if it's a response to something you wrote, which is handy. It's a lot like here where you get an alert if someone likes your post or quotes you in a thread.

 

It's still important to remember however that its primary focus is the live back and forth conversation, ala IRC, which is inherently different from a traditional messageboard. They are attempting to bridge that gap at least.

As you know, I've always been one of... rather strong convictions, and partially due to my own eccentric personality. I believe the first thing you ever said to me here was "shut the fuck up" or something to that effect after I said something about online subscription fees being stupid or something like that lol. (and don't worry about it, by the way lol. I don't really care, especially since that was like 2.5 years ago!)

 

I wasn't planning on bringing it up, but there are rumours online about Discord actually being some form of spyware. I don't remember the details. Those who are interested can look it up. I'll continue to not use it, and yes, I have tried it and I hated it.

Edited August 26, 2022 by Steven Pendleton

[Austin]

31 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

As you know, I've always been one of... rather strong convictions, and partially due to my own eccentric personality. I believe the first thing you ever said to me here was "shut the fuck up" or something to that effect after I said something about online subscription fees being stupid or something like that lol. (and don't worry about it, by the way lol. I don't really care, especially since that was like 2.5 years ago!)

 

I wasn't planning on bringing it up, but there are rumours online about Discord actually being some form of spyware. I don't remember the details. Those who are interested can look it up. I'll continue to not use it, and yes, I have tried it and I hated it.

I totally get "strong convictions".. with logical reasoning to back up said convictions. It's when I see blanket statements like, "it's trash", with no nuance or logic, that it starts to bother me.

 

I've said it here occasionally over the years, but I'm of the mindset there's a gradiant of tiers and words to use when it comes to judging something's quality. When someone tosses around the word "trash" without much thought, I take it with a giant grain of salt.

 

I may have been tough on you at one point in the early days, but probably said it a little bit nicer than what you just quoted it as.

[roots.genoa]

Also since I know Steven is into MISTer, his view of Discord may be biased by the awful MISTer Discord. 😝

[newtmonkey]

Discord channels are a lot like message forums, in that they can total garbage or really useful, and it all depends on who is posting there.

 

I've found that bigger Discord channels devoted to general topics (especially those related to "classic gaming" or whatever, not mentioning any particular channels) can be total cesspits, full of cliques of longtime members that ignore or even belittle newbies and where it's impossible to get straight answers on anything.

 

In contrast, the smaller channels are really amazing and helpful.  I've been playing through some indie RPGs lately, and the developer Discord channels have been fantastic, with everyone being helpful and friendly.

[roots.genoa]

2 hours ago, newtmonkey said:

especially those related to "classic gaming" or whatever, not mentioning any particular channels

I saw what you did there. 😉

[Cobra Kai]

To the OP, there's nothing stopping you from starting topics in SNES. If it's a game I'm familiar with I'll join in. I play my SNES routinely, but I mostly don't write about it. That's pretty much  true for most of the forum anymore. I need to have a serious burst of inspiration to start a new thread around here, something that gets me excited for some reason or another. I'm more interested in gameplay and strategy, if it's anything about programming I'm out.

[Kirk_Johnston]

3 hours ago, Cobra Kai said:

To the OP, there's nothing stopping you from starting topics in SNES. If it's a game I'm familiar with I'll join in. I play my SNES routinely, but I mostly don't write about it. That's pretty much  true for most of the forum anymore. I need to have a serious burst of inspiration to start a new thread around here, something that gets me excited for some reason or another. I'm more interested in gameplay and strategy, if it's anything about programming I'm out.

Well, I've posted a few threads so far, so hopefully those are a good start.

[Tanooki]

Well I just don't bother making the threads as this place isn't super pro-Nintendo historically speaking so it never got a lot of traction.  And now you have that nutty johanncthulu or whatever it making utterly contradictory, loaded, and just insane posts about various things, quite a few in this sphere it really does nothing to help but drive people off from the crazy.

 

I go through bursts of stuff due to time being squeezed.  Right now I'm on catching up on a lot of anime, it takes time, so the consoles are getting somewhat dusty.  I can talk up the SNES extensively (as I can the NES) and fairly well but on no similar level the Genesis just from years of use(and less of Genesis compared.)  When there are no topics, or at least no sane topics of good use it's hard to see things go anywhere.

 

Maybe if you're so concerned, make a post or two a day, something original on thoughts, a game you know isn't usually brought up and light review/preview it, just something.

[Bloodreign]

We've given it a bit of a jolt lately, there's more we can do, even if it is just a few of us posting in this section.

[Tanooki]

I'm game, just not sure what.  There's much to go into, even tangents like the similarities but not on the SNES to the GBA.  Or even how some games got ported or solid sequels from the SNES to that handheld too.  The ports, you can see where some care was done, others were cash in to down right incompetently handled.

[MrDave]

Snes is my favorite game machine of all time.. it's just a shame we did not have "Blast Processing "  😝  .. at least we had real stuff.

[Kirk_Johnston]

6 hours ago, MrDave said:

Snes is my favorite game machine of all time.. it's just a shame we did not have "Blast Processing "  😝  .. at least we had real stuff.

I found it quite funny when, after so many years, I finally found out what real "Blast Processing" was and what it's mostly used for, which is basically just showing more colours in static images than the Genesis is normally capable of, and then realised a few days later that even the stock SNES using one of its completely standard background modes still does this much better anyway. And, to be clear, those background modes on SNES can be pushed much further too, for even better results and still with less impact that the Genesis' "Blast Processing" has on that system. Oh how that changed my entire thinking about this legendary "Blast Processing". And, what it's done even more so is make me question just how much of the recent narrative of how capable the Genesis is in this area or that area compared to the SNES might in fact also be a bit of bullsh*t too. I've found a few other examples that fall into that category, such as some stuff around those extra PSG sound channels on Genesis, which some people would have you believe means the Genesis is simply capable of better sound than SNES because it has ten [and apparently even more when manipulated this way and that way] sound channels vs the SNES "only" eight, but it really isn't the full picture at all once you look into things, and some other stuff like that. So, yeah, interesting times.

Edited January 7, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Tanooki]

Ehhh mine hasn't changed.  It was nearly 35 years ago a market buzz word lie to attack Nintendo in 1991 and on from there claiming to be slow highlighting Sonic and a few things while using unrelated slow moving games to compare to be insulting dishonest trolls.  I think the concept of blast processing someone found a convenient reality to in that color mode because in reality you're blasting the processor to 100% locking it up hard to spit out all that color well beyond the systems natural capability.  It turned a lie into a lie wrapped around a half truth.

[CapitanClassic]

Blast Processing is just a marketing gimmick, but it worked. (Marketing is just lying to customers about why they need your product)

 

When it comes down to it, the Genesis was easier to develop for than the SNES for 3rd party developers. The Genesis CPU was twice as fast, without requiring additional hardware (DSP-1, SA1, etc). Although it does take more cycles to process those instructions on average.

 

The 8 32-bit general purpose registers on the 68000 likely make programming games is assembly for the Genesis easier than for the 65C816 (made even more likely for Arcade conversions that are mostly based on 68000). It is difficult to compare the Genesis/SNES like it is difficult to compare the Saturn/PSX, they were designed with different architectural goals in mind. You might think the Saturn is more powerful than the PSX, but coordinating all the processors to access to that power made development for the Saturn much more difficult than the PSX.

 

 

 

 

[Steven Pendleton]

inb4 meltdown occurs.

[Rhomaios]

I want to buck the trend here and actually speak up in favor of more Nintendo (NES and SNES) activity here. AtariAge surely represents Atari, which started the whole gaming at home movement, but with the death of all the other major consoles, it's the last home for this type of discussion. I will never play a new console (never played anything newer than a Wii already), but if those machines can get some love, so can the Super NES.

 

A few points:

On 8/18/2022 at 1:19 PM, Cobra Kai said:

There have been Nintendo dedicated rivals to Atari Age in the past, such as Nintendo Age, but they floundered after being bought out IIRC. The internet has spoken, and Atari is the classic platform of choice for discussions.

NintendoAge was always garbage. Garbage community, garbage leadership, the place was the antithesis of AtariAge, with a stronger focus on collecting and encasing in plastic than actually playing any games. A better site was FamicomWorld, but it's very quiet in comparison.

 

That AtariAge was different, broader, more in-tune with the classic forum style discussion board, meant that it has powered through the storm that took down most forums. And it's better for it. Reddit, etc. is awful, and I'm so glad for an oasis here. There are just so few proper discussion boards left. Here feels less of a relic and more of a treasured old haunt.

 

If anything, I wish more, targeted classic gaming discussion took place at AtariAge, and more users of dead forums come here instead of migrating to Reddit or (gods forbid) Facebook. Here is that perfect balance of anonymity, moderation, and preservation that the others can't get right.

 

On 8/24/2022 at 2:15 PM, Cobra Kai said:

I'm registered at shmups.com, but don't post at all. I mainly stop by to read strategies and tactics of whatever current shmup I'm into. That place depresses me because everyone there seems to be super geniuses at every shmup. I used to think I was a pretty good shmupper, but after browsing those forums you realize you're not very good at all.

I think you'll find plenty of us casuals lurking about. There are a bunch of die-harders in the board, but they'll also be likely to offer guidance and helpful advice, even if sometimes it might seem like they're endlessly ribbing ya. It's overall a good-natured board.

  

On 8/26/2022 at 8:20 AM, Austin said:

That hardly makes it "trash", it's just different. You've clearly already been on the shmups forum for too long, heh. It's starting to rub off on you.

 

Discord has come a long way. They now have things like direct reply features that partially quote the topic being responded to, and it'll tag you/alert you if it's a response to something you wrote, which is handy. It's a lot like here where you get an alert if someone likes your post or quotes you in a thread.

 

It's still important to remember however that its primary focus is the live back and forth conversation, ala IRC, which is inherently different from a traditional messageboard. They are attempting to bridge that gap at least.

 

IRC bots used to do all that and was a free and open source protocol. Discord is proprietary garbage. I think the issue is that a lot of people treat Discord like a message board and can't be bothered to spend more than 5 minutes of their brainpower writing up a response. It's casual conversation, but subversively undermines actual conversation at the same time.

 

As a veteran of IRC, email list groups, forum software, and messy takes like Reddit and StackExchange, there is simply nothing better than a traditional, well-run forum, especially if it contains long-form articles, Wikis, or other ways of getting the best information in short format. I think that will save the forum more than anything else (and why forums like Racketboy can plod along, even if a bit zombie-like).

[Steven Pendleton]

30 minutes ago, Rhomaios said:

I think you'll find plenty of us casuals lurking about. There are a bunch of die-harders in the board, but they'll also be likely to offer guidance and helpful advice, even if sometimes it might seem like they're endlessly ribbing ya. It's overall a good-natured board.

I used to have a pretty negative opinion of that place. I'm glad I was wrong; it's one of the best forums on the entire WWW, and the single greatest source of STG information in English. Given how fragmented/non-existent the online Japanese game community is outside of 2ch and its variants, which are very difficult to parse for information due to their structure and the fact that sometimes stuff there just seems to vanish or otherwise not get archived at all, it's also one of the best STG resources you'll find anywhere in the world, for that matter.

[Tanooki]

He's right, NintendoAge imploded under it's own controlling, divisive, group think, investor toxic question nothing behavior.  But that isn't what killed it, the owner took a payoff and the buyer went above and beyond and didn't preserve the site and membership was was thought to happen but instead nuked it.  Killed the forum, put this sketch place up instead, gobbled up the database that was a great resource then hid and buried it for personal private financial reasons stealing a decade worth of many members work(their fault mind you, wasn't like 'owned' persay by them either.)  The people who didn't go all vile on others, largely they all went to videogamesage.com and that is comparable to here, it's not a toxic dumpster fire.  NA got what it had coming, but not in the way it deserved to happen or should have, it was a more of a two faced smash and grab.

 

I am with @Rhomaios this place needs more Nintendo, they're the last long standing old pillar of what made gaming nice, and they keep it relevant too and not just with modern era sequels.  There's so much there, but AA historically has been pretty anti-Nintendo keeping it to a minimum, which is fine, not like Atari and them were buddy buddy, but it's gone, and given the group here and age of the site it seems weak it's not more catered to now as it would be a growth potential in a sea of dying sites and floundering spaces due to crappy (anti)social media apps/sites that catch all and save nothing once it's not trending.  Like he said, more of this needs to happen here (and in fairness VGS too which is a catch all, not Nintendo-all) because the more who get driven to reddit(I do this) and facebook(annoyingly a bit too) it's ruining the long term value of such things.

 

See I'm still registered here, VGS, but also digitpress going way back, couple others but I never post because why bother when you get 1-5+ posts a week, A WEEK, even a day would help try and get something going, but not that.  When you have a big forum with 20 areas and 2-3 get some light traction the writing seems to be on the wall.

 

Discord maybe proprietary garbage, but irc has fallen off a cliff and at least discord is like some form of like IRC 2.0 or whatever, has most the same comforts and uses, easier at this rate to access too for the general population.  I've rarely hre and there jumped back onto (m)irc to my old 90s earlier 00 areas I used to do my shady and less shady stuff in including some where I were channelops, and you know what I see?  Something sad, a mix of dead air, and the same names from 20-25 years ago like they forgot they left their computer logged in as the name is there, but no one is home...like many gaming forums now too which sucks.

 

I can not suggest strongly enough both here and VGS push forward, create a good forum, good active archive of helpful data, information, and just conversation as it has real value which click bait trending social media burns to the ground in a matter of hours or days at most now largely.

[Steven Pendleton]

9 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

I am with @Rhomaios this place needs more Nintendo

Wrong; it needs more everything.

 

Like I said last year, the levels of activity here just kind of died here in like June or July of 2020 outside of the Amico dumpster fire that continues to burn. That's why I've largely moved away from here, as it's like nobody even cares anymore. shmups forum, whether you love it or hate it, has a small but extremely passionate group of people ranging from complete beginners to world record holders, and the place is quite active. Not bad for a forum that is focused solely on a supposedly dead genre that probably scares away people due to just the difficulty of the games.

[Rhomaios]

2 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Wrong; it needs more everything.

 

Like I said last year, the levels of activity here just kind of died here in like June or July of 2020 outside of the Amico dumpster fire that continues to burn. That's why I've largely moved away from here, as it's like nobody even cares anymore. shmups forum, whether you love it or hate it, has a small but extremely passionate group of people ranging from complete beginners to world record holders, and the place is quite active. Not bad for a forum that is focused solely on a supposedly dead genre that probably scares away people due to just the difficulty of the games.

I wonder if it's because you saw it first right at the beginning of lockdowns? By June or July, there were some people starting to creep outside, but there's only so much of a single place one can take before they need variety!

 

I've not really noticed a plunge in activity over the years, at least not to the point that this place feels abandoned or anything.

 

But I do agree that more activity here would be better.

[Steven Pendleton]

7 hours ago, Rhomaios said:

I wonder if it's because you saw it first right at the beginning of lockdowns? By June or July, there were some people starting to creep outside, but there's only so much of a single place one can take before they need variety!

 

I've not really noticed a plunge in activity over the years, at least not to the point that this place feels abandoned or anything.

 

But I do agree that more activity here would be better.

Maybe. I'm not really sure since we never had a lockdown; it's illegal for the Japanese government to do something like that from what I understand, and I'm not really sure what happened in the rest of the world.

 

Anyway, the place is definitely not as active as it was when I joined in February of that year. Not much I can do about it, of course, so not much point in worrying about it.

[MrDave]

I have been on atari age over 2 years..i just found out about this section

 

[Tanooki]

Well kirk is nearly single handedly lately trying to keep it going and growing.  I used to post more but when no one gave a damn I didn't either.  It's a shame given how potent the system is, its legacy, and that its core output is what people still strive to do in the indie/mobile market still which is nuts.