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foone
foone
@Foone 3 years, 2 months ago 2986 views

An interesting set of games that I've been vaguely interested in since I was a kid, after seeing one at a friend's house and never being able to find it again, was the BATTLES IN A DISTANT DESERT/BATTLES ON DISTANT PLANETS series.

 These are turn-based wargames for windows 3.x, sharing the same engine.
Battles in a Distant Desert is from 1992, and is based on the first Iraq war (Desert Storm)
and Battles on Distant Planets is from 1991, and takes place in SPACE!
I'm pretty sure this is the one I played as a kid.
They've got 3 options to play with:
* Player vs. Player
* Player vs. Computer
* Computer vs. Computer

So it's a 0-2 player game!
They also did a DOS strategy game called "STARDATE 2140.2: GALACTIC CONQUEST" in 1990, but it seems to be lost.
All the games share an experimental AI system based on neural networks.
There's also CRUSADE IN SPACE from 1993, which is on the internet archive but doesn't seem to work:
https://t.co/LsXXGlcxTD
There's WORLD WAR II BATTLES: NORMANDY from 1994, (which seems to be lost but I have some leads, so I'll keep looking), and finally LANDS OF SWORDS AND SORCERY, which was in development in 1995 but then halted so it could be revamped for Windows 95 (which never happened)
So those are the six shareware games from Glacier Edge:
Three we have, two missing, one incomplete and never released.
But who was Glacier Edge?
They were basically one person: Eric Dysband, of Glendale, CO. He was a freelance AI consultant working on a bunch of games.
He was a playtester on The Perfect General (1991) by White Wolf Productions.
and the lead developer on Enemy Nations (1996) by Windward Studios.
He programmed The War in Heaven (1999), a Christian FPS from Eternal Warriors/ValuSoft.
He was the AI programmer for NHRA Drag Racing 2 (2000)
His final game was Men of Valor (2004), a Medal of Valor spin-off game.
Sadly, he passed away on April 15, 2004, due to an aneurysm.
He also worked on the AI for Rebel Moon Revolution, which was supposed to be the third game in the Rebel Moon series, which was canceled before release.
There is footage from the demo version, showing the squad-based combat it was going to use.
It turns out the engine for War in Heaven is the same as Rebel Moon Revolution, too.
https://t.co/wbyeSOYZ0j
A correction: I misread what he was saying on Usenet, his games were trying to do AI WITHOUT a neural-network based approach.
He also made some commercial games under the Glacier Edge name:
PARACHUTES AT KANEV (1987) was a DOS wargame based on the Kanev board game, under contract for World Wide Wargames.
He also wrote a series of articles for Gamasutra on AI middleware:
https://t.co/i5lDxELoNb

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this game definitely didn't have any problems in localization


ahh yes, I remember when my father went off to look for the dragon
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I was todays years old when I learned that Final Fantasy VII's Midgar Zolom is an exceptionally badly translated reference to Jörmungandr, the world serpent from Norse mythology.


The other name for Jörmungandr is Miðgarðsormr, which got rendered into katakana as ミドガルズオルム, or "Midogaruzuorumu".
But when it was translated back into English, the translator didn't get the reference.

So they split that into the city name Midgar and the rest as... "Zolom".
Which is not a word.

It was supposed to be a bit of a pun in Japanese. Midgar, the big city in FF7, is named after Midgard, the Old Norse name for the Earth (as opposed to the other realms of the Nine Worlds)

so obviously a big snake living near the city of Midgar would be the Miðgarðsormr, since that basically translate as "Midgard Serpent"
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foone
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does bubble memory count as solid state?
I guess? I mean, it has no moving parts. but it requires preheating and involves movement of magnetic fields across a surface...

it's kinda like a traditional hard drive where you don't spin the disc, you just trick all the bits to migrate off the edge

who called it "bubble memory" and not "lemming bits"

(obligatory "lemmings don't throw themselves off cliffs, that's an urban legend")

(obligatory "the idea that disney invented that urban legend it itself an urban legend, they just helped popularize it")
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foone
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yesterday: somewhat viral post about shooting billionaires into the sun (and my stupid "WELL ACTUALLY" reply)
also yesterday: elon musk leaves twitter "for a while" and jeff bezos steps down

COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

elon's gotta be off twitter for a while because they don't have wifi on the SunCrasher 9000, and bezos keeps stealing his phone anyway

elon thought he wouldn't need it because of starlink but THE SATELLITES ARE IN LOW EARTH ORBIT, MUSK, AND YOU'RE HEADED TOWARDS THE SUN

bill gates is the only one who still has internet access because he remembered to set up a long enough ethernet cable

(although tim cook joked that was just because his WinPhone doesn't have wifi support anyway)

zuckerberg asked if bill gates would let him use the network connection for a while and while billy g was fine with it, it turns out none of the other billionaires brought phones with built in ethernet ports

finally, the win95 phone comes up top!
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