So someone on IRC mentioned the ending(s) to Zero Wing and I found out there's a cheat code to skip to it. I thought it might have some more "All your base" style dialogue I could put in the generator, but I really wasn't prepared for what ending #1 looked like

ending #2 is some very thin credits

ending #3 is reportedly the "true ending", at least on the European release. The Japanese version has 35 endings.

This one is... more serious? a little?

The other 32 endings are translated here, by

functionally all the japanese endings work like this. you get CONGRATULATIONS and then CATS says something to you.
usually something silly, or possibly the debug menu cheat code

The #Q project was aimed at gamers, younger people with inquiring minds and the skill sets to educate themselves; just like a gamer has to go through a new game to find out how to play it, what tricks there are, and how to advance past certain obstacles. They have to learn and >

🎉Global Game Jam Online Sponsor Appreciation thread 2021!🎉

Please support our sponsors this year if you are able as GGJ could not happen without them. Give them a like, RT an @, follow, download or subscribe. Show them how much #GGJ means to the community!! 👏👏👏 #ggjonline

First a huge thanks to @CoreGames for being our Headline Sponsor! 🤍💛💙Core is a radically accessible game construction kit, content exchange, and game-playing platform, all in one. Get started here

Our Empower Sponsors this year are @Microsoft & @unity3d

Unity believes the world is a better place with more creators in it. Game jams and hack weeks are part of Unity’s DNA, so they are proud to be able to help continue the tradition. Visit

The biggest games in the world run on Microsoft Game Stack but Game Stack was born to democratize game development and even the playing field by giving all developers the same powerhouse toolsets as big studios, so they can create the games they want.

Our Diversifier Sponsors for #ggjonline: @IGDAFoundation @Sony/@PlayStation @NextNav @virtuosgames @EpicGames @EndlessOS @CalPoly DxHub & Carina Fund

OK, we're going to go through this and explain why it sucks.

War *is* political machinations. That's the entire thing about war. It's politics that leads to people killing each other. The entire point is political gain or the diminishment of the other party's political power.

In the case of Iraq, it was neither: the US made up a reason.

Engender sympathy for US troops? Excuse the fuck me? When you look up the casualty statistics for the Iraq war you'll find US deaths, but you could barely *find* Iraqi victims, civilian or resistance or insurgent or terrorist. They're all defined "terrorist" or "collateral".

How about the experiences of that individual that was just living there & they & their kids and husband tried to flee but men of military age were refused escape from the besieged city by the US before the US went door to door & killed anyone that was looked at them wrong.

This is literally the least interesting part of the entire conflict: between kill and be killed, people tend to opt to kill. We can play that in DOOM. We can play that in Quake. If you leave out the context of knowing the war is wrong, you might as well not make this.

@Karnythia Staying warm while sleeping: use lots of blankets/comforters. Don't wear lots of layers to bed, they can trap sweat and oil and you'll kick off the blankets then get cold. Wear a toque or "beanie".

Use rolled up towels or t-shirts as draft excluders on your windows and doors.

If your bed is against an outside wall, move it away from it.

If you have some, hang rugs and spare blankets on the outside walls in your house. It's old school in the extreme, but it will create an air barrier between the cold transfering through the wall and the warm air in the house. Covering windows on the inside has the same effect.

Whatever you do, DO NOT burn charcoal of any sort inside your house. Or wood if you don't have a fireplace. The chances of suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning are huge and this kills whole families every year. Don't do it.

Past that, drink lots of hot drinks and warm water. You'll burn less energy than if you drink cold drinks.

And for clothes, layer up. Sweatpants and sweatshirts/hoodies are going to be your new besties.

A little bit of fading video game history, inspired by both recent events and also how badly Cory Doctorow's graphic novel In Real Life (IRL) botches it.

MMORPGs in the 90s and 2000s used to rely exclusively on monthly subscriptions. That's how they paid for the servers to run them.

That's all well and fine, but even the most expansive games of that era capped out at 100 hours at most of "unique" content.

Most core gamers would finish within two months and quit. That's unsustainable.

So, how do you keep people playing? There are a few methods.

There is tried and true level grinding, of course. Make it take forever to level up.

But that's finite. How do you extend that further?

Make players do it all over again. If you want to play a different class, start over from scratch.

I've only got one quest in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and it's always active.

wow, I think I just rolled a critical failure on my image capture.
I told my script to take a picture of Oblivion and instead got a badly cropped screenshot of Heroes of Might & Magic III, a game I don't even have installed

the endless questions of trying to capture fonts from modern 3D games:
1. what's the native resolution?
2. IS there a native resolution?

it looks cleaner at 1024x768 (earlier one was 640x480)
but not perfect.
maybe 800x600?

nope. I think it's 1024x768, for a simple reason:

this splash screen! it doesn't scale based on resolution, and it seems to be sized the same as 1024x768

Early this week I ranted about a @nytimes editorial misrepresenting the scientific literature around video game uses and effects.

It's one thing for an editorial piece to mishandle scientific information, but it is another when an “educational” organization does it.

A thread.

A new training from @childrenscreens was announced called BLOOD, SWEAT, and FEARS: Understanding the Psychological Effects of Graphic and Violent Media on Children and

What a title. One that is clearly meant to instill fear, shock, awe, pearl clutching… moral panic.

For a primer on the history of the moral panic see here:

There are many points to discuss in their advertising, but for the sake of time I’ll focus on a few. Starting with this gem of an anonymous quote.

First, games are not addicting in the way as cigarettes or any other chemical addiction

See:

1/8
Some quick thoughts on delivering value and what is of value and to who (whom?).
A lot of indie developers make videos about indie game development -- but are the people who watch videos about indie game development the most likely customers for indie games?
Perhaps not.

2/8
Some #indiedev even go all-in on making YouTube videos and become entertainers that earn money primarily from entertaining rather than selling games.

My general quick take is:

3/8
- An artist (painter, writer, sculptor, or even indie game developers) needs an audience - fans of their work.
- Any way one can develop and nurture an audience is better than having no audience.

4/8
- Delivering value (entertainment, education, etc.) to that audience keeps them coming back.

5/8
- An audience might not help the artist directly. As I pointed out, fellow developers might find devlogs and programming tutorials interesting -- but they might not be a good fit as customers for the actual product being created.

It’s Friday and you’ve had the most difficult week of work! All you can think about is loading up @GhostRecon #Breakpoint and playing some PvP to tame the beast! You get in the PvP lobby and hit search.... 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes go by with no games found. (1/10)

Finally at 12 long minutes of searching you find a game and you’re excited to have a chance to release your pent up aggression on some other players. Lets go! You load into the match, btw it only took an additional 2 minutes to load after finding the match, (2/11)

and find out your teammates are 17/18 kilometers off map? Invisible! What? How!? You also find out this has been going on since June 2020 and it’s February 2021. You saw, on another forum, (3/11)

you need to take steps to go to the @Xbox home screen and return to the Game at the very beginning of the match to “fix” this issue but you didn't do it in time. Now you’re running the match and you get killed by someone right in front of you but you can’t see them! (4/11)

Where are they? On that’s right! They’re invisible because the opposite team was also 17 kilometers away making their players invisible too! All because you couldn’t take some awkward, unwarranted steps, to try and correct the buggy game, you’re just losing the matches. (5/11)

The Review: GW 20 - A thread

Hi everyone, welcome to the latest edition of “The Review” where I look at the GW gone by and Kane replacements with an eye on the upcoming GW21:

#FPL #FPLCommunity @OfficialFPL

(Data taken from @FFScout and @FFH_HQ with consent)

Before I start, I'd like to introduce to you this game Fantasy5
that I play each GW. It's free to enter and all you have to do is pick 5 players to beat their Fantasy points target. It's very exciting and you have a chance to win £10k! Link

At this point, I’d also like to mention that I post about FPL on my Instagram too, so if you have an Instagram account, follow up here!

Q: In this section, I talk about Manchester City.

I first run a comparison between Man City’s midfielders from GW 13-20:

(read below)

Gündoğan V Foden v Bernardo v Sterling

Mins per chance created: 46 v 26 v 57 v 51
Mins per shots in the box: 38 v 32 v 81 v 41
Mins per big chance: 92 v 208 v 285 v 124
Mins per expected involvement: 149 v 179 v 278 v 122

As nearly all teams have played 18 games, a thread checking in on who is ranked top/bottom of the #EPL for all the key numbers

Shots per match (FBREF)
16.0 City
15.8 LFC
15.6 Villa
14.5 Leeds
13.9 United
...
8.9 Newcastle
8.8 Sheff Utd
8.0 WBA

Shots conceded per match (FBREF)
7.3 City
7.9 LFC
8.9 Brighton
9.7 Chelsea
...
11.6 United (9th)
...
14.5 Leeds, Burnley
15.0 Newcastle
16.5 WBA

Penalties awarded (Opta)
10 Leicester (extremely high)
6 United, Brigton
...
1 Burnley
0 West Ham

Penalties conceded
7 Brighton, Wolves
6 Leeds, LFC
...
1 Sheff Utd, Leicester, Arsenal

New thread because new day + progress. My Fogleworm configuration search is now pretty darned working-ish. Here's three stages for N=3: finding unique candidates, generating valid configurations of candidates, and filtering that down to unique configs. N(3) = 2, as hoped!

The same output for N=4 looks like this. I'm expecting N(4) = 96. I got...97. Here's a fun game, find the two grids among the 97 in that last pair of images that are congruent under transformation. [screams in math] But this is CLOSE, which is GREAT.

N=5, targeting N(5) = 856. 1087 is...a great deal more than 856.

I don't dare run N=6 right now, but if I'm lucky and the proportion of search time is going up by "only" two orders of magnitude for each N, it'd probably get done overnight if I start it tonight in this current form.

gonna get colorful, testing out graphics stuff

Sega Ages are on sale again on Switch & someone asked me about the enhanced features—I feel like ppl might be sick to death of me talking about em but otoh, there are plenty of ppl who didn't follow them at all, so here's a rundown of what's new for all 19 Sega Ages Switch games:

Sega Ages Sonic the Hedgehog includes both the OG Mega Drive game & the obscure remixed Mega Play arcade version (with score attack leaderboard), Sonic Mania's Drop Dash (& spin dash, ofc), a "ring keeper" helper mode, a Green Hill act 1 time attack & more

Sega Ages Thunder Force IV (aka "Lightening Force"), the first-ever international reissue, includes the extras from the 🇯🇵-only Saturn port—the addition of the Thunder Force III ship & a more friendly "Kids Mode"—plus slowdown options, leaderboards & more

Sega Ages Phantasy Star includes tons features that make it a much friendlier modern experience: an "Ages Mode" with improved encounter/xp/money rates, a walk speed booster, a dungeon automap, detailed item/gear/monster glossaries, FM music toggle & more

Sega Ages Outrun includes many of the enhancements added for the 3DS version—60FPS+widescreen, car upgrades, JP/US ROMs, two brand-new arcade-authentic FM tunes etc—as well as gyro controls & 4 extra FM & non-FM arranged tunes from across the Outrun series

Fifty years have passed since CONWAY'S GAME OF LIFE firstly appeared on a column called "Mathematical Games" on @sciam.

While most Programmers & Computer Science enthusiasts are familiar with it, not many know that the game is actually TURING COMPLETE.

Let's see why. ⠠⠵

🧵👇

The quickest way to prove that a system is TURING COMPLETE is to show that it allows for the constructions of LOGIC GATES. 🖥️

So, let's see how the 𝗔𝗡𝗗, 𝗢𝗥 and 𝗡𝗢𝗧 gates can actually be constructed in Conway's Game of Life...

Firstly, we need to find a way to encode binary signals.

One very popular choice is to use a stream of GLIDERS. The so-called GOSPER GLIDER GUN can generated a new glider every 30 generations. 🔫

Hence, receiving a glider every 30 generations counts as a "1".

When two GLIDERS hit each other in just the right way, they both get destroyed. 💥

This means that a GLIDER GUN can stop an incoming glider stream!

We can exploit this mechanism to simulate a NOT gate:

⬇️ 𝗡𝗢𝗧 0 = 1 ⬇️ 𝗡𝗢𝗧 1 = 0

With the same principle, and AND gate can be also constructed by extending a NOT gate.

⬇️ 0 𝗔𝗡𝗗 1 = 0 ⬇️ 1 𝗔𝗡𝗗 0 = 0