The Musings Of The Consensus

I've been following the news of late that RPG Maker MZ will release this summer, and while I'm mostly happy, as I had a few projects in RPG Maker MV I backburnered due to issues with it I hope MZ will address, the news so far is generally good, here are the highlights. 1. Codebase is still Javascript, but apparently, they rewrote the backend code quite a bit. Given JS could drool on good computers due to bad optimization, hopefully, this will ameliorate that. 2. Ships with a crapload of resources and are generally compatible with MV stuff out of the box. I can live with that. 3. Includes a lot of features to make it easier on noobs and lots of shortcuts for things like pathfinding for cutscenes, Good stuff here. 4. LAYERS. As in XP style stuff so you don't have to do complicated hacks to do things like being able to walk under bridges. Definitely a good thing. 5. Now added Active Time Battle as a default battle engine. Good deal. 6. Effeskeer powered particle-ba...

As the title says, some enterprising soul made Windows 95 an application that runs in it's own window and runs Windows 95 natively, without the hassle of setting up a virtual machine. It can be found here if you're interested. Now, compared to a VM version, this one has some limitations. This is based on a pre-integrated Internet Explorer copy of Windows 95C, meaning it has the classic interface, no IE stuff. It cannot detect USB drives despite larval support for that being possible in the 95C version (admittedly, they are fluky on VMs too), and while a decent amount of pre-included software is added, you basically have to mount ISO images to add anything else. Regardless, it's impressive all the basics of Windows 95 work out of the box with no special tweaks. It does have some issues. It does not handle restarting the application well, and changing display settings can lock up the program. It's preconfigured to selected values, essentially a locked VM sandbox,...

Something I find often on Steam I LOATHE and find utterly detestable is finding games that are obviously left to rot by developers who could at least ensure it will function on modern PCs when bought. Two games in particular this is odious on are Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Invisible War The first one admits it's not gonna run well on anything newer than Windows 7 and requires several fan patches to fix issues that the official developers could have taken twenty minutes out of their lives to do themselves. Considering one usually has to still buy Fallout 3 and use it as one half of the Tales of Two Wastelands Mod just to run it on the Fallout New Vegas engine (which is modern computer friendly), and considering they still expect people to pay money for it and it has a very active modding community even now, you'd THINK Bethesda could be bothered to care. Nope. They are too busy running customer goodwill into the ground with that trashfire called Fallout 76. As for Deus Ex:I...

One game I enjoy on Linux is "MInetest", a free, open-source clone of Minecraft, and in some way, I deem it superior. 1. It's FREE: Might as well start with the best aspect, I pay nothing to play. Granted, I don't regret spending money on Minecraft when I did, it was worth it, but you cannot beat absolutely nothing in terms of price. 2. MODS. Yeah, I know, Minecraft has mods too, but unlike Minecraft, I pay nothing for all of Minetest's mods, and the modding feature is way more granular, meaning I can strip a Minetest game down it's barest essentials if I please, while I can't do the same to Minecraft 3. Open-source. When Notch sold Microsoft Minecraft, all hope the engine would ever be completely free for anyone to mess with to whatever extent possible died. Prior to their acquisition of Minecraft, modders had been doing a lot of fun things unfettered by limits, now it comes with oversight by a third party over the core source and price tags on mod...