They absolutely did. So much more room for air/sound to flow through those speakers in CRTs. That’s why most people resort to sound bars at a minimum to get halfway decent sound for today’s flat panel televisions. You just can’t fit powerful speakers into them.

I’ve tried them all, and as of right now Connect feels the most polished and feature rich. So that’s my recommendation.

Another hot tip: don’t refer to people as “normies.”

Nostalgia is really interesting in that it’s inherently bittersweet. It’s nice because it grounds us in a shared timeline and focuses on mostly positive aspects of some past point in time, but it’s also sad because it means thinking back fondly on a time that will never be again.

So maybe it’s the bitter half of that bittersweet feeling that you’re subconsciously averse to? Either that or maybe your past/childhood was mostly negative or even traumatic? I’m no psychologist, so really I don’t know what I’m talking about.

An empire that we lived in and got to experience when it was thriving. That’s why dead malls in particular have a distinctly bittersweet feeling to them. Those of us who frequented malls in the 80’s and 90’s can vividly remember when they were filled with people, commerce, and social activity. They were such lively social spaces back then, so seeing them slowly succumb to the ravages of time and fade into irrelevancy is both sad and fascinating.

Nah. It’s morbidly interesting IMO.

Yep. Still have my black one with AmberElec installed. I love everything about it other than the display’s somewhat muted colors and mediocre battery life.

Phew.

Lol. I read this in an entirely different context, like you were implying that they’d go to hell for this.

That’s really cool that someone thought to preserve this and put it on display in a museum. It’s like a modern historical artifact from the golden age of computing.

“Shouldn’t we wait for reinforcements?”

“I am the reinforcements.”

• Vagrant Story, PS1

I do remember Lost Souls, yeah.

And that Papyrus font… I can feel the 90’s-era PC gaming vibes radiating off of it. Love it.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread because I would also love to know if I’m missing out on some good games journalism out there. Sadly, sites like what you’ve described are increasingly rare in the modern era. Nevertheless, here are a few that come to mind:

NintendoLife is pretty great for this if you’re looking for Nintendo-related news, reviews, interviews, and feature articles.

One of their affiliate sites, Time Extension, is also really good for long-form articles and retrospectives about retro games.

And while it’s mostly just news, like you said, Polygon will sometimes surprise you with some really excellent feature articles that have a lot of thought and research put into them.

Yeah, that surprised me, actually.

I just took Mastodon for a spin only a week or so ago, and it felt much less active than most of the communities on here do. Just my anecdotal experience, though. I couldn’t find more than a handful of Twitter-migrated accounts on Mastodon that I cared to follow. There just wasn’t much happening on there that I’m interested in when I last checked. I’ll look again.

Oh hell yeah they are. I’m a tech enthusiast, myself. Don’t even get me started on Wednesdays because I’ll never stop.

Because it’s just an incredibly small userbase made up mostly of tech/privacy enthusiasts as of right now.

Oh, DLC. I thought this was a full-blown sequel out of nowhere.

Not yet, no.

Is this an assumption or can someone else confirm this? I just started using Connect, so I’d love to know for sure.

I wouldn’t say that I’m against subscription models as an option alongside a traditional purchasing paradigm for games, but if what we’re seeing now is simply a trojan horse for a wholesale upheaval of that traditional purchasing model sometime in the not-so-distant future then I’d happily see it fail. Just in general the constant push toward an all-digital gaming future consistently concerns me.

But I’m old. I’d be willing to bet that most young people and teens gaming today probably couldn’t care less about that prospect since they’ve never experienced this medium during a time before digital distribution, day 1 patches, etc.