The way Mario seems to teleport when turning around in the water seems to say something about the way hitboxes worked in the original DKC1.

Super Kong World

Well, it seems the Lila’s Sky Arc key has been claimed, and/or I’m not figuring out what Theta is.

Thanks for offering it anyway.

Yeah, N64/PS1 era was when the industry started pushing 3D games hard, and it really feels like the beginning of the modern era to me too.

Woohoo! We did it! With (literally) more heart than originally planned!

Thank you to everyone who helped out!

Well I accidentally made a heart shape with the lower O.

Now I kinda wanna keep it lol

By far, the games of Nihon Falcom.

We gotta step up our game, over here in North America!

Yeah, this seems like a partial solution which is not very broadly viable on its own, but can still have niche applications.

Also, pardon me for bringing up the topic of violence, but I was thinking about what electronics might have particularly short lifespans and I thought of the circuitry of kamikaze drones and missiles used in military conflicts. It’d be a curious but potentially relevant way for defense industries to be more environmentally friendly in at least some way (and it’s not like weapons production is going to stop anytime soon, regardless of moral questions).

You’re definitely right to point out that the other components are much more concerning from a pollution standpoint. Still, though, I think this improvement is certainly better than nothing. And it might be part of a more broadly applicable change in the future.

A keyboard. Any standard computer keyboard.

This post was originally written as a reply to a comment by @[email protected]. But it got kinda long and it’s basically my answer to the thread topic. So yeah, lemme tell y’all a story.

I started out playing 2D platformers for DOS, where the default – or more like, only – control scheme was arrow keys to move and Ctrl and Alt to do things (commonly Ctrl to jump and Alt to shoot). I also grew up on NES, GB, and SNES games, and a handful of PC games. Notably, though, I never picked up FPS games as a child, and also never really got anything from the 32-bit era and beyond until much later in life.

With emulators being more integrated into Windows (meaning Ctrl and Alt do important things), I shifted the action buttons to the lower left corner of the keyboard. Emulating an SNES gamepad, for example, I generally map the action buttons in a mirror-image fashion to ZXCS (respectively, ABYX). (A friend of mine maps them in a similar fashion, using ZXAS instead.) This then lets me map the L and R buttons to A and D respectively. And I move this whole ensemble of six buttons up a row if I have ghosting issues. (The Sega Genesis gamepad can be mapped similarly easily.)

This works brilliantly well (at least for me) for 2D platformers, top-down action games, JRPGs, and more. Notably, though, this excludes pretty much anything that requires analog controls of some sort, e.g. FPS games, N64 games, etc… But between a lack of hardware capable of playing 3D stuff (whether natively or by emulation), a lack of a familiar control scheme, and a lack of personal interest (due to just not having ever gotten into them), I pretty much just stuck with emulating up through the 16-bit era, with a little PS1 emulation thrown in. It’s not like I ever had a shortage of excellent games.

And curiously, it turns out my control scheme (arrow keys + ZXC(V)ASD(F)) is the favored scheme for a number of Japanese indie developers who made things like action games and RPGs using 2D sidescrolling and top-down views. So I ended up having even more to play! In contrast, it seems western devs often prefer WASD, even for stuff like 2D platformer Flash games (to my chagrin). And I see (English-speaking) PC gamers these days regarding my sort of control scheme as a “left-handed” setup (which is amusing since I’m not left-handed).

I only learned to WASD as an adult. At first I even tried to use the mouse with my left hand, and tried putting my left hand on the arrow keys, but eventually I gave in and learned to WASD. I still only use this when I need to use mouse aim though, e.g. Terraria (which I played a lot).

For games that actually require console-style analog controls, though, I nowadays have a wired XB360 gamepad that connects via USB. I’ve tried mapping things like the N64 gamepad to a keyboard before but with no success. But now that I have this, funny thing is this means I’m only recently getting into a number of classics from that era.

I’ve considered getting an 8BitDo SN30 or SN30 Pro(?)…whichever basically looks like an SNES pad with added analog sticks. I specifically want a gamepad without “legs” – the two stubs that seem to be meant as palm grips on each side of the gamepad. That’s because I held my SNES pad from the side so that I could press A, B, and Y at the same time with my right thumb. (This was highly useful when playing Mega Man X.) Controllers with “legs” basically make it way harder for me to do this, as I found out when I tried to play MMX4 on my PS1. It felt so awkward, I just went straight back to emulating it, despite having the disc and hardware.

But, for now, I only pull out my XB360 gamepad for stuff that needs analog stick functionality. Everything else is keyboard. (And mouse, if needed.)

Good gosh I’ve always hated how I often can’t reuse packaging material and/or containers for something else. I would want to but (1) I get too many of them, (2) they’re sometimes too dirty (for various reasons) to be able to reuse easily, and (3) even if I could come up with ways to reuse them I’d also have to convince people I live with.

We need to reduce the amount of stuff from further upstream, rather than just having consumers try to do all the three R’s by themselves.