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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • From seeing discussions among those Zelda fans (which to be clear I am not one), the issue is that the mainline games are now a completely different genre, but treated as though it’s the natural progression of the series.

    The classic zelda games are primarily puzzle games, with a little bit of combat and intricate hand-crafted exploration to spice it up a bit. The modern zelda games (BOTW & TOTK) are exploration games with puzzles to spice it up. If you were a classic zelda fan, the niche genre you loved used to have regular releases by a major developer and now doesn’t.

    Plus, there’s a “all my homies hate skrillex” effect here; the series is massively more popular now, but the newcomers have a different idea of what makes a zelda game a zelda game. By sheer numbers they dominate a community that is now reshaped by their presence. In other words the zelda fan community is itself a different genre.

    For what it’s worth, I haven’t played that much of the series. Link to the Past I didn’t care much for, Links Awakening (new one) I honestly hated, and BOTW I liked but had a couple issues with. All I’ve written above is based on passively seeing a bunch of discussion.




  • As someone who’s used both, I’d have a strong preference for Odin over Rust if it were at a stable 1.0 release. As it stands now (or, at least, when I used it), Odin is very much in flux. Spend enough time with the language, and you’ll either find a bug with the compiler or the semantics will change after you update.

    That said, it would be my favorite without those problems. It is a really simple language in a good way. There’s no fancy language features that are just syntax sugar (well except maybe context, but I find that to be actually convenient). You can understand everything in an afternoon if you are already familiar with programming in other languages. Rust is pretty much the opposite in all of these reguards.

    Rust also has the benefit of being pretty recognizable at this point, so if you say your project is in Rust then people will know what that means, unlike Odin. More “resume-able” in a way.

    So, in short:

    • Odin if you’re doing it as a hobby
    • Rust if you want something “real”

  • While I do agree that math gets much easier with interest, and that it gets more interesting the further you get into it, and that math is inherently beautiful, etc. I feel this argument has to fall flat to people who don’t already agree. It’s the education equivalent of when someone says they couldn’t get into an anime and then the fans tell them ‘oh it gets really good around season 9’. You could be completely correct, as you are here, but it’s utterly unconvincing if you don’t already “know.”

    To be fair, I think this is mostly a problem with math curricula. Math classes up through high school and early college seem to focus on well trodden solutions to boring problems, and at some (far too late) point it flips around to being creative solutions to interesting problems. I think this could be fixed eventually, but such is the system we have now.






  • There is the Anno series of games, which are technically RTS games but if I’m honest I find them the most fun when I go out of my way to avoid combat/micromanagement. I’ve only played 1404, 2070, and 2205, 2070 being the best in my opinion, but it has a bad history with DRM so I’d suggest 1404 (known as “Dawn of Discovery” in the US because us americans are afraid of numbers apparently).

    Edit: looking at the steam page it looks like they decided to take 1404 down and made a new page where the game is (mostly) unchanged besides requiring you to jump through all the BS hoops that 2070 did, so I’d say if you’re gonna spend money get 1404 on GOG, or if you are willing to do unspeakable things go with 2070.



  • There is this excellent video which shows how a simple C program looks in assembly (don’t worry about it being C, the program is simple enough to be understood without C knowledge). There’s also this which does what the video shows automatically for you. Neither of these are fully sufficient to understand assembly but they are still incredibly useful resources.

    Also: watch out for AT&T syntax vs Intel syntax if you’re doing x86. It took me way to long to figure this out. And as another commenter mentioned look at TIS-100, but also some other similar games (sorted from easiest to hardest, TIS being harder than all of these): Human resource machine, EXAPUNKS, Shezhen I/O, and Box-256