I have never found the Gex series to be “exciting,” even when it was new. Gex was always a shallow also-ran mascot in the time when everyone was trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle without understanding how it actually worked, and desperately trying to recreate what Sonic and Earthworm Jim and to a lesser extent Toejam and Earl had.

He was marginally less annoying than Bubsy. That’s about all I can say about Gex.

If I really decide to play some sub-par 90’s platforming stuffed with stilted and dated TV and movie references, my 3DO still works. Yes, really…

You should check out an original Famicom, then. Not only are the controller cables only about two feet long, but they’re also permanently affixed to the console. Well, unless you’re willing to dismantle it, anyway.

It seems Nintendo expected gamers to keep the console in front of them and connected to the TV via a cable running across the floor, rather than our now familiar methodology of keeping the console under or next to the TV and only bringing the controller(s) with you. The limited amount of space in Japanese households may have also had something to do with it.

Anyway, if you’re a modern western gamer nowadays it’s annoying as hell. Big N made the right choice when they brought the system to the US in not only making the controller cables significantly longer, but also unpluggable.

Maybe in full HD we’ll be able to determine definitively if anyone in Ivalice actually has a nose.

This guy… he’s un-fuckin-believable.

See, this is exactly my point in my other comment above. I could do this in about five seconds with Corel PhotoPaint.

1. Make a new document that’s arbitrarily large.
2. Import both (or all 3, or all 10, or however many) images. (Images can be batch imported.)
3. Snap the first one to the top left corner.
4. Snap the others below it. Their corners and edges will click together if you have alignment guides enabled. 4a. Optionally resize any of the images by just typing in the value you need in pixels, in the toolbar when it’s selected. If you need to know the size of any other image, just click it and it’ll tell you. It’s not even in a menu.
5. Crop tool (D) to knock the oversized canvas down to whatever size you need. Again, you can just type this in, in pixels, and it’s not even buried in a menu.
6. Export, post, accumulate lulz.

Export to a flat format (.jpeg, .png, .gif, whatever) and your output will be flattened. You don’t need to think about layers or merging or layers being bigger than the canvas or not. There is no, “Be careful not to XYZ.” What you see in the preview is what the output will look like. Period. You can even apply your monitor’s color calibration to it or the color profile of any other output device (printer, a different monitor, etc.) on the fly if you are a big enough nerd.

You can do this in an even simpler dumber way in CorelDRAW!

1. Import the images. Images can still be batch imported.
2. Arrange them however you want, snap them together, whatever.
3. Lasso them all and export.

That’s… literally it. You don’t have to crop, you don’t have to trim, or layer, or anything. You can specify the dimensions of the output file in the export window before you hit save if you want it to be different than the original. Your arrangement doesn’t even have to be rectangular and it will still work.

“And if I do give you a solution, we’ll be sure not to share it with anyone else.”

No, GIMP does suck.

It has the same problem as most FOSS packages that are too wide in breadth and have multiple contributors with their own hobby horses pulling in all different directions, and to this day does not actually provide a feature-complete whole, nor an interface that actually makes sense. And it’s not a matter of the workflow just being different – it categorically fails to replicate functionality that is core to its commercial competitors. Numerous other “big” productivity packages have the same problem including FreeCAD (boy does it ever), LibreOffice, etc. I say this as a staunch supporter of FreeCAD, by the way. It’s the only CAD software I use even though it’s a pain in my ass.

The shining exception to this I see is Inkscape, but it is still significantly less powerful than even early versions of CorelDraw.

For 2D graphics work these days, I hold my nose and just use Corel. I use it for work. Like, actual commercial work. That I get paid for. It is at least a lesser evil than doing business with Adobe.

And if you want to stick it to the man, it is easily pirated.

Even at the time I found the contortions they put themselves into to avoid your protagonist from either speaking or having a name to be equal parts sad and hilarious.

I write a lot of PHP for part of my job.

The beauty of PHP is that for any given task, there are always multiple ways to do it, all of which are wrong.

I love Ikaruga from an aesthetic, mechanical, and presentation perspective.

But it’s been 23 years and damned if I still don’t suck at that game. This coming from someone who can fairly reliably at least see the final boss of Progear on one credit.

Gento is a shipping container full of car parts, with an Ikea screwdriver zip tied to the door.

There’s probably a race car you could build in there… somewhere… eventually.

No one is arguing which game came out first. I didn’t say C&C was the first game. I said C&C was the first one to nail the modern RTS format, and because of that I think Dune 2000 is a less irritating game to play from a modern perspective than Dune 2.

Warcraft, especially the first one, was quite archiac compared to C&C.

If I can get at the connector I prefer to de-tarnish it with Flitz, then after a bath in contact cleaner I’ll goop it up with dielectric grease, which ensures I will not have to do it again any time soon.

You can realign the leaf contacts carefully with a dental pick or, if that doesn’t come to hand, a pin with a short 90 degree bend in it. You can also truly realign the pins in specific connectors if the fancy strikes you; my front loader NES will now happily (and easily!) play cartridges without having to push them down.

And while Dune 2 laid much of the initial groundwork for early real-time strategy games, I highly advise anyone from current times who is interested to play Dune 2000 instead. If you ask me, the original Command and Conquer (same developers, Westwood) is the actual genesis of the modern RTS, and Dune 2000 is built on the Command and Conquer engine and is this significantly less clunky and irritating to actually play.

And it’s got John Rhys-Davies in the cutscenes. You can’t really go wrong there.

Not officially, from what I recall. That was possibly one of the plans for it’s alleged successor, the N950, which turned out to be vaporware. Sailfish OS then went to be used on the first Jolla Phone, which probably sold in single digit numbers. Jolla now manufactures nothing, although they apparently continue to develop Sailfish for licensing to embedded applications, and their main deal seems to be the “Appsupport” compatibility layer for Android apps to run on Linux.

My Nokia N900 ran Linux back in the day, and was a more polished experience than the iPhone it was then contemporary with. Too bad that particular line went precisely nowhere.

I’m still waiting for John Romero to make us all his bitch.

We’re talking about opening the door, not starting the engine.

…Or if there were an alternative option that didn’t rely on software and electronics is my point.

Cars have had electronic remote keyless entry for decades. It’s not new. Some of them even have phone apps that duplicate that functionality. No one but Tesla has been stupid enough to remove the keyhole, though.