original screenshot from cardcaptor sakura / blank, for your convenience / serving suggestion
Thirty-something that rarely streams games anymore, but really enjoys cats and complaining a lot.
I feel like, at that point, why even mention the first bit? Just play the game and cope with your guilt in your own time. You're not getting a cookie for being conflicted.
Because the reality is there is no such thing as "games journalism". It's an advertising business, and you don't get to pay the bills if you run it like one.
I've seen a rag run an entire headline story about how the director of a game was a revisionist fascist and the game was full of racist propaganda in the guise of "historical fiction" ... and then quietly edit that story and go on to run six weeks of strategy guide coverage for it anyway.
It's a fundamentally broken enterprise, because your livelihood depends on access and ad revenue from the very people you're meant to cover. Game publishers are your real customers, the readers are a product you are delivering to them.
You're compromised from the start, and the money men don't like it when you piss off the customers.
That's why the journos you see actually reporting on abusive employment practices or fraud or whatever are increasingly all working for other media, writing the games coverage for outlets like CNN or Bloomberg or Time ... outfits whose revenue isn't dependent on advertising for the very games and studios they're covering.
i was on a call trying to demo something unrelated, and ran past a chicken, scaring it, it ran through a campfire, caught fire, flapped into a cornfield, and set the entire cornfield alight. the corn fire generated enough popcorn to crash the editor
this was a direct self-own since i had myself implemented the chicken-spooking, fire propagation and cooking systems
I'm so proud of the title of this article because the staircase objects in Super Mario Bros. are complicated, and this can happen if there are two near each other in a level's data:
The Super Mario Bros. convolution function. Convolution is a mathematical operation on two staircases (f and g) that produces a third staircase (f ✱ g) that expresses how the shape of one is modified by the other.
Staircases were only ever meant to be as big as the ones you see at the end of most levels, which is nine blocks wide and eight blocks high. This corresponds to an internal length of 8. An objects length is defined by a 4-bit number, which can take on any value from 0 to 15. So larger staircases are possible, but they glitch out a bit. Also when larger staircases are near each other, they glitch out as well.
By the way, this program is SMB Utility, a level editor for Super Mario Bros. It actually emulates the game in order to render its display, so it's great at rendering the bugs too!
It turns out staircases are a pretty unique object in Super Mario Bros.' object list, so lets take a deeper look!