#tech demo unit

[natsumipocket]

Rare Olympus Infinity Stylus Mju 1 demo unit

src

#Olympus #olympus infinity stylus #olympusphotography #olympus stylus #camera #transparent #transparent tech #transparent design #translucent tech #translucent design #old tech #techcore #demo unit #tech demo unit #aesthetic blog #90s #90s tech #rarities #rare tech

[nostalgebraist]

Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.

Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.

This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.

Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.

This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.

My options in the short term are to

A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or

B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.

Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.

I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.

----

In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.

[EDIT: I've seen several people misread the previous line and infer that nostalgebraist-autoresponder is still using GPT-2. She isn't, and hasn't been for a long time. Her latest model is a finetuned LLaMA-13B.]

Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.

And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.

In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.

There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.

And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.

I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.

Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.

Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.

----

I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.

Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?

(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)

"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"

No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."

Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.

I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?

I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.

I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.

I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.

----

Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.

If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.

"But -- but how, exactly?"

Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.

There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.

Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.

#nostalgebraist autoresponder meta

[tirami-tzu]

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia; the sins of the father, plus some all new Original Sins (do not steal).

Introduction: Bygone Days

I could not accurately regale any tales of the background of the original Fire Emblem Gaiden. It was a Japan exclusive release over 30 years ago, and I was neither in Japan nor anywhere 30 years ago. While more ink may be spilled over the matter of Gaiden later, it is fair to give you an impression of the conditions under which Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (henceforth referred to interchangeably as ‘Echoes’ or ‘SoV’) came into existence. The Fire Emblem series was a series on decline prior to the 3DS era. The last wholly original game in the series was Path of Radiance, a GameCube exclusive, greatly limiting it’s reach. The next game, Radiant Dawn, for the far more successful Wii, was another attempt at the series at making a follow up game set in the same setting, one which was met with disaster, meeting more poor sales and reception. For the DS, only two games were made, both of which were remakes of past games – the original Shadow Dragon and the highly successful Mystery of the Emblem, which itself was a partial remake of Shadow Dragon, almost 20 years prior. Neither of these games met the developer’s expectations. The rest is likely a formality to many in the audience. Fire Emblem: Awakening was conceived as the series’ last chance, where if it continued to sell poorly the series would be axed altogether. Awakening’s swan song was a strange medley, a grand symphony of almost everything that the series had ever tried until that point. The story jumped around between vastly disparate arcs, introducing story element after story element with reckless abandon. Traditional stories of imperial conquest being battled by heroic soldiers with evil sorcerers and dark godlike beings scheming in the background met with time travel, amnesia, many faked deaths, large jumps in time offscreen and brief asides on extinction. The gameplay was a grand unification of many mechanics in a strange, almost sandbox like format – the return of the world map, the skills system, the child inheritance system, and class changing. Many of these systems had only appeared in one game previously, but they all had a place in Awakening. It was grand, it was marketed, and it was popular. Awakening was not the end of the series, but a new beginning. It is fair to make special note of two changes Awakening introduced to the world as a whole. The first of these is the customisable avatar as a gameplay character. This was not the first time the series used one, as New Mystery of the Emblem, an aforementioned DS exclusive remake, featured one. However, New Mystery was only released in Japan. Casual Mode, a mode which disabled permadeath, was also added to Awakening. Again, it was not the first time it had appeared in the series, but it was the first time the world as a whole received it. Awakening’s success drove an even more ambitious follow up. The next 3DS game was Fates, though it may be more accurate to say it was three games, or more accurately around two and a half games. Fates: Birthright and Fates: Conquest had radically different casts and map designs, with Fates: Revelation sharing the casts of Birthright and Conquest but with some new, bizarre and experimental maps more suited to a tech demo than a full game. These games were sold separately at full price with Revelation being a DLC, a feature that would become maligned as undermining the point of the game.

Overall, Fates was a doubling down on Awakening. Awakening’s return of child units and inheritance was intimately tied into the story, with all three major story arcs having a shared focus on a time travel plot to prevent the evil dragon Grima from destroying humanity. In Fates, child units were a strange afterthought, with an odd aside about hyperbolic time chamber dimensions to accelerate the growth of newborns into units who are old enough to be usable in gameplay. In Awakening, the customisable avatar, Robin, was a character who was essential to the story (to the point that in permadeath mode, their death was a game over condition, which is typically reserved for main characters), but they were deceptively well defined – despite having the option to choose between male and female and alter the name and appearance, Robin had a concrete personality and backstory. They were effectively one of three main characters, sharing much of the spotlight with Chrom, a more ‘traditional’ main characters in the likes of Alm or Ephraim: a well meaning noble who thinks with his hands and fights against the forces threatening his people. Lucina, the time travelling daughter of Chrom, is also a major character, though has less spotlight than Chrom and Robin. In contrast, in Fates, the customisable character, Corrin, was the clear sole main character. They were similarly deceptively well defined, but in such a way that made most players highly frustrated with Corrin and unable to relate to them. Robin was seemingly modelled on how Fire Emblem players would like to see themselves – a tactician who is skilled and caring, who tries to win fights while minimising losses. Robin’s amnesia helped ensure that they wouldn’t have specific story details that alienate the audience. Corrin, on the other hand, has only partial amnesia which is removed by chapter 5. Corrin is a sheltered and highly idealistic noble, who is trusting and well meaning to a fault. Players were frustrated by Corrin’s naïveté, especially considering the strange character writing overall. Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest is, to this day, considered by many to be the worst story in Fire Emblem, largely owing to the melodramatic scenario being undermined by inconsistent characterisation of many of the protagonists, alongside some fairly uninteresting and poorly defined main villains. In contrast, Fates’ gameplay was extremely well received – to this day, some still cite Fates: Conquest as the best map design in Fire Emblem. Personally I view Fates’ core gameplay as an exemlar for systems such as reclassing and alternate objectives in maps.

The effect of this great doubling down was, of course, a double down in a split in opinion. Awakening was not too divisive, but Fates was extremely so. Fans of more traditional Fire Emblem were disappointed to see another game like Awakening, with common complaints addressing the story writing, the characterisation, the game being ‘too anime’ (this was a common complaint, though what they were actually complaining about was likely that aspects of the writing and art direction were specifically designed to be titillating to a primarily male audience, which is a common feature in many anime series), and the nature of a customisable self insert protagonist as the main character. At risk of derailing this even further, Corrin was frequently called a ‘Mary Sue’ character, due to the story revolving around them so heavily. To offer a personal opinion, I think Corrin’s writing is generally reflective of the quality of the individual game they’re in. In Birthright it’s fine because Birthright’s story was inoffensive and bland. In Conquest it’s distractingly bad because Conquest’s story was strange and melodramatic. In Revelation Corrin becomes a black hole of characterisation around which the entire story is warped because Revelation’s story is a series of disconnected cool ‘moments’, in which Corrin is generally placed front and centre. Enter our protagonist. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia was the first game to feature the ‘echoes’ subtitle. As of the time of writing, it is the last game to feature the ‘echoes’ subtitle. It was the last FE game on the 3DS, and the first remake in the series since the disastrous New Mystery. Seemingly emboldened by their recent successes in Awakening and Fates, Intelligent Systems returned to remaking past games. Gaiden was perhaps the most interesting choice of a game to remake, largely due to the strange nature of Gaiden.

Gaiden: the Nature of Gaiden

Fire Emblem Gaiden had always had the reputation of being the black sheep of the series. This was largely because, as the second game in the series, it was experimental to an extent no other game was. The original Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon codified many tropes that would return in future games. Promotion to a second tier class, weapons being determined by a unit’s weapon rank stat alongside which weapons they have in an inventory, management of money (which is trivialised by the use of an Arena where you can fight for money), villages as timed objectives to visit on maps for rewards, stationary bosses who sit on gates and many more all have their origins here. Gaiden is interesting specifically because it threw out so many of these, replacing them with features that occasionally stuck around, but usually didn’t. The linear campaign was replaced with a world map in which two separate protagonists had their own tracks to follow. Battles between human and dragon armies were replaced with battles between human armies with specific ‘monster’ classes thrown in. Both features weren’t revisited until Sacred Stones, a game that wouldn’t be released for another 12 years! Magic and weapons were totally reworked, with the system of weapon levels being dropped and inventories being limited to a single item slot, which could be a weapon or an item. Magic relied on using your health points to cast, a system that was never reused outside of SoV, which was a mostly faithful remake of Gaiden. Units having their own personal list of spells they could learn was later revisited in SoV and Three Houses, both games which were over 20 years after the original Gaiden. Celica was also the first main character in Fire Emblem who was a woman. There is much ink to be spilled about how this was handled later, but for now I will note that this fortunately is more of a series staple than most other features Gaiden pioneered. Perhaps most strangely of all was the inclusion of dungeon crawling, another feature that would never return outside of SoV. This is a lot of words to say that Gaiden was a thoroughly strange game. Now, almost 2000 words in, enter our protagonist in earnest – Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia.

Act 1 - Land of Coherency and Joy

I don’t intend for this piece to be what modern analysis of games has boiled down to, which is a chronological retelling of exactly what happens in a game. However, I think it’s for the best to analyse act 1 in a vacuum. Act 1 is the point where, in my opinion, you can meet the game on it’s own terms and get a positive experience. The game’s flaws are inherently minimised by the limited scope of act 1, and the contradictions in writing and gameplay haven’t had enough time to build up. Furthermore, act 1 is mostly limited to Alm’s side of the game. Generally Alm’s side has issues that are far more implicit while Celica’s side has flaws that are very hard to overlook. When starting the game, there’s immediately a change from Gaiden. A new tutorial section based around a younger version of the characters from Ram Village and the wise old mysterious mentor character, Mycen. Following this opening, a timeskip is shown, with an older Alm training with Mycen – a humorous reference to an old advertisement for the original Fire Emblem Gaiden. The game pulls out it’s trump card in storytelling almost immediately – the town sections with a first person perspective. These are sections where the player is given control of one of the protagonists in an area with the option to have short conversations with NPCs or other playable characters, as well as some points that can be inspected to learn the protagonist’s opinions on it. Ram Village is a fantastic implementation of this. Gaiden’s story was always known for it’s simplicity, and SoV rises to the challenge of helping contextualise the beginning of the game – Lukas, a solder in an army fighting in the ongoing civil war, arrives in Ram Village hoping to recruit those for the cause. Count Mycen is his intended target, but Mycen refuses. Alm and his friends volunteer in his place, with the events of Alm’s route mostly following Alm and the Resistance Army, here renamed the Deliverance, to fight against the forces threatening their home country of Zofia. Right off the bat, we’re given characterisation that incentivises the characters to want to leave Ram Village – Alm and his friends are presented as a reckless and restless group, with signs of them training for combat all over the village – marks from Alm and Gray swordfighting, an arrow Tobin left in a fence, and scorch marks on a wall from Kliff practicing fire magic. This is also an interesting form of characterisation considering that each of these references a class that the Villager class can promote to – mercenaries who wield sword, archers who wield bows, and mages who start with fire magic. Even though these three start as villagers, you’re given the impression that they were itching for a chance to be something else. There’s another deviation that occurs this early. Originally, Alm has three friends who join him in Ram Village – Gray, Tobin and Kliff. SoV added a fourth one, Faye. Faye is the first of the original characters added to SoV which alter the gameplay and story. In contrast with Alm’s other friends, she’s given less of an inherent reason for leaving the village. Her characterisation is mostly around her unrequited love for Alm. This characterisation has always kind of confused me to be honest, and there is more ink to be spilled on it later – for the time being, I will mention that it has a setup which can either be a tragedy or a comedy, considering that her romantic aspiration is doomed by the narrative – Alm and Celica ending up together is the canonical ending to Gaiden.

Oh right, this game is fully voice acted. It’s the first Fire Emblem game to be fully voice acted, and it’s one of the best parts of the game. Both the Japanese and English voice actors did a great job with what they’re given, and I probably won’t even mention it beyond a few stand outs from here on out because the baseline is actually very good. Generally, in Fire Emblem, the earlygame doesn’t really have much worth mentioning. Frequently there’s a lot of generic, forgettable maps with few interesting mechanics – lots of open fields with a few villages scattered around and many generic disposable bandits with axes for your squad of weak units and a single, stronger unit to dispatch. However, longer time fans would notice something immediately when gameplay begins in Act 1. The maps are, for the most part, unchanged.

(Figure 1 and figure 2 – beyond an extra deployment slot for Faye, there’s not really anything different with the map.)

In Act 1, this isn’t really an issue, though, because the map design in Act 1 of Gaiden and SoV is mostly fine. It even has a few stand outs. While it succumbs to the trope of generic bandits for earlygame maps, it actually does something with this! The earlygame bandits are merely presented as opportunistic looters taking advantage of the disorder of a civil war, which they highlight in a map early on with a single professional soldier on it – a mercenary equipped with a leather shield. He’s the strongest unit you’ve faced until this point by a long margin, and many of your units will struggle to deal more than single digit damage to him. However, he starts away from most of your opponents on the map, meaning that by playing quickly, you can isolate and defeat him without much risk. It’s good map design. I wish I had more chances to say that in SoV. During act 1, the general story begins to shape up. Much of it is largely an expansion on the original story. Alm is the grandson of the count Sir Mycen who has retired to living in the small Ram Village. His friends are mostly youths who are expected to grow up to farm the same fields as their parents did – Kliff spends some time in an academy elsewhere, but for the most part their life is presented as closed off. Celica, who once lived with them, was whisked away to a far off priory for her own safety following the incident of the tutorial. Lukas, a minor noble, comes promising glory and righteousness of their cause, fighting against a usurper chancellor who killed the rightful king. Some of you reading this haven’t played Fire Emblem and might have some kind of idea of how this story will go based on darker fantasy, and it’s not that. Alm’s story is a story where shockingly little actually goes wrong for him. What we do have here, though, is the beginnings of a new theme added to SoV – classism. Alm and Lukas are both stronger units than the Ram villagers at base, but this is due more to training – Lukas, who is characterised as a reasonable and intelligent noble who can appreciate the talents and capabilities of those below him on the social ladder, is the source of tutorial text telling Alm, and thus the player, that giving the other villagers a chance to experience combat will help them improve. This is reflected in gameplay fairly well – the Ram villagers, with a minimal amount of investment of experience, can easily become competent units, with multiple possible class lines benefitting them.

The classism theme is laid bare with the second original character added in act 1, Fernand. The leader of the Deliverance prior to Alm’s arrival is Clive, a noble cavalier. Fernand is another noble cavalier, though he’s presented as far less courteous than Clive, and with a preoccupation on birth status. He worries greatly for Claire, a noblewoman, and views the commoner volunteers among the Deliverance who gained high positions in the army by meritocracy with scorn. This serves as a gnawing form of suspense that later builds into dramatic irony for players of the original Gaiden, who know far more about future events than Fernand, Alm or Clive can, when the conflict boils over – Alm, as a hypercompetent protagonist with almost no flaws, meets victory after victory and is generally a great leader, is nominated by Clive as a new leader of the Deliverance, which Fernand cannot tolerate. He furiously storms off to surrender to the enemy, refusing to serve under a commoner from a farming village who’s merely a count’s grandson. When Fernand surrenders to the enemy, he’s met by two of the new original characters, with these three largely being the most important ones for Alm’s side of the narrative – Berkut, the crown prince of Rigel, the neighbouring country of Zofia, and Rinea, his wife. These scenes are overall quite good, and I think they’re actually layered in this regard. For a first time player, these are a dramatic and somewhat entertaining way of exploring the characterisations of the cast, introducing a new villain with close connections to many of the main cast in the form of Fernand. The dialogue is also great.

(Figure 3 and figure 4 – this moment is too good not to include, Lukas is a treasure in this game.)

For a returning player, though, these scenes are haunted with dread. Namely, the canonical outcome of Gaiden is that Alm is the true heir of Rigel, the son of the emperor. He will end up as the king of Valentia. Berkut’s pride and Fernand’s convictions are based on false premises, leaving the player to wonder how they will respond to the later revelations.

(Figure 5 and figure 6 – Fernand and Clive argue with incomplete information – this scene is completely recontextualised knowing future information.)

In this sense, SoV manages to rise to the challenge of making a remake of a game with a simple story compelling. While it’s already known how the events will proceed in the broad strokes, these unknown factors in the form of original characters provide returning players with an unpredictable element they can watch unfold. Unfortunately, though, this is where the hitherto unmentioned phantom rears its head. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia is a game that is infatuated with paid DLC content. Among these is information on the background of Fernand and his shared history with Clive and the Deliverance, which is otherwise scarcely mentioned in the game. The DLC is almost outside of the scope of this piece, and it will be addressed later. This is, I believe, as far as we can go with this framework of analysis, superficially covering things as the player will meet them. Therefore, greater depth is required. There will no longer be the semblance of chronological analysis, and sections will be mostly dedicated to individual aspects of the game. Let us begin.

Act 2 – Land of Questionable Design

It is easy to begin with the elephant in the room, the maps. SoV has the worst map design in the Fire Emblem series, and it’s hardly even a contest. A shockingly high number of maps in SoV are worst in the series candidates, with almost no maps coming close. While I don’t have the reach to conduct a poll, in my experience, when Fire Emblem players are asked for their least favourite maps, the most common offenders are Fire Emblem 6 optional maps (+ Arcadia) and Celica’s maps in Gaiden or Shadows of Valentia (+ Nuibaba’s Abode on Alm’s side). However, it’s not as easy to dismiss these maps as bad and move on as you may believe. Some people even argue the map design is good as a whole when accounting for optimising, though I don’t believe this to be an accurate assessment of the way the systems interact with the gameplay. Perhaps a more constructive approach is one of contradiction – what is a good map in Fire Emblem? Perhaps the most important feature that I find unites a lot of people’s opinions on good map design is that it must remain interactive and engaging. This can come in a variety of forms. One of the most obvious is challenge – there is a curve of sorts to difficulty. Maps are engaging when they are difficult enough that you need to strategise to prevail, but not too difficult that you’re reliant on highly specific strategies with little room for deviation. However, there’s more to a map than winning or losing – one of the most common features in Fire Emblem, present since the original, is alternate objectives, which are usually timed. What’s worth noting here is that this has been present since the very beginning of the series. The concept of a time limited objective is introduced in map 1 of the original Shadow Dragon, when a thief destroys a village before you have gameplay control. This is a classic element in almost every Fire Emblem game – villages are in peril from bandits, if you save them you get a reward.

(Figure 7 - the beginning of something really excellent.)

Of course, as fitting of an analysis of SoV, the lowest hanging fruit of a good map will be used. Around the time SoV came out, Conquest Chapter 10 was the stock answer for the best map in the series. To be fair, it’s pretty good.

(Figure 8 - the basic structure of Conquest chapter 10: Unhappy Reunion.)

Unhappy Reunion is a challenging defend map which puts the players’ skills to the test while offering a wide array of choices. There’s four villages, with increasing levels of commitment required to visit each further one, stretching the players’ forces out further. There’s multiple choke points and map features to the players’ advantage – tiles that block enemy advancement, water patches that only flying units can manoeuvre over, of which both the player and enemy has, multiple minibosses with unique skill sets, and the boss, Takumi, as an objective that requires the player to move extremely far from their starting position to reach. If the player doesn’t defeat Takumi before the last couple of turns, he’ll remove the water from the map, turning the last few turns into a desperate struggle against the entire remaining enemy forces as the choke points become wide open spaces. Planning ahead is both rewarded in the level of the individual map, as being able to defeat Takumi makes the end of the map easier, with the longer term rewards of the villages helping in later maps. Furthermore, the player is rewarded for engaging with the game’s mechanics on a deep level – utilising Niles’ capture ability on a previous boss gives you access to Rally Defence, which is helpful on a map where you need to be able to sustain a defence against many enemy units with time pressure. Broadly, this is a good map. What helps tie it together is that there’s not truly downtime – in Fire Emblem, downtime can exist in cutscenes, or in moments between battles, but generally something should be going on – the player should be always planning for the next move.

Now, I will give an example of a bad map not from SoV. In order to understand SoV’s map design, it helps to understand the standard to expect from bad maps in Fire Emblem. I will avoid the obvious one of Arcadia – most people who have played Fire Emblem reading this already know why Arcadia is a bad map, and by SoV’s release, Arcadia was over a decade old. Instead, I will use one from Awakening. Maybe two.

(Figure 9 and figure 10 - it's like high tide covering a sand bar, except it's on fire.)

This is Sibling Blades from Fire Emblem Awakening, and it is, arguably, not a very good map. What makes it relevant for this analysis is that it has some of the trappings of a good map. In terms of storytelling potential, the drama of siblings fighting is obvious. In terms of gameplay, it features an interesting implementation of a time limited objective from lava consuming tiles, as well as the use of varied enemy formations that should require a variety of solutions. Furthermore, the tight corridors and split structure should make for a few fronts of combat where maximising player phase value and minimising enemy phase value should be key. In practice, though, there’s disjoint here – the items found in the chests aren’t valuable enough correlating to the risks you take to get them in a timely manner and the enemy formations seem spiteful – you’re immediately being flooded with many enemies, including fliers, encouraging deploying a small number of extremely durable units to just enemy phase tank using strategies such as vantage or Nosferatu. However, it’s possible to come away from this map enjoying the parts of it which are interesting. So to add to this, here’s an inarguably awful map in Awakening.

(Figure 11 and figure 12 - it really is that boring.)

Priam’s paralogue is awful. It’s just a huge mass of units against your huge mass of units in a mostly empty field with some water for you to use stalling strategies on higher difficulties. It’s dreadful and boring and it takes too long and is primarily a stat check – your units must be this tall to ride, at which point there’s little agency involved. There’s no time pressure or alternate objectives, just an endless swarm of generic units with some longbows to make it not completely dull. The only good news is that it’s not required.

SoV maps are uniformly quite bad. A lot of this is tied to the game’s systems – depth was added in ways that don’t help them make more interesting maps, even compared to FE1 – time sensitive objectives are borderline nonexistent, there’s a lack of objectives that can be resolved without combat (such as reaching villages or opening chests in time) and the only enemy recruitments in the game are resolved based on events outside of battle – combat is reduced to a simplistic battle of your side vs the enemy side. This would be fine if the maps used interesting design. They don’t.

(Figure 13 - Alm’s map design is, broadly, better than Celica’s on the grounds that it’s boring but inoffensive, as opposed to boring but miserable.)

SoV’s maps generally consist of far too large, open terrain with haphazardly placed difficult terrain, or practically no difficult terrain at all. Unit formations are far too spread out, and very few unit formations are threatening at all. Your options for approaching are usually limited, and the number of maps with alternate objectives can be counted on one hand. These maps are also, generally, trivially easy. Enemy units can’t really take advantage of the combat systems the way you can (won’t use combat arts, unlikely to score crits, can’t trade weapons, don’t use forged weapons, limited spell lists), with the exception of Witches. Witches are one of the only units that will be able to get you to use Mila’s Turnwheel (the turn rewind feature added to this game) because their teleportation is difficult to predict and they generally have weapons with a crit chance, and considering that units have very low resistance in this game, they will sometimes just randomly kill one of your units with no real chance of defending against that. By the way, a map which meets that description is pretty good by SoV standards. Here's the worst map in the entire series, with almost no contest outside of this game.

(Figure 14 - it speaks for itself.)

Waste time walking through desert up to a tiny box in the desert guarded by units that aren’t threatening, but most of which are archers who will waste your time by being able to take multiple shots if you try to approach directly, forcing you to watch dull animations or skip through them. Nevermind that most of your units don’t have high movement except for fliers who can’t really approach this. Extremely dull, but also not even difficult – par for the course for Celica’s side. Celica has a rough time of this – she goes from a long set of boring desert maps where movement is extremely slow and enemies aren’t threatening to a long set of swamp maps where movement is extremely slow and enemies not only aren’t threatening, but also includes Cantors who will constantly summon more enemies that aren’t threatening.

I could keep going, but I don’t really want to – I’ve given these maps more time than they deserve. They are terrible, and they’re mostly terrible from adamantly sticking to the design of the original Gaiden. This design choice looms over you as you play the game – every time they deviate from Gaiden in a new way, positive or negative, you have to ask yourself why they prioritised that over making the maps, arguably the most important part of the gameplay experience, not awful. And no, for the two defenders of SoV maps left – cantors are not a time sensitive objective. They summon units that are useless, and healing isn’t a limited enough resource to make the minimal chip damage they impose truly meaningful. The incentive to kill cantors faster is completely intrinsic, as by doing so you spend less time playing these maps.

Act 3 - Land of Deviations from Normality

I would say that, in some ways, SoV might be a worthy successor in spirit to Gaiden, as a strange, experimental game in a series that frequently commits to a single path. While many atypical gameplay features present in SoV originated in Gaiden (such as three tiers of classes, limited spell lists and no weapon durability), not all of them did – the stand out of SoV’s gameplay system is combat arts, a new feature added to the game that was hitherto unseen in Fire Emblem. Combat arts, which were unlocked by a unit who mastered a specific weapon, were unique attacks that cost health to use and provided special effects. For example, the simple iron sword’s wrath strike combat art costs an extremely low amount of health to use for a single, more accurate and powerful strike. Effectively, wrath strike is a trade off between the chance of double attacking the enemy (which is far easier in SoV than in previous games) for more damage and accuracy – ideal when an enemy is a single hit from death with the added power, as it allows you to avoid the opponent counterattacking. There’s also some quite interesting skills from previous games that were brought back, but as combat arts – such as shields having the repositioning skills used in Tellius duology and Fates, or the Mercy skill returning tied to the protagonists’ signature weapons as Subdue. They even made subdue have a specific use case beyond XP redistribution in the Delthea recruitment, a rare example of a complex map objective in this game (albeit a very luck based one). Notably, this system actually made a comeback! In Three Houses, combat arts were revisited, tying them to weapon rank levels generally, treating them as a physical equivalent to spell lists, costing durability instead of health (as Three Houses brought back weapon durability). In that sense, this was a successful experiment, allowing the mechanic to be tested and later iterated on in an improved manner. In terms of SoV itself, though, they were somewhat mixed – the fact that they were something the player could exploit but not the enemy contributed to making the game far easier than it was likely intended to be. Still, as far as original systems go, it was a success.

SoV also altered supports mechanically somewhat, bringing it more in line with Thracia’s support system for many units with Binding Blade onwards style three tier supports being available for a few select unit pairings. It’s a fine system – there is more to be said about the narrative contents of this system later, but mechanically it works well. At minimum, it is a good mechanical recognition of the additional storytelling granted by the dungeon/town sequences – these systems mean that more characters get dialogue without the need of support chains for characterisation, thus not everyone needs to develop three tiers of supports for many characters.

Arguably the most influential alteration was the implementation of Mila’s Turnwheel. Historically, it has been quite difficult to access past Fire Emblem games – while this has improved over time with virtual console releases (and then became worse over time due to closing of online storefronts), emulation is a standard, especially for games that never received a virtual console release – the Tellius duology of Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, aforementioned as a pair of games that sold poorly, is notoriously difficult to play on the physical hardware. With emulation and even the virtual console releases come savestates – to some, an antidote to random noise in Fire Emblem. Your lord dies to a 1% crit on a 40% hit? Just reload a savestate! Seemingly this approach to the game was looming over the developers when they designed Mila’s Turnwheel, a system of limited reloads. When you take an action or lose the map, if you have a Mila’s Turnwheel charge, you have the option to rewind to a specific point in the map previously and play it out from there. In terms of a game design choice, I think it’s an interesting and conflicted one – the concept in a vacuum is fine, but it’s unclear whether it led to worse design overall, as it allows for greater leniency in random or subjectively unfair design. Witches are the primary example – units that randomly teleport in and have a chance to instantly kill units with no reliable defence against them is far less frustrating when you can redo the turn and hope they target another unit who they don’t instant kill – but it’s still thoroughly frustrating design, largely being a waste of time and turnwheel charges. In fairness, I think this system was a good idea overall – while it may be possible to blame it for the bad design of SoV, a lot of this is merely a symptom of remaining faithful to Gaiden – witches being teleporting magic units and units generally having low resistance were both design decisions in the original Gaiden that SoV were not obligated to retain. It may be worth going over the differences created by the new units added here. On the player side, during the story, there’s two. I’m mostly positive about them in strict gameplay terms, but will have room to criticise the story integration later. Faye is an additional villager who, if reclassed to a cleric, learns a spell which refreshes a units turn – effectively, she’s a growth unit version of a dancer, which is a somewhat opaque way of implementing it in the game, but overall fine. The fact that she’s a villager adds replay value to the game, as you can get different experiences from reclassing her to different class lines on future playthroughs, like the other Ram villagers. However, at this point the demon bangs on the door and asks to be let in – her class options are very restricted compared to the other Ram villagers. Faye is a woman, and almost every class in SoV is genderlocked, meaning her options have little overlap with the other Ram villagers or the game’s other natural villager, Atlas. With Conrad, the demon is rattling the windows, screaming that it’s time to let it in – not yet, it will have it’s time – Conrad is a paladin on Celica’s side. Celica’s side is infamous for having almost no class diversity, largely being a sea of mages and mercenaries, disappointing compared to the versatility of units in Alm’s side. Conrad, as a mounted unit, adds some appreciated diversity to Celica’s side. In strict gameplay terms only. I will get to the demon.

I think one thing that was greatly overlooked at the time of SoV’s launch has been made apparent by now – it’s an easy game. Possibly one of the easiest games in the series. In practice, the game’s dungeon crawling and world map mechanics serve as an extremely easy and unlimited source of experience, allowing grinding if desired. Resurrecting dead units, normally an extreme cost requiring a rare item and an adequately trained user for it, is as simple as an interactable in a dungeon. Said interactables in dungeons include all the stat boosters, eliminating the time pressure or difficulty in stealing stat boosters from enemies or getting them from villages. In terms of the impact of the changes made on the game’s difficulty, the vast majority of them serve to make the game easier – this includes the previously unmentioned and absolutely absurd retreat feature which allows you to exit a map at any time, and enemy units you killed previously are not replaced, meaning you can individually pick off units and simply leave before being overwhelmed!

Oh right, there’s dungeon crawling. The dungeons are dull and uninteresting and there’s little challenge to be had. Getting treasure and stat ups from dungeons is less compelling gameplay than needing to accomplish tasks in maps for them. There is really not much to say about dungeons at all, honestly, too many of them are far too similar and are mostly divided by aesthetics and sheer length. Even then, they're mostly just stone corridors.

Act 4 - Echoes and Themes

In truth, the issue with the games’ story is largely symptomatic of the issues with the games’ protagonists. At a very fundamental level, Alm and Celica do not function as dual protagonists of the same story in the way they were likely intended to. What we’re given throughout the game is a theme of duality - Mila is kind and Duma is strong. The time of the gods falls away for the time of man, and thus they are defeated by Celica, who has Mila’s kindness, and Alm, who has Duma’s strength. If this was done effectively, we would have a pair of protagonists who act as thematic parallels or even foils to each other, selling the conclusion that they both embody different values that, when brought together, will repair Valentia. The state of Zofia and Rigel reflect what each other are missing - Zofia, lacking the strength of Rigel, is riddled with infighting, banditry and piracy, with the previous king being stated to be more concerned with his personal quality of life than of his kingdom. In contrast, Rigel is a more orderly country, but this is a mere façade - the cruelty of Rigel is not enacted by bandits exploiting weaknesses in the law’s enforcement, but by highly organised state approved actors in the Duma Faithful, who are willing to ruin others to become stronger through Duma’s blessings. The ordinary people we see in Rigel’s towns appear to live frugal and unkind existences. Therefore, a One Kingdom founded by Alm and Celica should serve as a way for their values to synergise.

There’s one glaring flaw with this - Alm and Celica’s disagreements, which are largely delivered in one scene, are infamously shallow, and extremely biased. While Alm’s arguments are presented as more of a rational consideration of the information available at the time based on previous actions, Celica’s arguments are driven in part by a nightmare/vision she had earlier, with her position being framed as more of an emotional one – playing into stereotypes about men compared to women. In fact, the story as a whole is biased in a specific framing. Alm is generally presented as right, while Celica is generally presented as wrong. Broadly, this is clear in the overall theme of the game - we are told, textually, the time of gods has reached it’s end, and they pass the world to the people. Alm is a character who already represents a refusal to allow fate to control one’s life, and is very forward in his actions and thinking. Celica, as a character who believes for much of the game that the gods are needed to keep Valentia in order, must be converted to a way of thinking more aligned with Alm’s for this conclusion. Notably, Alm never experienced such a fundamental paradigm shift in terms of philosophy - his paradigm shift, his revelation of being royalty, while an emotional plot beat, does not mean that he has to change greatly personally - Alm’s humility is presented as a character strength, and he remains humble and forgiving even after he is revealed to be Rudolf’s son. There is a strong impression that Alm and Celica are both supposed to be growing as people, with such an emphasis placed on the new experiences they gain as they travel across Valentia, except Alm is a mostly static character - he is almost never wrong, and his choices generally do not backfire. When he does make difficult decisions or choices that those around him find questionable, these choices are always intensely moral, and later information consistently demonstrates these to be correct. Alm is then praised by other characters for his steadfastness and strength of character, with multiple characters having arcs specifically built around feeling showed up by Alm - the heroic Clive and Tobin come to accept that Alm is a better leader and more skilled fighter than them and thus grow as people, while Berkut’s refusal to acknowledge Alm as anything but an inferior is one of the main character flaws leading to his downfall. Fernand’s refusal to accept Alm’s leadership is his lucifer-esque falling moment which condemns him to being a villain, a choice he regrets only when it is too late to change course.

The counter to this would be that Echoes SoV is trying to return emergent storytelling as the principal method of conveying failure. A cursory glance at the events of Celica’s route is enough to prove that this isn’t the case for the game as a whole, but it may be treated as this for Alm’s route. Seemingly, you could read the intention that Alm’s choices are supposed to seem difficult based on player choice - his decision to divert to Nuibaba’s Abode may seem more of a difficult choice if, say, Python dies there. Furthermore, they back this up with post battle quotes - in a successful battle, characters will comment on relief that it’s over, while if one of your units falls, their friends or family will often deliver heart wrenching statements of grief, which are typically voice acted well in SoV fashion. However, whether or not they intended this is irrelevant - as a result of SoV being an easy game, this dependence on emergent storytelling means that generally, there will be almost no tragedy on Alm’s route, and his calls will always be correct - the deck is so stacked in favour of the player that where player control determines the outcome, even suboptimal players leads to the best outcome. There is, of course, the matter that this doesn’t apply to Celica’s story at all. Celica, in contrast to Alm, is a character who is incorrect in much more blatant ways. Since both Alm and Celica are acting on incomplete information, this isn’t inherently an issue, but later revelations will almost always indicate that Alm was in the right from the start, while Celica has to grow and change. This would give the impression that Celica is a far more satisfying character by having an arc in which she grows, but in practice, the contrary is true - her changing does not feel like personal growth, as the further the story progresses, the more she makes consistently worse decisions, and is written to be dependent on outside sources to save her far more than Alm. This is egregious in the case of Conrad, her secret brother who was not present in the original Gaiden but was written into SoV as saving her from situations where she is a damsel in distress, and a later scene added to SoV where Celica trusting the blatantly treacherous and cruel villain Jedah leads to Celica being mind controlled by Duma and Alm has to save her by killing her to progress the story. Yes, they took a game where most of the women are damsels in distress who are imprisoned or mind controlled with one of the two protagonists being the main exceptions and added scenes that specifically make her a damsel in distress dependent on outside intervention to be saved. It’s nauseating. Said scene where she is controlled is placed near the end of the story - Celica is a character who begins the story as a character with agency and wit who is willing and able to solve issues herself and with her community, and over the story regresses into being a character dependent on being saved from outside forces and her own poor judgement by the men in her life. The correct outlook of the world of the game is more or less that Alm had it right from the start and Celica needs to be converted to Alm’s way of thinking while Alm has almost no lessons to learn from Celica. Bluntly, it’s misogynistic writing.

At this point, the cat is out of the bag. It’s impossible to address SoV’s story in a meaningful way without discussing it’s bigotry.

Act 4, skirmish 1 – Water, flour, a whole orange and a tablespoon of sexism

At this point, SoV’s sexism is generally recognised enough to be a reliable punchline, largely because of how bizarrely out there it is, as well as a very strange way of interpreting the role of a remake. Gaiden was a game which was very light on story, but from what little there was, there was arguably some stereotyping content – many of the units who were women were initially rescued from prisons, but beyond that, there was little room for truly objectionable content. Being the first Fire Emblem game to feature a female lead, it could even be seen as relatively forward. However, the legacy of Fire Emblem while it’s original creator Kaga presided over the series is infamous for depicting women in sexist ways – in games that added more room for storytelling such as Genealogy of the Holy War, women were more likely to be lacking in agency and reduced to being objects for men to fight over, often imperilled or mind controlled and being dependent on the men in their lives to save them. Generally, this lightened up as the series progressed.

(Figure 15 and figure 16 – in Fire Emblem Fates, the previous game to Echoes SoV, characters losing agency and being mind controlled happened more frequently to men than women, while in earlier entries it was greatly slanted towards women.)

SoV’s writers, thus, had a decision to make. They were remaking an old game with a lot of room to create new themes and narrative. The game was from an era in which the development of Fire Emblem games saw more sexism in the stories. Arguably some of Gaiden’s structure fed into this. SoV writers decided to add more sexism, and make the new sexism more blatant. As previously mentioned, while Celica was previously spared from the treatment of women in older Fire Emblem games, SoV added new scenes dedicated specifically to Celica being imperilled and needing to be saved by men. Among the major original characters added to SoV, only one of them is a woman, Rinea, and she’s entirely a satellite character – her character only exists in relation to Berkut, and her ultimate fate is to be fridged to build up tragedy and sell to the player that Berkut’s downfall is complete, who is so denied agency by the narrative that she is shown to be forgiving her abuser and murderer after she is already dead. Moments which you could construe as possibly implicitly sexist in the original Gaiden are made explicitly sexist – Mathilda being held hostage to threaten Clive and then being saved by the protagonists goes from being a gameplay moment to featuring a cutscene to seems intended to sell us on the moral degradation of Fernand, featuring a bizarre shot of her in prison in an out of character pose that I think speaks for itself.

(Figure 17 – did you really need to make the bars transparent to highlight how ridiculous this shot is?)

The changes to the story have a habit of lingering uncomfortably on the peril in which women are placed. Cutscenes with specific artwork made for them are spread throughout the game with some important character moments lacking them, and yet they decided that Mathilda, Silque, Claire, Celica and Delthea needed artwork specifically for them imperilled or being saved by men. Comparatively, there’s very few instances of the cutscene graphics of men being used to show them in anything but positions in which they have agency and volition – though part of that is that most of the cutscene artwork of men is of Alm. It’s egregious in the case of Mathilda and Delthea, as Mathilda gets a specific shot of being imprisoned and Deltha gets one of being mind controlled, yet neither of them have as much dedicated to them being reunited with their loved ones, or making any decisions themselves.

(Figure 18 – for being a graphic of a prisoner being released (which really does happen so many times in this game that I still have examples that haven’t been explicitly mentioned), I think this one’s fine.)

The ending of SoV is infamous in this regard, and it’s such a blatant example of sexist values in SoV’s writing that it’s very hard to miss. Like most Fire Emblem games, the ending features a slideshow, framed as future historians interpreting the lives of the surviving characters after the game’s events – a final reward of sorts for keeping characters alive to the end. Gaiden’s endings for characters were fairly bare bones – SoV had a lot of room to change them or add to them. SoV’s endings ultimately fall into two archetypes with few exceptions: men typically become knights or statesmen of great renown, women generally become homemakers and husbands. It’s jarring because previously, we just spent an entire game with them fighting alongside each other, and it’s a strangely repeating throughline.

(Figure 19 – despite previous characterisation as a competent and spirited knight, by virtue of being a SoV character, she ends up with this.)

I should note that the sexism isn’t just ‘women choosing to be housewives instead of girlbosses’. It’s a betrayal of previous characterisation. In the case of Delthea, for example, her ending is one where she gives up fighting and the pursuit of magical power – this is consistent with her previous characterisation and presentation, where she’s far less interested in cultivating magical talent than her brother Luthier, and makes no secret of this to him. The events which put her into war are against her choice, so her ending being a rejection of this is in character for her. Mathilda’s previous characterisation makes this conclusion seem jarring and contributes to the general feeling of women being sidelined in endings, with almost none being given chances to make long term impacts on the world.

The endings for women can seem bizarrely spiteful – Sonya’s ending, due in part to it’s vagueness, is rife for desperate searching for interpretations that don’t indicate that Sonya’s ultimate fate is a betrayal of her own valuing of her independence. For what it’s worth, I think this is a symptom of the way witches being framed in SoV is a case of being focused more on spectacle than forming a consistent narrative – witches are only viewed as tragedies of Duma and the Duma Faithful taking advantage of women and using them as tools, except there’s a counterexample of a witch who does retain her independence and is part of the Duma Faithful, but seemingly didn’t give her soul to Duma, but to another entity. Even teleportation isn’t a consistent part of witches in strict gameplay terms – Delthea can teleport as an enemy but is never a witch (albeit she does later learn rewarp as a playable character), and there are enemy witches who don’t teleport.

(Figure 20 – whether you interpret her ending as actually becoming a witch or not, the sheer ambiguity on whether her search bore any fruit is extreme by the standards of SoV's ending slides.)

Since it wouldn’t be complete without it – a note on the manner in which magic users are portrayed in SoV. On the good guy side you have mages and clerics. Men and women have functionally different class lines, but that’s more of a symptom of just about everything in SoV being segregated by sex. The bad guy side has an entirely separate list of magic classes – arcanists, cantors and witches. Arcanists and cantors are generally just ambitious evil cultists, a trope that’s common in fire emblem. They’re also all men. With the sole exception of Nuibaba, witches are presented as helpless women who are tragically forced to fight for villainous groups. Practically none of the villains or generic soldiers are women, in fact – the classes exclusive to women are barely present at all, with Claire being seemingly the only Pegasus knight in the entirety of Valentia (and wyvern knights are wholly absent altogether). To be a woman on the side of the protagonists is to be generally framed as a damsel in distress, while to be a woman on the side of the antagonists is to also be framed as another damsel in distress, albeit one who ends up dying.

(Figure 21 - why is this on the game's cover, anyway? There's no wyvern riders and this clearly isn't a necrodragon.)

It's almost undisputable that the writing of SoV is the most sexist in the series. But in some ways this is a hard pill to swallow, mostly because…

Act 4, skirmish 2 – Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia had the most unambiguous but respectful acknowledgement of LGBT topics in the series until this point

While gay characters have existed in the series for years, it’s generally been a hushed and ambiguous affair. For example, take Raven and Lucius from Fire Emblem 7. In their A support, they give the following exchange:

Raven: Meeting Eliwood really opened my eyes. I know that the marquess of Ostia is not behind the attack now… Some day… Yes. Some day when this war is over, I’ll go searching for the truth. And I’ll pay Ostia back for my suspicions in full. Lucius: Excellent! Raven: Except, I want you to stay home. Lucius: What!? You are too cruel! Why!? Raven: I want someone to go home to, you see. So go back, and wait. Lucius: Why don’t you marry! Then there would be someone at home… And I could journey with you! Raven: I need no bride to jabber at me– There’s enough going on around here already! Lucius: W-What is that supposed to mean!? Raven: My case in point. Lucius: Wait– Wait! Lord Raymond!

(Figure 22 – paired endings for support chains are uncommon in Fire Emblem 7, mostly saved for romantic pairings.) Raven and Lucius’ relationship is quite typical as most LGBT content in Fire Emblem was prior to Fates. It’s often ambiguous and implied, but with just enough thrown in that it’s clear – it’s hard to interpret Raven’s statement as not needing to be married as he already has Lucius as lacking romantic intention. Sometimes it was less implicit, though, except when it was, there was always a somewhat bitter edge to it. For example, Heather from Radiant Dawn is characterised as interested in women, but much of her little characterisation is dedicated to presenting her as a misandrist and a manipulator, playing into stereotypes. Come Fates, the S support system had been created to explicitly demarcate romantic relationships, and A+ support for same sex friendships. There were two curious inclusions, though – the customisable avatar Corrin, who could be male or female, could S support Niles and Rhajat regardless of this, creating explicit same sex romance. This was, as far as I’m aware, the first time that bisexuality existed on a mechanical level in Fire Emblem as opposed to a narrative one. There was, yet again, an uncomfortable edge to this inclusion – Niles and Rhajat are generally viewed as playing into stereotypes regarding the LGBT community. Niles is a sadist and a sleazy criminal, while Rhajat is antisocial with stalking tendencies. Also, because this is Fates, Rhajat is a child soldier who was aged up in the hyperbolic time chamber, which obviously made people uncomfortable to have her as the only option for a female Corrin to romance of the same sex. What Fire Emblem had seemingly created unintentionally was an expectation where the more explicit LGBT content was in the series, the more negatively it was portrayed – characters who are LGBT in unambiguous ways are more likely to be presented as offensive stereotypes or otherwise presented poorly.

Then SoV decided to rewrite Leon, a character from the original with little characterisation to latch onto. In SoV, Leon is the archer who joins alongside Valbar and Kamui in Celica’s side. In contrast to Python, the archer on Alm’s side, who is a sarcastic and cynical wisecracker who relentlessly mocks his close friend Forsythe, Leon is a far more affable and earnest character. He discusses his past quite openly, with his attraction to a man being a formative experience leading to him becoming a soldier in the first place, and his interest in Valbar, while one sided, is not depicted as unhealthy – he understands that there are many people out there who could catch his eye, and knows that he can move on.

(Figure 23 and figure 24)

Seemingly, SoV’s dedication to being experimental was used here to test having explicitly LGBT characters where their sexuality is actually presented as a positive without a backhanded note tying them into a negative stereotype. I think it speaks for itself, honestly. I’m genuinely moved they included it. This is the example everyone remembers, but it goes even deeper than that – they put in extra effort to including positive depictions of LGBT characters, as shown in a conversation between Lukas and Python. Lukas, discussing his lack of interest in the woman he courted, wonders if it indicates that a part of him is broken, comparing himself to Clive as an example of a ‘normal’ person. Python, who is typically presented in a particularly standoffish and mocking type, is shown consoling Lukas, stating that there’s nothing abnormal about lacking interest in romance – and that whether Lukas decides to pursue romance or not, he should take life at his own pace. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia featured a respectful discussion about aromanticism and asexuality in the game.

It's utterly bizarre how SoV triples down on becoming the most sexist entry in the entire series, while being unprecedented in terms of respectful LGBT representation in Fire Emblem.

Act 4 – Let’s, like, talk about the other themes and characterisation, I guess?

For what it’s worth, I think SoV does a good job at creating interesting experiences for both new players and returning players. Already mentioned in previous sections is that a lot of dialogue is loaded with dramatic irony, some of which the player is let in on and some of which requires the player to have played the original or to be replaying the game. Entire characters are reframed in terms of this, though it could be argued the twists are too obvious – there’s enough clues to Alm’s heritage in act 3 that it’s thoroughly unsurprising in Act 4. Still, this arguably gives you a better perspective over Berkut’s downfall – the arc works much more effectively when you know in advance that he’s building a castle on sand. The game’s themes regarding class and station of birth are a refusal to play fastball, but I don’t really have an issue with that – there’s obviously the contradiction between the concept that everyone is valuable regardless of the condition of their birth when Alm is a near flawless superhuman royal who was destined for greatness from the start, but for just about every other character, I think it works fine. I’m realising now just how little there is to talk about in terms of the villains, actually – Jedah, while refreshingly quite clear with his intentions, is very obviously evil, and Rudolf isn’t particularly interesting either – just melodramatic. While modern Fire Emblem fan culture trends are towards spiting recurring bosses due to the most recent entries as of the time of writing, Engage and Three Houses, depending very heavily on individual villains who will frequently appear on 5-8 maps, I think SoV suffers somewhat from the opposite – most of the chapter bosses are one and done enemies, but not particularly interesting ones at that. Nuibaba, on top of being one of the only villains who is a woman, gets a fair amount of characterisation and a number of interactions prior to her one and done map. While some other minor villains like Greith or Tatarrah are given some contextualisation for their villainy, very rarely do they get characterisation – vast swathes of bosses are simply ‘loyal Rigelian soldier’, ‘immoral bandit’ and ‘fanatical Duma follower’.

In contrast, the character writing for the protagonists is generally excellent. Even though many characters felt homogenous in terms of gameplay, in terms of personality, the exact opposite is true. Full voice acting and many sections with optional dialogue contribute to this – SoV was the first main series game to use Heroes’ approach of unit selection quotes, too, which stick with you and are a great method of quickly characterising new members of your army. Compared to some other RPGs, Fire Emblem typically rushes you quite quickly into the meat of the gameplay, with less time for early characterisation as a result. While I was dismissive of most of the villains, there’s a reason why Berkut and Fernand were mentioned so much throughout the piece – as original villains they’re stand outs for having more depth to them compared to the villains from Gaiden. One point that stands out as an example of the game’s writing and the performances is that it manages to frequently be able to make the most out of bad situations. While the game’s fixation on imprisoning, mind control and other imperilling situations is unhealthy and detrimental, these usually provide a degree of characterisation for the characters involved, and the voice actors generally do a good job at acting the role of despair or newfound courage in responding to these situations. Faye, one of the original characters, is an instance of a ‘yandere’/obsessive character, a trope that 3DS Fire Emblem arguably made overuse of, but in the case of Faye, the direction taken is not one of it being an appealing personality trait, but instead as an unhealthy and dangerous outlook on the world created by a person who couldn’t move on from the past and traumatic experiences. It’s somewhat refreshing. I would want to just take us to the conclusion at this point, but I can’t.

Act 5 – Remember how the game had an act 6? That was kind of weird right

Act 5 is the end of the story – Alm and Celica defeat Duma, unite Valentia, and everyone gets their ending slides. Then act 6 opens. It’s an example of ‘fanservice’ – you get to go to Archanaea from the original Fire Emblem and are given a bonus dungeon conveying a story of the creation of Grima, the villain of Awakening. Remember how earlier I stated that Awakening was a kind of blending of every other game in the series? Awakening’s final villain, Grima, was a Lopt-esque ‘dragon god who hates humanity’ character without too much going into them beyond the identity split between Robin and Grima. SoV decided to change that by making Grima the personal project of an alchemist, and the zombie army of the Risen are biotechnology based on scarab beetles. It’s a bit silly and out of place in SoV, honestly, but arguably adding this post game content helps justify the insane degree of optimisation you can do regarding forging and reclassing – sure, doing this is pointless because the main story is easy, but after you’ve finished the game you can throw your optimised units at a big dragon from Awakening with capped stats. But wait, hold on, who are Overclasses even for? Why would you pay money for DLC to make your units even stronger in a game that’s not particularly hard? Why is there so much paid DLC dedicated to making your units stronger, anyway? And what are Cipher Legends for, actually? Who is the target audience of this? As a swan song for the fixation on elaborate sets of paid DLC, SoV mostly confuses me, to be honest. I’m left feeling cheated that story and character content (Rise of the Deliverance) is relegated to paid DLC alongside some baffling features that can only be described as ‘pay to win in a singleplayer game that’s already difficult to lose’.

Conclusion – the Future of Echoes

In terms of sales numbers, the fate of Echoes: Shadows of Valentia is not only unsurprising, but a humorous mirror of sorts to Gaiden. It didn’t sell particularly well, but like the original Gaiden, it was towards the end of a console’s lifespan. Still, it sold notably worse than Fates, which presumably is part of why, to this day, the Echoes subtitle has yet to return, and there have been no further remakes of Fire Emblem games. The next entry in the series, Three Houses, seems to have learned it’s lessons from SoV, and become better for it – it brought back many of the most enjoyable features from SoV such as combat arts, respectful depictions of LGBT people, and spells being a replenishable resource. As by far the best selling game in the series to date, Three Houses appears to be the future of the series, especially considering Engage’s relatively poor performance comparatively. But the subtitle stuck in the minds of players – Echoes. For years, people have wondered what the next Echoes will be, with the Jugdral duology, Elibe duology and Tellius duology being favourites – often with proposed concepts of combining multiple separate games into one. The favourite target for this speculation, which is perpetually ‘going to be revealed in the next Nintendo Direct’, is of course Fire Emblem 4: Genealogy of the Holy War. There’s an appeal to this – a game with questionable map design informed by a very experimental approach to Fire Emblem with a memorable story seems ideal for a remake. But Echoes: Shadows of Valentia took a game that was somewhat dated and made the most sexist game in the series out of it. Do we really want an Echoes: Genealogy game? Genealogy as a game has some subtext that it’s hard to trust the writers to not latch onto if using the philosophy of Echoes to approach a remake. Genealogy’s writing makes use of the same tropes regarding women and agency as SoV, which it’s hard to believe they’ll suddenly reverse course in a remake. Furthermore, Genealogy’s decision to make one of the main antagonistic groups a religious minority group subject to persecution and lynching which ends up being a religion of evil trope played completely straight seems risky to follow up on without some changes to the story considering that specific elements of the Lopt Sect’s actions appear to mirror imagined actions found in medieval (and sometimes modern) propaganda levelled against religious minority groups, such as in long standing antisemitic propaganda. Gaiden was a game with very little bigoted subtext (possibly as a symptom of there not being much text in the game, period) which became a game where sexism was a consistent element of the story while never being acknowledged – remaking a game which already has questionable subtext with this philosophy seems like a bad idea.

At this point, there’s probably supposed to be a part where I come up with possible improvements to the game. It’s pretty hard to since the issues are somewhat structural – it’s difficult to come up with a real solution to the map design being so dull without creating new ones, and even when you do, the game’s systems don’t naturally lend themselves to compelling maps, due to the poor dungeon crawling. It’s an unfortunate thing to say but the best solution would likely have been to axe the dungeon crawling altogether – it’s half baked at best. … Is what I would be saying. Literally the exact day I finished the first draft of this piece, I learned that somebody recreated the entire game as a Sacred Stones hack and tried to fix all of the issues. I can’t even begin to scratch this without another 12000 words. Perhaps another time.

(Special thanks to my beta reader Ashe for helping with this post, and Marbs for helping convince me that people would want to read this.)

#this post has text in it #fire emblem #fe echoes #long post

[seraphinitegames]

I'm a bit confused about the Tiers. Unit Bravo all seem to be very high, but then they're struggling with like trappers and shit. Are power levels really close together, or does having a high Tier just mean having special/rare powers but not necessarily meaning you'd take most other supernaturals down in combat?

The Trappers do have numbers and tech. Their tech can be very debilitating to supernaturals, and for vampires the Trappers usually attack during the day (like in Book Three's demo). This really does weaken most of them quite badly, no matter what A tells you ;D

But the number one reason they struggle against most is because they are holding back A LOT. They don't want to kill anyone or fatally wound them, even Trappers.

The tiers are based on general 'power' but mostly it means for the strength of one particular talent as well (A's physical strength, F's speed and agility, M's pheromones and senses, and N's healing as well as...well, you know, spoilers...)

Hope that helps! Thank you so much for the ask :)

#the wayhaven chronicles #asks #lore #vampire #twc spoilers

[indiegamesofcolor]

[I.D.: A gifset containing four gifs of the first person detective thriller game Keyword: A Spider’s Thread.

Gif 1 shows two scenes. One scene is of the player lifting the blinds on a window, showing a night time view of a neon-lit cyberpunk city. Another scene focuses on a silhouette of a large figure sitting against a darkned sky while a red ring sits behind it like a halo.

Gif 2 shows a close-up of the player filling out information in an order window. The window is labeled “SHIPPING INFO” and the Street Number is entered in as 3336, the Street Name is entered in as Queen, and the Unit Number is entered in as 703. The player then clicks on the “order” button in the window, causing the screen to zoom out to reveal a sushi website. A new window pops up saying “ORDER RECIEVED!” as its title, with the additional message, “Your order has been processed, please watch your window for delivery!”

Gif 3 shows the player standing at a computer desk. The player picks up a photo frame, which moves closer to the screen to be examined in detail. As the photo is rotated, the player has the option to Take Notes or put the photo away.

Gif 4 shows a text message conversation between a stranger and Sala, the player’s daughter. The stranger’s text bubbles read “I finally found you. You looked very really pretty last night :)” to which Sala’s text bubbles reply with “WTF. Who the fuck are you.”

end I.D.]

Keyword: A Spider’s Thread is an interactive fiction game about being an investiagtor! Play as Guo, a Private Investigator whose daughter is missing in the 2048 sci-fi city inspired by Toronto with traditional Chinese aesthetics. With your binoculars, logical skills, deduction, hacking, and social engineering, travel through time loops to change your view on reality and evaluate if forgiveness is possible!

For Windows and Mac. Free demo is also out.

Developed by City From Naught Inc., a Toronto-based indie studio. Keyword is the company’s first full indie title, and was inspired by the tech devs’ experience in hacking the Instagram account of a real life stalker to was harassing a friend of the company. 

#free demo #cyberpunk #interactive fiction #crime #indie games #video games #puzzle #immersive sim #narrative driven #rpg #hacking #thriller #adventure #puzzle platformer #windows games #Chinese devs #asian devs #East Asian devs #Mac games #mystery #sci-fi #scifi

[ask-mortarion-the-death-lord]

Tau Auxiliaries

since everyone and their mother have ideas on how tau auxiliaries should be handled/expanded, I'll throw in my own two cents on the matter as I do hold a perpetual love for the greyskins.

Personally, i love the tau battlesuits. I'm a real sucker for them, and I have a lot of ideas on expanding just the battlesuits which i'll go over quickly:

"infantry" battlesuits which would include stealth suits but also new strike suits [infantry crisises], demo suits [infantry broadsides] and jet suits [infantry hazard suits]

medium battlesuits which would include crisis suits, broadsides, hazard suits being moved into fast attack as the tau fast attack option, and new spectre suits [medium stealth suits]

large battlesuits which would broadly include the riptide, ghostkeel, and new skyline [hazard large suits] and wavesurge [broadside large suits]

and finally the special twoperson heavy battlesuits which would be the stormsurge for ridonkulus artillery and the stormtide for a more mid to close range approach knight killer

however I'd also like to see expansion on just regular tau infantry before ever expanding on battlesuits, and that would naturally lend itself to expansion of auxiliaries with it. so, first what do I feel the normal tau bois need?

shas'ui team, an elite infantry option that would be like your tau equivalent of a stormtrooper/karskin team. they could also have special rules/upgrades to act as an ethereal bodyguard attachment.

"stealth team", a more weird idea admittedly, based on how in dawn of war dark crusade tau get an early game single unit of an xv-15 stealth suit, canonically the older stealth suit [old game model] before the adoption of the xv-22 [the modern model], to capture immediate points and get ya through the start of a match until ya build a barracks. the stealth team in my mind instead of stealth suits use 'stealth armour' based on the xv-15 makin em an elite non battlesuit tau infantry.

demolition team, tau heavy weapon infantry option.

Which now brings us to the tau auxiliaries themselves. Personally I would have things set up to focus on four main auxilia races to simplify things a bit and try and control the spiral of units on the army list. Namely: kroot, vespid, morallian, and gue'vesa

kroot and vespid are obvious being longterm mainstays, the only units I feel would need to be added being an 'elite'/stronger vespid variant and a single character vespid unit like how the kroot have shapers. a similar pattern I feel would be best applied across other auxilia detachments.

vespid strainlord, a single character vespid unit and the boss of vespid strain leaders. strainlords would be a 'boss' by virtue of having the best planning and organizing skills of a group of strainleaders as opposed to being the strongest, though they would also get the best gear and first pick among the strainleaders for stuff like food usually making them the strongest by proxy of being a strainlord.

vespid sonicshrieks, a special/stronger vespid unit notorious for being exceptionally fast and using special sonic weaponry attuned to their faster then usual wingbeats.

next morallians. we dont have basically anything in the way of knowledge on morallians or what they looklike, outside of the skin of their young being particularly soft and sought after by drukhari and that they're more of a kroot mercenary type of auxiliary. their name alone, morallian deathsworn, brings to my mind a heavy support auxilia option.

morallian deahtsworn, the basic morallian unit. morallians would be big and chunky bois in the classic vein of heavy weapon experts in games everywhere. they would have heavy armour and their bodies would be naturally tough in comparison to their softskinned youth, which also results in them specializing in a ton of hard hitting highly explosive weaponry they can survive but others not so much. their own unique tech would be particularly nasty in that regard not dissimilar to stuff like phosphex or rad weaponry, though the tau tend to disdain applying such tech outside of the most extreme circumstances so most morallians under tau employ keep to more traditional incendiaries or explosives.

morallian oathkeepers, the single character morallian elite. as all commanders in morallian forces regardless of seniority would be required to undergo a series of extensive oaths they get called oathkeepers and their general stubborn bloodimindedness. oathkeepers rise to their position with age their skin having hardened to a truly impressive degree and the countless battlefields they've experienced giving them a distinct edge in experience and wisdom to their youngers.

morallian warmongers, a special morallian unit consisting of morallians not far away from becoming oathkeepers. warmongers would be recklessly eager to prove themselves and thus dive headfirst into the thickest of fighting heavy weapons blasting away and special cqc weapons gripped firmly to crack as many heads as possible.

and finally gue'vesa. the simplest solution is to just offer options to incorporate imperial guard units into a tau army, but frankly that feels like a missed opportunity to generate some wacky hybrid units of imperial and tau tech. niche wise they like their lore would fit into the middle of tau gunline and kroot aggressive melee being the guys ya keep infront of your melee impared fire warriors to add some gunline punch, throw grenades and eat charges but also behind the kroot line letting you charge in your kroot worry free of lacking a shielding unit for your fire warriors. like the kroot they'd also get a bit more toys in the army to work with.

gue'vesa squad. your "gue'la's" and imperial guard infantry equivalent. unlike the imperial guard however your gue'las get a bit more fancy gear and the training to use it ultimately playing like an imperial guard infantry squad got outfitted in tempestus gear by accident. So, they all get caprace armour, and special 'pulselas' guns which are kinda like hotshot lasguns but made with tau tech so ya dont need an oversized powerpack to run it. they are still otherwise an infantry squad though. the trusted bayonet remains on hand despite tau questions to the contrary.

gue'vesa stormtroopers. your elite gue'las or gue'vre as it were either being turncoat stormtrooper regiments or descended from such groups and their practices. well most gue'vre tend to be kept close to home as a nescient imperial governor turncoat to the tau empires sides best tool to keep order and protect their own skin from dangers 'inside the house', many more gue'vre get sent out with tau empire forces as either shows of solidarity or as means of currying favor by winning big battles and 'doing their part for the empire'. gue'vre get all the best shit including special infantry armour designed with tau technological assistance, and access to the experimental weaponry pathfinders use cause like pathfinders gue'vesa are 'dangerously hotheaded/insane' enough to use that stuff. the basic weapon of the gue'vre however would be the 'pulseplas gun' a spin on the standard imperial plasma gun thats been stabilized with tau technological designs increasing its reliability/rate of fire at the cost of making it behave a bit more like your usual tau pulse weapons. Tau earth caste engineers originally wanted to remove the overcharge capability but human project advisors insisted otherwise. in essence, your straight upgrade to the pulselas gun but with the option to overcharge at risk of exploding.

gue'vesa sentinels. well most gue'vesa armour like leman russes, chimeras and even baneblades can be found on gue'vesa homeworlds they tend to be reserved for home defense/reserve use among the gue'vesa. partly for logistical reasons as the tau have perfectly functional often superior armour equivalents to the leman russ and chimera in active service and thus easier to supply for and maintain on campaign, partly for moral and safty concerns as something like a baneblade is good for home moral and too valuable a symbol to risk losing on campaign. sentinels on the other hand are widespread among gue'vesa forces being relatively unique yet easily producible and replaceable by tau logistics well providing unique utility as a speedy gun walker usable by auxilia units. perhaps more importantly however is the unique model of sentinels the tau empire have helped design for gue'vesa use are compatible with many tau battlesuit system upgrades and all tau battlesuit weaponry meaning you can have these things lumbering around with some extra railguns or missile pods or ion blasters or what have you in support.

gue'vesa officer. your single character/hq for gue'vesa. pretty much exactly what it says on the tin being a gue'vesa officer, with the unique function of being able to issue some uniquely human spins on mont'ka or kauyon strategy in the form of 'killing blow order' your gue'vesa equivalent of fix bayonets and 'patient hunter order' your gue'vesa equivalent of suppression fire.

aside from that, some minor auxilia to help get a couple into most catagories. For my taste that would include greet stealthers, a mentioned auxilia race with flyers and vorgh that one auxilia mentioned recently that is lord of war sized and capable of fist fighting em cause it'd be very funny. finally, I think a tau psyker auxilia option would not be remise. not the nicassar mind as they are stressed to be voidbound, but something to cover that whole for the tau without being a tau unit itself. For my money, all i can think of is either an original creation of an auxilia race for that niche or just to throw in gue'vesa psykers as an option.

#warhammer #warhammer40k #warhammer 40k #tau #t'au #tau empire #tau auxiliaries #kroot #vespid #gue'vesa

[ajcgames]

Research - Part I

I managed to cobble together the research processing structure I'd been planning to add. This now takes the form of the mainframe, and functions mostly similar to how I originally intended.

Demoing the new Mainframe object, within the context of the game as a whole in its current state, sound-and-all!

The Mainframe's job is to process science data you've accumulated from the Analyzers and convert it into usable science points. Each mainframe is capable of processing 1 unit of data from the science buffer in about 8 seconds. You'll probably want to have a few of these in your factory to keep the science points coming!

Research, part deux

The second part of the research work will be to implement the research screen. This will give an overview of your current science points, your science-per-minute estimate, and (of course) the all-important tech tree.

The tech tree is going to be fairly small for this early phase, you'll only have one item to unlock. This will be the next machine I'll be working on (which I'll talk about more nearer to when I'm working on it). For the time being I'll be looking to get this screen put in place, and the tasks / objectives side-panel.

Hopefully this was a much more pleasant, shorter read than my last post! And once again, thanks for swinging by! Have a great evening :)

#indie games #game development #game dev blog #gamedev #automation #factory game

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA, ULA Successfully Launch Weather Satellite, Re-entry Tech Demo NASA successfully launched the third in a series of polar-orbiting weather satellites for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at 1:49 a.m. PST Thursday, as well as an agency technology demonstration on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. In addition to the newest Joint Polar Satellite System or JPSS-2, also aboard was NASA’s Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator, or LOFTID, a test of inflatable heat shield technology that could one day help land astronauts on Mars. Mission managers for NOAA's JPSS-2 confirm the satellite is now in Sun acquisition mode (initial operations mode) with the solar array fully deployed. The operations team will continue to evaluate an earlier solar array deployment issue, but at this time, the satellite is healthy and operating as expected. The team has resumed normal activities for the JPSS-2 mission. “NOAA is an important partner for NASA in providing essential data about climate change, weather prediction, and environmental modeling for the benefit of citizens both in the U.S. and around the world,” said NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana. “Our Launch Services Program has successfully launched its 100th primary mission, and on this same flight enabled us to test a new technology for atmospheric re-entry with the LOFTID demonstration.” JPSS-2 will circle the globe 14 times a day 512 miles above Earth, providing forecasters the benefit of three polar-orbiting satellites operating simultaneously, joining its predecessors Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) and NOAA-20. “Exploring the unknowns of our planet to the benefit of our fellow citizens is in our DNA,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “The data that JPSS-2 will send back to our NASA and NOAA scientists on the ground will be critical in saving lives both on Earth and in space.” The JPSS fleet will assist with weather forecasting, help predict extreme weather events, and help track and monitor climate change. JPSS-2 will be renamed NOAA-21 when it reaches its final orbit. The instruments will start collecting data about a month after launch. “As partners, NOAA and NASA have successfully launched more than 60 satellite missions that have significantly improved weather forecasts, solar monitoring, and climate prediction,” said Steve Volz, director of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. “Launching JPSS-2 is just the latest example of what our collective agencies can achieve for the benefit of the Nation and the world at large.” Following JPSS-2's deployment, the LOFTID heat shield autonomously inflated and re-entered Earth's atmosphere, splashing down about 500 miles off the coast of Hawaii just over two hours and ten minutes after launch. Inflatable heat shields – also known as aeroshells – could enable landing heavier payloads on worlds like Mars, Venus, and Saturn's moon Titan, as well as returning large components and samples to Earth. Inflatable aeroshells are not limited by the diameter of a launch vehicle fairing, so they can be made much larger than conventional rigid aeroshells. Larger aeroshells provide more drag, allowing them to slow heavier payloads for atmospheric entry – such as the many tons of equipment required for crewed missions to Mars. "Proving new technologies through flight test is one of the main ways we expand capabilities for future missions," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. "We were pleased to work with our ULA, NASA science, and NOAA colleagues perform this technology demonstration in conjunction with JPSS-2's launch." The LOFTID team will review detailed data from the demonstration following the recovery of the aeroshell and ejectable data module to evaluate how the aeroshell performed. Results of the demonstration will be shared when available. NOAA funds and manages the JPSS Program, operations, and data products. On behalf of NOAA, NASA develops and builds the instruments and spacecraft and launches the satellites. NASA developed the ground system, which NOAA operates and maintains. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, managed the launch service. LOFTID is a partnership between NASA and ULA. The mission is dedicated to the memory of Bernard Kutter, manager of advanced programs at ULA, who passed away in August 2020 and was an advocate for technologies like LOFTID that can lower the cost of access to space. The LOFTID project is managed and funded through NASA’s Technology Demonstration Missions program, part of the agency's Space Technology Mission Directorate. The project is led by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, with contributions from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. IMAGE....A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-2 civilian polar-orbiting weather satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA's Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) tech demo lifts off from Space Launch Complex-3 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 1:49 a.m. PST (4:49 a.m. EST) Nov. 10, 2022. Credits: United Launch Alliance

#space #science #Astronomy #physics #news #nasa #noaa

[gadgetsboy]

CES 2023: MediaTek Shows Off Latest in Wi-Fi and IoT Tech

The new year has finally arrived, and we’re getting a load of awesome tech to go along with it. As such, MediaTek has announced several new technologies ahead of the Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES) 2023 in Las Vegas, and they bring some promising new advancements for Wi-Fi and smart home technology. Let’s take a look! Genio 700 Platform To kick things off, the company announced its latest addition to its Genio platform for IoT devices, which aims to bring improvements to smart home and smart retail tech, to name a couple. In particular, the series’ MediaTek Genio 700 is an octa-core chipset designed for just this purpose, featuring two ARM A78 cores running at 2.2GHz and six ARM A55 cores at 2.0GHz while providing 4.0 TOPs AI accelerator. It also comes with support for FHD60+4K60 display, as well as an ISP for better images. According to Richard Lu, Vice President of MediaTek IoT Business Unit: “When we launched the Genio family of IoT products last year, we designed the platform with the scalability and development support that brands need, paving the way for opportunities to continue expanding. With a focus on industrial and smart home products, the Genio 700 is a perfect natural addition to the lineup to ensure we can provide the widest range of support possible to our customers.” The Genio 700 SDK will allow designers to customize products using Yocto Linux, Ubuntu, and Android. With this support, customers can easily develop their own products with a minimal amount of effort, regardless of application type. Additionally, the chipset will have support for high-speed interfaces, including PCIe 2.0, USB 3.2 Gen1 and MIPI-CSI interface for cameras, Dual-Display support including FHD60+4K60 with AV1, VP9, H.265 and H.264 (video decode) support, industrial grade design and wide temp with 10 years longevity, ARM SystemReady certification for providing a standard and easy way to integrate the platform, as well as ARM PSA certification for increased security. The Genio 700 will be commercially available in Q2 2023. Wi-Fi 7 Ecosystem MediaTek also unveiled its new Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem, making it one of the first adopters of the fastest Wi-Fi tech available right now. The company says that this new breakthrough is the result of investing into Wi-Fi 7 technology, aimed at improving always-on connected user experiences for use across smart devices, streaming products, residential gateways, and more. As per Alan Hsu, MediaTek’s corporate vice president and general manager of the Intelligent Connectivity Business unit: “Last year, we gave the world’s first Wi-Fi 7 technology demonstration, and we are honored to now show the significant progress we have made in building a more complete ecosystem of products. This lineup of devices, many of which are powered by the CES 2023 Innovation Award-winning Filogic 880 flagship chipset, illustrates our commitment to providing the best wireless connectivity.” To put it simply, Wi-Fi 7 uses r320MHz channel bandwidth and 4096-QAM modulation to improve overall speeds and user experience. Multi-Link Operation (MLO) also enables Wi-Fi connections to aggregate channel speeds and greatly reduce link interruption in congested environments. MediaTek’s Wi-Fi 7 solution uses a 6nm process, which reduces power consumption by 50%, a 25x reduction in CPU utilization, and 100x lower MLO switch latency. 4T5R and penta-band mesh are also included to address a larger area of coverage and higher number of linked devices. The company also demoed several devices which use its latest Filogic chips, combining Wi-Fi 7 access point technology to broadband operators, retail router channels and enterprise markets. In particular, MediaTek’s Filogic 380 chipset is designed to bring Wi-Fi 7 connectivity to all client devices, including TVs, smart devices, and computers. With that said, MediaTek’s push to innovate and integrate Wi-Fi 7 technology was met with much praise, particularly from its partners including AMD, Lenovo, ASUS, TP-Link, BUFFALO LINK, Korea Telecom, Hisense, Skyworks, Qorvo, Litepoint, and NI. MediaTek x Federated Wireless Additionally, MediaTek has also been working with Federated Wireless in successfully completing interoperability testing for Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) on MediaTek Filogic Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 6E chips. For those unfamiliar with the term, AFC systems allow for standard power operation for indoor and outdoor unlicensed devices, including 5G CPEs, fiber gateways, and ethernet gateways, to transmit over 850 MHz of spectrum in the 6 GHz frequency band. This improves range for Wi-Fi products, as well as faster connectivity speeds and improved capacity, which comes into play alongside the arrival of Wi-Fi 7 technology. According to Alan Hsu, MediaTek’s corporate vice president of Connectivity: “Our leadership in Wi-Fi technology would not be complete without ensuring our customers have easy access to AFC solutions. We are very happy to partner with Federated Wireless and to have finished an extensive series of integration testing. Our Filogic Wi-Fi 7 and 6E chips, including the CES 2023 Innovation Award-winning Filogic 880, will soon support Standard Power operation in the 6GHz spectrum for companies producing Wi-Fi devices.”  The aforementioned AFC interoperability testing consisted of a set of positive and negative tests drawn from the Wi-Fi Alliance (WFA) AFC System certification specification.  The positive tests included verifying the proper AFC calculation and response of spectrum availability at several locations, while the negative tests included verifying proper AFC System error handling. Kurt Schaubach, chief technology officer at Federated Wireless states: “We are proud to partner with MediaTek to perform these critical interoperability tests to ensure that the commercial industry is ready for standard power device operations to begin. Federated Wireless prides itself on being a premier collaborator with our partners and customers interested in spectrum sharing solutions.” The completion of these tests will allow customers to use Federated Wireless’ AFC system on MediaTek Filogic Wi-Fi 7 and 6E chips (upon full approval by the FCC). Read the full article

[rodspurethoughts]

NASA, ULA Successfully Launch Weather Satellite, Re-entry Tech Demo

NASA, ULA Successfully Launch Weather Satellite, Re-entry Tech Demo

A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-2 civilian polar-orbiting weather satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA’s Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) tech demo lifts off from Space Launch Complex-3 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 1:49 a.m. PST (4:49 a.m.…

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#JPSS #NASA #NOAA

[humphriessnider]

The Best of Big Download: May 18-24

It's a long holiday weekend which means watching basketball and racing on television and going to the movies, or for those who are reading Big Download's highlights from the past seven days (and you are sad if that's the case). You can read it right now.

Exclusive Features

Countdown to E3 2009 We continue our gallery feature leading to the trade show , with a look at the action games we'd like to see at E3.

NASCAR iRacing Interview with the Co-Founder: We interview the co-founder and CEO of iRacing about his plans to bring NASCAR licensing racing sims back to the PC in 2010. MINECRAFT

Reviews: We have opinions on the co-op shooter Killing Floor and the Thrustmaster T.16000M Joystick

Mac Monday: Our Mac column reviews the latest port of the odd adventure game The Path.

Boot Disk Our regular retro games feature looks at the original Command and Conquer RTS game.

Indie Showcase: Our indie game column this week takes a look at three games that are still in beta form: Aces Wild, Arc & Malice and Minecraft.

Big Ideas: Our column on game themes provides a look at why game adaptations of movies rarely work out as well.

Big Iron: Our PC hardware column this week examines input devices and how they can harken back to old fashioned tech.

Freeware Friday: This week's peek into free PC games is a little different. It's also a vintage feature from Grand Theft Auto 2.

Downloads

Sherlock Holmes Vs Jack The Ripper demo: Play the demo of this latest adventure game from developer Frogwares.

World of Warcraft 3.1.2 Patch Download the most recent patch to Blizzard’s hit MMO game.

Trailer for Team Fortress 2 "Meet The Spy", a hilarious trailer for Valve's multiplayer shooter.

Blur Teaser Trailer The trailer is the first teaser for Bizarre Creations' upcoming driving-action game.

Aliens Vs. Trailer for Predator Teaser The trailer is the first glimpse of the return of the FPS series by Rebellion and Sega.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 E3 2009 trailer: It's the first gameplay footage DICE has released from its FPS sequel.

NASCAR will return to the PC in 2010 with iRacing online racing series

3D Realms responds; says studio is not closed and will defend Take-Two's lawsuit

Robot Chicken to work on free scenarios for Spore Galactic Adventures

Two more Fallout 3 DLC expansions announced

Blur officially announced for the PC

Zeno Clash 2 announced

Terminator Salvation PC retail copies recalled

Red Faction Guerrilla delayed for PC

Popcap game hint:

Empire: Total War will get new units for free

New Diablo III screenshots show off The Fallen Ones

#My Blog #Minecraft Online #Minecraft Servers #Minecraft

[peak-systems]

Elevating the Electronics Shopping Journey: Exploring the Voltas Experience Zone in Bangalore

In today's era dominated by the convenience of online shopping, the process of purchasing electronics can often feel impersonal and overwhelming. With countless options available at the click of a button, consumers are faced with the challenge of navigating through a sea of products while ensuring quality, authenticity, and value for their investment. However, amidst the digital landscape, there exists a haven for electronics enthusiasts and consumers seeking a more personalized and rewarding shopping experience – the Voltas Experience Zone in Bangalore. Let's delve into the myriad advantages of stepping into these authorized brand shops and how they elevate the electronics shopping journey.

Assurance of Quality and Authenticity: One of the foremost concerns when purchasing electronics is the authenticity and quality of the products. Authorized Voltas Experience Zones prioritize the brand's reputation by offering genuine, brand-new products that adhere to stringent quality standards. Customers can shop with confidence, knowing they are investing in reliable and high-quality electronics that meet their expectations.

Exclusive In-Store Discounts and Added Value: Beyond the convenience of online shopping, visiting a Voltas Experience Zone presents the opportunity to avail exclusive in-store discounts and promotions. These added incentives enhance the value of your purchase, whether through special discounts during festive seasons or complimentary services such as free shipping and assembly. By offering these perks, Voltas ensures that customers feel appreciated and rewarded for their loyalty.

Hands-On Experience and Product Inspection: Unlike online shopping, where you rely solely on descriptions and images, Voltas Experience Zones offer the advantage of hands-on experience. Customers can physically inspect and test various products, interacting with demo units to make informed decisions based on their preferences and requirements. This tactile experience enables customers to assess the build quality, features, and functionality of the products before making a purchase, resulting in greater satisfaction with their decision.

Prompt Service Response and Specialized Knowledge: With dedicated service centers and knowledgeable staff, Voltas Experience Zones ensure a prompt response to any issues or queries customers may have regarding their electronic devices. The staff's specialized knowledge and expertise in the brand's products further enhance the shopping experience, providing valuable insights and recommendations tailored to individual needs. Whether it's troubleshooting technical issues or seeking advice on product compatibility, customers can rely on the expertise of Voltas staff to address their concerns effectively.

Personalized Assistance Tailored to Your Needs: Perhaps the most significant advantage of visiting a Voltas Experience Zone is the personalized assistance customers receive. Unlike generic customer service, the staff takes the time to understand each customer's specific requirements and preferences, offering tailored recommendations and solutions to ensure a seamless shopping experience. Whether you're a tech enthusiast looking for the latest gadgets or a homeowner in need of reliable appliances, Voltas staff goes the extra mile to cater to your needs and exceed your expectations.

In conclusion, stepping into a Voltas Experience Zone in Bangalore transcends the traditional electronics shopping journey, offering a plethora of benefits that enhance customer satisfaction and value. From the assurance of quality and authenticity to exclusive discounts, hands-on experience, prompt service response, specialized knowledge, and personalized assistance, these authorized brand shops prioritize customer-centricity and elevate the overall shopping experience.

In an age where convenience often comes at the expense of personalized service, Voltas Experience Zones stand as a beacon of excellence, ensuring that customers not only find the perfect electronic appliances but also enjoy a fulfilling and memorable shopping experience. So, the next time you're in the market for electronics, consider venturing into a Voltas Experience Zone – where quality, expertise, and customer satisfaction converge to redefine the art of electronics shopping.

#Voltas Experience Zone

[fahrni]

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Kim let me sleep in this morning. I must say it was pretty glorious.

Not too much to report on my work week. Busy, but in a good way. I really love this project. The people and the technical aspects have been amazing. Fingers crossed we get to continue on after delivering everything we had to do in this initial round of work. 🤞🏼

JoBlo

Very sad news today as it’s been reported that M. Emmet Walsh has died at the age of 88. No matter the size of the role, the prolific character actor always made a unique impression throughout his long career, which spanned six decades.

He was great in Blade Runner and I loved his character in Christmas with the Kranks.

R.I.P. 🪦

Peter Bergen • CNN

Kushner’s newly disclosed musings last month that Gaza has a lot of “very valuable” waterfront property reminds one of Marie Antoinette’s purported observation, “Let them eat cake.”

Kushner is a perfect fit for the Trump crime organization. He’s a sociopath just like his father-in-law.

My gut reaction earlier sums it up.

Casey Newton • Platformer

Today let’s talk about one of the most significant antitrust lawsuits ever filed in the tech industry: this 88-page complaint against Apple, filed by the Department of Justice and joined by 16 states, accusing the iPhone maker of illegally maintaining its monopoly over high-end smartphones and artificially inflating prices for consumers.

I personally see some similarities between this case and the case the DOJ brought against Microsoft in 1998.

I wrote about it earlier in the week if you’re interested and pointed out the piece from a Jason Snell article that really caught my attention.

Emma Roth • The Verge

Threads is coming to the fediverse — and we just got our first official look at how that might work from Meta itself. During the FediForum conference on Tuesday, Meta’s Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users will eventually be able to connect their accounts and posts to the fediverse.

Being the administrator of a Mastodon instance I’m actually excited for this! There are certain famous people I’d love to follow again and my hope is I’ll find them on Threads.

Tim Bray

When I’m away from home, I still want to listen to the music we have at home (well, I can live without the LPs). We had well over a thousand CDs so that’s a lot of music, 12,286 tracks ripped into Apple Lossless. Except for a few MP3s from, well, never mind. This instalment of the De-Google Project is about ways to do that with less Big-Tech involvement.

I really like the idea of this. I have an old Mac Mini I’d like to turn into a media server, most likely using Plex. I’ve started buying Blu-ray’s again for fear of losing parts of my video library at the whim of the corporation I purchased the license from.

Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein • The Washington Post

Lawyers and former judges said they are baffled by an order issued this week by the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s pending trial on charges that he mishandled classified documents — and believe her instructions suggest the case will not go to trial anytime soon.

The sway the Orange Turd has over parts of our government is shocking. I hope she’s replaced and soon.

Ryan Hockensmith • ESPN

How one fan picked the greatest March Madness bracket ever built

This is a fun story. I’ve picked Final Four winners and won tournaments among friends with better brackets, but there’s usually a surprise early on that can make or break your bracket.

Just look at the South this year. It’s a mess and I’m here for it.

Jason Karaian • The New York Times

Unilever, the consumer goods giant, said on Tuesday that it would cut 7,500 jobs and spin off its ice cream unit, which includes Ben & Jerry’s, to reduce costs and simplify its portfolio of brands.

Big corporations continue to make huge profits for shareholders at the expense of the working class. I don’t know if that’s exactly what’s happening here but it feels like it.

HomeGrown

As part of creating the Grow Your Own Services site, I set up my own Mastodon server through a managed hosting service. I thought I’d write an article about this topic, in order to help others considering doing the same thing. I’ve tried to break down the process into ten main steps.

If you have the gumption to run and maintain your own Mastodon instances this article is for you.

Me? I just use Masto.Host.

Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro • Oracle

Java users on macOS 14 running on Apple silicon systems should consider delaying the macOS 14.4 update

This is a pretty big thing to break and I’m sure the DOJ will not look kindly on it.

Louie Mantia

We’ve truly lost sight of how to make good apps. There’s a serious lack of vision and taste in the industry. Everyone’s given in to the lowest common denominator in the design of apps, simply mimicking what others do without understanding if it’s even the right choice.

I’ve been reading Louie more and more lately. I’m glad he’s started blogging because I’ve loved his pieces on his work history, from The Icon Factory to Apple.

Not to mention his blog is fully hand built. That is very tempting to me.

Joab Jackson • The New Stack

After 20 years of development, the open source GnuCOBOL “has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments,” said OCamlPro founder and GnuCOBOL contributor Fabrice Le Fessant, in a FOSDEM talk about the technology.

What a journey! 20 years in the making. And yes, COBOL is still a thing.

[Erika Morphy • TechSpot](www.techspot.com/news/1022…]

The big picture: Job cuts in the tech industry last year were attributed to the need to economize, driven by inflation and a hiring spree during the pandemic. So, what’s the explanation this year, especially when many of these firms have accumulated a significant amount of cash?

It’s been a rough couple years for tech. 😔

KIRSTEN GRIESHABER • The Associated Press

In Germany, the far right is on the rise again. How did it happen?

The extreme right is growing around the world. Both of my grandfathers would roll in their graves if they were around to see this. They both fought to help free us from fascism.

Derrick Bryson Taylor • The New York Times

The former television anchor Don Lemon’s wide-ranging, testy interview with Elon Musk was released online on Monday morning, touching upon topics including politics, particularly the billionaire’s recent meeting with former President Donald J. Trump; Mr. Musk’s reported drug use; hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which he now owns; and more.

I watched this and thought Lemon asked some really great, pointed, questions and Musk revealed his authoritarian, racist, self.

Lawrence Hodge • Jalopnik

Lincoln dealers have a big problem. Aside from having just four models to sell, dealers have a bunch of cars from one and two model years ago that they haven’t been able to move.

I admit it. If I could get my hands on a brand new Lincoln Navigator for a super crazy sub 30,000 price tag, I’d consider it. They’re nice.

[wasteland-soul-project]

Here's an insano list that will be continually updated so I have an online record of all that Im currently receptive to include. Consider this spoilers actually.

Greens got a spot on the timeline finalized.

White is sorted by era for workload

Agar.io, Saurian,Ancestors,Far Cry,Civ,History channel,The sumerian game,Hammurabi,Ass cred,Ryse son of rome,Ghost of Tsushima,evil dead,Kingdom come deliverance,western gun,Turok,Oregon trail,Samurai western,Call of Juarez,Red Dead Revolver,GUN,This land is my land,Bioshock Infinite,Valiant Hearts,Call of cthulhu,Sea wolf,Battlefield,Mafia, front line, endless war, the saboteur,Medal of honor,Call of Duty,Capcom 1942,Commando,Castle wolfenstein?The incredibles,Cathode ray tube amusemen device,La Noire remember da whorient,Bertie the Brain,Nimrod,Destroy All humans,Christophers draughts,Fonzie road race,Atomic Heart,Tennis for two, gta,Spy hunter ,Spacewar!, xcom, metal gear, resident evil, 1967 world series, team fortress, afterburner, galaxy game, computer space, pong, silent hill, night driver, elevator action, E.T, space ace, uncharted, firewatch, jalopy, contra, gone home, portal, postal, prey, max Payne, illbleed, blood, FEAR, venture bros, manhunt, dead island, dead rising, kane and lynch , bully, cherry 2000, hell comes to frog town, burt reynolds flick, socom, saints row, mercenaries, half life,Alpha protocol,Outlast,Life is strange,Payday,Sleeping Dogs,Lollipop Chainsaw,Duck dynasty, hatred, tomb raider, Evil within,Dying light, edith finch, control, trad meme, alaskan road trucker, tume pilot, disco elysium, octodad, tacoma,Van Buren Tech Demo,Five lesbians eating quiche, thag cute radioactive couple,Fallout: Zero,System Shock,One man and a crate of puppets,Fallout: Frost,Wasteland,Fallout nevada,Atom RPG,Metro,Soma,Ashes twentysixty three,Fountain of Dreams ,Organ Trail,Employee of the month,Fallout 1.5 Resurrection,Squidward suicide,Stray,Horizon,Fallout Yesterday,Jazzpunk,xcom classic, breaking badFallout New Califnornia,Mad Max,Hwarts of Iron OWB, soace station 13,Storyteller,Fallout Lanius,Fallout nuka breakFallout 4 miami,All roads,Death Stranding,Morrowind,Outer Worlds

Fallout minecraft map,Fallout:Dust

Post war:Spongebob, 60 seconds, the story must be told, fallout revelation, starcraft, space quest, dead space, broken roads

Prewar: 2050+, idealized-era retroscifi jetsons, overwatch, series of unfortunate events, deathloop, f zero x, afro samurai, thief reboot

Prewar 2025-50, dystopia class struggle sci fi deus ex, cyberpunk, mirrors edge, cruelty squad, final fantasy

Pre war (big mess of speculative future) home front,dishonored, naissancE, space station 13, crackdown, timesplitters, kentucky route zero, red faction, dreambreak, attack of the saucermen, metal slug

My lived yearss that one 4chan comic in france, plants vs zombies ,the boys, slender, sniper assassin, stalker, hitman, the quarry, pandemic 2, black watchmen, alien hominid, police quest, tony hawk, ape out, ace attorney, the beginners guide, arma, aemy of teo , chimamande adichi, crysis, just cause, just dance, prototype, skate, various sports, dangenrampa, true crime, post void, burger tycoon, dino crisis, the cat lady downfall devil went through here lorelei, science adventure, goldsrc counter strike, detectives united, deadly premonition, freedom fighters, eternal darkness, unboxing, that unity game abt the painting, subnautica, perfect dark, famicon wars, the darkness

1900s fnaf, calvin and hobbes, papers please, mother, zaxxon, heros journey, stalin vs martians, x files, tom clancy, spec ops, gorillaz, the sims, GI Joe, leisure suit larry, pathologic, cold war game, hammer and sickle, jurassic park, evil dead, james bond Tropico, sims city, ikari warriors, spy hunter, time crisis, alone in the dark, syphon filter, gabriek knight, arma cold war, chinua achebe, camara laye, persona, shenmu, yakuza, brothers in arms, company of heroes, punchout, operation flashpoint, professor layton, sniper ghost warrior, sniper elite, undying, stanley parable, hotline miam, war in the east, wings of orey, men of war, 9th company, red orchestra, iron front, death to spies, mother russia bleeds, roller coaster tycoon, counterspy, esrls day off , gaiden, shin megami, suda 57, fatal frame, gorogoa, hotel room dusk

1800s thief, amnesia, samurai champloo, jojo, dark pictures anthology, wadjet games multiverse, bloodborne

1500s sekiro

1400s Europa Universalis

1300s Demons souls classic

1100s lionheart

1000s crusader kings, chrono trigger

800s prince of persia

200 silk

100 romanc eof the three kingdoms, dynasty warriors

Ancient 0ad, pharoah, the scorpion king, sphynx and the cursed mummy, age if mythology, noahs ark, empire esrth, rise of nations, total war, tak and the power of juju, hades

Cavepeople: dawn of man, jawa mammoth, age of empires, tork, tail of the sun, echo secrets of the lost cavern,roots of patcha

Old af: jurassic the hunted, nanosaur, a prehistoric tale, id software timeline, AVP TIMELINE OLD AF, evo, evolution games of itnelligent ligr, lynn margulis, civ dinosaur war like cthulhu mythos, robert howard books

[daveg65]

292 - Vision Pro, Bad and Good - With Guest Dylan Stewart, Jeff Gamet, and Ben Roethig

The latest In Touch With iOS with Dave he is joined by guest Dylan Stewart, Jeff Gamet, and Ben Roethig.Beta this week. iOS 17.4 Beta 2 is released. Our guest Dylan has the Vision Pro and did an unboxing last week. He gives us his review and thoughts. YouTube Claims an Apple Vision Pro App is On the Roadmap.The Windows world officially has 3 apps, goodbye iTunes for Windows. Plus more.

The show notes are at InTouchwithiOS.com


Direct Link to Audio 

Links to our Show

Give us a review on Apple Podcasts! CLICK HERE we would really appreciate it!

Click this link Buy me a Coffee to support the show we would really appreciate it. intouchwithios.com/coffee 

Another way to support the show is to become a Patreon member patreon.com/intouchwithios

Website: In Touch With iOS

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In Touch with iOS Magazine on Flipboard

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Mastadon

Twitter

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Spoutible

Topics

Beta this week. iOS 17.4 Beta 2 is released.  Apple Releasing iOS 17.4 in March With These New Features and Changes 

Apple Seeds Second iOS 17.4 Public Beta With EU App Ecosystem Changes 

Apple Starts Improving Vision Pro Personas in visionOS 1.1 Beta 

Apple Seeds Second Betas of iOS 17.4 and iPadOS 17.4 to Developers 

Apple Seeds Second Beta of watchOS 10.4 to Developers 

Apple Seeds Second Beta of tvOS 17.4 to Developers 

iOS 17.4 Allows Video Calling Apps to Turn Off Hand Gesture Reactions to Prevent Awkward Moments

Apple Releases iOS 17.3.1 With Fix for Text Bug 

Apple Releases watchOS 10.3.1 With Bug Fixes 

  Our guest Dylan has the Vision Pro and did an unboxing last week. He gives us his review and thoughts. Here is his unboxing video. Unboxing the Vision Pro

We find out his likes and dislikes and maybe a demo. 

Bad

 Difficult to share with others

Keyboard

Battery pack - not battery life

Non-Spatial Apps - from Appl e (Calendar)

Persona

Good

Watching videos is amazing

Siri and dictation work well

iPad Apps

Ability to be productive/multi-tasking in an infinite environment

Ability to toggle from immersive to

Vision Pro news

YouTube Claims an Apple Vision Pro App is On the Roadmap 

Apple Shares Vision Pro User Guide and Dozens of Support Documents With Useful Tips

PSA: You'll Have to Visit an Apple Store If You Forget Your Vision Pro Passcode

Vision Pro Demo Appointments Begin Today at All Apple Stores in U.S.

This hospital system just bought 30 Vision Pro units and launched a new ‘Spatial Computing Center of Excellence’

The Windows world officially has 3 apps, goodbye iTunes for Windows. 

Apple Officially Splits iTunes for Windows Into Apple Music, TV, and Devices Apps 

Apple Redesigns iCloud App for Windows

News

iOS 17 Adoption is Slower Than iOS 16 Adoption 

Apple's 2024 Swift Student Challenge Now Live 

Apple TV+ Previews 2024 Lineup of Shows and Films 

Bluesky Social Network Ditches Invite Codes, Opens Registrations to All

Our Host

Dave Ginsburg is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users and shares his wealth of knowledge of iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and related technologies. Visit the YouTube channel https://youtube.com/intouchwithios follow him on Mastadon @daveg65, and the show @intouchwithios

  Our Regular Contributors

Jeff Gamet is a podcaster, technology blogger, artist, and author. Previously, he was The Mac Observer’s managing editor, and Smile’s TextExpander Evangelist. You can find him on Mastadon @jgamet as well as Twitter and Instagram as @jgamet  His YouTube channel https://youtube.com/jgamet

Ben Roethig Former Associate Editor of GeekBeat.TV and host of the Tech Hangout and Deconstruct with Patrice  Mac user since the mid 90s. Tech support specialist. Twitter @benroethig  Website: https://roethigtech.blogspot.com

About our Guest

Dylan Stewart first discovered Apple computers and technology in 1981, and ever since then has loved pushing its boundaries to create the simple out of the complex. 

In 2001 Dylan founded 2 Smart Techies, a Mac and PC computer consultation company that would set the stage for his future. As it grew, he grew. Along the way, Dylan was dubbed the MacWhisperer, and became the go-to guru for Los Angeles and beyond.

Over the past 20 years, Dylan has hosted podcasts, live trainings and seminars, and online courses.  He has recently created the MacWhisperer Monthly Membership to help technology enthusiasts of all ages and technical abilities to improve their skills, and to their tool chests, and take their technology to the next level. CLICK HERE to sign up. 

Find Dylan on YouTube, TikTok , Facebook , Linked IN, Instagram:  and X/Twitter: @macwhisperer

Here is our latest Episode!

[linuxgamenews]

The Excitement of the '90s - Nuke Them All 

Nuke Them All an old-school fast-paced RTS game is testing Linux with Windows PC. GameEraStudios' success is a testament to its dedicated and skilled team. Due to make its way onto Steam Early Access next month. Let's dive into the world of Nuke Them All, an upcoming title that's due to bring back the adrenaline rush of old-school fast-paced RTS experiences. If you've got a thing for high-speed strategy and intense action, this one's for you. While stepping back into the '90s, but with a modern twist. Think of the excitement we got from legends like Z, KKND, and Red Alert, mixed with the flair of recent hits like C&C Generals and Company of Heroes. Nuke Them All is being developed in Construct 3 engine. As a result, GameEraStudios is working to create a Linux build to test. Whether this makes into Steam Next Fext or not is yet to be decided. But it's also encouraging that the developer is showing interest in native support. GameEraStudios is diving into new waters with their latest project developed in the Construct 3 engine. Exciting news: the studio is crafting a Linux build for testing! While it's still a mystery whether this will be a highlight into the Steam Next Fest, it's great to see the developer's enthusiasm for native support.

Nuke Them All Trailer

Now, imagine a tech tree that makes mid-game progress thrillingly fast. It's a fresh breath in the RTS scene. You're not just building and battling; you're racing against time and your rivals to unlock the best upgrades. And the territory capture mechanic is a game-changer. It's straightforward – grab those flags, claim the land. But there's a lot more going on beneath the surface. The Nuke Them All feature list offers relentless RTS combat, random events that could flip the script at any moment. There is also a lineup of unlockable units that sounds like a sci-fi fan's dream team – laser bots, rocket bots, you name it. And the humor? Get ready to laugh with an array of voiceovers filled with puns and references. But it's not just about the laughs. This game's got massive battles across extensive maps, where day turns to night and brings a whole new challenge – zombies. Plus, weather actually impacts how you play. And then there's The Nuke. Control that, and you're reigning supreme power over your opponents. As for the journey ahead, Nuke Them All has a two-year saga in Early Access, with the promise of a new map each month. It's not just about waiting for the complete version; it's about being part of the evolution. So this is going to be one wild ride. Mark your calendars for March 2024, because that's when Nuke Them All is due to hit Steam Early Access. There's also demo available right now, and it's also featured in Steam Next Fest until February 125th. Don't miss out on this chance to jump into the fray early! Playable right now on Linux via Proton with Windows PC. But the old-school fast-paced RTS is aiming at native support.

#nuke them all #fast-paced RTS #old-school #linux #gaming news #gameerastudios #construct 3 #ubuntu #windows #pc #Youtube