Dec 23 2023

A Year of Retro Games

a selfie of me with a silly pixelated mario hat
At the end of last year I was reflecting on people I was thankful for in my life, and one of the people I reached out to was my buddy Scott, a fellow enthusiast of retro games. I told him that I wanted to double down on joy in 2023, and that included more time for playing retro games.

He was in firm agreement on this, and so we made it happen. Thursday nights became retro game nights. More often than not we’d enjoy some pizza, possibly a dessert (I enjoyed coming up with new recipes to try out throughout the year), and we’d play through a retro game of our choice. Usually we’d need two sessions to play through a game completely, but some of the games were quicker to play through and we’d play a couple in one evening.

I’m not going to leave reviews of every single game, but I do want to share some highlights:

Mega Man

Scott was very excited to introduce me to Mega Man and he was not shy about selling it hard. I believe his exact words were that it would “change my life.”

And I have to say, the games are great. We played all the NES games, starting with Mega Man 2 through 6, then playing through Mega Man 1 after (Scott felt that Mega Man 2 was far superior to Mega Man 1 but when we played through it I found it to be quite solid and I would have enjoyed playing that first).

If you want to play Mega Man on a modern console, it’s available for the Switch, and I actually prefer playing this way because it includes a Turbo mode that prevents frame rate slowdowns (especially noticeable in Mega Man 3), and you get a rewind feature and save states, both of which are super handy when trying to do a play-through.

I am deeply impressed overall by the graphical quality of the Mega Man games. Levels are beautiful (especially when you know the limits the NES has in terms of color palette) and the soundtracks absolutely slap.

Mega Man bosses do not fuck around, though. In the earlier games they aren’t so bad (especially when you accumulate weapons in the right order and use them strategically against the right bosses) but in the later ones they get punishingly difficult. Mario bosses are downright child’s play by comparison.

One other thing I loved about playing the games in order was seeing the evolution of the weapons and tools, and letting that complexity gradually build up so I didn’t get overwhelmed by choices. Each boss you defeat does give you a new weapon and that can be overwhelming, but my strategy was generally to stick with the default Power Buster gun which is really great. In the later Mega Man games it became possible to press and hold B to get a charge shot, making the power buster a great all-around weapon.

The Mega Man X games for SNES feel like a lovely evolution of Mega Man. They didn’t mess with the format much, but they used the extra graphics headroom to make even more beautiful levels, and the extra controller buttons made it easier to perform maneuvers like sliding. The X games feel more forgiving than the NES games to play (I didn’t find myself pining for the save state/rewind functionality when playing the SNES games on real hardware). My one criticism is that the Mega Man X soundtracks aren’t nearly as memorable as their NES counterparts. Something about the constraints of NES sound hardware really brought out great music composition, and with the SNES that felt lost.

I think Mega Man X is my favorite of all of them though.

Modern Homebrew Games

It delights me to no end that to this day, there are game developers actively making new games for the NES, and in many cases they will actually ship real physical cartridges for these games too.

Yes, you read that correctly. In the year of our lord 2023, game developers are continuing to make and manufacture brand new games for the NES console. It truly speaks to the caliber of the NES as a game system. It’s not the only retro game platform getting new games made for it, but it seems to me like it gets the largest number of games.

Scott and I played several of these, and they’re great.

screenshot of the NES game Spacegulls (courtesy of Morphcat games)

Two of my favorites are Spacegulls and Böbl, both by Morphcat Games. Spacegulls is a demo that was built in just a week and can be played through in under a half hour, while Böbl is a bit more substantial (I think still weighing in under two hours).

In Böbl, you play a bubble and you navigate through water by diving, trying to avoid touching solid blocks which will pop you. I don’t think there’s any other NES game with a play mechanic that works like that, and the game is delightful to play; everything feels very smooth.

Micro Mages is another fun one, and it’s one of a handful of games you can actually play with four players simultaneously on the screen (with an accessory like the Four Score). One thing I found fun about Micro Mages as a rather mediocre player is that even when I was dead, I remained a ghost on screen who was capable of moving around more easily and I was able to stun enemies, providing assistance to the other players.

Finally, if you’re interested in an incredibly ambitious NES game, look no further than Full Quiet. I got a chance to meet its lead developer at PRGE this year, and he was absolutely a delight and I appreciated his goal with this game, which was to make a game that wasn’t a quick play-through; instead, it involved a massive amount of discovery and trial and error. It respects you as a gamer because it expects more from you than most other games.

Full Quiet has been around for months and it’s only recently that we’re starting to see players managing to finish the game or offer speed runs.

In the game you play a father looking for your lost son in the forest, and to do this you need to travel to different outposts and get radio equipment working to restore the radio grid.

The game’s graphics are stunning, and as you play you are spanning many days, so you get to experience daytime mode, evening mode, and night mode. You need to get to camp in time or you will get eaten by monsters!

I was more deferring to Scott when playing this together, and he got through more of it than I did, and we have yet to fully finish it, but it’s a wonderfully ambitious game and I love that something like it exists now for the NES. But it is not for the faint of heart.

It’s also available on the Switch and I purchased it if for no other reason than to support the developer.

Underrated Games

Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll

screenshot of level 1 of Snake Rattle 'n Roll for NES (source: wikipedia.org)

When I was first introduced to Scott we bonded early on over our shared enjoyment of the game Snake Rattle ’n Roll, a delightful game that doesn’t get discussed that much.

The game is super whimsical and fun, though. The levels are isometric, and in 2 player mode both players are on screen at once. You play snakes who need to grow by eating little balls called “Nibbley Pibbleys” until your snake weighs enough that you cause the door to the next level to open.

It’s a delight, and you’ll want to use a Game Genie code for infinite lives to play this one.

The soundtrack slaps as well, and you can even get it on vinyl (the record itself is beautiful too).

Mendel Palace

I was also delighted to introduce Scott to Mendel Palace, a game he was unfamiliar with but one that I played a lot as a child. The story is that you play a good doll that belongs to this girl, and the girl’s other dolls have all turned evil, and you must fight these evil dolls by playing these puzzle like levels where you flip tiles to push the other dolls toward the wall in a sort of sumo-like fashion.

Songs for this one are memorable too.

It’s a very easy game to pick up (I played it as a five year old) but it’s a formidable challenge to play all the way through; those final bosses get challenging!

Kirby’s Adventure

For some reason I always thought of Kirby games as a less challenging game for little kids, and I regret sleeping on Kirby’s Adventure for NES in particular.

It was one of the later games made for NES (released in 1993 after the SNES was starting to come onto the scene) but because it was released so late in the NES’s life it is very well-programmed and is able to achieve beautiful graphics and fluid gameplay with minimal slowdowns.

I recommend this Kirby game in particular because the SNES Kirby games all felt relatively disappointing by comparison.

NARC

This is total ’80s copaganda/“Just Say No” anti-drug type content, but the game itself is kind of fun and the soundtrack is quite possibly one of my favorites for NES.

Am I a Gamer?

I played a decent number of video games as a child, but throughout high school and college I kind of fell out of touch with gaming and didn’t pick it up much as an adult.

For a few years now I had been meaning to dedicate more time to gaming, and I thought of my commitment to retro game this year as a sort of New Year’s resolution. It’s a little silly; most adults are resolving to read more or hit the gym, and I’m over here committing to playing more video games, but I really was excited to do more gaming, and I think it was important for me to get deeper into it, and my ADHD-addled brain has benefited from developing the habit of giving these games more dedicated focus.

As a kid I always just dabbled in stuff. I never really played all the way through games (I think the only game I fully played through on my own was Donkey Kong Country), and it has felt really good to be playing games through to completion as part of these game nights. Having a companion who’s great at gaming really helps too, and for the single player games we had a driver/navigator dynamic going where the person not driving was helping guide.

I never stopped loving video games, but this year helped rekindle my love for them. It’s even gotten me more interested in some modern stuff. I’ve been playing more games on the Switch, and I have been deeply enjoying Super Mario Bros Wonder (fun fact: the five people who worked on the original Super Mario Bros for NES worked on this game too!). I’ve been casually playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land and it’s an absolute joy (and does a great job of retaining the fun of being a platformer while being a 3D game).

After the Nintendo 64 came out I had long been dismissive of more modern games as having left me behind, being too complex. And there are certainly plenty of video games out there nowadays that are quite involved to play, but I think it’s been a delightful discovery that there are still games being developed for me to this day (whether for today’s systems or for the systems of yesteryear).

Also, it’s kind of funny: I still haven’t thought of myself as a serious gamer. But one evening back in October Scott was going over the games we had played and pointed out we had played over 30 games together (and that’s just the games he and I played). That’s more than just dabbling, I think! I also enjoy my Playdate.

We ended the year of retro game nights playing Mega Man X3 for the SNES. To help commemorate the year of playing great games I decided the best move would be to play the game on real hardware with a real cartridge. Mega Man X3 is relatively rare, but I managed to snag an X3 cartridge on eBay and gift it to Scott so he could complete his collection of Mega Man X SNES cartridges, and he was like a kid at Christmas. Indeed, X3 was a delight to play.

2023 has been a really difficult year for me, but it was nonetheless full of bright spots. Having game night to look forward to every week wasn’t just a bright spot in my week, it was a constellation of bright spots in a very dark year. I’m really happy to say that things started to turn around for me in the last few months and I’m looking forward to even more retro games next year, and possibly some field trips as well (the https://icanthascheezburger.com/wow-vegas-online-casino-reviews/ in Hillsboro sounds tempting).

The Games

Here’s a full list of the games we played so far, in no particular order. We played most of these games this year.

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Dec 17 2023

Mastodon Doesn’t Need Fucking Algorithmic Timelines

First off, for the hopeless pedantics among you, let’s get this out of the way: yes, I am aware of the definition of “algorithm,” and I realize that literally any arrangement of feed items into a feed is algorithmic, even a chronological feed. But “algorithmic feeds” has a clear colloquial meaning here and I will hereafter use the term “algorithmic” to refer to feeds or timelines where the content isn’t based strictly on straightforward things like who you’re following, but rather a bunch of complex choices, usually optimized around maximizing engagement.

I keep hearing people running into literally any friction whatsoever bootstrapping their community on Mastodon and their immediate suggestion is that Mastodon needs the algorithmic timelines that all the other major social networks use, and that Mastodon’s failure to do so is relegating it to failure.

There’s a lot about this that’s a bad idea but it’s all predicated on this fundamental misunderstanding that the algorithmic timeline exists to benefit you, the user.

And sure, that’s how algorithmic timelines get sold to you, but the real reason tech companies have invested so much in making timelines work like this is because they want growth and don’t care about anything else and will go to ridiculous lengths to fill feeds with content that are statistically more likely to make the app “sticky,” keeping you on there for longer. It’s not because big tech companies believe in earnest that you spending more time using their stuff is better for you; it’s just a nihilistic mentality that growth is good. It’s an empty belief system and it’s naive to think it’s better for you. I like that Mastodon isn’t burning through millions of dollars VC investors’ money a year desperately trying to increase growth without bound.

It is an important philosophical difference between Mastodon and mainstream social networks that you have agency over the people you see content from in your feed. When you cede that control, you’re giving someone else decision-making power over your media diet. You’re giving someone else control over the things you learn, and how you grow.

But the thing that really just pisses me off about the “maybe we need an algorithmic timeline” takes is this false dichotomy that the only two options are how Mastodon activity feeds currently work, and how Twitter’s activity feeds now work.

We spent years lamenting the consequences of the algorithmic timelines. We talked about how they created echo chambers and sowed more political division, and when faced with obstacles when using Mastodon with chronological timelines our immediate knee-jerk reaction is “let’s go back”?

Fuck that noise.

There exist other solutions that can help address the issues people want to solve with algorithmic timelines.

If seeing every post in your chronological timeline is overwhelming, we could experiment with other ways of presenting those posts. Maybe if you’ve got some serial posters who clog your timeline, we could collapse the posts automatically. We could experiment with letting you look at a digest view of your timeline, perhaps letting you filter to just posts that are popular or getting the most replies. Hell, we could even experiment with LLMs that try to summarize your feed content or sort posts by topic. There are lots of filtering options not yet explored that can make it easier to sift through a timeline full of content while still keeping the philosophical spirit of control over who is in your timeline.

Mastodon has a “reply guy” problem, and as it’s getting some notable users they’ve been raising alarms about it. I would like to see instance admins moderate reply guys better (seriously, if you’re a Mastodon admin, it’s okay to discipline users for just being assholes in replies to people; it’s not a human right to be able to antagonize people on Mastodon). But we could also offer more robust options to limit replies, or to display lower-quality replies separately (which is flirting with “algorithmic timeline” in similarity, yes, but we could do it in so many ways). There are so many different options for heuristics that could be used to help with that issue.

And yes, a fresh and brand new Mastodon account is daunting. And that is a tough problem so solve automatically without resorting to things that look close to algorithmic feeds, and an account’s beginning is an important time in its lifecycle because the people you initially follow serve as the seed for the community you eventually build. But this is solvable. Human curation is an option. I’d suggest using contact lists to help build social graphs but I know so many social networks abused the crap out of this and it feels like a bad idea. But we can build better search tools, and clients can help you find your people by asking a handful of questions early on that might help you connect to the right people.

Plenty of people are more stubborn about Mastodon’s need to evolve and add new features; its growth reveals that its needs are different than they were in Mastodon’s early years. Mastodon has handled its growth with grace, and it continues to look a lot like Twitter did in the early 2010s. Now is a chance for Mastodon to start to take a path that is uniquely its own, thinking of new and unique solutions to issues in ways that Twitter failed to.

To suggest Mastodon has to solve its problems by being more like today’s Twitter is unimaginative and it fails to grasp what Mastodon is about.

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Dec 11 2023

The Bubble Wars

the distracted boyfriend meme where the boyfriend is looking at a blue caption bubble while the green caption bubbble is looking at him
There’s been an increasing tension around the exclusivity of Apple’s iMessage product, and it feels like that tension has hit a peak over the last month or so.

Here’s a handful of the iMessage related events in recent history:

  • Automattic (the WordPress people) acquired the Texts app, a universal messaging app with support for, among other things, iMessage
  • The makers of the Nothing Phone started offering iMessage support, only to shut it down when it was revealed how terrifyingly insecure its implementation was
  • Apple announced it would be bringing support for the RCS protocol to iPhones next year, allowing rich iMessage-like features (like typing indicators and better support for media and groups) between iPhones and modern Android phones
  • Beeper, the makers of another universal messaging app, announced support for Beeper Mini, a new app that offers iMessage support by having the app itself behave like a real iPhone connecting to the iMessage system. Apple was able to promptly stop it from working

Despite what article headlines might have you thinking, this isn’t merely about the color of the text messaging bubbles iPhone users see when they message another iPhone user as opposed to a plain SMS message. iMessages work a lot better. Messages send back and forth a lot faster, and there’s an indicator when the other person is typing, which is handy when you’re having an actual conversation. You get things like delivery confirmation and (optionally) read receipts. You can send larger media items like high-res photos and videos. There’s also support for some extras like stickers, reactions, and native support for stuff like Apple Pay (and other iMessage apps). Finally, iMessage messages are end-to-end encrypted, ensuring that your messages aren’t getting snooped on in transit for governments or advertising networks to see.

Apple’s had internal conversations over the years about making an iMessage app for Android, and they have decided against it because it gently locks users into Apple’s ecosystem. iMessage is nicer enough than SMS that a user considering trying an Android phone might shy away from making the switch.

But it might be time for Apple to reconsider this move, given that there are obviously a lot of third party players trying to bridge this gap themselves, often disastrously. Most of the existing universal messaging apps add iMessage support by either using real Macs or Mac VMs in the cloud that you have to give your real Apple ID credentials to, and those Macs relay the messages to your messaging app, which breaks end-to-end encryption (Automattic’s Texts is an exception to this, but it worked on your Mac by talking to your Messages app with scripting/accessibility support). And although Beeper Mini was considerably more secure because it wasn’t sharing data with other parties, reverse engineering the Messages app is brittle and prone to breaking at Apple’s whims.

A lot of people are working hard to make iMessage work on other platforms, and the best way to stop them might be for Apple to suck the oxygen out of the space by making official iMessage clients for other platforms. Apple confirmed recently that one of the reasons they blocked Beeper Mini was to protect iMessage users from spammers and such, and the existence of a non-Apple made app that lets you send iMessages makes it really easy to start spamming iMessage users en masse. Spammers are lazy, and if the market dries up for a third party iMessage client, they won’t keep up the effort to make one of their own.

The New Halo Effect

Privacy aside, though, one might wonder what’s in it for Apple to make an Android iMessage client. It’s not likely Apple would be able to charge users for iMessage access (though Beeper certainly tried making a go of it); why give a free messaging app to these non-customers?

Well, first off, Apple wouldn’t just be giving Android users a glass of ice water; they’d be making Apple users’ lives better by letting them communicate with friends using a nicer messaging system. It’s useful for Apple users who happen to have an Android device as a secondary device (maybe for work). And sure, maybe it’ll cannibalize some iPhone sales, but “if you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will”.

But more broadly, this is a power move for a company where online services are their biggest growth opportunity. You could argue that iMessage is one of the biggest social networks on the planet already, and this gives Apple a chance to grow and dominate. Growth for growth’s sake alone isn’t exactly the most virtuous thing, but as a services company it’s worthwhile. It would be worth something to Apple to build out iMessage to be the world’s most widely used messaging app. If nothing else Apple can sell it as doing a public service to the world by giving widespread access to end-to-end encrypted messaging.

But there’s a legit opportunity here too: iMessage might very well be Apple’s foot in the door to sell other paid services to people not currently in the Apple ecosystem. If Apple makes a really nice iMessages app on Android and an Android user downloads it to appease an insufferable friend with an iPhone, they might realize it’s actually kind of nice, and later be inclined to try out something else Apple makes, like Apple Music, or Apple TV+. Suddenly the billions of users not on iOS are potential Apple customers.

And if these people become Apple services customers and like it enough, they might start even thinking about going whole hog with it and buying their first Apple device.

When you’re Apple-sized and your market cap is measured in trillions and investors breathe down your neck looking for several percentage points of growth every year, you start needing to look harder for growth opportunities, and you start maybe thinking about stuff you wouldn’t have considered before.

It’s an opportunity worth pursuing, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple take the path of least resistance, rolling out RCS support on iOS and hoping people stop caring about iMessage support afterwards. After all, they didn’t go bold with the Apple Silicon version of the Mac Pro (and no, I’m not going to stop being bitter about that one).

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