The Animal Crossing GC decompilation project is starting to bear fruit! It's amazing to see the tireless effort that's put into these projects, chipping away at code line by line, function by function, file by file. Even without mods, I think they're worthwhile just as research projects for understanding what makes games tick, but they open up a whole new world of possibilities and breathe life into these old games.

Features I spotted:

• Optional widescreen
• Character customization (you no longer have to be a )
• Optional smooth camera (removing the screen transitions between acres)
• New bugs and fish
• Collecting furniture that was only available in other regions (which I assume means JP and CN—I don't think there were exclusive items in the EUR/AUS versions)
• Build outdoor decorations (this was a feature in the JP versions—not sure if it's simply bringing that feature over or implementing it in a new way)
• New fruits
• No longer having to mail your damn fossils (hell yeah)
• Exterior home decorating via a new traveling NPC?
• Cycling through held items without having to go through the menu
• Waking up Tom Nook to shop at night (this was only in the JP GC re-release that followed the US release)
• Sitting on rocks (?!)

https://xcancel.com/leftistbeard/status/1939115723965833490

If you want to dive right in, here's a link to the Cyan collection in the VGHF digital archive:

https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/22cf9aa2-812b-4f39-b42e-e87a3c153b8c

The Video Game History Foundation does some great work, and it's really cool to see this project getting off the ground! Their project to vastly improve OCR for magazines seems pretty awesome--curious to learn about the technical details of that project.

Only poked around a little, but here's a random tidbit: while perusing the E3 2001 Directory I learned that CliffyB (of Unreal and Gears of War fame) used to maintain a website called cat-scans.com which was home to literal cat scans (scans of cats on flatbed scanners). Also Tommy Tallarico was at that year's E3 as part of the "How to Break into Gaming" panel...lmao.

Also, if you're into video game history I definitely recommend their podcast (RSS link)! I thought their most recent episode with a couple who worked at GamePro was a lot of fun.

edit: also perhaps of interest to Hexbears: this collection of zines from Game Workers Unite, which helped spark the movement to unionize workers in the game industry back in 2018

Was wondering about how Pikmin 2's procedural music works and came across this beautifully crafted video explaining the whole intricate system.

This channel seems like a treasure trove--if you just wanna jam, check out this sick Driftveil City arrangement for starters

There were a few posts showing interest already

https://hexbear.net/post/2909543
https://hexbear.net/post/2955745

so I figured I'd let people know! Idk if there are any scanlations in the works (let alone an official English localization), but if you're decent at Japanese I'd say the first chapter is pretty accessible. My kanji knowledge is pretty terrible but I was able to muscle through with only looking up a few key words and just relying on context for the rest. This is just a setup chapter, so there's not much to go on:

The art is great, IMO--to be expected of the mangaka of Our Dreams at Dusk (highly recommended if you haven't read it already, and a short read at only four volumes!). Also there was a neat touch which I haven't personally seen before: when German is being spoken, it's still written in Japanese but typeset in the typical Western horizontal style which makes it clearly stand out without requiring any annotations. Look forward to seeing where it goes, and I hope it'll get an official localization to maximize its exposure to Western audiences! Also from a raw reading perspective, it's nice to get in on the ground floor since it can feel really daunting to have 100 chapters ahead of you when reading is somewhat slow and effortful.

Love how the rhythmic hitch caused by the "missing beat" makes the bass groove so hard

Oh yeah, post your favorite 7/4 tunes! I went for the low-hanging fruit, but I'd love to hear some others, especially ones with different beat groupings (e.g. 2 + 3 + 2 instead of the 2 + 2 + 3 used in "Money")

This song is somehow simultaneously paint-by-numbers generic anisong #136 and a total banger. Been jamming to it ever since the anime started airing and the full versions just dropped today to coincide with the final episode of the anime!

Honestly, paint-by-numbers is a little harsh; I think it sounds like that at first blush since it doesn't do anything particularly innovative—Cry Baby, it's not (there are English subs!)—but it's well-written and blends a lot of typical J-pop tropes in just the right way such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I love that they did a bunch of different versions--the piano one really allows you to appreciate the voice leading, while the acoustic guitar one emphasizes the rhythmic elements. Maybe it's just because it executes something really well that I'm a sucker for: taking the same melody and recontextualizing it by changing the underlying harmony (the first melodic motif in the chorus is repeated three times, and each time it gets different chord changes!). And the hook is such an earworm:

♫ MAGICAL LOVE, BE WITH YOU! ♪

Ever since I got introduced to the joys of Minesweeper by Girl_DM_ I've been having a lot of fun playing it as a little timewaster. I'm specifically playing the version from Simon Tatham's lovely Portable Puzzle Collection (more specifically the Android port via F-Droid) which unlike the original Minesweeper does NOT require guessing. Most of the time, I'm well-versed enough in patterns and testing candidate solutions that I'm able to clear a 16x16 board with 99 mines in about 3-5 minutes. But on a fairly regular basis I'll run into situations where I get stuck and it seems like I'd either have to calculate an inordinate amount of possible solutions or just make a random guess, neither of which are appealing. Here's one such example:

with annotations

without annotations

There's probably some cool Minesweeper shorthand I could use to describe the constraints, but what I tried to show with my annotations is how I understand that, for each of the annotated squares, there is a mutually-exclusive binary choice (or in the case of the 3, two choices) for where a mine could be located. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, while the choices are internally mutually exclusive, it doesn't seem like there's any permutation of those choices that is invalid so I can't eliminate any possibilities. My usual strategy is to fix one choice and see if it results in a contradiction. For instance, if the other mine for the 2 is the upper choice, we can clear the lower square. That means the lower square for the 1 must be a mine, and this still leaves either of the two bottom choices as valid for the 3 (so this is a possible configuration based on these constraints).

The only remaining sections have a lot of freedom which makes them daunting to analyze. Of the remaining unanalyzed squares, from top to bottom they have 2, 2, and 3 mines remaining, respectively, which is quite a lot of options to fully check, and I can only eliminate a few heuristically (e.g. the top 3 must have at least one mine in either the east or southeast space, since otherwise the 4 to the south can't be fulfilled; the 4 must not have the remaining mines all in the east column because otherwise the 2 and 1 can't be fulfilled). I'm sure if I went through them methodically I would eventually arrive at an answer, but that's pretty tedious, so I usually just give up and generate a new board in this kind of situation.

TL;DR: am I missing some neat heuristic(s) that will allow me to either slash the possible solutions to a more manageable number or eliminate individual solutions very quickly, or is this kind of difficult spot just an inevitable outcome for some boards?

Uhhh let me play Nier

It's always a good day when a new Dolphin progress report drops!