About Wolfenstein ... I guess Doom rendered it obsolete as a *shooter*. As a continuation of the original top-down 'Castle Wolfenstein' from the Apple II, though, they could've done *something* -- because that was a stealth game based on a really primitive mechanic of avoiding the guards' line of sight while moving through a labyrinth. But they chose not to follow that path already in 1993, so yeah.

Apart from the funny 'Mein Leben!' shouts, there’s not much fun to be had in Wolfenstein 3D.

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If the minimum required GPU is an rx6600, I wonder why exactly the ray tracing is 'needed' -- or what kind of playability they have in mind, at minimum specs. That’s the card I own, and while it can 'nominally' (?!) do ray tracing, to the extent that I've tried it on Minecraft, it's not really worth it. And it can’t do any of the raytraced gzdoom mods, needless to say.

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The updated documentation certainly looks a lot better.

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Terry Cavanagh also used to have this blog where he introduced some free game picks weekly: https://terrysfreegameoftheweek.com/ [External Link] -- he’s no longer updating it; though the site is still up.

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Eike:

I like that you can compare your results to the ten percent percentile or the one percent percentile. ... When i couldn't cope with an optimisation puzzle, my 7yo daughter said to me, so I'm obviously not a good programmer.

Speaking as a silly amateur myself, FWIW: I've played TIS-100 a lot more than Exapunks -- though I think the same thing applies here: The best-optimized solutions in the top percentiles often (always?) rely on some shortcuts *specific to that particular puzzle*, so they don't necessarily correspond to a better algorithm *design*. If anything, they're more akin to compiler optimization tricks (rule out ­— decisively, or to a very high degree of probability? — that condition x will never be true, so don't ever bother calculating this or that value).

I don't think performing the latter sort of trick is the mark of a good programmer, at least not at the stage where his/her concern is a more general algorithm design.

(What *can* be a concern at that 'design stage', though, might be how your syntactical choices (or things that will come up in macro expansion in C) will trigger the compiler to perform some optimization tricks that it probably should *not* attempt. -- so, the exact opposite of preemptively optimizing.)

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CalebQ42 says:

I got mine the other day and it's pretty cheap garbage in my opinion. Has build quality of a sub $20 controller. Pretty disappointed; guess I'll have to wait until the Stream Controller 2.

I guess they named it the HORRI-BAD controller for a reason.
<insert laugh track>

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Not planning to play this right now; but I cloned the repo anyway, in case Nintendo nukes it.

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Merry Christmas everyone!
Happy New Year!

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The cinematic might be hard to digest for the lactose intolerant.

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During the last major (?!) sale a couple of days ago (?!?!) I was expecting Metro Exodus to go even lower, and it did, at 90% off; so I'm getting that.

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