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Cake day: September 3rd, 2023

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  • If we’re talking about the same thing, DS game sharing (download play I think?) did not share whole games and was not used for many games. Something almost identical already existed on GBA (though using a cable instead of wifi).

    The idea was to upload a stripped version of the game to other DSs and let them join a limited multiplayer. Like, you could play Mario Kart, but players without the cartridge had only one character or you could only select certain tracks (on GBA at least). Sometimes game sharing was used for multiplayer minigames, while the main game was only playable with the cartridge.

    This sounds more like the new thing they’ve advertized with Switch 2 being able to share select multiplayer games with other Switches, not the virtual game cards stuff. Though I don’t know whether those will be limited like GBA and DS did.





  • It could happen, but especially if the game has at least some popularity on a platform like Steam I expect someone more tech savvy than average would smell a rat and start looking, or ask around, and it’d be found out.

    I don’t know exactly how those work, but I imagine on top of weird CPU usage it would make very suspicious network calls too. There’s always a guy that sees stuff like that and goes “where the fuck are my cycles and packets going?”




  • They certainly don’t review code, but on those there must be at least a scan for the most obvious malicious stuff. I am not sure it’d detect something hidden like in the article though. After all even on the guy’s PC it was only detected once it tried to actually download stuff.

    The good thing about workshop is visibility, if someone notices something shady it’ll be known fast. Not perfect, but probably better than getting your mods from random sites nobody knows.




  • I used to buy physical as much as I could, but nowadays it doesn’t mean anything, so I don’t care as much about it.

    Flash memory cartridges die, even faster in cases of bad batches. Optical discs have disc rot (again, some worse than others). Many many games have updates, DLCs or patches that won’t be on the physical medium. Plenty of games coming on discs have to be fully installed on the machine’s drive anyway because disc drives are too slow.

    Most indie games, including some of the best experiences out there, never get physical versions, or only very limited ones.

    The only way to preserve is to duplicate and archive everything, even if it’s not easy. Keeping original physical media as a souvenir is nice, but it doesn’t achieve long term preservation.


  • I literally have a Rimworld mod that calls an external python script as a feature.

    It’s a special case, of course said script is not part of the mod package, it has to be installed manually. What it does is allowing generating portraits for characters externally.

    I even rewrote the script to use local generation, but the one provided as an example calls an online API.


  • If you want extended mod support, you kinda need it though. Stuff like Minecraft and Rimworld come to mind.

    Rimworld has very good official mod support that lets you do quite a lot with completely safe XML configuration files. But as soon as you want to deviate a bit from what the vanilla game allows, you’d have to code that and embed it as a DLL in your mod.

    Almost all gameplay or UI mods are DLL mods or depend on one. Quick survey : I have about 250 DLLs from my active mod list.


  • This made me think, okay, this particular exploit uses malicious code in a mod that targets an old embedded chromium vulnerability, and can be fixed by updating the game’s dependencies. This game started a dozen years ago, but it’s still being worked on.

    How many retro games that are not still in development could have vulnerabilities like that? Especially moddable games.



  • They weren’t nearly so patient with Okami around that time. They barely communicated around it, killed the studio, then commissioned a port they…barely communicated around again, and then they complained the game was doomed to be a commercial failure because… I don’t know.

    It’s basically like one of the better classic Legend of Zelda games, only with a unique universe and charm and about twice the size of those.

    It was criminally overlooked on PS2, but they have zero excuse for not turning it into a major hit for the Wii. One of the best game on a console with an absurd install base and that had almost no competition for it at that point.