Tag: update

Musing About the Animal Crossing New Horizons Update

Years after Nintendo announced that Animal Crossing New Horizons wouldn’t get any updates following the 2.0 one that also introduced the Happy Home Paradise DLC, and underlined it by not even releasing any New Years arches after 2021, they’ve gone back on that statement, announcing that in January there’ll be a Nintendo Switch 2 paid upgrade (only $5 this time), as well as a free 3.0 feature update. As they tend to do now, they announced it in a video, not a Nintendo Direct video, but still (12½m).

There was a time when I would have been thrilled to hear about this. I did, after all, write a guidebook to AC:NH, the “Black Book of Animal Crossing New Horizons,” which I still sell at itch.io. It contains an absurd amount of material. I suppose now I’ll have to update it again, but I’m feeling ambivalent about going back to the island paradise, despite the fully-upgraded house and tens of millions of bells I’ve left there.

Animal Crossing New Horizons holds a special place, not just in the series history, but in video gaming history. Incredibly, it’s the second best selling game on the Switch, at over 48 million copies, and it has the pandemic and the concomitant lockdown to blame for it. It outsold all of the other Animal Crossing games put together, going all the way back to Gamecube (and, in Japan, the N64) because a lot of people, for a time, used AC:NH as a replacement social scene, a kind of mini-MMORPG, focused not on fighting fake monsters in a bullshit fantasy world, but on decorating fake houses and islands, in a different kind of bullshit fantasy world.

And I think that’s okay, despite my use of profanity! Of course video game worlds are bullshit; that’s what they are made of. They’re all fake, they’re mere bits and bytes, but if you have a group of friends who pretend they’re real, then they gain reality from it, substance granted from their shared experience.

Well, the people are gone. I can’t expect that even a small fraction of the players it had back then are still invested in it. A few will return for this, surely, but without another lockdown it’s impossible to expect it’ll come anywhere close to it.

And even if they did… I think I’m done with Animal Crossing. Not just New Horizons, but Animal Crossing in general, even with the idea of Animal Crossing. The grandmothers who famously played the various versions, who the media happily reported on as a kind of uplifting story, they’re gone now. What happened to their memory cards, I wonder? Do their descendants load them up from time to time, pretending to be their grandmum, to falsely reassure the animals they still love them? Do they keep it as a kind of museum? Do they put it in the attic, maybe for future generations to discover, assuming their consoles still work, or sell them?

These are all troubling thoughts for me. Recent events have reminded me that life is finite. I still play video games, for my own reasons, but I don’t think I can appreciate, that I can afford, another huge timesink game like Animal Crossing, whether it be New Horizons or anything else . If I knew many other people who still played then maybe I could muster the will. I was on a Discord of Metafilter members who all played, but I left it over a year ago, before I knew they’d revive it, to clean up my server list. (Discord limits the number you can be a member of, you know. It’s higher if you play for their much-loathed “Nitro” feature, but I condemn that to extra hell.)

If this changes, I’ll let you know. The book could still use updating. But the joy in it has left me. Sorry critters; it was fun for a while.

Mega Man Maker 1.10 Released (a while ago)

I’m a bit late in announcing this, but a lot’s been going on here lately, and it’s a worthy announcement, so here’s the release video for Mega Man Maker 1.10 (2 minutes). This isn’t the last time we linked to a MMM release, and its coders don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.

A free program, it’s got the usual array of new enemies (including favorites Guts Man and Snake Man), items and music typical of MMM. A big new feature is ability capsules, which can grant new powers if found in a level, or at the creator’s option even disable them. This can let you pull off dirty tricks like making a chamber that requires the slide to enter, but that gives you a capsule that disables the slide, making it inescapable. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?

NES Pac-Man Bug Update

Some time ago you may remember I explained here a bug I had discovered in the official NES port of Pac-Man. When you get very far into the game, starting at the 8th Key level, the ghosts spend a long period of time at the start of each level just circling around their home corners of the board. I recorded video of it happening here (30 seconds):

Well I was just notified this morning by a comment on that video, with the handle kirkbradfordmyers7196, that this happens because a table of ghost scatter times in the code is too short, so it reads data from an unrelated source which indicates a long period of time, much longer than the scatter phase is supposed to last.

kirkbradfordmyers mentioned that they’re working on a romhack that provides a fix for this bug, and others that exist in the code, and hopes to get the game much closer to the arcade. We wish them luck, and hope they’ll come back and tell us about their work when it’s done.

Godot 4.2 Released

Events often resist efforts to package them up and stamp a Convenient Narrative on them, but it’s really tempting to me to say the history of the internet in this era is that of many people rejecting the hegemony of large corporations and doing things for themselves.

Social media has seen the rejection of Twitter, for reasons I really don’t want to hash out again here, and while some ran directly to Threads or Bluesky, a good number realized it was eventually just going to happen all over again, and that helped to increase the update of open source, federated work-alike Mastodon.

Another piece of this narrative vase that we might be able to fit into place, with creative thinking and a whole lot of glue, is the downfall of Unity and how it helped the effort to create the free open source gamedev replacement Godot. And lo, after a fairly recent release of 4.0, yesterday they already released 4.2. The changelog is here. Here is GDQuest’s rundown of the changes (22 minutes), and here are Lukky’s five favorite new features (3m), which are:

  • FSR 2.0 support (upscaling higher resolution output from lower resolution rendering)
  • Color-coding of folders in the file hierarchy within Godot’s UI
  • The ability to “bake 2D navmeshes”
  • When resizing 3D objects, the UI no longer resizes symmetrically around the object’s origin by default, but instead only the side you’re changing is modified
  • And, within the code editor, you can now create special comments to define a code region, which can be independently collapsed to reduce clutter, and expanded when you need access to its contents. And the Ctrl-K Comment Out feature works better now.

To get back to talking about software philosophy…. There are unique problems with using fully open tools to create games. Console manufacturer devtools are still locked in a mode where the maker hands you proprietary libraries, which they are unwilling to make freely available because of their economic desire to preserve trade secrets and control their platform. Most developers get around this by going through a third party, who has independently created a system of working between the open development framework and the publisher’s libraries, and then licenses it to a studio so they can get their project working on consumer hardware.

Godot is subject to this limitation, with 4.2 being no exception. But there is a sense, with it, that it’s the brightest hope for free and open game development going right now. They don’t ask for any license fees, they don’t try to count how many installs you have and they don’t track user behavior. But because they don’t try to claw in income through direct means, fair or foul, they must survive off of contributions. If you find Godot useful to your work, please consider using their donation link and signing up for an entirely voluntary plan.

Team Fortress 2 Stirs In Its Slumber

Team Fortress 2, Valve’s infamous hat simulator, is, amazingly enough, still popular. Eons after it went free-to-play, years after it saw its last content update, many players had assumed it was, as far as new content went, dead.

Yet, people keep playing it. Following, arguably creating, the “games as service” concept, it seems somehow fitting that its makers might be turning their attention back to it right around the time that the industry generally seems to be reconsidering whether it works as a concept for most games. And so Valve has put out a call for community content to be included in an upcoming large-scale update. People got so excited over it that Valve said:

So, as reported by Kotaku, PC Gamer, and no doubt over half of the gaming internet by now, they’ve walked back their claims a bit. But it’s still a lot more movement than the game has seen lately.

How long has Team Fortress 2 been at it? It was included in the Orange Box for Xbox 360, along Half-Life 2 and the original Portal, a used copy of which is currently resting on the shelf of the donations shop of my local public library. (I’d get it but I don’t have a 360!) It’s been out for sixteen years. It was released in 2007, in that dusty age pre-Obama. The meme culture around it, bolstered by the game’s cartoony presentation and sponsorship for several years of the Saxxy Awards, helped establish, for better or worse, the tone of gamer humor. One of its most beloved actors, Rick May, the voice of Soldier (also Peppy Hare and Andross in Star Fox), passed away in 2020.

I’ve played some TF2 back in the day, I’m with it, I’m “hip.” I think I may have even scored a point once!