Random Gaming Thoughts

[funk_Farmer]

Yea I'll agree that dealing with that brick and all the cords for stuff on the Wii is a little bit of a hassle. I still think it's pretty convenient for what it offers though. Plus I don't have a computer powerful enough to run Dolphin so the Gamecube compatibility is pretty righteous. Wiis are also pretty abundant and cheap nowadays, I have 4 of them and wasn't even trying.

[Segata]

I hate my Xbox 360's power brick. It's massive.

[Erik_Twice]

A modded Wii is a retro fantasy land. I still have the Wii I bought at launch. The disc loading tray deal took a dump on me and now it won't take discs but that's ok. A sd card and usb stick keep it going. I honestly can't say how much my homebrew Wii means to me. It's the perfect emulation device and has kept my sega genesis gaming going strong. It's given me a way to introduce the young people of this world to games gone past.

Glad you are enjoying your modded Wii! Sadly, for me it's very much a mixed bag.

The Mega Drive emulator, as you say, is fantastic. The best on the system.
SNES emulation is a bit iffy video-wise but otherwise solid.

Now arcade emulation is just terrible. It barely runs any games, less than a quarter than I tried, and it's not related to power nor age. None of the Capcom beat'em ups work well, neither OutRun nor Space Harrier work, either, and there are only a handful of shmups that are playable. You can't even run a good chunk of the golden age arcade games, the Williams don't even work because you have to restart and MAME crashes if you do.

A shame because the games look positively amazing on my monitors.

[RCBH928]

I just realized the part of gaming that will be lost is Flash games and Shockwave. I know a lot of them are easily ported to other platforms but not everything. Shockwave was amazing, I didn't experience it so much but I remember you can like play Unreal Tournament in your browser.

If you come from the days where the java ripple effect on pictures kept you in awe you will understand what I mean.

I know HTML5 is supposed to take over but it doesn't seem to be as powerful.

[isiolia]

Google ported Quake II to HTML5 way back in 2010. It's quite capable.

To a fair point, content for Flash (particularly) isn't really lost, since there are other ways of running it. You can grab the stand-alone projector from here to run SWF files, for instance. Or a developer can make Flash programs stand-alone apps with Adobe AIR. Shockwave, I think, is a little less readily done these days, but it could be done.

While it is kind of a mixed bag for content that was primarily distributed that way, there are a lot of security and performance concerns with running things inside a browser like that. So it's pretty understandable that things have migrated away from that.

[marurun]

Another thing that has hurt the torrenting scene is fake torrents, some of which distribute malware and viruses. Heck, even a number of bittorrent clients in recent months have had malware included right in the package.

[Reprise]

The main thing in my country is torrent sites are blocked and so are most of the proxies. Of course getting around it is as straightforward as using a VPN or finding a proxy that hasn't been blocked, but it just means another step that most people cannot be bothered with.

It's pretty easy to avoid malware and fakes etc., but the majority of internet users these days are 'casual' internet users and don't have much technical knowledge. That's why apps and iphones and tablets have all taken off in such a big way.

It's a lot easier to pay 9.99 to Spotify (or even just use a free account), or pay for Netflix/Hula/Amazon/whatever than to mess around with torrents.

Edit: Actually I'd wager the biggest reason is the huge increase in stuff like PopcornTime, XBMC and Kodi etc.

[Segata]

Opera has a built-in VPN for free. I have never torrented anything but I needed it when for whatever reason Google Fiber and Giant Bomb serves would not get along. So I used Opera to watch Giant Bomb until the issue just fixed itself after a few weeks. So an accessible VPN is out there.

[marurun]

Opera's built-in VPN is kinda slow and not appropriate for torrents. You'd need an actual separate VPN client for that.

[RCBH928]

The main thing in my country is torrent sites are blocked and so are most of the proxies.
Edit: Actually I'd wager the biggest reason is the huge increase in stuff like PopcornTime, XBMC and Kodi etc.

Which country?
Last I heard PopcornTime was abandoned and basically XBMC and Kodi need torrent to survive. The idea is to get digital media to play via this software, and I doubt most people spend their time buying blurays and spending hours ripping them

Google ported Quake II to HTML5 way back in 2010. It's quite capable.

To a fair point, content for Flash (particularly) isn't really lost, since there are other ways of running it. You can grab the stand-alone projector from here to run SWF files, for instance. Or a developer can make Flash programs stand-alone apps with Adobe AIR. Shockwave, I think, is a little less readily done these days, but it could be done.

While it is kind of a mixed bag for content that was primarily distributed that way, there are a lot of security and performance concerns with running things inside a browser like that. So it's pretty understandable that things have migrated away from that.

My point was once Adobe abandons Flash (they abandoned Shockwave and Director already) those games will be lost otherwise you will need older hardware with older Windows software with the older Flash software to run the games. I don't think you can emulate them but I can be wrong.
I am not sure how older games from the 90s gets easily re-released for Win10. I just assumed as long as its windows it will work with few bug-fixing here and there.

I tried finding the quake II html5 versoin but it seems it went no where after 2010. I tried looking HTML5 FPS but didn't find anything either.