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Goodbye, GameDeed

I closed GameDeed today. It was the web site with a list of video games where the left part was sort of a mini database and the right part your personal checklist and backlog. It was my first complex web site project that started in 2013. I can’t believe it’s been so long now since I started it.

Since it was my first big web site (not counting WordPress blogs with my own theme) it was a sad feeling closing it down. I wanted to make it the go to web site for tracking your gaming, but it was never a success. Only a handful of visitors used it. Some even stuck around for years – but eventually, they also waved it goodbye. Suddenly the web site was a ghost town.

I waited for more than a month to make sure no one was visiting it anymore, and then…

But in spite of it not being a success, I wouldn’t say developing it was a waste of time. Putting it together taught me a lot about building and maintaining a complex web site using PHP and MySQL. I doubt I would have been able to create DeepSID without that experience.

For a bit more history on GameDeed, see The Story of DeepSID.

Posted on MusingsPC Games
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1000xRESIST

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Developer: Sunset Visitor | Released: 2024 | Genre: Adventure, Sci-Fi

It’s tempting to describe this game as a visual novel disguised as a walking simulator, but it wouldn’t quite make it justice. Although it did have some exploration and light puzzles, the distinct style and narrative really made it stand out from its peers.

A disease from an alien race, the Occupants, wiped out all humanity except one girl, Iris. She was immune, and she created a new society with clones of herself, known as the sisters. They were not immune and had to wear masks, and they worshiped Iris as the ALLMOTHER. They lived in an enormous underground bunker called the Orchard, hiding from the Occupants.

I was playing as the Watcher, a girl with the ability to relive and interpret the memories of the ALLMOTHER through a process known as Communion, made possible by Secretary, my floating AI companion. These Communion sequences were like virtual reality experiences in the past memories of Iris.

I could talk to a lot of NPC, sometimes jump forward or back in time, and there were tasks for finding specific NPC. Talking to these quest goal NPC typically shifted me into a surrealistic scenario zipping from node to node, trying to find the NPC in a cloud of floating objects. The time jumps were typically useful for bypassing blockades like closed doors or force fields.

This game had received top scores by most review sites and an overwhelming positive user rating on Steam. Especially the story and the dialog were praised as an amazing experience. Many claimed they were jealous of gamers experiencing it for the first time. Did I agree with the consensus?

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Caravan: SandWitch

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Developer: Studio Plane Toast | Released: 2024 | Genre: Adventure, Third Person

This was an easy and relaxing third person adventure roaming a small open world with Sauge, a girl looking for her lost sister. It became a distant goal as she first had to disable various jamming devices in the area to populate a map. To help her out, an old lady lent her a van that even had upgrade options. The first upgrade was an antenna that made it possible to spot a jamming device in a structure.

The game reminded me of Sable, another free roaming open world exploration game that also featured a vehicle across deserts and random structures to climb. However, it was considerably easier on the puzzles and tasks. Sauge met a few NPC in a couple of outposts and did get quests for helping them out, but for the most part they were usually just fetch tasks. Most of the game was about exploring.

Posted on DeepSID
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More tags in DeepSID

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I’ve recently completed another marathon, parsing through all the MUSICIANS letter folders in the High Voltage collection. I’ve added a bunch of new tags for thousands and thousands of tunes. Needless to say, it took several weeks (if not months) to get through and I got myself a severe case of mouse arm. Turns out using the middle mouse button so much is bad for a nerd of my age.

But I got through it and I guess it’s time to talk about what I did.

The biggest and most important reason to go through all those SID tunes again was to add events and link them to productions. The production would be what the SID tune was meant to be used for. It could be a demo, an intro, a game, a tool, even as part of a music competition – a lot of things. Some of these productions were released at an event, which would typically be a computer party.

I also wanted to connect the two tag types with a new bracket line between them. This would indicate that the production was released at that event, and that’s what the SID file was made for.

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P as in Perplexed

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For my site DeepSID, I have recently had a project going where I wanted to show focus icons for folder rows in a song list. Each folder would represent a collection of songs by one composer. The focus icons would be solid circles with a letter in it and would indicate whether the composer was a professional (P), a scener (S), was on Compunet (C) or on Battle of the Bits (B).

The first version just used CSS to put a font letter inside a DIV rounded as a circle. However, the letter didn’t always align well within the circle. Sometimes Firefox and Chrome disagreed on the exact position. I had a session with ChatGPT about it and it suggested some clever centering of the letter, but it was never perfect. Especially when zooming the site in or out, the letters wobbled a bit.

I wasn’t satisfied with this, so I decided to go with SVG icons instead. I started searching for SVG icons on the internet, and I found three good circles with letters inside them on Pixabay. They looked really good on the site and I knew this was the way to go.

I particularly liked these icons because the circle and the letter were each their own path layer. This meant that I could specify a unique color for each of these layers.

Unfortunately, there were only icons for the S, C and B letters. The letter P wasn’t there. I thought about making it myself using one of the other SVG as a starting point, but I have never created an SVG before and I barely know what all those parameters in the file mean.

Posted on Philosophy
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Uncanny Features of the Human Body

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Most of us know about the uncommon features of the human body that not everyone can perform, like wiggling your ears, shaking your eyes sideways really fast, or whistling extremely loudly. There are even the rare ones that almost everyone experiences, like an eye twitching, or the lightheadedness occurring when standing up too fast. The conscious versus the autonomous features.

The latter has been particularly interesting to me in my life as a human being. I have noticed quite a few bizarre phenomenons repeating themselves that I’m quite sure is not just me being wired differently, yet I have barely read or heard anyone else talking about them. So I decided to start listing the ones I know about so far, while also trying to research them on the internet.

Zooming fatigue

I’m sure a better expression could be invented for this. The effect occurs in the exact center of my vision, typically after having exerted myself. I’ll see a transparent zooming tunnel, and it’s most clear to see against the blue sky or even the tarmac. It looks a little like the zooming tunnel you see when space ships are traveling at hyperspeed in Star Wars, although completely colorless.

Back when I was working as a postman, having finished a route and ready to go home, I used to see a strong version of this phenomenon while waiting for the bus. That was many decades ago, but I can still see it today if I have been busy outdoors. I’ve almost never seen it indoors. Maybe the sunlight is required for the effect to be clear? I’m not sure if that makes sense.

Let’s start by getting the obvious explanations out of the way first. No, it’s not floaters. It’s also not the Alice in Wonderland syndrome nor is it the Blue field entoptic phenomenon. It’s difficult finding anything about this on the internet at all. I did find this thread on Reddit that sounds like the same thing, although my version was never purple. As mentioned before, it’s completely colorless to me.