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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3364 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I stumbled upon some parodies of CEO Morgan from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and you lot are the only people I can share 'em with. Nobody else I know is both sufficiently unhinged and has enough appreciation for the classics:

It's a shame that they can't make another SMAC game... the rights were sold in a bankruptcy, then bundles and split as things were sold around. It's no longer clear who owns them and making another game would lead to a string of lawsuits from people with a plausible argument that they are the true owner.

I am happy that you shared them with us, this is a skull, as kids today say.

I have no idea what that means, but I'm sure it's lit. Or groovy. Or something.

As we cats say, it gassed me, man.

Those are wonderful!

Alpha Centauri is still the only Civ like game I've ever played to completion. Something about the factions made it engaging. I love 4x games but always found the Civ model less fun than other systems. It's impressive how memorable the factions were.

SMAC is frustrating these days for combining some of the best mechanisms ever seen in Civ games with graphics bad enough to just about render it unplayable now.

It would need a lot of rebalancing for the modern age. Hasn't the meta stabilized on "settle densely and forest all the things"?

Tell me about that! I found the game unplayable when it was new (the alien life was a color I couldn't differentiate from the background.

Does it? I mean I get graphics are subjective. But everything post 320x200, 256 color VGA graphics seems to have aged incredibly well. You still see games made in that pixel art style, unlike 4 color CGA or 16 color EGA! And especially the late era 2D games, before devs rushed into half baked 3D implementations that truly aged terribly. The original StarCraft, Master of Orion 2, Alpha Centauri, Red Alert, Baldur's Gate, etc all still hold up today IMHO. I mean I know there are bonkers HD sprite versions of many of those now. And yeah, HD StarCraft and Command & Conquer do look a lot better. I'm not gonna pretend there is no meaningful difference. But 640x480 or 800x600 sprite graphics aren't half bad. They are closer to 720p HD than to 240i SD.

For me at least yeah. The graphics and interface were so bad that I couldn't really stick with SMAC when I tried it. I don't mind old graphics per se, but something about that game really did not age well imo.

This is glorious. Got any more?

Like the vast majority of the AI voice content they're originally from 4chan. For instance a quick search of the /v/ archive for Nawbudike finds this post with one of those linked and two others. (The archive sites for the other boards are desuarchive.org, 4plebs.org, and archived.moe but that one doesn't have working search for many boards.) You could also search Youtube for "AI voice" for the ones that someone uploaded there, this account has a bunch, most haven't made their way to Youtube but presumably the ones that have tend to be somewhat higher quality.

I previously came across this list of 163 ones but they're mostly ones from /pol/, I don't know if there's a similar list with more from the AI voice threads on other boards. Creation presumably slowed down a lot since ElevenLabs started requiring payment to train new voices. Note that Vocaroo deletes files after 3 months to a year, I bulk downloaded the ones in that list of 163 but I don't know how many others are just Vocaroo links in archived 4chan threads that nobody has saved.

Alas, no. I checked the guy's youtube page but it seems to be just those two.

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