Redkey

A great stealth/adventure game. It's a pity that only one of the three was localized into English.

Icons that are based on English puns and wordplay are easily understood by speakers of other languages.

This reminded me of one of those Top Gear "drive across a foreign country in weird vehicles" specials where Jeremy Clarkson needed to borrow a cable to jump-start his car, and laboriously mimed out jumping for "jump", and walking a dog for "lead", to a perplexed local. Richard Hammond was cracking up but finally managed to point out what a fool Clarkson was being.

Geolocation is an accurate way to predict the user’s language.

And as an addendum to this, in 2025 nobody should be using Windows' "Non-latin/-unicode character set" setting to guess the user's preferred language. That's a pre-WinXP kludge. I'm specifically looking at you, Intel integrated graphics software writers, but you have plenty of company, don't worry.

Why be like that? Whether you think their position is silly or not, this person obviously gets called out on this a lot. And rather than pitch a fit over being needled about it for the umpteenth time, they responded with links that ought to satisfy any genuine curiosity. Considering the times I've seen an empty "Go educate yourself!" as a response from petulant children, I'd say buddy did us a solid. They don't owe us a personalized response.

Some of my favourite slow-burn adventures that no one's mentioned yet:

• Project Zero/Fatal Frame (1, 2, and 3)
• Shadow of Memories/Shadow of Destiny
• Echo Night: Beyond
• Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 1 and 2 (a.k.a. S.O.S. The Final Escape/Disaster Report, and Raw Danger)
• Killer7
• Siren (1 and 2)
• Chulip

And some action-adventure-RPGs that have a place in my heart but aren't generally considered to be anything special:

• EverGrace (there's also a sequel which I haven't played yet)
• Eternal Ring

Sure, but as far as I'm aware, no other large group of LISP users exists. My contention isn't that most AI researchers use LISP now, but that most LISP programmers are (were?) AI researchers.

I've been trying to learn about early AI work, and I'm finding that to get any practical details you're almost guaranteed to have to wade through LISP code, although at least it's usually pretty well commented.

LISP: You are an AI researcher and a nerd.

Very similar variants of the same CPU and VDU were used in the Colecovision, the MSX, and Sega's early systems, among others.

I've also read that there were several ports from the ZX Spectrum to the MSX, due to them sharing essentially the same CPU at the same clock speed, and the MSX VDU having a video mode that could operate similarly to the Spectrum's display.

You're kind of arguing against yourself, here. If the point is to impose limitations in order to reduce choice exhaustion and foster creativity, then portable software like PICO-8 can do that just as well as a physical device, and creators will have a much larger potential audience.

I've often daydreamed (I'm sure I'm not alone) of making various kinds of electronic entertainment devices with very low specs as a challenge/creativity booster to myself and other creators. But I always come back to the realization that it makes much more sense, in a world where almost everyone has a powerful computing device with plenty of storage and a responsive colour display in their pocket, and constant Internet access, to implement them as software rather than hardware.

A handful of people may be excited enough by the physicality of a device like this that they'll buy it, but many more people will pass it by. Look at the proliferation of games for software-based formats like PICO-8, Bitsy, Inform, and Twine, compared to development on purely physical "low spec" devices like the PlayDate. Even real vintage systems are starting to become software-based formats; new games developed for them these days will often include an "emulator-friendly" version if they do anything particularly tricky with the original hardware.

One of my favorites. I'm so glad that I played it without any guides, so I could find all the little touches on my own.

Also, if you've got the time (or a cheat device), it's mildly amusing to grind to the maximum level so you can virtually one-shot the final god-like boss after all its posturing.

I did jump through the hoops necessary play this, years ago, although I can't remember why. It was probably due to reading an article much like this one.

Honestly, while I think it's important to make a note that this game existed, I also think some people overreach a bit on just how influential it was. I wouldn't say that anyone needs to play it these days unless they really want to. Just look up a few screenshots; it plays almost exactly how it looks like it plays.

We'd better keep an eye out for them in the future.