For me, the cherry on top of this little piece of embarrassing history is something that only a handful of people remember: The PS1 had an official mouse controller, and this was one of the few games that supported it.
I bought the mouse when it came out, and I got a copy of this game about 10 years ago, and I've gotta say it works very well. It was also how I played the single-player campaign of Quake 2 back in the day.
Anyone who is already familiar with HSR, imagine seeing this video and having it be the first time you've even heard of Homestar Runner.
You'd probably feel like some kind of tapeleg.
The classic adage of "The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time" comes to mind.
Its always all those "little touches" that eat up so much time, because you know that your audience will expect them, and you yourself feel that they should be there; a smoothly-moving cursor for menu selections, playing little sounds when selecting or cancelling, a puff of dust that jumps up when the player character lands (but keeps animating in place rather than sticking to the player), text sliding or fading in and out instead of just appearing and disappearing... All the individual "little" things that add up to quite a lot of work.
I also sympathize with you on a lot of the points you raised about "family-friendly" games. I'm a teacher, and when I make activities and games for my students, I face a similar set of constraints (must be enjoyable for the weakest students but still engaging for the most advanced students, little to no player elimination, high replayability/reusability, has to actually reinforce the target knowledge/skill and not just be fun with the material tacked on as an afterthought).
I appreciate the touch of making this with generative AI. Unless someone went to the effort of deliberately writing "VIbc coam" on the spine.
I have a stupid question: Are you sure you're not confusing "line out" and "headphone out"? They're different, and pretty much every desktop supports both these days. But standard PC speakers usually connect to the "headphone" socket.
Private members aren't actively blocked from external access; they're passively marked "Access prohibited".
That means that rather than being unable to find the members of a class, C programmers simply can't pick up on the signals telling them that they're not wanted.
(Fellow C programmers: I'm joking. :D)
People can hate on Microsoft all they want, but I use LibreOffice on a regular basis and it does the same thing, for exactly the same reason.
Cheers to the person who linked to the "font - hide" solution. I didn't know that one and the equivalent works LO as well.
There are even rumors of a Final Fantasy VII reboot!
Final Final Fantasy VII?
The problem I find with many games made for Win95/98/XP is that the game uses one or more third-party libraries that were only "valid" for a year or two. After that, updates to the OS closed loopholes that the poorly-written old versions of the libraries relied on, but the poorly-written newer versions of the libraries released to deal with those issues then break compatibility with the previously-released game, which was never updated or patched.
Are Sony still selling new PS2s and PS3s? I think we can only buy them secondhand now, which means Sony already got whatever money they were going to get a long time ago.
Also, while the top sellers work reliably, unless something big has changed in the last year or so, plenty of PS2 games still don't work right in emulators, and even have game-breaking bugs. I have a large collection of PS2 games, and many of them are awful or unplayable in emulation.
He sure loves to evangelise "cloning", a.k.a. "copying other people's work". One wonders how anything new or even slightly tailored for each situation will creep into this ecosystem.
To make an analogy, there's usually nothing terribly wrong with the mass-produced clothes that big box stores sell. But it rarely fits that well, looks too stylish, or does much more than cover your nakedness. Often, that's acceptable. But sometimes you need special gear or want a really good quality, tailored shirt.
People still make a living as tailors. In fact, a lot of their work these days is making small alterations to the mass-produced stuff for individual clients.
Thanks to the proliferation of portable devices, a lot of people no longer need a printer for "regular" printing at all in 2026, and some of the more interesting printing substrates either don't accept toner well or won't survive the heat of a laser printer's toner setting stage.
Also, while the technology is theoretically simpler, it may be harder for an individual to source or make the physical components like rotating drums and high-res LED arrays.