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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • From later in the article (emphasis author’s)

    Earlier in this article I intimated that many of us are already dependent on our fancy development environments—syntax highlighting, auto-completion, code analysis, automatic refactoring. You might be wondering how AI differs from those. The answer is pretty easy: The former are tools with the ultimate goal of helping you to be more efficient and write better code; the latter is a tool with the ultimate goal of completely replacing you.


  • I personally think MOBA should be used to broadly describe a style of game rather than what’s done while playing it. I know that when Riot coined the term, they were referring to games like DotA, LoL, etc.; to me the whole approach to a match’s flow is echoed similarly enough throughout multiple games, that applying the term MOBA to other games is a logical extension.

    To me a game is a MOBA if:

    • The way to interact with it is primarily designed around playing with other players online (the M and O of MOBA.)
    • The goals of the players are against the goals of other players — ie. it’s competitive rather than cooperative (the B of MOBA.)
    • Any player at the beginning of a match has access to all the same options as any other player. This one is a little more vague, but as the A in MOBA stands for arena, I imagine it like a group of gladiators standing before a communal weapon rack that they’ll all pick from; no one has any options that the others don’t have access to.

    Following these criteria, something like Overwatch is a MOBA, as is DotA, and ironically LoL isn’t as you have to unlock options meaning you don’t satisfy the arena condition. To differentiate games like DotA, Smite, Awesomenauts, Deadlock, etc., I prefer the term lane-pusher as that’s a lot more specific and understandable.

    Does it really matter what it’s called? Not really. I mostly just do it so I can feel superior to Riot for coming up with a vague term that is applied, how I deem, incorrectly, while also excluding their own game from the term that they made to describe it.




  • I would recommend going and watching the pannenkoek video because it is so good.
    The quick version is that it has been known to be possible to clip through the wall to get to the door, but Mario has to be in the walking state to open it. Since the floor directly under the door hitbox is all covered by wall, and the part that isn’t covered by wall doesn’t have a floor directly below it, it seems like there’s no way to actually be in the walking state to open it.
    However, by abusing an exploit where Mario finishes his turn around animation the same frame he leaves the ground, the transition to the freefall state is overwritten by the transition to the walking state; this lasts one frame until a check is run next frame — which properly puts him in freefall. Timing the turn around right lets you be past the wall and walking, so you can open the door.




  • I’m sure there were other consoles that did it, but the one I remember is the NES; it had a physical switch on it for channel 3 or 4, and you had to have your TV tuned to the respective channel to get the game to show up. As to why that was necessary on a technical level, I’m not sure. But it was a thing you had to do.



  • Awesomenauts

    It’s a 3v3 2D platformer lane-pusher with an art style reminiscent of a saturday-morning cartoon. The upgrade system is very simple compared to other lane-pushers, and the games tend to go a lot quicker (15-25 minutes.) It’s very intuitive to get into, but still has room for a lot of expression of skill.

    Unfortunately Ronimo (the company who made it) went bankrupt in late August, so the matchmaking server went down in September; but recently Atari bought the rights to the IP, so it’s possible it will come back soon.