I remember the first time I saw it, i stared at it for several minutes until I finally just started crying. It made me resolve to leave, and I turned in my resignation about a month later.
This is your reminder that if life keeps throwing you lemons you are not morally obligated to make lemonade from them. You can duck, or catch them in a trash can, or get a baseball bat and slam those fuckers into the stratosphere.
occasionally, when I need it, I Google ‘Cave Johnson Lemon Rant’ and either read the clever typography versions or, as above, listen to it, because yeah
Woke up crying from a stress dream where I dreamt that all the hardback copies of Hunger Pangs went out with the wrong illustrations and half the content missing because I didn’t obsessively check every page of all 300 books before mailing them, and my mother was standing over me telling me, “see this is what happens when you don’t pay attention, you just need to try harder” and I don’t know what ADHD-trauma part of my brain just got unlocked but I would like to put it back in the box.
It’s been three days, and I’m still getting nightly stress dreams that make me wake up in a cold sweat.
One night, I dreamt that Holly Mop got injured because I “wasn’t paying attention,” and then I couldn’t get her to the vet because I was too disorganized, and I kept thinking, “If I wasn’t like this, she would be okay. Why am I like this?”
Woke up sobbing. Just inconsolable.
The night after that, I dreamt I was a character in a Senfield-type show??? Anyway, it had a laugh track, and everyone looked very 80-90s. My “character” started going into anaphylaxis because the joke was that no one believed I was allergic to the thing I said I was allergic to and fed it to me. I could feel my throat closing as the laugh track swelled at my expense, and some Jerry Seinfield looking-ass-mother-fucker told me it was my fault. I was always ill. How were they supposed to know this time was serious?
Woke up panicked, angry, and paranoid.
Last night, I dreamt I was in the Gotham Knights game I’ve been hyperfixating on, but I wasn’t one of the heroes. Oh no. I was one of the NPCs who gets kidnapped and winds up with a bomb strapped to them. Except when Nightwing got to me, my bomb wouldn’t disarm, and I just looked up at him and said, “Sorry, it’s probably my fault. You can go,” as the bomb ticked down, and I just sat watching the timer go down like, “well, this is what I get for being a bad hostage. I should have tried to be a better one.”
And can I just say what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck…
okay I’m hacking on the House MD DS game. it’s nice of them to include a cast option in the credits, in case you bought the game without knowing the show.
That was easy. Good news: text is very, very injectable.
So, here’s a bit of info about how the DS works: It has two GPUs, one for each screen. Each screen can show 4 separate background layers, and one sprite (object) layer. So that’s a total of 10 layers, across two screens.
But you can also copy from one to the other, at the expense of lower framerate. So some games that do stuff like render 3D on both screens do it by having the main GPU (which has the 3D graphics functionality) render both screens, which means the framerate has two be half, as you’re doing twice the renders.
So here’s House MD DS, with all layers enabled:
And here it is with the 1st background layer of the main GPU turned off:
Yeah. For some reason this game DOES NOT AT ALL use the layer system of the DS, and renders ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING into the background layer 1 of the main GPU, then copies that onto the second screen. What the hell? Was this made by some company that had never touched a DS before?
I thought it just might be the dialog screens, and the other gameplay sections use layers and sprites and such…
NOPE! works exactly the same.
all the images are just PNGs. They implemented a PNG loader on the DS and just load them at runtime.
This is a prank, right? this game isn’t real, one of ya’ll just made it up to troll me?
THERE’S A PANTIES SORTING MINIGAME?
I don’t even need to extract all the portraits: they’re just in a folder called “layouts\ui\avatars”
well I still need to extract the font, I guess..
MOTHERFUCKER!
(also: all the sound effects are just WAV files)
this image is labeled “bottom.png”.
No comment.
the game has all the screens defined as XML files for “layouts”.
each one has a group of polygons defined in it, and the <layout> element has an attribute called “num_ploys”.
THIRTEEN YEAR OLD TYPO DISCOVERED
yep, there’s a panties sorting minigame. watta hell
WAIT
The font is shaped the same, but it’s 1-bit, not the several-bits that the game’s font is! SO IT’S WRONG! so I actually still have to do some work!
motherfucker. it IS the right font, they just set all the colors to the same. It’s palettefucked. Easily fixable.
I decided to skip the font image so I could just use my existing methods (aka AVFE*) which’d give me widths as well, and then I finished that.
but then I realized something:
these two shades do not match. This font is SEMI-TRANSPARENT. oh no…
* Automated Visual Font Extraction, my patented** method for extracting fonts from games
** not really
Look at this background. Look at how it’s got, like, smooth gradients and shit.
Now let’s compare to the actual game:
It looks like shit.
You can especially see on the ground between the medical thingy and the bed. It’s because the DS has a limited number of colors and is converting this file at runtime. That’s right, the first image is the actual texture that the game is loading… it then has to down-convert it to be able to display it at all.
This means that the death generator is going to accidentally LOOK BETTER THAN THE GAME ITSELF
annoyingly they didn’t define the shadow-color with a distinct color. They just used a specific palette index. So I can modify it to make it useful… but then I have to somehow do dynamic palette manipulation on 142 PNG files which have different palettes.
That’s not going to be fun. Palette support is a fucking mess in most image editing programs/image manipulation libraries.
So I hacked some new backgrounds in and overwrote some images, and it turns out that they’ve done all of this in a very weird way:
There are 32 colors per avatar, except the avatar actually has 256 colors. When loaded, they’re converted so that some of them have alpha transparency.
Why they did this, rather than just using PNG’s built in transparency? I don’t know.
Left is how the sprite renders on a white background, right is what it looks like in the sprite file.
OKAY I wrote some code to fix the transparency. Here’s all the avatars
BTW check out @plorpl’s two posts that got me looking at this game:
From what I found (although I’ve not gotten around to the step of just playing both ROMs), the DS game is a port of a PC game from the same time, so that would explain why it utilizes the DS’ hardware so poorly.
Could be! I’ve gotten a copy of the PC version and I’ve not looked into it yet, but I saw a letsplay that suggests it’s very similar.
Being a very poor painter, Magritte’s works seldom resembled what he intended them to. This attempt at a glass key ended up looking like a rock in a mountain landscape.
Other mispainted works included his attempt at a self portrait, which looked like a slice of ham with an eyeball; his painting “Heartstrings” which resembled a cloud in a glass; and perhaps his most famous failure, “This is Not a Pipe,” which sadly very clearly showed a pipe.
I 3d printed and hand painted a pipped d20 last week. My family refuses to use it and calls it an abomination. They're right of course, it would be awful to use, but I still think it's hilarious
My submission for weird dice Wednesday is this WEIRD ass d6% i found at my job (i work at a LGS), paired with beast of a mini dragon figurine i found in the same drawer.
