Let’s be real, while other actors have done an okay job, there is only one true Joker: Jack Nicholson.

In all honesty, the Jokers portrayed by different actors were not trying to mimic other actors. They were doing their own portrayal of the character. Which works well enough for Joker because each different version is in its own universe so to speak.

Darth Vader with any voice other than James Earl Jones just sounds wrong, not matter how well the actor does. The two are inseparable, IMO.

Seems like SAG could try to make the same argument if Epic had hired a non-SAG voice actor.

Yes, or perhaps he gave his permission just to use his voice since he recorded more dialogue lines but maybe voice AI wasn’t advanced enough at that time. His estate did give permission with regards AI though, IIRC.

Honestly? Let James Earl Jones keep Vader. He can keep living as Darth instead of fading away into obscurity. He earned it.

FOSS Community Tries To Go A Single Day Without Controversy and Drama Challenge: Impossible

This was already real though…

It is not retro. It is “Modern,” like how art from the 50s and 60s is called “Modern Art.”

Here is an easy chart:

1st Console Gen (Magnavox Odyssey) : Historic

2nd Console Gen (ColecoVision) : Antique

3rd Console Gen (NES) : Vintage

4th Console Gen (SNES) : Retro

5th Console Gen (N64) : Classic

6th Console Gen (XBOX) : Renaissance

7th Console Gen (X360) : Modern

8th Console Gen (XBOX ONE) : Post-Modern

9th Console Gen (XBOX SERIES) : Contemporary

While I definitely agree the overall best design goes to the Atari 2600, this comes in close second for me:

This bad boy (or girl, rather) is the Casio Loopy. Yes, Casio, the company primarily known for making wristwatches. This console was only released in Japan, and when it launched it had a target demographic of girls and young women. The console came with a built-in sticker printer, and the games were woman-targeted games in genres like romance, fashion, and life simulation (like Animal Crossing). Only 10 games were ever made for the Loopy, by the way. Its biggest failure and reason for not selling well was being a console that had games that looked like the SNES but having to directly compete with the PS1 and N64, as well as the replaceable sticker cartridges being very expensive.

Now, I am a man, and I am clearly not a part of the target demographic of this console. The games are entirely uninteresting to me, except maybe the Animal Crossing-like game “I Want A Room In Loopy Town.” But something about the curved shape of the console and its cool purple hue speak to me. The black cover for the sticker ejection port has me imagining a newer version playing an animated logo on that part if a small screen was behind it. The absurdly massive Eject button just looks like it gives the most satisfying “kerchunk” when you press it to eject a cartridge.

In third place I’d have to give a shout out to the Apple iMac G3, even though I really dislike Apple products and its neither a game console.or made for gaming in general, something about the white and bold color combo just looks really cool. The mouse was really bad though. Got a bit of that Frutiger Aero look.

The NES was extremely dominant among the gamer population with home consoles at the time, which was pretty small. Some gamers may have already owned an Atari, or ColecoVision, or MagnaVox, or other console and did not feel the need to buy an NES. However, the NES was so popular that people rushing to buy it for their children were disappointed that it was sold out. You never read or heard about this phenomenon happening with any other video game console at the time, because it did not happen at the same scale as the NES.

Of course the NES did not sell as well as the PS2 or Wii, because by the time those consoles released, the general population of gamers had greatly increased, naturally more people would buy those consoles. The same goes for the Switch outselling the Wii and WiiU, the general population of gamers has increased. It would not be entirely surprising to see the Switch 2 outsell the Switch for this very same reason, assuming the global economy improves enough to encourage luxury spending on the same level of when the Switch released.

Personally, my gaming began with a Super Nintendo. I never had SEGA or Sony consoles growing up. Nintendo up until the Xbox came out, then I had Nintendo and Xbox. And PC. Then the Switch released and it collected dust for so much time I decided to sell it and just keep my PC and Xbox.

I don’t feel like I missed out growing up, but I do enjoy being able to play games on those platforms I did not play. Some of them were good, but I find a lot of them are subpar compared to what Nintendo and Xbox had.

To be fair, this was changed so that the AUDIENCE could know who it was.

For example, the 1980s movie Firefox takes place mostly in Soviet Russia, but everyone speaks English. This was done so the audience could clearly understand what was being said and what is happening. There are instances where it is simply assumed that if that particular situation was real, the characters would actually be speaking in Russian and not English.

For Star Wars, the audience could only assume the mysterious third Force Ghost was Anakin, but could have been confused as to who it was if they were not paying close attention or if they had missed some parts of the movie. After the prequels released, it could have been more confusing to leave it that way since the original actor looks nothing like an aged Hayden, so the actor was changed. There also could have been a likeness or royalty deal that needed to be renegotiated and it may have been faster/cheaper/better to simply have Hayden instead.

To be fair, this is using an HD Texture mod and a higher render resolution, which increases the “scare” factor. The game didn’t quite look like this originally. It lacked a lot of detail and was slightly blurrier.

Kinda like how people in the past talked about how realistic graphics looked, but then comparing them to today’s graphics advancements makes that seem rather silly. Or how “realistic” DOOMs violence was, compared to the violence in DOOM 2016.

Also thiss is a screenshot from Ocarina of Time, not Majora’s Mask.

Wasn’t gaming basically synonymous with gambling at that time though?

I think gaming as a recreation without gambling didnt really come about until the 1940s - 1950s, right? Commonly, of course.

EDIT: Also of important note, in 1638 the Puritans in the US state of Massachusetts (colonial at the time) enacted a law that made gambling illegal. It outlawed ownership of everything gaming related from dice to cards, and citizens were not allowed to even play in their own home.

Old cigarettes and pizza smell, very true.

My point was simply to illustrate how unfair of a comparison it was, not to comment on the hardware capabilities of those two systems.

The thing is, with FM sythesizers you always know it is an FM synthesizer. Nothing you can do will mask the sound of it. However, with a sampler it is significantly harder to know for sure a sampler is being used just from the sound.

Yes, I am aware. Again, I was merely illustrating that the comparison was not a fair one. But my point remains, FM synthesizer music is very prone to ear piercing shrieking, whereas the SNES tends to produce a softer, warmer sound. Yes, it can still shriek, but you really have to try with the correct note and sample combinations to do that. Even though the Genesis can output a better range of notes, it is easier for the notes to clash as well. Mostly you will find games from those times had the audio crunched into the midtones, and this is probably because CRT speakers werent very good and pushing the audio into the midtones produced a better sound.

Its obviously not a fair comparison, lol.

“If you connect a Nintendo Wii to a surround system and play a game that supports surround, it sounds way better than an Xbox Series X connected to a 1981 portable radio tv with a mono speaker.” Yeah, of course it will. But when considering the output capabilities of the audio systems of each, absolutely nobody is talking about this kind of scenario.

The comparison is assuming all things are equal, which includes the skill or knowledge of the sound programmer, speaker quality, etc. The Genesis can sound more crisp, but at the cost of being only capable of FM synthesizer music, which is extremely prone to sounding piercing or tinny. High pitch notes especially are susceptible to this. The Genesis is vastly easier to make it sound worse than the SNES, specifically because of the ability to have 8 channels of samples.

I am not sitting here saying that this sounds so much worse than this because its obvious. That is also not a fair comparison.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I love FM synthesizer music, Ryu Umemoto was a god on the PC98, not a single one of his entire composed library sounded bad. But in comparison to hardware capable of sample playback, that is already an unfair comparison right from the beginning.

Being debt free one of the few status symbols you cannot see. At that point, is it a status symbol if other people cannot see it?

I mean, I still agree though. Be debt free, seriously.

This is cool but the title of this article could not be more wrong.

The Genesis SPU is not capable of recreating the output of the SNES APU. The Genesis SPU was a programmable FM synthesizer, which is a completely different technology that is significantly more limited than the programmable sampler-like SNES APU. It is impossible for the Genesis to “perfectly recreate” anything from the SNES, unless the SNES soundtrack used samples of an FM synthesizer, in which case the other way around would be more accurate: that the SNES is recreating the Genesis. This did happen in some multiplat games that were made for the Genesis first. Even if somehow one could program the Genesis SPU to use only samples, there is only one channel capable of sample playback on the Genesis, whereas on the SNES, ALL 8 channels were capable of sample playback.

While it does not sound bad, in comparison to the SNES, the Genesis will lose every time. Its like comparing the NES to the SNES, the capability of the SNES APU (which was actually only slightly modified and then used for the PlayStation 1 SPU, both chips were designed by the same person, fun fact) just vastly outshines it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love FM synthesizer music. Games from the PC98 just sound wrong to me when played through generic MIDI or the Roland SC-88 Pro. But to say that the Genesis is perfectly recreating the music from a SNES game is just incorrect.

Star Wars was not so obvious in its real world parallels as Star Trek was.

I did not mean that Star Wars contained absolutely no “message” about ethics or morals. All entertainment art contains a message. As humans, it is not possible to create entertainment that is completely void of this, as such a piece of media cannot entertain a human. (Just to clarify, I mean entertainment art that has a storyline. Tetris, for example, is entertaining as a puzzle game, but it does not have a story. Tetris would therefore be excluded). Rather, Star Wars did not present real world social issues to its audience in the way that Star Trek did.

The Jedi were good, but also demonstrated that a person that becomes too imbalanced can also become just as evil as a Sith. Star Wars also showed that even an evil Sith can change their mind and become good again. Fantastic messages that are easy to understand and applicable to any person, place, or time.

Star Trek, on the other hand, openly debated the benefits of something like religion or slavery. Still timeless messages, but presented in a very different way. An alien race would believe a religion or have slaves, and the benefits of such would be clearly presented. Maybe the aliens were happier with a religion or their economy was reliant on slaves to continue otherwise their world would fall into economic collapse or whatever. Then the Enterprise crew would talk about the down sides, maybe the religion was oppressive, or the obvious downsides of slavery. Usually, in the end the crew of the Enterprise would choose to not interfere with the aliens, for fear of damaging their culture or something. They never made an “evil” choice, but they never made a choice that caused the viewer to feel like the writers of the show were telling them how to think.

I will make an exception this one time, but I have a personal policy to block anyone talking about current world politics. I will not engage in that discussion myself, because I do not want to.

A bigger difference IMO was that Star Trek attempted to make commentary on real world social issues, whereas Star Wars did not. Star Wars was a fantasy story about good versus evil, it did not try to comment on the real world. Well, pre~2012 mostly, anyways.

Star Trek, I mean the old good Star Trek from pre~2012 and not its most modern iterations, could logically present an episode that was very obviously about X or Y real world social issue. So far, same as modern Star Trek so why do I differentiate them? Well, old Star Trek did not feel compelled to tell its viewers the “correct” answer, or how to think. The episode would present the viewer with an issue, and then it would usually spend time explaining both sides of the issue. Then, the crew of the Enterprise would make their choice, and explain why they chose that answer. It was not about “this is the correct answer,” it was mostly about getting the viewer simply to think. To use their brain. Form their own opinion just like the Enterprise crew did. If someone disagreed with what the Enterprise crew chose, they did not feel like the show writers were calling them unsavory names. The viewer simply felt like they didn’t agree with the Enterprise crews choice, but that did not make them stop watching the show because they felt insulted. They would tune in next week to see what happened next.

This is where I think modern Star Trek goes wrong. The last two or three episodes I tried to watch featured character assassination, bad writing in general, lore inaccuracies, but also it tried to tell the viewer how to think, or what the correct answer was, at the same time insulting the viewer if they chose any other answer than whatever was decided in the show. The only one that I didn’t get this feeling from and actually still liked a bit was the Lower Decks animated comedy.

I mean, some people will agree and others will disagree because ultimately the two series are quite different from each other.

Star Trek is for the people that like hard science fiction. They want the technical explanation why something happens or how it works.

Star Wars is for the people that don’t really care about hard science fiction. There might be a scentific explanation for something or there might not be. The people that like Star Wars aren’t really going to care if it isn’t explained.

As for me, I like both for different reasons. Though I don’t really like either series after ~2012.

If this documentary doesn’t require the LEGO Island Documentary CD to be in the CD-ROM drive, then it is fake.