Notices by Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social), page 38

Happy 25th birthday to The Matrix! 🎂🎉🍾🥂

@lurkjay Oh shit. I'm stealing this!

@dundee Quake (1996)

He has risen!

CJ's Elephant Antics (Genesis Software/The Codemasters Software Company, 1993) #DOSGaming

@loadhigh It's another EGA game that changes palette with VGA card.

Вот тут некоторые товарищи думают что мой пост - это шутка над этой дамой. Нет. Это шутка про меня. Чаще смейтесь над собой, господа.

@hubbitant Вам интересно, а вот мне нет, честно говоря. 🤷

Pray for Death (Light Shock Software/Virgin Interactive Entertainment, 1995) #DOSGaming

A photo by Anastasiya Berthier.

HEY WAIT A MINUTE! 👀👀👀👀

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bra35drF4Jr/

Ooh, I need a dirty MIDI
Ooh, I need a dirty song

🔊🎵 #OPL3MIDI

@HauntedOwlbear Wait. What? How was it packaged?

@sol_hsa And are you always playing on the first difficulty?

@sol_hsa When was the last time you played through the game? Or are you going on 20+ year old pleasant memory of it?

@sol_hsa So its intent is quite literally broken. Because in order to meet the condition for lowering the difficulty you have to die FIVE times within 180 seconds, and you have to watch the 10 second death animation *to the end* & not press any keys, despite the game prompting you, every single time. What human being would do that?

@sol_hsa It's broken because it gives you an option AND A PROMPT to reload *before* it counts your death towards the adjustment. That's why it's broken. Otherwise it wouldn't be an issue.

@sol_hsa I die a lot inside on the daily basis, I don't need to add any more to that.

It's somewhat okay now when it takes a second to quickload, but I *really* could have used this patch back in the early 2000s when Max Payne took actual minutes to load on my Cyrix machine. 😭

For those who don't know:
Max Payne's initial difficulty has 7 different levels that affect enemy & your damage factor, hit points, pickups, etc. You start in the middle (level 4), & if you're doing good the game ups the level. If you die quickly, it drops it. BUT in order for it to determine you died the entire slow mo death animation has to play out. That never happens. So by the mid point one ends up with difficulty higher than the highest manually selectable one. That can be really annoying.

Last year someone finally (after 22 years!) made a patch to disable the broken adaptive scaling algorithm from Max Payne's starting difficulty setting. Playing the game with it is like playing it for the first time. Final levels are no longer an exercise in patience and savescumming. I recommend it highly.
https://www.moddb.com/games/max-payne/downloads/mpadaptivedifficultyremover