HN is great for news, but man it sometimes feels like I am browsing LinkedIn when I go to the comments. The cult of techno optimism and progress at all costs is strong here. It is entertaining, but man it is also depressing.
Have you ever listened to the difference between a piano and a digital keyboard? The difference is night and day. Digital tech can only imitate the sound of a string piano, but it can never truly be the real thing.
its like smelling fresh apple pie vs smelling an apple pie car freshener. The idea gets across, but it can never be the same.
Im not a skeptical agnostic materialist, but those objects were far from being cheap. Those instruments cost thousands of dollars each. The arcade cabinet as well(there aren't exactly a lot of those left).
The entire point of the ad is that the entire human creative experience is consolidated into the ipad, which is a pretty dystopian way of looking at things. Even if you ignore the cost and rarity of these items, the symbolism is pretty horrible.
You know there are reproductions of those arcade cabinets right? And used instruments cost hundreds, not thousands. A guitar with a broken neck or stripped screws could be propped up long enough for a scene such as this and be useless to actually play. And busted pianos are easy enough to find.
>And used instruments cost hundreds, not thousands.
A guitar, sure. I tried getting an used string piano and couldn't find one...used...for less than five grand. Used violins and other instruments are also usually very highly priced.
Try craigslist or a local piano mover. Local piano movers are often asked to haul off abandoned pianos and will resell them [1]. This company's stock at the moment is a bit pricey compared to what I usually see, but it's not unusual to be able to get even a baby grand for ~$1,000. The catch is you've got to pay to move them, which is a bit of an ordeal.
You are trying to get a working piano. This ad only required a non working piano.
Someone bought me a broken piano once thinking I would be able to repair it. We ended up letting someone else have it for free. It wasn’t expensive to begin with because it didn’t work.
Everything in that press was a representation of a real and useful thing, and the people who hate this commercial the most seem to have substituted a real and useful thing for the simulation of one. Whereas the moment the cans on the piano were crushed, I thought, "wow that old (busted?) piano is holding up well."
Practical effects are not only full of fakery, they're also the origin of a lot of the tricks known to the world.
Good, if Stanley was going to bully them into not publishing I am glad it got published eventually. I like Stanley Kubrick's films but every time I read about him he comes off as a generally unlikeable guy.
Agreed. Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. all are better options for beginners. Gamemaker Studio even lets you program for free...you have to pay to make an executable though.
You won't have as intimate knowledge of PS1 hardware as OP's course, but I think thats a better starting point than paying first and then stopping because you didn't already know programming and it turned out more involved than you thought it would be.
Now I DO think that there is a place for a paid course like this. I can see the appeal of getting hyperfixated on extremely specific hardware such as this, and making some cool stuff for it. For that type of person, the 100$ is worth it.
> Agreed. Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. all are better options for beginners.
Am I just lost or are a game engine and a game development course not very obviously different things? Paid tutorials exist for everything you've listed, because they are in fact tech and not teachers.
I have had some experience with Godot and Net Yaroze (PS1). It was significantly easier to make a game with Godot.
Godot comes with an IDE that build/edit/run games all in one integrated experience, and the user manual comes with a tutorial. I was able to make a game in less than a day, and the edit-test iteration cycle was practically instantaneous. I am familiar with Python, but I suspect it would have been possible to make some games without any programming experience.
Net Yaroze came with two printed manuals and a serial cable. There was no tutorial. Memory was limited and I had to lay out all the sprites in the video memory myself. The edit-test iteration cycle was slow since it involves uploading your compiled binary over the serial cable to the console on each run. If I wasn't already familiar with C, I don't think the PlayStation was the best place to start learning it.
Everything definitely got better in the past few decades given all the tools that became available, but ultimately we are comparing a purpose-built tool for making games versus a development kit plus lots of hardware constraints. There is a different type joy to be gained in developing for a console, but for beginners who just want to get some game up and running, a modern game engine is going to be an easier path.
Im saying that it is better for beginners to start with a modern engine than try to make something for an older console. Newbies will see a course like this, think "oh I loved the playstation! This course will help me learn how to make a game for it? I will buy." When in reality, they will just waste their money because development is hard, especially for the PS1.
What I was saying is "If you are dead-set on making a game for PS1 for your first game" use a free course instead of buying something like this. Newbs don't realize how complicated learning CPU architecture and assembly is. What they want to know is how to get started making games, so I linked a free course while discouraging new developers from even trying to develop for the PS1, but to go for a more modern engine.
Things like this terrify me. I am only 28 so its not like I'm much older than the college kids they mention in these articles. But still, its like...is this actually a thing that I need to be worried about? Are kids really not learning how to read? Hope that this is just fear mongering and it doesn't become a serious problem down the line.
