#recode

[funhive]

weird dog pagedoll from feb that i forgot to post

[breadcells]

DMMD Recode decrypted/extracted CGs, sprites etc

After all these years it is done hehe. Here’s a torrent link for now (please don’t forget to seed it) a non torrent will appear soon! https://easyupload.io/x1omt8

[steamcardsartistry]

Dot Hack Last Recode

[clairwil]

Deep thinking with Nathan Martin, of Recode, Deeplocal

Nathan Martin, once a punk hacker dude and now CEO of ad agency Deeplocal, thinks we should be nice to each other.  From the Deeplocal website. I thought I’d seen complex workflow charts working with engineering graduate students, but this kludge takes the prize. DEEPLOCAL Nathan Martin, owner of Deeplocal Recode Recode.com was based on Priceline and was a punk trick. Copy subbar codes;…

[laejoh]

acey_ducey.el

A few days ago I posted a BASIC computer listing of the game "Acey Ducey". Here is the final Elisp Emacs translation:

And here is a sample run:

[room-of-lies]

I’m just doing what you told me

[descendant-of-truth]

While I'm of the opinion that the Re:Coded movie that's in all the collections generally does a better job at giving you all the relevant cutscenes than the Days movie, after playing through the DS game myself, I still think it's a shame how much they left out. Notably, the Castle Oblivion section is... extremely nerfed in the movie.

See, when Roxas tells Sora that he can do whatever he wants when talking to the illusions from his past, he means it. You, the player, are presented with different tasks that come with multiple dialogue options, and there are three possible endings for every "world" you enter. You get a different Ending Card depending on how you act; a Normal Card, an Alternate Card, and an Extra Card.

In the movie, instead of providing you with any kind of choose-your-own-adventure routes that lead to different cutscenes, they just. vaguely animate everyone talking silently to each other, and then have the illusions fade away. Which I think loses a lot of the intrigue, but it also means that relatively few people in the fanbase have even seen any of these routes.

I won't go over every single one because that can easily be done by looking them up on YouTube, but I do want to bring up one route in specific because it's really stuck with me ever since - Wonderland's Extra Ending.

So, in Wonderland, you're presented with a series of dilemmas:

Alice can't remember her name

The White Rabbit drops his pocket watch

The Cheshire cat gives you a riddle that requires you to choose the correct box or else fight a Heartless waiting in the wrong ones

One card soldier asks you to deliver a potion to a second card soldier for him

A third card soldier is weakened and woozy

You get the Normal Ending by doing at least one of these tasks correctly, the Alternate Ending by doing all of them correctly, and the Extra Ending by doing everything wrong.

In order to get the Extra Ending, you must:

Tell Alice that she's the Queen of Hearts

Pick up the White Rabbit's watch (causing Sora to lose sight of him, unable to return it; you're supposed to just tell him where it is)

Give up on the Cheshire Cat's riddle

Give the potion to the third, weakened card soldier, instead of its intended recipient (it turns out he was just hungry, not injured, so you didn't help him. the second card soldier would have given you a sandwich)

No matter what you do, at the end of each route, the Queen of Hearts will grab your attention and accuse you of being the thief who stole her memory. She'll try to back it up with proof, and even when you've done everything right (which she acknowledges), she still concludes with an "off with your head!" which Sora implicitly runs away from, ending the world's story.

Except for in the Extra Ending.

After she recaps everything you've done wrong up to that point, she drops this dialogue that I haven't been able to stop thinking about:

Queen of Hearts: "Don't tell me you were trying to be NICE? Cheering that girl up by telling her she was important? Giving things away because you thought someone else needed them more? Trying to... to own up to your failures!? Bah! Go on! Off with you!" Data Sora: "Not 'off with my head'?" Queen of Hearts: The punishment must match the crime! See how YOU like having something NICE done to you!"

It's hard to describe what it was about this that's still so striking to me months later, but it's just... kind of off-putting, in a way?

Having the Queen of Hearts choose to spare you as a "more fitting punishment" is out of character enough already, but the fact that it's the consequence to you actually doing everything wrong makes it feel all the more pointed. This is somehow supposed to be worse than being beheaded, and it kind of works, because it feels so much more personal than her usual schtick.

And it exists in such an isolated incident, too. The level is completed immediately after this dialogue, and nothing else is changed by getting it, it's just. there.

At the same time, everything about it feels so deliberate that I can't help but feel like it either is or will be relevant elsewhere somehow. It could just be overanalyzing on my part, but the first thing that comes to mind is actually that the Queen's final line could parallel the consequence of Sora misusing the Power of Waking?

He did so for a good cause, after all, but it wasn't what he was supposed to do. He broke a taboo of nature in the process. But his punishment isn't a straightforward death; he's just put somewhere else, somewhere he can't see his friends. "Off with you," the universe says, "see how you like having something nice done to you!"

...but that doesn't really feel like it's getting to the heart of the matter, which is that Data Sora did not need to do any of this. He could have told Alice her real name, on account of it being the default dialogue option, and he could have tried to figure out what was wrong with that card soldier before giving away stuff that wasn't his. He could have tried a little harder at the riddle. These were all fairly low-stakes situations - in particular, he really didn't need to lie to Alice.

The original Sora didn't have much of a choice in what he did. It was either lose his powers and vanish, or leave Kairi shattered and functionally dead. You can't really say he made the wrong decision, or did something immoral for a superficial reason.

So then... will this line remain an isolated slap in the face to completionist DS players, or will there be more to it? Is there already more to it that I'm missing? Where's our parallel to Data Sora "cheering that girl up by telling her she was important"? What are we supposed to make of "see how you like having something nice done to you"?

What does it all mean???

(In conclusion: go check out the DS versions of these cutscenes, they're great)

[twilight-gullwing]

namixi on the mind…🐚☀️

[cbgvww]

[funhive]

old thing for cringetober that never made it to main

[cendrilloncd]

Kingdom Hearts menu appreciation post

The art + dearly beloved playing will always be just as important to me as the game itself

[felikatze]

so robin and i were talking about the psychology of sora kingdom hearts, as you do. coded and how characters treat real sora vs how they treat data sora came up; and i know very very little about coded. and i was told you are the Coded Guy.

here's a free pass: talk to me about how people treat the little computer guy i want to know more about him :D

(crawls out of my cave covered in blood) okay i finally escaped enough hells to actually have the brainpower to infodump once again

the answer is. the answer is. they treat him like a friend.

the main characters who interact with data sora are mickey, donald, goofy, and data riku. and the first three in particular just treat data sora like he is sora. mickey introduces himself as d sora's friend, and d sora believes him. i've made posts waxing more lyrical about it, but-- those three are what made d sora a real person. i love it so much

i am struggling for words a bit rn, but like, the biggest point is, you know like, the point in hollow bastion where riku steals the keyblade so donald and goofy leave sora all alone`? well. well. the game does the exact inverse of this.

data sora's keyblade, this whole entire game, was an imitation of the keyblade created by mickey, because d sora skipped ever getting it. mickey spoke to him and directed his path before the journal, the recording of kh1 and com, got to the part where Sora Gets The Keyblade. So yknow, Mickey cheated one in, because Sora ought to have one!

And we're in hollow bastion here, Sora is being opposed by Maleficent (the real one), and she shatters his keyblade, because it's not real, and thus not unbreakable. It's not the proof of a heart. Data Sora, in this moment, is literally proven to be heartless. Except, well, not really.

THIS IS THE ONLY PART IN THE ENTIRE GAME WHERE YOU HAVE PARTY MEMBERS. Donald and Goofy swoop in to help D Sora out and fight for him, because he's their friend! You spend a whole section only having them for action commands, and relying on them to defeat enemies and activate switches while you are a defensless little boy running around trying to keep alive.

And by the end of it all, when you reach Maleficent again... Data Sora pulls out a keyblade. A real one. One that cannot be destroyed. Because in being treated as a human person, as more than just the program, the recording he is supposed to be, he became real. He gained a heart.

The disney trio treat him Precisely No Different At All from the actual Sora. They just treat him like they pick up right where they left off like they just talked yesterday. One quick introduction of "Yeah, I'm Mickey, and I'm your friend!" and that's all it takes. That's all it takes.

It's a fascinating position because data Sora only exists as a tool, an avatar, a sentient antivirus to figure out what the hell is wrong with the code. They don't need to treat him like a person at all.

In fact, we have our foil here in Data Riku, who is aware of his own purpose as the avatar of Jiminy's Journal. He is keenly aware that he is a visual representation of a complex program. He is this entire world. And when he is failing his purpose, he asks to be destroyed. But it is Data Sora, who has been treated like a real person, who has become a real person, that insists Data Riku can be saved, and then does so, in that typical Sora tenacity.

Data Sora is just Fascinating because none of the bad things ever happened to him. There was no fall of Destiny Island, there was no betrayal from Riku, there was no princesses getting kidnapped, just more episodic adventures as he is guided the entire way and knows he's fighting for a good cause and knows and hears and feels that he is not alone.

None of the bad things ever happened to him. His adventure is comfortable. Friendly. Episodic.

I know Robin sent you a rom of this game, Robot, and I don't even know if I want to talk about everything that happens After Maleficent if you haven't experienced it firsthand, because it is wild.

Because (re)coded doesn't ask "Is any of this for real or not?" it asks, "Does it matter if any of this is real?" and the answer is, no. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it can all be reset and wiped away with the press of a single button. Because it moved our hearts, it invoked emotion. Even if it cannot be remembered, the impact of it, the afterimage, the way it has shaped us as people, will remain. And the loss will be worth it, because in that loss is where we feel what we had.

Is it better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all? Yes. In the loss, you feel the love. There is no such thing as "reality", only what you perceive it to be.

So yes, the computer program is a real boy, because he's your friend, and you love him, and he learned to love you back.

[howlsofbloodhounds]

I find it a little strange that some people just don’t acknowledge that if killer stays with the bad sanses, being all “murderous and evil together so wholesome!!” then the person the gang supposedly love just won’t be there anymore given enough time.

Stage 4 will take over more and more and more, as it is getting worse even before Killer left with Color, and killer will attempt to kill even the ones he supposedly loves or die trying.

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

if they were cats...

Lute: *baps vaggie*

Vaggie: *hiss*

Lute: .....

Lute: *baps vaggie* *baps vaggie*

Vaggie: *Growls*

Lute: *bap bap bap bap bapbapbapbapbapbapbap-*

Vaggie: *singe paw smacks lute off the counter top so hard she flips ass over tea kettle and lands head first in the waste paper bin*

Charlie: *flops on top of vaggie* *PURRRS*

Chaggie: *happily grooming each other while lute wiggles frantically in the trash bin*

[kingdomhearts-and-soriku-trash]

I got the scene. I got it. The one I’ve been looking for.

THE WAY HE SHAKES WITH ANGER??? My little man is DONE with these people talking about Riku. I love him sm and gosh…….the way he defends Riku🥺.

[laejoh]

A fun way to learn a computer language is to recode old BASIC Computer games.

Here's a ZX81 BASIC version of Acey Ducey:

Here's Acey Ducey in Emacs Elisp: