I've had a copy for a long time, and I dust it off to try playing it every year or so. My Japanese reading skill is improving very slowly, so each time I make a little more progress before giving up.

It feels super interesting in a surreal, David Lynch/Haruki Murakami/Garage way.

The classic adage of "The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time" comes to mind.

Its always all those "little touches" that eat up so much time, because you know that your audience will expect them, and you yourself feel that they should be there; a smoothly-moving cursor for menu selections, playing little sounds when selecting or cancelling, a puff of dust that jumps up when the player character lands (but keeps animating in place rather than sticking to the player), text sliding or fading in and out instead of just appearing and disappearing... All the individual "little" things that add up to quite a lot of work.

I also sympathize with you on a lot of the points you raised about "family-friendly" games. I'm a teacher, and when I make activities and games for my students, I face a similar set of constraints (must be enjoyable for the weakest students but still engaging for the most advanced students, little to no player elimination, high replayability/reusability, has to actually reinforce the target knowledge/skill and not just be fun with the material tacked on as an afterthought).

Not only do GB and GBC games work on the GBA, but some of them even have special GBA-only content. I know that at least one of the Legend of Zelda Oracle games has an extra house in the village on GBA. When you play the game on a GB/GBC, there's just an empty lot in that place.

the boss can detect headphones going on your head and music starting from 50 feet away and instantly be behind you with a burning question that doesn't make any sense.

I'm sure you realize that the question doesn't make any sense because they had to think of it on the spot, just to prove that you can't wear headphones in the office due to all the important ambient office talk you need to be a part of.

One of my best, most competent bosses once said to the team "I don't understand how you guys can work while listening to music, but as long as your output stays high, I'm not going to interfere."

So many great games. Some of my favourites (mostly action RPGs, exclusives marked *):

• Landstalker*
• The Story of Thor*
• Wonderboy in Monster World (* virtually an exclusive)
• Soleil*
• Flashback
• The Immortal
• Quackshot*
• Light Crusader*
• Arcus Odyssey
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2* (the other main games are good too, but this is my favourite)
• Desert Strike and Jungle Strike (I don't remember playing Urban Strike, but it got excellent reviews)
• The Lost Vikings
• Sword of Vermillion*

Make sure that Windows Fast Startup is turned off. I don't know if that's specifically the problem here, but in my experience quite a few "everything's fine, it should be working!" boot issues have been resolved by booting into Windows, turning off Fast Startup, and then doing a full shut down before going back to Linux, especially on laptops.

Yeah, you got it basically correct. I bought a few of these games back in the day, and while I think you could do most of it by texting codes to premium SMS numbers, I did it by setting up accounts on the distributors' websites. I paid by credit card (my phone plan didn't fully support premium SMS billing), and they sent a special MMS with the game package attached (not as a link; this was in virtually pre-phone-Internet days). I had to make sure that my phone had enough MMS space free to receive the message including the bundled game, or I wouldn't get it.

One advantage of getting the games through a website account was that I could have the game resent to the same number as many times as I wanted. Since I didn't know any easy way to back up the game locally from my phone at the time (or how to reinstall it even if I could), this let me free up precious space by deleting the MMSs and uninstalling games without losing my purchase.

I played some games on a lower-mid-range Motorola flip-phone, but mostly on an nGage. It was like chalk and cheese. The experience on the flip-phone was stuttery and the controls were almost always painful to use. But Nokia was the biggest phone manufacturer at the time, and they even published guidelines for how to make games for their various categories of phone. So a lot of developers supported those specific requirements because they were common and well-documented. The nGage could run S60-targeted games flawlessly, and often the controls were pretty usable (obviously). The only real negative was that since even S60 phones usually didn't have multi-press keypads, a lot of developers didn't write their games to support them. So if a game needed diagonal movement or the like, I still had to use the keypad.

Where are these conversations happening? I could see a lot of enterprise-focused groups potentially getting behind OnlyOffice, but individual home users? Not so much.

EDIT: My mistake! I didn't realize that there are standalone versions of OnlyOffice in addition to the web app version.

LSD: Dream Emulator must also rank up there, surely? :)

Gorogoa has been on my "pile of shame" for several years now. Perhaps today's the day.

This game is criminally unknown even in Japan. I first learned about it years ago and wish I had paid the high price to buy a copy then; now it sells for 10 times as much, and that's if you can even find a copy. It's the only game missing from my physical collection that I know I want.

I've tried a couple of times to get into it over the years, but the language barrier was always too high for me and broke immersion. Hopefully I and others can now give this game the attention that I think it deserves.

Edit: A link to the patch: https://www.romhacking.net/translations/7187/

There was already a Spanish patch a few years ago, as well.

Edit 2: And now it's been flagged as "noncompliant". I'm not sure what that means, but it's not available from that site for the moment.

I completely agree. And the video didn't discuss how any of that actually happens, except to say that they send the update over radio, and to give a brief description of how the storage system on Voyager works (physically, not logically). That's what I meant by "really nothing here", "here" meaning "in the video", not "in how the Voyager probe works and updates are carried out".

That next line, "It turns out they they update the software by sending the update by radio," was meant to be a bit sarcastic, but I know that isn't obvious in text, so I've added a signifier.

After reading your responses to some other comments here, I might be able to offer some advice. I haven't done professional web dev for a long time now, but I've kept my hand in a little with hobby projects.

First, you need to imagine a wall between the server and the client (browser). Unless you deliberately build a connection between the two, it won't exist. A standard static webserver only sends flat files to the browser. Now, if I understand what you're thinking, what you want to do is technically possible, but it's kind of like getting milk from the corner store by moving the store's fridge into your kitchen.

Usually what you're talking about is done with dynamically served pages, using some kind of server-side scripting. The server-side script grabs all the pieces of your page from files, assembles them on the server, then sends the finished page to the user's browser (on the other side of the "wall") as a regular, static page. I haven't used it myself, but I believe that Node.js allows us to use JavaScript as a server-side scripting language, although you still need to have it installed on your server (as with any server-side scripting language).

It should certainly be possible to achieve a similar end result by sending an initial page to the client, loaded with JavaScript that performs subsequent requests from the browser back to the server, and assembles the page on the client's side, but doing your basic page construction this way would probably be considered by most as a really messy solution.

Here's an article I found which may give you some tips for further research: https://css-tricks.com/the-simplest-ways-to-handle-html-includes/

If I absolutely had to do something like this with client-side JavaScript, I'd probably make a .js file (or files) with each section (i.e. header, footer, etc.) being handled by a single function that takes a CSS DIV id and fills it from static strings with insertAdjacentHTML() calls. This is nasty enough without trying to write a script that loads and parses other HTML pages from within the browser.

It's easy enough to include extra .js files in an HTML file; you just need to make sure that the included files have loaded before you start trying to alter your page in the browser. Keep in mind that those "included" .js files are actually going to be fetched by the user's browser in a separate HTTP exchange, after the inital page request, although most browsers will parse the page as if the included files were literally copied and pasted into the base HTML at the point where they are included.