Many years ago I lived alone in a small apartment, and I used to leave most of my consoles connected and kept them in a big shelving unit with my TV. But now I live in a house with my family and that's not practical.

At the moment I'm in the process of moving the consoles I still use to wide, shallow boxes with fully removable lids. Up until recently I laboriously unpacked and repacked every console when I wanted to use it, carrying armfuls of cables and equipment to wherever in the house I wanted to set it up. But now, I'm buying these boxes and transferring each system across as I use them.

The idea is that I can leave everything attached to the console while it's in storage, and then when I want to use it I can just take the box to whichever room I want to use, remove the lid, connect power and AV, and pull out the controller and go. When I'm done, it's easy to disconnect the cables from the display and power socket, tuck everything back into the box, and put it away. This is almost as easy as leaving systems set up in place, plus it keeps dust and pet hair out of the equipment, which was a constant issue when I lived alone and left them all set up.

You just need to find boxes that are long and wide enough to hold the console with all its cables and peripherals attached without putting undue bending stress on the cables. For older systems you need to be careful of height as well, for joysticks and so you can leave any top-loading flash carts plugged in to save the connectors.

Reading current discussion, it seems more like "You say that it's impossible to dirty your house, yet nothing's stopping anyone from dumping out this bucket of mud on your floor, curious!"

I loved my MDs and Hi-MDs, but they had so many frills. All the frills. That was part of why I loved them!

What's the word? I started looking but realized I have better things to do. Before I stopped I did find "nips" and "chow", both of which have completely unrelated, normal meanings. Hell, I didn't even know "chow" could mean anything other than food until I read the definition in the dictionary file.

There are several other racist, sexist, and generally rude words in there too. There is even a slur which has been used against me, and it's defined as such (one meaning among many), but I say leave them. Well, maybe "cunt" could go without being missed.

If you or anyone else is interested in playing more, I recommend:

• Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (aka Director's Cut). Not a continuation of the story of the first game, but a separate story in the same universe. Generally agreed to take everything good from the first game and improve upon it. The "Restless Dreams" version has a substantial extra scenario which adds some backstory and lore, but should probably be played only after completing the main game.
• Silent Hill 3. This one does continue the story of the first game, somewhat. To be honest I remember enjoying it but not much in terms of particulars.
• Silent Hill 4: The Room. Started out as a separate game unrelated to the Silent Hill mythos, but was rewritten to become an SH game during development. This sounds like it might be a terrible cash-in, but it really is a perfect fit for the SH universe. IMO almost as strong as SH2.
• Silent Hill: 0rigins. A PSP game set as a prequel to the first game. A little light on story, and with some odd combat mechanics, but I still found it very enjoyable. I played the later PS2 port.
• Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. A "reimagining" of the story from the first game. It plays and feels very different to the previous games, but I still enjoyed it quite a lot.
• Silent Hill: Orphan. A series of point-and-click adventures for Java-enabled mobile phones from the 2000s. Totally different mechanics from the mainline games, but they do the atmosphere and story well if you don't mind the slower pace of point-and-click. They run on some J2ME emulators.
• Silent Hill: Alchemilla. A free fan-game centered on the Alchemilla Hospital, but also including several other locations. First-person view with many puzzles and no combat. Very polished and really nails the atmosphere.

I played a little of Silent Hill: Homecoming but got tired of it about 1/3 of the way through (I guess). I also bought Silent Hill: Downpour but gave up on that even more quickly. I don't recommend either of them. Things introduced in the earlier games for specific psychological reasons related to the plot - especially sexy monster nurses and Pyramid Head - tend to be regurgitated in the later games for no real reason other than "Silent Hill", which removes their impact completely.

Swap the positions of Minish Cap and Link to the Past, then play them from the bottom up.

I'm not sure if that's the actual release order, but it feels like the right "progression" to me.

It is available on mobile BUT I encourage you to get the PC version on Steam because the mobile one doesn't include the pretty decent voice acting

That's odd; I was sure that I played some of this on Android with voice acting, so I searched my records and discovered that I also got it from Humble Bundle. I just downloaded and installed it to check, and aside from a warning that it was written for an older version of Android, it seems to be working fine, full voice acting included. There's an option to turn it off, but it was on by default for me.

Maybe there was an issue with your specific device?

Since this is marked as "solved", I wish you'd post the answer! Not just for me, since I've seen this show but can't remember which series it was from and now it's driving me crazy, but for anyone else in the future who's searching for this same show and finds this post.

I can't respond directly because I haven't played either Metroid Dread or Hollow Knight specifically, although I've played and enjoyed many other metroidvania games, including the majority of the Metroid series (I even enjoyed Metroid Other M... mostly). But I'll say that there's no rule that prevents metroidvanias from being entertaining until you unlock some specific part of the ability set. The search to unlock new abilities should be fun itself.

I think that we mostly agree. My contention is that pretty much the entire game should still be engaging to play; having a long total play time shouldn't excuse that, and a shorter play time simply doesn't allow for it. Plenty of games have shown that it's possible to gradually layer mechanics one or two at a time, creating experiences around those smaller subsets of abilities that are still entertaining. I work in education and this idea is vital to what I do. Asking students to sit down and listen quietly as I feed them a mountain of boring details while promising, "Soon you'll know enough to do something interesting, just a little longer," is a sure-fire recipe for losing my audience.

And as I think you may have intimated, creating environments that require the use of only one ability at a time reduces those abilities to a boring list. When you've finally taught the player each ability in isolation, and suddenly start mixing everything up once they get to the "good part" of the game, they'll virtually have to "relearn" everything anyway.

We don't need to give the player everything at once to make our games interesting, but we do need to make sure that what we're giving them piecemeal is interesting in the moment.

Just a quick heads-up: I've been working with SDL2 and OpenGL lately, using LazyFoo's tutorials, and there's a tiny point that could save you hours of head scratching. I e-mailed them about it but either they didn't read it or thought I was mistaken, because the page hasn't changed.

In the part where they talk about "SDL and Modern OpenGL", they use OpenGL 3.1, and make a very explicit note at the bottom of the page that you DON'T need to create a vertex array object, because that only became a requirement in OpenGL 3.2 and above. That appears to be correct according to the specification, but from my searches it lools like there is more than one OpenGL implementation/driver that incorrectly DOES require VAOs, even for OpenGL 3.1. If you compile the Lazy Foo example code and it mysteriously does nothing (it won't crash, it just won't draw anything), this might be why. It may be that all you need to do is add one line that creates a VAO in the initialization. Since the example code never changes any settings, you won't have to actually do anything with it.