For me, the cherry on top of this little piece of embarrassing history is something that only a handful of people remember: The PS1 had an official mouse controller, and this was one of the few games that supported it.
I bought the mouse when it came out, and I got a copy of this game about 10 years ago, and I've gotta say it works very well. It was also how I played the single-player campaign of Quake 2 back in the day.
There are all sorts of licensing shenanigans when dealing with HDMI, so I wonder if it's compatible with their open source policy. But personally I'd have put a VGA output on it as a compromise between period correctness and modern usage. Easy to output as analog from the console, and easy to convert cleanly for modern displays with inexpensive adapters.
Heh, TFW someone describes "resurrecting" a "low-spec" machine, and others talk about how old and out of date it is, and it's roughly equivalent to your main gaming PC.
How many techie types have had someone come to them and say something like "Hey, you know tech thing XYZ? You know how it sucks? Well I've got a great idea: make a BETTER one! So what do you say? You whip it up in an afternoon, I'll handle marketing, and we'll be rich!"
Like they really thought that the issue is just that no-one can see the flaws. They thought that the fix is super easy and they're just the first person clever enough to see it.
At the very least, please state which section you made small changes to, even if you are sure it's not worth mentioning what or why.
People are writing a lot of things that I agree with, but I want to chime in with two points.
The first, which one or two other commenters have touched on, is that in 2024 we have approximately 50 years of content already in existence. There's no need to limit ourselves to what's been released in the last 12 months. Classic books, music, plays, and movies stay popular for decades or centuries. Why feel shamed out of playing old games by 12-year-olds and the megacorps?
The second thing is, yes, try indie games, and IMO the best place to find them is for PCs on itch.io. Forget 95% of what's marketed as "indie" on consoles.
Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.
Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour.
You make it sound trivial. While Sega left a security hole open for games to be loaded from a regular CD, the official games were released on GD-ROMs, a dual-layer CD with a 1.2 GB capacity.
So first off, you couldn't read them completely in a regular CD-ROM or even DVD-ROM drive. (I'm not counting the "swap" method because it's failure-prone and involves partially dismantling the drive and fiddling with it during operation.) You had to connect your console to a computer and use some custom software to read the GD-ROM on the console, and send the data over.
Once you had the data, you then had the problem of trying to fit a potentially 1.2 GB GD-ROM image onto a regular CD-ROM. A handful of games were actually small enough to fit already, and 80-minute and 99-minute CD-Rs would work in the DC and could store larger games. But for many games, crackers had to modify the game files to make them fit.
Often they would just strip all the music first, because that was an easy way to save a decent amount of space. Then if that wasn't enough, they would start stripping video files, and/or re-encoding audio and textures at lower fidelity.
Burning a CD-R from a downloaded file was easy, but ripping the original discs and converting them to a burnable image generally was not.
Whatever it may have become in later years, Alan Kay, who is often called "The Father of Object-oriented Programming", outlined the message-passing idea as the main concept he was driving at, originally.
He also says that he probably misnamed it.
Here's a discussion in which the man himself makes a (small) appearance: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/46592/so-what-did-alan-kay-really-mean-by-the-term-object-oriented
This isn't a slight against you, OP, or this game, but I'm just suddenly struck by the way that, "aside from the first few hours," or more commonly, "it gets better a couple of hours in," has become a fairly common and even somewhat acceptable thing to say in support of a game, as part of a recommendation.
As I get older I'm finding that I actually want my games to have a length more akin to a movie or miniseries. If a game hasn't shown me something worthwhile within an hour or so, I'm probably quitting it and never coming back.
Yes, refuse to federate from the get-go. By the time the hostilities become open, it'll be far too late not only to attempt to repair any existing damage, but even to avoid further damage coming down the line like a juggernaut.
Plenty of large corporations have shown time and again that SOP is to take over and kill any potential threats before they can develop. When a corporation finds another corporation using their resources for gain, even while still following terms and conditions, the lawyers come out and the fur flies. Why should we be pushovers just because we're not rich and don't have a legal fiction to hide behind?
The Fediverse is a direct competitor to monolithic social networks. That's definitely how they see us, and it's how we should see them. I know that there's a "share and share alike" ethos behind all of this, and that blocking any entity arbitrarily feels wrong and unfair, but it really isn't. I also know that, assuming that things go well, one day there will be successful business ventures that evolve naturally from the Fediverse, and the community is going to have to decide how to respond to those situations in time. But right now we're a group of little pigs playing in a somewhat secure pen, and a huge, voracious wolf is asking us to open the gate so it can join in our game. By the time we realize that we haven't seen Jerry or Louise for a while, the wolf will have changed the lock on the gate and spread rumors about us to the other animals.
If people still feel uncomfortable with refusing a large corporation "just because", then make a policy: "Due to the dangers inherent in unequal business relationships, it is our general policy to refuse federation with any entity with an average annual turnover in excess of US$200,000." You can always make exceptions, and even change the policy later, but it can ease your conscience that you aren't unfairly targeting one entity without justification; you're sticking to a sensible policy.
We bought a new car a few years ago that came with a whole suite of sensors and warnings. I'd like to turn them off, but my partner insists on turning them on again every time I do, so I need to deal with them. In the first six months with the new car, I think I had four or five near-accidents caused by the "safety" system suddenly making some loud noise when I was already partway through a manoever. But after a while I became able to tune out the stream of beeps, boops, and buzzes that come about half a second too late to be of any use, when they're not false alarms.
The car also has a "safety" feature I don't think I can disable, that restricts acceleration when proximity sensors are triggered. It was not a pleasant feeling to be in the path of a multi-ton truck, flooring the accelerator, and having the car slowly mosey forward at the pace of a quiet afternoon stroll down a country lane. Worse, I believe that it was the barrelling behemoth itself which caused this reaction. Fortunately, I found quite by accident that if you keep pumping the accelerator in a blind panic for a couple of seconds, the car decides that you might really be serious about accelerating, and that maybe it should defer to the actual human intelligence that's nominally in control of the vehicle. That, or the idiot software finally clocked that I was already in the truck's way, and needed to get out of it. But subsequent events have lent credence to the pedal-pumping theory.
I feel like new, automated "safety" features are going to kill and injure at least as many people as they protect.