• 12 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • FidoNet does still exist, but it’s commonly called “fight-o-net” for a reason, as there are… some characters there.

    If you do resurrect your node, I’d suggest also picking up FSXnet, as it’s the second largest network, is better maintained, and has a no-politics-or-religion rule that makes it way more pleasant to be on.

    Or, you know, you could call one of the BBSs out there, and make a sysop’s day by being a user, as non-sysop users are not super common, at this point. You can try my BBS at http://bbs.stormbbs.com or telnet://telnet.stormbbs.com, if you’d like to see FSXnet and FidoNet in their current lives.

    But there are plenty of other BBSs out there, too, and my BBS is really only special because I have an ANSI calendar with a different graphic every day that I made 370-ish graphics for. It celebrates a holiday every day.

    And if you’re wondering about BBS networks in general, I recently found out about https://clrghouz.bbs.dege.au/domain/list , which has way more info than I was expecting about what the available FTN networks look like.


  • Yeah, I think they could’ve done that one better, though I guess they had a variety of reasons why they didn’t have those campaigns. Some things that just didn’t work right because of it not being the AoEI engine.

    But I don’t recall specifics on that one, as I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention, given that, despite having the Rome DLC, I haven’t actually played the AoEI content, at all.

    That said, I thought I recall some rumors about them working on porting over the original campaigns, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you get those campaigns eventually.

    But, yeah, not yet, and not something they mentioned specifically in this update, in any way. At least as far as I read.






  • I followed that link, and the post itself seems to not be that, no one in comments was pointing to anything that was a smoking gun on that, and someone else linked to the CEO directly saying that, no, absolutely not, it’d be bad business to do so.

    Which feels weird to defend GoDaddy, because, while I haven’t used them in a few years, my experience with them is that they’re an awful registrar, but mostly because of how hard they make it to transfer away and how sleazy they get with sales tactics. And their ads haven’t been… good, but I’d probably let that slide if they provided reliable, good service.


  • It’s been having monthly updates for a while, at this point. The thing is, yeah, it was released in 1999, but it remained popular despite no significant updates in years, other than fan-made enhancements.

    But they released the HD edition in 2013, and then the DE in 2019, with a variety of expansions / DLC along the way with both of them. Most recent expansion was to add Romans as a playable civ, and port Age of Empires I into the AoEII engine, so that you wind up playing AoEI in AoEII.

    But, yeah, kinda cool that the game continues to receive support, and continues to receive support because it continues to be popular.

    And, yeah, my desktop is overkill for the game. Though the requirements have gone up a fair bit since it was released in 1999. But it’s not like it’s slinging around a full scene of detailed 3D models or anything.



  • I’ll second that. I’ve been using them for 4 or 5 years, and have been pleased.

    There even was a day where there was an outage for my server, and they made it right by giving everyone credits roughly equal to 3 years of service or something. I thought that was overkill, and I guess they’ll take a loss on it, but… the instincts are nice. It seems like a place where it’s some dude taking care of servers, rather than a giant corporation who is more focused on extracting money than providing a great service for a reasonable cost.


  • Agreed!

    As a child playing this, I got to be decent at the arcade version (biggest hint is to not use nitros, unless doing so would directly result in winning, because otherwise the computer starts speeding up because of them.), and would happily play for an hour on only a few tokens.

    And, yeah, it was fun that steering was, “…and now go spin as fast as possible, and grab onto the steering wheel to stop when the truck has turned the correct direction.”

    It wasn’t really accurate, but I liked Super Mario Kart (SNES) and Stunts (PC) for driving things, and a certain amount of unreality was part of what made them fun.

    But this post was about the console versions of it, none of which I was able to get into, probably because of it not being like the arcade.

    All the same, it’s a bit of a white whale for Lynx, and I’d jump at the chance to own it for any moderately-reasonable price. Even though, obviously, I’d want to own four copies for the one random time when I had enough interested people together in the right place to play the game.