Great episode, hope Heather comes back in the future!
Thanks for fielding my question re: controller buttons. Glad to hear Heather and Frank bring up the two specific things I had on my mind when I asked it (the Select button and that big honkin’ GCN A button, respectively). I feel like the evolution of the Select button would make an interesting deep dive article, or at the very least a pretty intricate flow-chart! Re the GCN controller, I’m sad that the idea of more specialized button shapes and placement was something of an evolutionary dead end. Nintendo kept the dream alive with the Wii remote, but it was back to the symmetrical diamond face button layout for the Wii U and Switch. I guess its a good thing that the reanimated corpse of the GCN controller is being dragged from generation to generation by the Smash community.
Re: the museum discussion, I am really interested in learning more about the Atari 2600 exhibit Frank mentioned and the Sega Genesis technical writeup @exodus mentioned. Is there a link to that article you were discussing? I’m a big fan of technical breakdowns of console technology and programmed aimed at the layman and would love to read it! I mean, I just watched a 20 min video about an obscure C++ trick Quake III used to calculate an inverse square root, which was way more interesting than it sounds.
I appreciate all the recs, as always! I wanted to echo what Frank said about DG Voodoo 2–I discovered it not too long ago trying to play Gabriel Knight 3 on my Windows 10 PC and I managed to get it up and running pretty much flawlessly.
One other thing, with all of this Skies of Arcadia talk, what would be the ideal way to experience this game in the year 2021?
edit: also, keep the music recs coming! Currently jamming out in D’LaVance Zone Act 1