On the other side of this, you have company’s that are in tangential fields looking to grab up a piece of that pie. Electricians, low voltage companies, fucking furniture companies (oh, we totally do audiovisual, that’s similar enough), the C-suite is trying to force their way into this new golden goose and expecting their staff to be able to handle this without training, time, or real hands on experience. And, no, a 2 day workshop from a manufacturer isn’t really “training”, at least not the only training needed…

And that the Wikipedia article discussing it is in fact wrong as well…

Sorry, there isn’t a lot of contemporaneous discussion referencing microtransactions on an arcade game that came out in the mid-90s… Back then, we paid up and complained about it to your friends or the person who had their coin on the table.

Basically, the gist is during game play, at specific breaks, you could have the opportunity to buy things like characters, combat abilities, infinit resources, etc.

Here you can even watch someone play the game. Miracle of the internet age, you can just open up a browser, type in “double dragon 3 arcade gameplay” and watch someone play the game and live the experience of being 10 years old in the 90s vicariously through someone else.

Or you could even download the PC port, or play it in emulation on your device of choice so you can truly see if those nasty first-hand accounts are telling the truth and you don’t have to question whether those people posting were knowledgeable, astroturfing, etc.

I thought it was going to be hard to find, since this was an arcade game from my childhood… But here’s one article from Neogaf.

If you Google “Double dragon 3 arcade insert coins”, there are reddit articles, forums talking about this, and even the Wikipedia article talks about this being one of the first commercial games to have in-game micro transactions.

"The U.S. version also features item shops where players could use additional credits to purchase in-game items such as weapons, a

dditional moves and new playable characters in one of the earliest forms of microtransactions in a video game, although this system would end up being removed in the later-released Japanese version…"

Also, not defending Bethesda’s practice, but Horse armor also wasn’t their first microtransaction for oblivion…

They also had themes and stuff on the Xbox store, and literally told people that these types of things were going to be released.

To be fair - I didn’t buy oblivion, a friend of mine had it for Xbox, and I went and sailed the kazaa seas and downloaded the base game + all the DLCs without having to pay micro$oft’s ransom. Only pointing out that we knew well before horse armor that gamers will open their wallets for this.

Double dragon 3. You had to put coins into the arcade machine to literally buy items from an in-game store…

Also, second life came out before Oblivion.

So if I turn the car battery upside down, a 12v DC battery should run a 120v AC appliance?? Brilliant! I have an idea for how we can use this with two fans to create infinite energy!

Do you know what BSOD is?

It isn’t. It would most likely be windows IoT. it’s an embedded windows OS that allows for a single app instance to be running.

You’d be surprised how many things run windows IoT right now…

So… Literally the same voice input, but now with more time overhead waiting for responses so that it can be a bit more human sounding?

Because now manufacturers are tying the last year of their warranty to having the devices connected to their stupid information harvesting apps.

What? There have been hundreds of experiments confirming many different hypotheses of quantum physics…

The photoelectric effect you have seen nearly every day (have you every used a modern camera with auto-iris? What about solar power?)

The double-slit experiment proves that subatomic particles can act as both a particle and a wave, which is pretty instrumental in further theories of QM.

Freedman-Clause verified quantum entagnlement.

Usage of Nuclear energy for both bombs and generating electrical power…

Superconductors and Cooper-pairs.

Even the other poster joking about the Copenhagen interpretation - Copenhagen lead to discoveries in Qubit measurement (read up on Quantum State Tomography).

Quantum physics isn’t one single, independent theory… And it keeps evolving as our understanding changes.

Ohtheirony.jpg

It isn’t. Or at least it isn’t as big of a problem as they are letting on. https://www.retaildive.com/news/retailers-crime-problem-numbers/699107/

Shrink has hovered around 1.5% (that’s 1.5% of total sales…) And the NRF has been coy about the fact that 1/3 of that shrink is “administrative” issues - lost product, mis allocated, warehouse issues, broken in transit, etc.

Additionally, a little less than a third is from employee theft, and a the remaining 36% is external theft.

But since they lump mistakes and general admin issues in with theft, they get to claim a higher number whenever they complain very loudly so that they can redirect the conversation away from the massive increase in profits they have had, along with the increase in wage theft cases they are losing, as well as trying to cover up the fact they are closing “under performing” stores in poorer neighborhoods (which not limits access to people in those locations, but the store doesn’t care, they dont buy stuff anyway…).

I kinda think it’s ChatGPT’s interpretation of Tux?

Honest question, as I don’t own or play starfield: Is the mod scene not strong?

And if you REALLY need the Photoshop workflow… there is always gimpshop.

But how do we know? They didn’t use the sarcasm font!

Narrator: “It wasn’t”.

Sure, let’s just say Final Fantasy was the only popular JRPG around 1997 and we can forget about Pokemon, Earthbound/Mother, Super Mario RPG, Zelda, Dragon Quest…

To be fair… Mac works 90% with Mac hardware. It’s third party things that can screw you up… Like that pesky “USB” everyone is talking about. Who knew reading the official documentation and creating a USB driver for your own chipset would break all the USB devices not made by Mac? Who would have thought? At least there is an Intel emulation layer you can run in…