[HN Gopher] LCD, Please
___________________________________________________________________
LCD, Please
Author : abra0
Score : 265 points
Date : 2023-08-08 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dukope.itch.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (dukope.itch.io)
| JeremyBarbosa wrote:
| If anyone has been putting off playing Papers, Please, it is an
| amazing game and currently on sale for its anniversary for only
| $1.99:
|
| https://www.gog.com/en/game/papers_please
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/Papers_Please/
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Further, Lucas Pope recently released the game for mobile OSes,
| and did an awesome job porting it over. There's a great blog
| post at his devblog where he talks about the challenges of
| taking a game originally developed for mouse/keyboard (mostly
| mouse) and making it work in the mobile form factor.
|
| Edit: this one: https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-
| please/mobile/
| hbn wrote:
| I already own it on Steam but I pulled the trigger on the iOS
| version, if not only to support Lucas Pope.
|
| I still haven't played it, but I played through Revenge of the
| Obra Dinn a few years ago and read a lot of his blog posts from
| the development of the game, and I think the guy's an absolute
| genius.
| mattl wrote:
| I'd love to see this on the Play Date console. https://play.date
| rjh29 wrote:
| He's working on a different game for PlayDate, so maybe it
| will?
|
| https://www.escapistmagazine.com/mars-after-midnight-gamepla...
| mattl wrote:
| That would be excellent.
| throwawaydog5 wrote:
| https://play.date/games/recommendation-dog/
| solardev wrote:
| Wait, this thing is STILL in pre-order? When is it actually
| supposed to ship? I first heard about it when the 1st gen
| Switch came out, and then silence for years. I assumed it'd
| come and gone, but it hasn't even actually shipped yet...? Are
| people still expecting it to, or is it considered vaporware by
| this point?
| wombat-man wrote:
| Got mine recently. Nearly an entire year after ordering. It's
| alright.
| evan_ wrote:
| It's shipped, the preorder is for the next batch. They sell
| them in batches.
| mattl wrote:
| I've had mine for over a year.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I recently got an email asking me to confirm my address
| before... today or so, so the next batch is on its way. I
| ordered one for my girlfriend, she really digs it, I hope
| it'll be here before christmas... but not too far before
| because else I'll have to give it to her sooner :p.
| scrame wrote:
| I saw a guy with one on the train a couple months back. I
| think a friend got one, too.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| Mine arrived a couple weeks ago--two years after I initially
| ordered it. Their ordering transparency really does leave a
| lot to be desired.
| noree wrote:
| Lucas Pope's other game, Return of the Obra Dinn, is also
| excellent
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Obra_Dinn
| Covzire wrote:
| For some reason that game makes me insanely nauseous, something
| very few games do.
| verandaguy wrote:
| Careful, you might end up with the return of your Obra
| Dinner.
| butz wrote:
| Still 5 years to go.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| for some reason i just couldn't get into it. i love the
| aesthetic, but i hated the pacing; the game's frequent
| unskippable walking sequences and menu transitions between
| puzzle solving felt like a slog.
|
| papers please is one of my favorite games of all time, though,
| and i enjoyed other first person puzzlers like the witness and
| portal.
| smcl wrote:
| I'm a little bit the same. The look and feel is wonderful,
| the idea is great and novel. I just couldn't get that far
| into it. I _think_ I may have also gotten distracted by the
| release Elden Ring around the time I started playing it, too.
| TylerE wrote:
| I can't even do this aesthetic. Instant massive eye strain.
| adamrezich wrote:
| I played the demo at release (as I'd liked Papers, Please),
| and it completely failed to grab me--aside from the art
| style, which seemed to me to be "wasted" on such a dumb
| gameplay concept.
|
| then I picked it up years later, earlier this year, and was
| absolutely hooked. I practically couldn't put it down until I
| finished. one of my top games of all time. a perfect example
| of how video games, as a medium, can tell stories in ways
| that other media never could--an excellent counterexample to
| cutscenes and dialogue trees being the accepted industry
| standard for storytelling.
| skeaker wrote:
| I had a similar experience. It's unfortunate since I hear it
| get praised constantly for being a masterpiece and I am a big
| fan of puzzle games, but it just would not click for me. I
| think it's also to do with the nature of the puzzle being
| kind of abstract (and at times almost subjective since I
| think multiple answers can potentially be correct for some
| causes of death). The game tries to handle this with the
| evidence book that you can refer to, but it's a massive thing
| that just feels clunky to use due to the sheer size of it.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Same here, and I also felt like I was missing out, since
| people were raving about it so much. But to me it really
| did feel like I had to slowly work on making any progress,
| and I mean "work" in its most tedious meaning.
|
| Though, I wonder whether, had I played past a certain point
| where my evidence book would have had enough "critical
| mass" for things to fall into place more readily, it would
| have been more fun. Not sure it solves the pacing issue,
| though.
|
| I should probably get back to it and find out.
| frabcus wrote:
| I recommend playing it with friends!
| yayachiken wrote:
| I loved the game, but I can see where people struggle.
| You cannot laser-focus on the objective. Just get in
| character, you are on a mysterious ship, it's completely
| abandoned and somehow returned to harbor still. You are
| just trying to get a clue what the heck is even going on
| here, why would you care about filling in a puzzle book?
|
| Just enjoy the first part cinematically. Explore the ship
| and unlock the scenes. Absorb the atmosphere from the
| scenes, and enjoy the music. Try to figure out the
| disjointed narrative, and don't focus on your puzzle
| book. (One of the flaws is that the forced waiting
| sequence should IMO lock you out of accessing the puzzle
| book completely. I often forgot, and got annoyed because
| I could not enter the cause of death before the page got
| unlocked after the scene...) You will not be able to
| solve a lot in the first pass anyways. The game throws
| you some freebies, yes, but that's just to let you get
| used to handling the book.
|
| For context, once I had unlocked all scenes, I had not
| even one quarter of the book solved, and despite what I
| recommend in the first paragraphs, it was not for lack of
| trying. This is when you notice that you have everything
| you need, and a sort of panic sets in. You realize that
| it will not get easier than this. This intrigued me a
| lot, and this was when the real puzzle game starts. Now
| you revisit all the scenes analyzing every nook and
| cranny of the dioramas like some nautical Sherlock
| Holmes. But it's never stupid "hunt the pixel" like one
| would assume from that description, no. I have never seen
| the attention for detail in any game before, and the dev
| really thought of everything.
|
| If you ever find yourself thinking "Oh wow, I can deduce
| something here from the position of that piece of
| scenery, but there is no way this was intended", then the
| answer is always "Oh yes, it totally was". Then you enter
| the suspicion into the book, and suddenly the game
| validates you by copying your notes into print with that
| cheerful music jingle. After a while the screen turning
| black and the first notes starting will give you a
| dopamine rush already.
|
| The game captures perfectly what for example escape rooms
| or detective stories are about. The only real downside of
| the game is that the replay value is 0 by its very
| concept. I envy you for still being able to play it
| blind.
| anyfoo wrote:
| That convinced me to try it out again, with a slightly
| different mindset, thanks.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| ah, i didn't think to try playing the game like that.
| i'll give it a go.
| crickey wrote:
| God im old
| donatj wrote:
| My first thought was literally 0 "Papers, Please" came out ten
| years ago!?
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Oh no, I thought we were old because we recognized LCD games,
| not because we recognized "Papers, Please." Now I feel so
| much older!
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Nothing to make you feel as old as a younger person who
| feels old!
| capitainenemo wrote:
| [EDIT] If anyone is wondering why it is rendering poorly in
| Firefox with Resist Fingerprinting enabled, that's because this
| page seems to serve the game from a random CDN on a different
| host. https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/8469963/index.html in
| my case.
|
| Because the canvas is attempting to read pixels, which can be
| used for fingerprinting, Firefox is blocking this. But because it
| is being done in an iframe, there is no prompt until you open the
| iframe in a new tab at which point you can whitelist it, and it
| will work ok in the original iframe too. Unfortunately reloading
| it in the original may give you a totally different host to
| whitelist, repeating the problem. So, probably best to just play
| outside the iframe.
|
| In order to do that I had to inspect the page and copy the url
| since I can't right click on the game iframe to choose open in
| new tab, probably because it is capturing that.
|
| Oh, you can also allow canvas fingerprinting, but that seems like
| a bad idea - maybe in a separate firefox profile just for sites
| like this one..
| nemetroid wrote:
| It sounds like you have privacy.resistFingerPrinting enabled,
| an experimental feature which is disabled by default:
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-agai...
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Yep! Sorry, didn't mean to imply it wouldn't work at all.
| I'll edit my post if HN still allows me to.
|
| I'll note that apart from a handful of sites where it causes
| additional checks and occasional breakage (noted them in
| another comment below), I'm really happy with that setting. I
| leave it on by default and only have to break out a
| fingerprinted Firefox profile on rare occasion.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > an experimental feature which is disabled by default
|
| Good luck trying to figure out that is the issue if you don't
| keep it in mind at all times. (No matter how obvious it seems
| - hindsight will never not be 20/20.)
| gpspake wrote:
| Random coincidence... This is the second post this has popped
| up in today. Another frontpage post mentioned this in regard
| to getting blocked by Cloudflare.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37049016
| [deleted]
| burkaman wrote:
| What issues are you seeing? It works fine for me, and I'm
| pretty sure I have all the fingerprinting protections turned
| on.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Resist Fingerprinting was enabled. I updated my comment to
| note that.
| solardev wrote:
| It feels like there's one of these "doesn't work on FF" threads
| any time there's a post about a halfway interesting web app.
|
| Intentional or not, they really contribute (in my mind at
| least) to the overall perception that Firefox is truly dead.
| Nobody even tests for it anymore, or worse, accepts that it's
| fine to be broken on FF.
| donatj wrote:
| I think part of the reason nobody tests for it anymore is
| just because web standards have largely gotten so good. I
| don't often test in FireFox these days myself largely in part
| because it just hasn't been a problem in years.
|
| I'm old enough to remember the days when every change I made
| I had to roll through multiple versions of IE all the way
| back to 6, and different things would be broken in different
| versions.
| butz wrote:
| It makes me shudder to remember when we had to include some
| outlandish workarounds just to make shadows work on IE6,
| not to mention custom web fonts.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Remember the Line25 "realistic shadows" pack??
|
| (I cringe when I look at some of the emails I had with
| them back when I was 11, though...)
| [deleted]
| donatj wrote:
| Transparent PNGs using CSS
| filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader
| is my shudder. Flat design would have made life so much
| easier back then.
| burkaman wrote:
| Counterpoint: I use Firefox with every privacy setting
| maximized and several extensions installed, and I can't
| remember the last time I had an issue with something posted
| here. This game works fine for me as well.
|
| The only apps that are noticeably worse in Firefox for me are
| Google Docs and Google Meet.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I feel first we need to validate the original premise that
| there's something wrong with this game in Firefox.
|
| I'm running Firefox, with containers enabled, with ublock
| origins (and as such "somewhat privacy conscious over and
| above the defaults"), and this works fine for me.
|
| There could be any number of things that cause an individual
| issue, which may or may not be related to Firefox itself :-/
| chungy wrote:
| Indeed, I have strict mode enabled, uBlock Origin,
| containers, and the game works completely fine.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Resist Fingerprinting was enabled. I updated my comment
| to note that.
|
| BTW, Resist Fingerprinting's main impact (for me) has
| been to increase triggering of "Click and Hold to prove
| you are not a bot" on sites relying on fingerprinting as
| an anti-bot measure (Drupal, Walmart, Kickstarter). On
| some of those, the developer doesn't even realise that
| measure can trigger, and it triggers in a background XHR
| (Kickstarter does this sometimes).
|
| This is still better than some other sites like Lowes and
| Fedex where the entire site (Lowes) or backend API (Fedex
| package tracking) simply errors due to an Akamai block
| without any option to prove yourself. For those, you
| pretty much just have to use another Firefox profile with
| fingerprinting allowed (or another website).
|
| .. oh, and none of the stuff above is due to Firefox
| blocking anything (like in the situation of this game
| where you have to click in the URL bar on the image icon)
| it's entirely due to the setting working too well, and
| making the user suspiciously generic :)
| schemescape wrote:
| iPad/iPhone also don't allow localStorage to persist in this
| scenario (iframe with unrelated domain). Even worse, there's no
| way to detect the failure because it's to resist
| fingerprinting.
|
| Adtech and mitigations are ruining the internet...
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| It renders just fine for me
| packetlost wrote:
| This is awesome, I'd consider buying one of these if it was real
| nom wrote:
| I've heard that custom LCDs are relatively cheap to order in low
| volumes. This one has quite a lot of segments, but feels doable.
|
| If we can find some premade game-and-watch style cases with
| buttons and battery compartment.. this could be made into a
| product or a hobby kit, without too much expertise or upfront
| cash. Hmmm.
| synack wrote:
| EEVblog did a whole series on designing a segment LCD, getting
| it manufactured, and integrating it into a product. Worth the
| watch if you're at all interested in low power embedded
| systems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYvxgl-9tNM
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| [flagged]
| travisjungroth wrote:
| In the same way that people should think about the impact of
| their purchases, I suggest you consider the impact of your
| communication more seriously. I don't think it is causing
| people to change their behavior in positive ways.
|
| It's the same as things like recycling. We can _wish_ that
| everything was perfect after we throw the can in the bin, but
| the reality is different. People _should_ make better choices
| when called out with the blunt truth. But is that what's
| actually happening?
| chungy wrote:
| [flagged]
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| [flagged]
| chungy wrote:
| Perhaps try getting off your holier-than-thou and no-fun-
| allowed horse. It might let you appreciate that people
| like whimsy.
| fragmede wrote:
| If it's a 3D printable kit with parts for rich Americans to
| solder and assemble in their free time, does it make it
| better? Does it make it better that they're taking that job
| away from a real human in poor conditions, but still better
| than the alternative, conditions?
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| >if
|
| I wrote my reply based on what GP wrote, which implied
| usage of mass produced garbage coming from god knows which
| hellhole factory in Asia. Adding "ifs" (what if it was
| produced by a Star Trek replicator using only solar
| energy?) does not further any argument.
|
| Also, nobody is taking anything away. The market is so
| oversaturated they would simply switch to a different
| product line. But still, carelessly contributing to the
| pile without even thinking about the consequences of your
| actions is not the best thing in the world
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Also, nobody is taking anything away. The market is so
| oversaturated they would simply switch to a different
| product line.
|
| So what you're saying is that even if the product the
| original commenter mentioned wasn't made, waste would
| still get made. So what was the point?
| legitster wrote:
| > This is not a web app running on an AWS virtual machine in
| Ohio.
|
| This also does not come from Magic Unicorn Land. Think of the
| sysadmins and developers in poor conditions who have to
| support the machines and networks. The electricity spent. The
| cycles on server gear. All for a throwaway comment on HN that
| you will forget within a few minutes.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Their tone is off-putting, but there are many orders of
| magnitude difference of impact between serving a game over
| AWS and serving it by mailing someone a small computer with
| an LCD screen.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| [flagged]
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| [flagged]
| deely3 wrote:
| Im not a commenter but you tone is quite arrogant.
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the
| site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that
| you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site
| guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| bobsmooth wrote:
| This is harder than the original.
| turtleyacht wrote:
| > _Celebrating a decade of_ Papers, Please _!_
|
| Additional content at
|
| https://papersplea.se/#year10
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-08 23:00 UTC)