10 ms·
Tape Recovery Simulator 96K
- bencollier49 5y agoThis feels like an elaborate joke that I didn't get.
- villgax 5y agoReminds me how how Basecamp would have acted during WW2 as well. Nothing to do with business so take it outside.
- efnx 5y agoI love that this is blurring the lines about what the idea of a game is. I bet a lot of people will hate this game and a lot of people will love it (and a lot will just be like huh?). One thing for sure is that it looks interesting.
- the_af 5y agoI can't tell if this is a joke or an actual game, but I find this blurring of the lines interesting. Another game that blurred the lines that is actually one of my all-time favorites is Papers, Please. This is a game about being an immigration officer, a bureaucrat stamping papers and examining work permits... and it's brilliant and tremendously engaging. It can only exist as an indie game, of course -- imagine EA saying "yes, let's spend money on building and publishing a bureaucrat simulator".
- eru 5y agoThe author of Papers Please also made The Return of the Obra Dinn. It's another game about bureaucracy. This time you play as an insurance investigator.
- ansible 5y agoI never got around to finishing that one. There's an article out there about how the 1-bit color rendering works, which I found quite interesting: https://blog.playstation.com/archive/2019/10/17/lucas-pope-on-return-of-the-obra-dinns-art-style/ https://blog.playstation.com/archive/2019/10/17/lucas-pope-o...
- the_af 5y agoYou should try to finish it, it's pretty satisfying. Do note some mysteries have more than one solution. It makes sense, when you think that "who" did "what" to "whom" has more than one possible interpretation, and the game tends to accept most of them as valid!
- jcranmer 5y agoMy recollection is that most of the multiple solutions are actually just cases where you're supposed to identify one correct solution, but how that solution actually maps to the very limited possible choices is ambiguous. This is most annoying in (I think) chapter 5, which is where you get some of the more difficult characters to identify, dying deaths that are somewhat ambiguous, involving some of the supernatural aspects of the story, all in scenes that can only be visited by going through other scenes (so it's hard to go back and check them).
- the_af 5y agoI know what you mean, but didn't find it annoying. I'm also in the camp of people who enjoy that there's not teleport within the ship -- you must walk everywhere, and if this is tedious tough luck! Walking inside actual ships requires walking. As for the other ambiguous situation I mentioned, I found it hilarious in the "guns don't kill people, other people do" sense ;) At this point I have blind faith in anything Lukas Pope creates.
- eru 5y agoThe ship is fairly small and compact, so I didn't mind the lack of teleport very much.
- the_af 5y agoYes, of course, I love Obra Dinn too. But that's a more traditional tale of adventure, by the author's own admission -- that the player is an insurance investigator barely matters. You're on board a mysterious ship and must investigate its fate... sounds intriguing by definition!
- frob 5y agoI feel just about anything by Zachtronics fits this category. Spacechem was the title that got me back into indie gaming in 2012, but almost every single one of their games is essentially programming for fun. They really dropped the facade with Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. The beautiful part about those games is how much story and narrative is pushed through design docs and specs and hidden man pages. I feel Factorio also sits right on the edge of this category. You do get to shoot bugs, but in the end, you're really just debugging a giant wafer.
- the_af 5y agoFactorio is amazing and for a brief time I got really addicted to it. Like you said, you're debugging an giant circuit. In the end I stoppped playing though. It felt like too much work, and rang too close to my day job. Fortunately, I'm neither an immigrations bureaucrat nor a 19th century insurance investigator, so those themes seem more fascinating to me!
- frob 5y agoI've been playing the demo for a few hours a week over the past month. Any game that gets me to restart on the second level not because I'm dieing but because I think to myself, "No, I can do better than this," is a winner in my book. Also, if I've derived more fun from this demo than I have from many other $30 and $60 games, so I'm already leaving towards paying for the full game. I understand what you mean about the day job thing. I got about 60% of the way through Shenzhen before walking away. Fortunately, I'm not a chip-designer, so hopefully that horizon is farther away with Factorio.
- the_af 5y agoDon't get me wrong -- I bought Factorio and adored every second of the first level or so. But the thought of going through it all a second time proved too mentally exhausting. I commend its creators, I just avoid the game now. Who knows, in a couple of years I may get hooked again.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Snoozus 5y agoGreat, where do I sign up?
- kencausey 5y agohttp://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/TRS/details.html http://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/TRS/details.html edit: This link doesn't really answer the burning question, which is "How do I play?". After a bit of looking around it seems that as of today, you don't, it doesn't appear to be released yet.
- bityard 5y agoNow there's a domain name that I haven't heard in a very long time
- notjustanymike 5y agoRight!? Up there with Adrenaline Vault, VE3D, and the original Shacknews before it got bought out. Good times...
- Fuzzwah 5y agoAnd reminds me once again that .plan files and finger was twitter before twitter.
- Twirrim 5y ago> Tape backups are still a thing in some places, but they are generally considered a relic of the past. Well that's utter BS. Tape is still a dominant backup form, particularly for archival purposes. The market is big and still growing year on year. You can't get the same data density and portability out of any other form of backup, and it is a format still under heavy development and refreshes, with LTO-9 due out this year introducing 45TB media at 1GB/s.
- pessimizer 5y agoThese are audio cassette backups, Commodore 64 style.
- meepmorp 5y agoNot just backups. I bought software for my Atari 400 on audio cassette, back in the day.
- cawigames 5y agoTape Recovery Simulator 96K will initially focus on audio-casette data, Speccy-style (48K). Commodore 64 and other formats will not be supported, but that could probably change with enough pressure from fans.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoI think by that they referred to audio cassette tapes specifically, not the custom tapes used for backups these days nor the tape reels of the 60s/70s. They don't use audio as an intermediate format like the 8-bit era tape drives did. As cleaning up this audio is the main gameplay mechanic here, it makes sense that that sentence refers to audio tapes specifically.
- cawigames 5y agoYes, I confirm that. The game will operate on 2 levels: audio tweak and software processing on 8bit era data. The main appeal about 8bit era is that the data quantity is low, and this allows some nice bit level gameplay mechanics. This works nicely on 13-byte (104 bits) headers, but it won't work on gigabyte(8623489024 bits) files. It hasn't stopped me to joke about it: http://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/games.html#TRS185Tb http://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/games.html#TRS185Tb
- GekkePrutser 5y agoInteresting game idea :) I initially thought it could actually read old tapes, I was hoping this because I'm trying to recover some old Atari stuff. But no. Funny idea though!
- pronoiac 5y agoChecking my bookmarks, look at wav2cas - http://home.planet.nl/~ernest/atarixle.html http://home.planet.nl/~ernest/atarixle.html - though I haven't actually used it.
- antonyh 5y agoSadly shared too soon: it's not yet released. I hope it doesn't end up as vapourware, it'd be fun just for the nostalia.
- highspeedbus 5y agoDoing the real thing is a lot of fun. Just need a bunch of used tapes and a walkman or generic tape recorder. You can convert files using kcs on msdos. The ultimate experience would be loading an entire program and running it straight out the tape instead of converting wav files back and forth. Sadly the IBM PC tape port is an obscure extension and is totally nonexistent on emulators.
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoLove the idea, but I'll just say they dev is really missing a trick here. For the UI they should follow Zachtronics lead and go extreme skeuomorphic, lots of dragging tapes into players and connecting cords, clicking buttons. Feel these are the details and the vibe that make Zachtronics so successful. They give you an atmosphere, aesthetic and world to be immersed into. So instead of "Virtual tape player" windows and virtual tapes it should be like an actual tape player on the screen and people are posting you actually tapes you drag into the player and stuff along with written letters etc.
- onurcel 5y agothat's funny. I have a project of recovering a game I wrote on Commodore 64 as a kid. It is saved on an audio tape. You can guess I have a strong motivation since it's for getting back something personal. I have the wav files ready, and regular conversion programs fail to recover it. I have a few ideas, one of them being using a sequence to sequence NN. The intuition is that the output domain has a strong structure (C64 basic program tokens) so the decoder can learn to generate valid programs. It looks like it is going to be funnier than this game :)
- thamalama 5y agoBeen meaning to resurrect my old vic20 system just so I can wait in anticipation of my "game" to load from the cassette tape. Nostalgia is a helluva of a good drug.
- th0ma5 5y agoI think you can put the emulators in like a 1x mode? I do not look back fondly on waiting for things to load hahha
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoactual link to official webpage about the game: http://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/TRS/details.html http://caffeinewithdrawalgames.com/TRS/details.html
- dann0 5y agoWow! I lived through that and do not have any nostalgia for tape shenanigans!