every now and then i see "speedruns" like "beat the end in 20 seconds" but the process involves like a hundred quit/reload abuses to dupe items or similar. how can this be counted as a speedrun??? if you tried that on real hardware you'd be waiting an hour for all the load times, i dont think its fair to just handwave them away to nothing. maybe add a fixed "load time" penalty instead of treating it as zero.

what's the best tas that doesn't use this trick?

source code available at https://codeberg.org/nupanick/qrplay

psst, any suggestions for good 1 screen 4 player pc games?

cutting machine is a pre-owned Silhouette Portrait v1 that i got on ebay. i dont have a color printer so these are shaded by hand with an orange marker. art by mikifluffs!

cards, dice, icehouse pyramids, and tiny plastic ducks

i designed this and ordered a print from mightyskins, it came out pretty good!

using an android phone running retroarch, an 8bitdo Zero Two wireless controller, and this 3D printable mount https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5998094 .

works pretty good for gb/gbc titles, and its much smaller than other controller attachments! I've been using it for some gba stuff too, like Game and Watch Gallery 4 or Pokemon: Too Many Types, which don't require the L/R buttons.

if this makes you want to buy a controller, I recommend the 8bitdo Micro, which is the same size but with two extra buttons.

based on https://sona.pona.la/wiki/sitelen_pona

inspired by The Best Way To Count.

made this to demonstrate mermaid flowchart generator

Homeworlds is a pure strategy game played using a set of colored pyramids. The colors and sizes represent different resources, and the goal is to build an interstellar supply chain to destroy your opponent's home planet.

Because the game is pure strategy, there's a risk of the meta becoming stale someday. Chess and Go are intimidating to new players because you basically have to study centuries of meta before you can do anything new in them.

So I've been thinking about ways to modify Homeworlds to be "imperfect strategy". This is my favorite pitch so far: the Secret Weapon.

When building your homeworld at the start of the game, each player also secretly places a 12mm dice under a large opaque pyramid. I'm using black 'mids here because they're not used for any purpose in game. The number on the hidden die represents one of the four resource types: 1 = yellow (warp), 2 = red (steal), 3 = green (replicate), 4 = blue (transform).

Once per game, without costing an action, you may reveal your Secret Weapon. Immediately take any piece of that color from the bank, and build it at your homeworld.

I haven't playtested this yet, so let me know if you do. I'm hoping it would lead to situations in the early- to mid-game, such as "hmm, I think it's safe to build a large piece, because you can't steal it this turn... unless your secret weapon is red, of course." The bluff and counter-bluff would make it impossible to play perfectly, so the meta would always have room to evolve.