Redkey

This looks like an attempt to copy the "Hello Neighbor" concept wholesale, although the most trustworthy looking review has much worse things to say about it. The majority of the reviews are pretty obvious shills, but I'll give a special shout-out to whoever wrote this line that made me laugh (I don't think I've seen it before):

"Made me cry but the tears came out of my underwear."

Yep, I put an Afterburner mod in mine back in the day and got the best of both worlds: a screen you can see without standing outside at midday, and a comfortable, wide layout that doesn't make your hands cramp up.

I don't know if I'd say it's the worst, but it must be in the top 10: The cookie baking puzzle from Still Life.

TL;DR The author of the puzzle mocked complaining players for not having basic cooking knowledge, but I think that the more you actually know about cooking, the less likely you are to find the "correct" solution.

The player character has promised to make a batch of Grandma's special Christmas cookies. However, Grandma wrote her method in code (e.g. "a cup of love", "a tablespoon of romance"), and while the PC can remember the list of ingredients, she can't remember which is which.

Now, some things are pretty clear; the recipe isn't going to call for two cups of ginger and a teaspoon of flour. And there's only one item given without a quantity, so that must be the egg (even if it goes into the mix at the completely wrong time). But there are literally no other hints in the game, and the puzzle's author confirmed (more on this later) that you're supposed to solve it by having some real-world, basic cooking knowledge.

The problem is that the author didn't seem to know quite as much about cooking as they thought they did. Also, there are places where swapping ingredients would be perfectly acceptable (it would change the flavour, but how is the player supposed to know how the finished cookies are meant to taste?)

When I played the game, I did have some basic cooking knowledge. I'd made (from scratch) cookies, cakes, soups, stews, and even done a couple of roasts. I tried to solve this puzzle on my own multiple times. And the game won't tell you you've got it wrong until you've mixed everything and put it in the oven. I'm sure this would've been annoying enough with a mouse, but I was playing with a controller on an OG XBox, moving a slow pointer around with a thumbstick. Ugh.

Anyway, after spending far too long on it, I hit the net for a walkthrough, but in the process I found an interview with the author, in which this very puzzle was discussed. The interviewer mentioned that a lot of players hated this puzzle, and asked if the author had any response. As much as smugness can be transmitted through plain text, he smugly stated that it wasn't his fault if players didn't have basic life skills like simple cooking.

I won't go into details, but the more I've learned about cooking in general, and baking cookies in particular, the less sense the method of that recipe makes.

I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner's photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.

I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup "options", which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn't seem to be any way to do it while using the "service" normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.

People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these "services" with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I'd imagined.

Assembler, BASIC, Old C code, Cobol...

...Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, Modern C code, PHP, Java, Python, C++, Lua, JavaScript, C#, Rust...

The list is infinite.

Show me a language in which it is impossible to write spaghetti code, and I'll show you someone who can't recognize spaghetti code when it's written in one of their favourite languages.

I haven't done it myself, but briefly flirted with the idea a while ago. This seems to be a solid guide, including tips specifically for the Surface Pro 8:

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup

Even crazier, the C64 version was only distributed in North America, ignoring the majority of potential buyers. And it apparently runs OK on PAL machines without modification.

One of the big draws of the game was all the detail in the backgrounds, and the little touches of animation. The C64 version being disk-only allows it to retain a surprising amount of this. As a tape game, the already long inter-level load times would've blown out and ruined the game.

I don't think that an NES or Master System port could've covered the game even as well as the C64 version. But I agree that it is strange that there was no Mega Drive or SNES version. The SNES in particular could've replicated a lot of the arcade's scaling effects with a minimum of trickery.

Guys, I know AI slop sucks, but maybe don't shoot the messenger (downvote OP)? I think it's worth knowing how mainstream media is presenting this.

These "home pong" consoles were very common at the time. They don't really do much, so their main value is historical interest, and this isn't a particularly famous model. A quick eBay search seems to indicate it might go for GBP 80 at most, but probably more like GBP 20-40. So OP got a good deal, but they didn't find a lost Vermeer. :)

They probably did. It's not exactly honest, but the system is technically outputting a colour signal, and it was released at a time when that wasn't a given. They didn't say "full colour" anywhere on the box, did they?

Let's call it a mix of lower expectations for the time, and a bit of marketing deception.

Found in an Edinburgh charity shop, so while it's not impossible, it's unlikely.

EDIT: Also, an NTSC signal on a plain PAL TV would be black and white (not even false colours) even if you got an otherwise stable picture.

It's easy to forget, but these old systems didn't connect to the TV with composite RCA connectors, but via RF. So we're not just dealing with straight PAL, but with PAL over a broadcast system. Scotland was using PAL-I for broadcast, while Poland seems to have used a combination of PAL-D and PAL-K. Differences in channel ranges and bandwidths, and sound channel offsets, could make it difficult to tune a TV set designed for one system to a signal from another, especially if it's a more modern set designed for automatic operation, as OP's set appears to be.

In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer's memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.