The Cutting Room Floor | Hacker News Reader

The Cutting Room Floor

tcrf.net

109 pointsherbertl21 comments

This wiki is a delightful mine of information! It's also full of humor; as an example, the description for Animal Crossing: New Horizons is:

> Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game in which you rapidly deprive an island of its natural resources in order to craft tools that never stop breaking.

https://tcrf.net/Animal_Crossing:_New_Horizons

There's a lot of strange design choices in ACNH. It feels like there was a miscommunication and they accidentally made all the construction actions and dialog boxes take 10x longer than they were meant to.

Besides that, they also added online features, but using them requires going through a deep dialog tree where a cartoon animal basically says that going online guarantees that hackers will set your console on fire and kidnap your children.

To be fair in the Animal Crossing game on the original DS that basically happened (People could drop glitched items spawned with an Action Replay that would effectively brick your game).

>but using them requires going through a deep dialog tree where a cartoon animal basically says that going online guarantees that hackers will set your console on fire and kidnap your children.

This is classic Nintendo, which has been both absolutely paranoid and deeply incompetent about online services for nearly 30 years now.

The sheer absurdity of Friend Codes speaks for itself.

Nintendo is actually thinking about the future by teaching children how to remember an IPv6 address, how considerate of them!

Japanese devs really see to struggle with this. They love confirmation dialogs for things that don’t need them.

When I navigate 3 menus deep to load a save, or walk through a door to enter an area, I don’t need a confirmation.

Japanese websites are the same way. Ordering from some of them takes 10 steps when it could be 1 because they're so afraid you might not have meant to do something.

The most popular page with Hacker News appears to be the Tetris rant:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342543

https://tcrf.net/The_New_Tetris

Thanks for sharing that article. New Tetris led me down the rabbit hole to the "Dirty coding tricks from game developers" [0] offsite articles. Lots of fun to read anecdotes about turning crashes and malfunctions into features.

[0] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/more-dirty-coding-trick...

The Wing Commander one was a myth. See https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/16279 and its HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37564217

So that's why saving never worked on NBA Jam TE. I figured they lazily didn't remove the save option from the port. A childhood mystery solved at last.

Developers should take it as a cautionary tale that no matter how much good work you do throughout your career, you will absolutely be remembered, above all else, for a stupid code comment you wrote late one night.

Don't vent in code.

I was confused by the 2nd rant using metric and imperial randomly (e.g. describing distance in feet but speed in km/h and temperature in c).

Yeah, Canadian units system usage is somethin' else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Canada#Common_u...

Measuring energy usage per distance, makes a lot more sense though.

Seems normal to me, eh?

Love that site. I used their page on Secret of Mana as a reference [1] during my work making ROM hacks for the game [2] and a large focus of my work was restoring content that was cut, including unused graphics, dialog, and even unused music. Fun project.

[1] https://tcrf.net/Secret_of_Mana_(SNES)

[2] https://www.romhacking.net/?page=hacks&genre=&platform=&game...

Great resource and the community around the site are equally fantastic. I went on spree and contributed most of the WonderSwan[1] and WonderSwan Color[2] content a few years ago. Many titles in the catalog were developed with a handful of engines and a few yara[3] rules made easy pickings.

[1]https://tcrf.net/Category:WonderSwan_games

[2]https://tcrf.net/Category:WonderSwan_Color_games

[3]https://virustotal.github.io/yara/

Gold mine of a wiki.

Check the pages for really big and famous RPGs when you have the time (Fallout 1&2, Baldur's Gate 1&2, Final Fantasy 7, etc.) Some games have so much stuff cut at the last moment you could pratically make a whole new game with it

(2010) maybe?

Er, what gave you that impression?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com