#Graphics Standards Manual

[searchsystem]

Richard Danne & Bruce Blackburn / Danne & Blackburn / National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) / Graphics Standards Manual – Index / Brand Guidelines / 1975

[science70]

U.S. Department of Labor Graphic Communication Standards Manual, 1974.

Designer: John Massey

[gayrobos]

red was right creamy orange bd is good

[thatonegreenleaf]

~urban haze~ reshade preset!

I've been using this preset on my twitch for a bit now, and i've finally gotten around to releasing it!! I'm very happy with it and I currently use it for everything😅

Urban haze has a focus on realistic lighting with a slight hazy and warm feel. Less blue in shadows, darker nights, deeper afternoon shadows, saturated sunsets, balanced greenery. Use it in any world, I've tested them all :)

__________________________________________

How to download:

♥ Download Reshade: (I use reshade 5.7.0, I can't say how this preset will behave with other versions of reshade, or G-shade.)

♥ During Reshade Installation, select The Sims 4, choose DirectX9 as the rendering API.

♥ Effect Packages to install: standard effects, sweetFX by CeeJay, qUINT by Marty McFly, color effects by prod80, and Legacy effects.

♥ Download urban haze below, drop it in your Sims 4 installation's "Bin" Folder

♥ Open the Sims 4, Disable edge-smoothing in your graphics settings if it's not already, In the reshade menu, set RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_REVERSED= to 0 in global preprocessor definitions if it's not, and MXAO_TWO_LAYER= and MXAO_SMOOTHNORMALS= both to 1 in qUINT_mxao's preprocessor's definitions.

♥ If you're struggling with installation, I suggest you check out @kindlespice's installation tutorial! It was made for reshade 4.9.0 but the instructions remain the same.

__________________________________________

Notes:

♥ Both Depth of field shaders are off by default, you can enable them using their shortcuts: ctrl + Q (MagicDOF), ctrl + W (MartyMcFlyDOF) or enable them manually.

♥ MXAO.fx also has a shortcut (ctrl + R) bc sometimes the DOF blur makes the shadows weird, most of the time it's fine!

♥ Could potentially be gameplay friendly, depending on your GPU! The MXAO and DOF shaders will be the most performance heavy, feel free to adjust to your liking.

♥ The pictures above were taken with this preset and no further editing, but I do use a few lighting mods that will affect how my game looks:

♥ NoBlu by Luumia

♥ NoGlo by Luumia

♥ twinkle toes by softerhaze

URBAN HAZE RESHADE PRESET ↠ download on sim file share!

Follow me on twitch!

Support me on patreon!

TOU: do not redistribute, reupload, or claim my cc/CAS rooms/presets as your own! recolour/convert/otherwise alter for personal use OR upload with credit. (no paywalls)

[autolenaphilia]

One of my strongest gaming opinions is that I should be able to manually save my game whenever I want, how many times I want, with lots of save slots. And when I reload it should return my gamestate to exactly what it was when I saved, including the location in the game world, not at the last checkpoint I touched.

This is a very “30-year old boomer” opinion to have, and reveals me as a literal 30 year old who has played a lot of old pc games. But manual unlimited saves used to be the standard for PC games, and it was wonderful. It’s such a quality of life thing for me, it ensures that you won’t lose progress when real-life interrupts your game, or you just don’t feel like playing anymore.

Sure, some games have it still, like the excellent retro-shooter Dusk and that’s great, but a lot of the games world views it as a thing of the past. And of course it was never the standard for console games, they pretty much always had some kind of save game limitation. But that was because of technical limitations that PCs didn’t have. Only having autosaves at pre-defined checkpoints feels like an old console limitation being presented as a feature.

Sure it can be convenient to have autosaves, but without manual saves, it’s suddenly not so convenient when you need or want to stop playing but you will lose serious progress unless you reach the next checkpoint first.

And for games that tout themselves as hardcore and challenging, limiting saves absolutely can increase the challenge for those looking for that. But it feels like a particularly cheap way of adding difficulty.

A game that is difficult even when you have unlimited manual saves, now that’s a real challenge. And that’s the case for a lot of old PC games, who are often infamously difficult. In part that was because their difficulty was designed with the player having unlimited saves and reloads in mind. One of my favorite games is Commandos 2: Men of Courage. It’s difficult, an unforgiving stealth game with long and complex missions in which minor mistakes will almost always lead to a game-over. And the only way to make this playable is the generous save and load system.

To be fair, for a lot of modern AAA games, it’s probably still technically impossible to implement an old-school pc game save system. These games have so much stuff going on that the game state has too much data to save all of it to a save file without that file becoming too big in size. So the designers instead make save games only save only a minimum of data, things like the player’s story progression, inventory items and the latest /nearest checkpoints and reset the rest of the game world when the game reloads.

But frankly this is a case of triple-a games becoming bloated, because in that case the developers’ GPU-melting graphics and massive open world actually gives the player less options, less features than what was once standard.

I can accept video games having limited saves of course. But that requires the rest of the game being good enough to outweigh that, and it will always be a minus in my assessment of the game’s quality.

[cityof2morrow]

Space-O-Rama Build 001

Published: 7-19-2024 | Updated: 7-20-2024 SUMMARY “With intricate geometric patterns, delicate parabolas, and inverted inversion, Space-O-Rama glass sets a new standard that’s out of this world!” An odd mixture of low-to-mid poly items for retro-futuristic builds, inspired by the Space-o-Rama glass fences (Pets EP). There are 41 objects and a host of recolors using texture resources from PineappleForest (2022) actions from CuriousB (2010), Pixelhate, and Klevestav (2015; 2013). Many of the recolors have a weathered/distressed look.

DETAILS Requires Uni, Nightlife, and Apartment Life Eps. §100-500 | Build and Buy Files with “MESH” in their name are required. You also need the BBNiche1Master (BuggyBooz, 2012),  Elemental TXTR Repository, and he Graphic Glass TXTR Repository from the Repository Pack (Simmons, 2023). Additional repo pack recolors can be found on this site under these tags - #co2recolors, #ts2recolors, #ts2repo #co2repo #co2repopack. ITMES 3 Fences (~1622 poly) 5 Divider Screens (1025-1528 poly) 8 Window Boxes (Columns) (576 poly) 4 Doorframes (Deco) (92-1353 poly) 2 Door Rugs (Columns) (34 poly) –for doors 003 and 004 7 Planters (546-1092 poly) 4 Wall Accents (Columns) (8-12 poly) (3) Neon Panels A-C (1080-1521 poly) – sharp corners and some overlap (shadows look better than when the mesh is completely smooth); small gap on the side ; requires the Nightlife EP. 3 Bunker Walls (22-24 poly) – some overlap 3 Garden Panels (99 poly) *You’ll need “moveobjects on” and “grid on/off” cheats since not all parts align perfectly. DOWNLOAD (choose one) from SFS | from MEGA

7-20-2024 UPDATE : Added alternative versions of Doors 3 and 4. The texture on the top interior was distorted when the poly count (“faces”) got reduced. I recolored that part separately in black. If you want the alternative versions, manually delete old files (they are “..doorframe3-MESH” and “…doorframe4-REPO”) and replace them with these new files (“…alt2”). DOWNLOAD (choose one) ALTERNATE DOOR 3 & 4  from SFS | from MEGA CREDITS Thanks: Simmers with meshing, cloning, and fencing tutorials. Sources: Beyno (Korn via BBFonts), Sci-fi House (AiKu via Creative Commons Attribution, 2018), Space-o-Rama Divider (EA/Maxis), 4t2 Eco Living Door (Ethan, 2020), Streets of Utopia (Stonemason, 2024), SciFi Panels (Unity Fan via CCA, 2023), Scifi Gate (Stan via CCA, 2023), Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Street [fan art] (Max Staples via CCA, 2023), Modular Bunker (mats de Wind via CCA, 2020), modular Walls (detona via CCA, 2018).

[argumate]

this NASA graphics standards manual from 1975 is an authoritative work, I hesitate to even call it a style guide, that gives detailed instructions on how to correctly brand everything from folders and cassette tapes to cars and jets and the space shuttle itself.

and it's excellent design work! it's really good, but it's noteworthy that it represents a shift from NASA doing stuff in space like going to the moon to NASA doing stuff in congress like lobbying for more funding for dangerously pointless projects, so the laser focus on communications and public relations takes on a darker tone as management does everything to bolster the agency's reputation besides doing their damn job.

[kremlin]

could you explain for the "it makes the game go faster" idiots like myself what a GPU actually is? what's up with those multi thousand dollar "workstation" ones?

ya, ya. i will try and keep this one as approachable as possible

starting from raw reality. so, you have probably dealt with a graphics card before, right, stick in it, connects to motherboard, ass end sticks out of case & has display connectors, your vga/hdmi/displayport/whatever. clearly, it is providing pixel information to your monitor. before trying to figure out what's going on there, let's see what that entails. these are not really simple devices, the best way i can think to explain them would start with "why can't this be handled by a normal cpu"

a bog standard 1080p monitor has a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, each comprised of 3 bytes (for red, blue, & green), which are updated 60 times a second:

~3 gigs a second is sort of a lot. on the higher end, with a 4k monitor updating 144 times a second:

17 gigs a second is definitely a lot. so this would be a good "first clue" there is some specialized hardware handling that throughput unrelated the cpu. the gpu. this would make sense, since your cpu is wholly unfit for dealing with this. if you've ever tried to play some computer game, with fancy 3D graphics, without any kind of video acceleration (e.g. without any kind of gpu [1]) you'd quickly see this, it'd run pretty slowly and bog down the rest of your system, the same way having a constantly-running program that is copying around 3-17GB/s in ram

it's worth remembering that displays operate isochronously -- they need to be fed pixel data at specific, very tight time timings. your monitor does not buffer pixel information, whatever goes down the wire is displayed immediately. not only do you have to transmit pixel data in realtime, you have to also send accompanying control data (e.g. data that bookends the pixel data, that says "oh this is the end of the frame", "this is the begining of the frame, etc", "i'm changing resolutions", etc) within very narrow timing tolerances otherwise the display won't work at all

3-17GB/s may not be a lot in the context of something like a bulk transfer, but it is a lot in an isochronous context, from the perspective of the cpu -- these transfers can't occur opportunistically when a core is idle, they have to occur now, and any core that is assigned to transmit pixel data has stop and drop whatever its doing immediately, switch contexts, and do the transfer. this sort of constant pre-empting would really hamstring the performance of everything else running, like your userspace programs, the kernel, etc.

so for a long list of reasons, there has to be some kind of special hardware doing this job. gpu.

instead of calculating every pixel value manually, the cpu just needs to give a high-level geometric overview of what it wants rendered, and does this with vertices. a vertex is very simple, it's just a point in 3D space, for example (5,2,3). just like a coordinate grid on paper with an extra dimension. with just a few vertices, you can have models like this:

where each dot at the intersection of lines in the above image, would be a vertex. gpus essentially handle huge number of vertices.

in the context of, like, a 3D video game, you have to render these vertex-based models conditionally. you're viewing it at some distance, at some angle, and the model is lit from some light source, and has perhaps some shadows cast across it, etc -- all of this requires a huge amount of vertex math that has to be calculated within the same timeframes as i described before -- and that is what a gpu is doing, taking a vertex-defined 3D environment, and running this large amount of computation in parallel. unlike your cpu which may only have, idk, 4-32 execution cores, your gpu has thousands -- they're nowhere near as featureful as your cpu cores, they can only do very specific simple math with vertices, but there's a ton of them, and they run alongside each other.

so that is what a gpu "does", in as few words as i can write

the things in the post you're referring to (V100/A100/H100 tensor "gpus") are called gpus because they are also periperal hardware that does a specific kind of math, massively, in parallel, they are just designed and fabricated by the same companies that make gpus so they're called gpus (annoyingly). they don't have any video output, and would probably be pretty bad at doing that kind of work. regular gpus excel at calculating vertices, tensor gpus operate on tensors, which are like matrixes, but with arbitrary numbers of dimensions. try not to think about it visually. they also use a weirder float. they're used for things like "artificial intelligence", training LLMs and whatever, but also for real things, like scientific weather/economy/particle models or simulations

they're very expensive because they cost the same, if not more, than what it cost to design & fabricate regular video gpus, but with a trillionth of the customer base. for every ten million rat gamers that will buy a gpu there is going to be one business buying one A100 or whatever.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ disclaimer | private policy | unsubscribe

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

1986 Pontiac Grand Prix 2+2

It is often said that racing improves the breed, and the move by Formula One to a hybrid drivetrain has seen the equivalent technology in road cars evolve at an unprecedented pace. Manufacturers will always seek what is commonly called “an unfair advantage,” exploiting the rule book to its outer limits to extract greater speed from their racing models. It was against this backdrop that Pontiac released its 1986 Grand Prix 2+2. It was developed as a homologation special for NASCAR competition and only graced showrooms for one year.

NASCAR competition has evolved into a sport featuring control underpinnings and exterior panels that are almost identical across all participating brands. Today’s cars share little with their predecessors, and the term “stock car” has a reasonably loose meaning. Earlier generations were based upon showroom models, and it was against this backdrop that cars like the Chevrolet Monte Carlo Aerocoupe and the Pontiac Grand Prix 2+2 emerged. General Motors sought aerodynamic and downforce improvements for their participating models, and smoothing the airflow across the body and rear spoiler achieved this without introducing additional drag. Wholesale sheetmetal changes weren’t warranted, but adding a fastback-style back window achieved the goal at a reasonable cost. The cars weren’t the most elegant on the planet, and the reduced trunk opening to accommodate the changes reduced practicality. Still, the Aerocoupe and 2+2 proved effective on superspeedways like Daytona and Talladega. Pontiac released 1,118 examples of the Grand Prix 2+2 to qualify for NASCAR competition, with all finished in a combination of Silver and Gray. The history of this car is unclear, but it presents exceptionally well for its age. The paint retains a healthy shine, while the plastic and graphics are excellent. Dealers sold the 2+2 at a premium price, but the extra cost didn’t guarantee that these classics would lead an easy life. Many owners drove them hard and fast, and it is common to see dilapidated and rusty examples appearing in the classic market. This car has avoided that fate and would turn more heads today than in 1986.

Pontiac considered the Grand Prix 2+2 to be a muscle car, although the 165hp and 245 ft/lbs of torque produced by its 305ci V8 doesn’t hint at anything special. Buyers received a four-speed 200-4R automatic transmission and a 3.08 rear end as standard fare, with no manual option to improve performance. The ¼-mile ET of 17 seconds perfectly demonstrates the depths of The Malaise Era. While that figure looks modest by modern standards, it was what buyers expected during that period. The situation would improve in the future, but it is sobering to consider that you can drive a four-cylinder family sedan or hatchback off the showroom floor today that could show this Grand Prix a clean set of heels.

The Pontiac Grand Prix 2+2 was a one-year-only model sold in limited numbers. I don’t find these the most attractive cars on the planet, with Chevrolet achieving better aesthetic results with its Aerocoupe. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you might find yourself irresistibly drawn to this classic. I respect that if it is the case because it is a car that would still draw crowds thirty-eight years after it rolled off the line. Evolving racing rules mean we will probably never see similar vehicles in the future, and owning this Grand Prix would be a link to the company’s motorsport heritage.

[itcars]

First Look: The Ford Mustang GT California Special

Standing out on the road has been a hallmark of the Mustang for 59 years. And now, as Mustang prepares to celebrate its 60th anniversary, Ford is putting a modernspin on the California Special.

The California Special package features Rave Blue details. The signature color appears on the nostril intakes, which flank a new horizontal-slat grille complete with low gloss black strakes. The headlights are surrounded by black bezels while Mustang GT California Special-specific graphics in Medium Light Rave Blue and High- and Low-Gloss Black appear on the lower body sides.

The California Special package is available with two 19.0-inch wheel options. The standard Carbonized Gray wheels have a GT/CS pad-printed logo in Rave Blue, while the optional Performance Pack wheel combines a machined face with Rave Blue pockets. The 5.0-liter engine badge on the front fenders and the GT badge at the back add Rave Blue outlines to black centers – like the GT Performance Package, there is a Performance Pack-specific badge. The GT/CS badge in the grille is also finished in Rave Blue.

Blue accents are prominent throughout the California Special package’s interior, where perforated Navy Pier upholstery and Ebony Black leather covers the seats. Further elevating its style is dual-color contrast stitching with Raptor Blue and Metal Gray threads that extend to the dash and doors. The same stitching is also available for the steering wheel and center console. A California Special IP badge and GT/CS floor mats round out the interior changes.

The California Special package adds $1,995 to the price of a Mustang GT Premium and is available in Coupe and Convertible body styles with either the six-speed manual gearbox or the optional 10-speed automatic transmission.

The 2024 Mustang GT California Special makes its public debut on November 16 at the 2023 Los Angeles Auto Show.

[vignellicenter]

Please join us for our next Open Houses! March 20-21, 2024 10am-4pm.

The NYC subway map that never was. Or at least it was never implemented.

The NYC Subway graphics are some of the most requested artifacts from the Vignelli archives. We acquired this unique “verbal map” aka “The Directory” aka the “How to get there” map in 2022. Our archivist put it on display for the first time in 50 years at our Open Houses in September 2022!

 “The Verbal Map described how to reach a destination, which train to get, where to change, and when to get out.” – Massimo Vignelli [comment on Michael Bierut’s essay “Mr. Vignelli Map” for Design Observer]

Printed on very glossy paper in full color, this map is large like the station size maps. Printed in two parts [top and bottom] each half measuring 29.5” x 47.5”.

In the Graphic Standards Manual on Page 3 “Diagram of Basic Sign Distribution” it describes the various maps to be installed:

Maps: System maps (implemented, the famous one),

neighborhood map (not implemented),

‘How to get there’ map (not implemented but we have the prototype!)

From the Graphics Standards Manual on page 75, “The Directory”:

“The directory is designed to help a passenger find his “Destination” and “How to get there” quickly and easily. Each station will have its own directory listing all other station alphabetically and numerically. Each station will be followed by the color disc designating he trains that stop there. If there is no direct train, transfer information will follow the station name. This directory will be placed at all important points in the subways station both inside and outside the turnstiles.”

We also have the Dekalb Av Signage Study “analyzed and completed by Joan Charysyn and Virginia Macintosh” for Unimark International in 1971 which shows a mockup of the various maps and states “A directory and three maps will eventually be in use in all subway stations.”

Be sure to join us for our next Open Houses and see what other surprises you can discover! Learn more opn our events page: https://www.rit.edu/events/vignelli-center-spring-open-house

Image descriptions:

Detail of “verbal map” aka “The Directory” aka the “How to get there” map

image of entire map

Video clip of map

Photo of Open Houses with logo

vintage 35mm slide of detail of “verbal map”

NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual pg. 75 “The Directory”

NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual pg. 75 “The Directory”

Slideshow of Dekalb St study: coversheet, Directory from Grand Central, System Map, Neighborhood map, and 5 Boroughs map

Vintage 35mm slide of 57th Street station signage

Vintage 35mm slides of 57th Street station signage

[searchsystem]

Atio Studio / The North Face / Standard Manual / Typography / 2023

[horseslur]

Someone else can link the tumblr post/reddit link in the replies under this, I'm mostly here to elaborate on uh. How SSE Fucked Up This Time (possibly illegal version).

Disclaimer: Not an actual expert on this stuff, but i am an economics major. and i literally took a class on this sort of thing this semester.

What is SSE doing?

TLDR: as of roughly today (dec 21st 2023) but possibly earlier, you have a chance of, when trying to buy starrider, getting not just the "regular" discount packages that we know, where you pay once and get a bunch of seasonal goodies and the weekly sc, but also a "special" "Discounted" option where you get the goodies and starrider and *no weekly sc*. Meaning you will have to manually buy starcoins if you ever want any beyond the initial 2k or whatever.

Why is this possibly illegal?

I'm not diving too deep into A/B testing, because I know the least amount about it, but essentially it is literally up to chance which option you get, the regular set or the "cheap" option.

Combined with the fact that they sneakily removed the "receive a weekly starcoin allowance" from the starrider page from one day to another, and the fact that a slight graphical change (that being the +100sc not being in the image of the cheap option) are the only acknowledgements of this change, it basically sets them up for a lawsuit in any location they roll out these options.

Trade, market and consumer authorities (the FTC in the US, the European Commission in Europe, Konsumentverket in Sweden for example) have as one of their main and foremost goals the protection of consumers in the country where a product is sold. They're the reason why you can get your money back if you order something online and it doesn't arrive, or something distinctly different from what you ordered arrives instead. Rule number 1 for any company or seller is do not mislead your consumers.

Does removing the sc allowance directly break said rule? No. But doing so in a shady, hidden way that leads people to believe they should be receiving starcoins onto to be told by customer support to suck it up, they bought the wrong thing, and to do so unannounced and randomly throughout multiple regions, Definitely sets up a case against them.

It can absolutely be argued that after a decade of having a premium currency allowance as the Standard in their starrider subscriptions, to remove it unannounced and present it to customers as a regular discount is deliberately misleading consumers to buy a product that is not what they intended to buy. Both new customers and returning customers buying alternate accounts step into this process expecting to pay once for a starrider bundle that, given the ongoing seasonal festival, includes the seasonal cosmetic options, in addition to the "regular" premium currency allowance. This is especially more obvious once you realise that (presumably since implementing this system), you have to have created an account on their site and logged into it to even see which starrider bundles are available to you, which makes people unlikely to ever realise that the offers they are getting might be different from other people in their same region, with one version being significantly worse/different from what they might expect.

TLDR: it's really fucking shady of them to just Suddenly shove a bundle without the weekly allowance in people's faces when people are expecting to have them, especially because they're clearly trying to hide the fact that it's an option at all or different from the regular bundle.

What now?

If you or someone you know is getting this bundle or has bought it and felt surprised/betrayed by the fact that it lacks the allowance, take it to your local consumer protection authority (after you've contacted customer support). If you're uncertain what to tell them, try and add the following points:

You bought an online product to be used inside the game, which turned out to be something different from what you thought it was.

When you contacted customer support over this, they told you that the version you bought does not contain the allowance, but offer no way to correct this mistake. (Unless the customer support script ends up changing. In that case simply add what they did tell you.)

The discounted bundle did not clearly state that it lacks the allowance, nor is it distinctly different from other bundles, and is in fact the first option you were given.

To see what bundles are offered to you at all requires logging into an account on their website, making it difficult for you to compare offers to what other people might be getting, and making it unlikely for you to realise that you got something different from others at all until after you have bought it.

At worst, SSE will be reprimanded and made to add more clearly on their website what the bundle contains and what you're missing out on.

At best they actually go to court and go bankrupt over said costs and we'll finally be truly free

[satoshi-mochida]

Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered International announced for PS5, PS4, and Switch - Gematsu

Red Art Games, in cooperation with Square Enix, has announced Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered International, a new edition of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered with English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish localizations for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Switch. It will launch both physically and digitally in early 2025 in North America and Europe.

The physical edition will be available for PlayStation 5 and Switch in North America, and for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Switch in Europe. The standard edition will be available at multiple retailers at launch, while limited and collector’s editions will be exclusive to Video Games Plus in North America and RedArtGames.com in Europe.

Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered International will also be playable at Gamescom 2024, which will run from August 21 to 25 at Koelnmesse in Cologne, Germany.

Get the details below.

■ Physical Special Editions

-Standard Edition

A copy of the game

Deluxe Edition (500 PEGI-rated copies per platform, RedArtGames.com-exclusive)

A copy of the game with a reversible cover

An exclusive sleeve with alternate cover art

A manual

A PVC keychain

Special Edition (500 ESRB-rated copies per platform, Video Games Plus-exclusive)

A copy of the game with a reversible cover

A PVC keychain

Collector’s Edition (1,000 PEGI-rated and 1,000 ESRB-rated copies per platform, RedArtGames.com-exclusive in Europe, Video Games Plus-exclusive in North America)

A copy of the game with a reversible cover

A box with retro-inspired cover art (Switch and PlayStation versions have different boxes)

A Steelcase

An artbook

A manual

Three postcards

■ Fact Sheet

About

The gods created man and man created stories. The primordial creator Marda brought forth the land of Mardias. In ages past a mighty battle rocked this land, when Elore, the king of the gods, fought three malicious deities: Death, Saruin and Schirach. After a long and drawn-out struggle, Death and Schirach were sealed away and rendered powerless, with the final deity Saruin also trapped through the power of the Fatestones and the noble sacrifice of the hero Mirsa. Now 1,000 years have passed since that titanic battle. The Fatestones lie scattered across the world and the gods of evil are resurgent once more. Eight heroes set off on their own journeys, as if guided by the hand of fate. What tales will these adventurers weave across the vast tapestry of Mardias? You are the only one who can decide! The original Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song included many of the SaGa series trademark elements, such as the Glimmer and Combo mechanics and was considered to be the epitome of the series when it first released. The free scenario system that lets you create your own storyline remains at the core of the game, letting you select one of eight protagonists with completely different origins and backstories, then set off on a unique journey. This remastered edition has evolved in all areas, featuring upgraded high-definition graphics and numerous enhancements to improve playability. And for the first time ever, the game will be fully playable in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. This makes it highly recommended for both fans of the original and newcomers to the SaGa series.

Key Features

Brand new localization in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. (English also included.)

Full high-definition graphical update.

Schiele, Marina, Monica, and Flammar can now be recruited.

Enhanced and more difficult bosses.

High speed mode.

Mini Maps.

New Game+ mode.

■ Staff Comments

Akitoshi Kawazu, SaGa Series General Director

“With the support of Red Art Games, we’re now able to release a new version of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered that includes localization into French, German, Italian, and Spanish languages. We are finally able to grant this desire of our loyal fans! We know there’s a big SaGa fanbase and community in the west, so releasing a new localized edition of the game to more of our fans has long been a dream of mine. I hope to continue to fulfill the wishes of our fans, as well as creating opportunities for even more people to play the game.”

Masanori Ichikawa, SaGa Series Producer

“The opportunity for this release all began when Michael Binkowski (CEO, Red Art Games) and Romain Mahut (business development and communications manager, Red Art Games) contacted me directly. Thanks to them, a long-time dream of ours is coming true and I’m so grateful. From visiting the Red Art Games office in France to all the discussions we’ve had on this project, it’s been an amazing experience from start to finish, and I can’t wait for SaGa fans to get their hands on this beautiful game.”

Hiroyuki Miura, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered Producer

“Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered International is a title that allows players to enjoy a great many of the characteristic mechanics of the SaGa series, including the Freeform Scenario system, Glimmer, and Combos. The addition of new localization into French, German, Italian, and Spanish is particularly impactful for the freeform scenario. Now, players globally will be able to experience the story on an even deeper level, in their native language. I’m excited for more people to discover the SaGa series thanks to the additional language support and the physical release of the game. I’m delighted to be partnering with Red Art Games on this collaboration.”

View a new set of screenshots and box arts at the gallery.

[cosmonautroger]

NASA Graphics Standards Manual (1976)

[game-boy-pocket]

I'm going to die on the hill that video games don't age poorly, or age at all. It's more that there's an epidemic of attention span erosion, and older games require more patience and learning curve, and since most of the games require you to read the manual to fully understand things. There's games out there where not even the manual helps, but those games didn't age bad, they were always bad ( same for games with racist content. Bad then, bad now. ).

You also got people that just won't give a game a fair chance purely on the basis of it being old. Like people who dismiss a vintage movie because it's not a high budget CGI filled crowd pleaser.

And on top of this, a lot of people's standards are just way too damn high after mostly playing a bunch of triple A slop. It just feels like nothing is ever good enough anymore if it doesn't have 10/10 story, graphics, gameplay, immersion, voice acting, muisc, even a game that could be very close to a 10 is usually given a 7/10 by today's standards, fuck.

I think the only really valid excuse for dismissing older games is that you're really busy with limited time for gaming, so you don't want a game that might require spending a lot of time figuring out what to do to progress. But that's not the games fault, and it's certainly not something exclusive to older games.

I know i've gone on similar rants before but man, sometimes I see or read something that just sets me off.