It's the Kendrick and Russell show, with special guest Jaimie! It's like
The Young Ones, except there's only three of us, and we're old and boring,
and we don't live together, and we're responsible with our money and our
property. But otherwise exactly the same!

Play:
--=--

Phantasy Star Online (PC) - The Mines are a lovely play area, and the
place where a spellcaster character can feel properly powerful. For other
classes this is the spot where the difficulty ramps up exponentially,
since enemies move very quickly and in large groups. But a properly
levelled spellcaster can hit multiple evil robots ahead and behind all at
once, so all the extra challenge from not being melee-based in previous
areas pays off here. I'm still unlocking abilities and stats for my kid,
to be clear, and the goal is to allow him to be able to sit and tank hits
from Boomas without having to ever decide to hit back if he doesn't want
to.

After 20 years I'm still discovering genius in the design of this old
game. The Mines are actually a constructed area, full of automatic
defences to keep the unworthy away from Dark Falz. But the name evokes a
sense that maybe the place once had an older and more benign purpose, or
that it was given that identity to obscure its purpose. It's the best kind
of storytelling, the kind that doesn't draw attention to itself unless you
want to notice it.

Dungeons and Dragons Dark Alliance (PS4) - This is not a worthy successor
to the old Baldur's Gate action spin-off. It's more like a 3D brawler than
a Gauntlet clone, with too many attack types and not enough ways to
appreciate the pretty scenery that the PS4 only barely has enough juice to
render properly or at a consistent frame rate. I really should have read a
review before deciding to buy it early.

Shin Megami Tensei III HD (PS4/Switch) - This is lovely, but it's not
really a remaster in any sense of that term. It's a PS2 game upscaled and
with some audio enhancements, and nothing in terms of quality-of-life
improvements that I've seen in about five or six hours of play. But the
story is still fantastic, although I can't actually imagine who would want
this apart from me.

Hellpoint (PC) - Mild spoiler, Hellpoint really leans into the science
fiction explanation for the whole parallel universe situation, whereby
multiple players are all having slight variations of the same events and
the same fights. So it's almost a disappointment to see all the features
of the game on the intended platform that they ended up leaving out of the
Switch version, most of which are more clearly ripped off of the Dark
Souls series than I would have noticed otherwise. By way of the clearest
example, players can leave little pictorial messages for one another to
point out secret doors or hidden dangers, and I can't help but be annoyed
when somebody tries to be clever and put one in an inaccessible part of
the level or in some funny location on the wall where the only way to read
it is to due trying. As always, the thing that ruins multiplayer games is
other players.

Yakuza 0 (PC) - This is lovely on a PC that can actually run it. Although
comedically I have no idea which of the buttons on a 360 controller are
which, and it's very odd for the karaoke inputs not to be square, circle,
X and triangle. I had forgotten how clueless and green Nishikiyama and
Kiryu are at this point in their lives, to the point where they actually
get a lot of the jargon and the rules wrong. They even refer to themselves
as 'yakuza' rather than 'gokudo' for a lot of the first few chapters. It's
a little jarring to hear Kasuga's voice out of Nishiki's mouth, even
though I've always known that they were both performed by the same actor.

Want:
--=--

Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX (Switch/PS4) - My copies are coming on
Tuesday! I think. Stupidly, ordering from Signature Edition was completely
unnecessary for me because there are normal media releases here in the
States through Amazon. I need to pay more attention.

All the other Yakuza games on PC (PC) - This is probably another case
where I'll just buy them all (again) at full price because I love to give
Sega money. It's not quite having them all on Switch or some other actual
portable platform, but it'll do.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

Expenditure:
-----=-----

Balance forward - $2,978

-KKC, who needs to spend less of his life cutting grass.
--
-- "People with happy families don't become spies. A bad | kendrick
childhood is the perfect background for covert ops. You | @
don't trust anyone. You're used to getting smacked around, | io-nyc
and you never get homesick." - Michael Westen, /Burn Notice/ | .com

Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

> Play:

Outrun 2006 (PSP) - more Flagman. I forgot this had drift-to-score
stages, they feel a bit out of place really.

V-Rally 3 (GBA) - while I imagine this is one of the hardest GBA games
to emulate smoothly, I'm still surprised it doesn't run better on the
Pi. I suppose using software scaling in X probably isn't helping.

zpsoli (Amiga etc.) - played it a bit, as I found that it happens to
work ok on that seemingly-buggy emulator I mentioned last time if you
use the BWK awk port from Aminet. Which is handy. Or was until I
realised I'd ended up with a 23-line terminal window by using a weird
display size, but dropping zpsoli's "displines" setting to 15 handled
that. That just leaves the elephant in the room - it's all very well
running it at effectively 150MHz or so, but at 7MHz or 14MHz I doubt
it'd be remotely bearable to play. Oh well. I also tried it on OS/2,
where it amusingly ran better than on Windows due to seemingly
accepting VT100 codes as-is. Speaking of which...

Klondike Solitaire (OS/2) - in shocking news, apparently other people
have also written Solitaire games, and sometimes they even feature
so-called "graphics". The version I was playing was from OS/2 Warp, as
IBM called 3.0 for maximum possible cringe. Funnily enough, this
defaults to the easier 1-card-draw style like zpsoli - and to the back
of the cards saying "OS/2". I think I prefer "%%".

> Want:

To try OS/2's "Mahjongg" game - including this was probably just a
weird little bit of oneupmanship over Windows 3.1 at the time.
Hopefully they didn't find a way to stick "OS/2" on the tiles.

> Bin:

OS/2 3 apparently handling a non-working driver by exploding and
leaving you to clear up the pieces, with no obvious fallback options.
(Luckily I'd made a backup after installing.) I can't imagine why it
wasn't more popular.

-Rus.

On 28 Jun 2021 at 00:46:50 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

>
> It's the Kendrick and Russell show, with special guest Jaimie! It's like
> The Young Ones, except there's only three of us, and we're old and boring,
> and we don't live together, and we're responsible with our money and our
> property. But otherwise exactly the same!

Responsible with our money lols. Well, Russ might be.

> Play:
> --=--
>
> Phantasy Star Online (PC)

I do want to create some time to try this, but haven't yet. Instead:

It Takes Two (PMG, PS4/5) Continues to be an absolute joy to play, with
occasional chat breaks while some terrible cheesy scripting is
happening. There was another "are the puppets gonna bang?" moment last
week. My theory that this game was made by four teams still seems to
hold true:
1) The lead dev team who made the gameplay and mechanics
2) The arts'n'assets team who made the stunning environments
3) The junior dev team who made the little competition games and the fun
little physics-y things to do out in the environments
4) The unpaid intern whose parents are undergoing a divorce, who sicked
up the cutscenes script after a late night drinking cider and black.

Nier:Replicant remake - I'd not picked this up for a bit, and it has
reminded me that they haven't improved any QoL stuff around the map and
I need to *remember* the routes to go places. So I did some mainline
questing, as that has "go here" red Xes on the map. Subquests do not.
Still Yoko Taro mad, he's very happy to inject misery into any
character's life.

Dorfromantik - built another little town. This has had some UI upgrades
so it's easier to tell which way around the tiles work best, but it's
still possible to get a "why don't these houses align with those ones?
Dammit" situation.

Beat Saber - after a change of cardiac meds my reaction speeds have
improved dramatically. I spent 45 minutes in VR a few days back knocking
personal bests out on tunes I've played a bunch before, which is hugely
satisfying. Then in another session I did a pretty tricky Expert+ in
"Even Faster" mode and nailed it. Watching the replay I am deeply
impressed by myself. Yay!

> Want:
> --=--

Switch Pro, because what I really want is to replay BotW - I barely
touched it after the DLCs dropped, and need to run through the second
one. But it's been three years so I really ought to just enjoy it all
again. I have had it pointed out that I should whip up an emulator and
play it in 4k on the PC... but that's at least ten minutes of effort and
a spot of not-really-piracy.

And anyway I've got Yak0 to get back to as well as finishing Nier.

> Bin:
> -==-

Stupid meat shell. Still crap, even when not dumbed down by drugs.

> -KKC, who needs to spend less of his life cutting grass.

Oh, I need to do ours too...

Cheers - Jaimie

--
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted;
persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
By Order of the Author." -- Mark Twain

In article <EBiCI.349223$v0S3.138695@usenetxs.com>,
Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:
>Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:
>
>> Bin:
>
>OS/2 3 apparently handling a non-working driver by exploding and
>leaving you to clear up the pieces, with no obvious fallback options.
>(Luckily I'd made a backup after installing.) I can't imagine why it
>wasn't more popular.
>

In my youth I administered an OS/2 lab (that hardly ever got used) and I
came to really appreciate it as more of a "Super-DOS with just a little
bit of UI" as compared to Windows being "Here's all this UI you have to
have and sometimes the DOS stuff still works". Obviously that was counter
to what the industry would end up doing, but I still imagine a world where
multitasking meant spinning off a whole separate machine instance rather
than trying to make one system try to decide when and how stuff should
happen asynchronously. I still have an set of OS/2 install floppies lying
around somewhere that I've meant to have running in an emulator.

-KKC, who needs a nap.
--
-- "People with happy families don't become spies. A bad | kendrick
childhood is the perfect background for covert ops. You | @
don't trust anyone. You're used to getting smacked around, | io-nyc
and you never get homesick." - Michael Westen, /Burn Notice/ | .com

Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

> In my youth I administered an OS/2 lab (that hardly ever got used) and I
> came to really appreciate it as more of a "Super-DOS with just a little
> bit of UI" as compared to Windows being "Here's all this UI you have to
> have and sometimes the DOS stuff still works".

I think OS/2 could have been quite interesting in a world without Unix
for exactly that reason. But it's still a neat curiosity, and at least
I now have some sort of context for the coverage it got in computer
magazines at the time - back when it was definitely the future of PCs.

-Rus.