Formula One talk is boring, whether or not you're a fan.

Play:
--=--

Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst (PC) - Except not really, because it was
hell trying to get a client going. It didn't help that most of the
available software was riddled with inserted viruses, which is the sort of
thing I honestly expect to see. Getting a homebrew server running was
surprisingly easy. But stitching together files from different releases
(and meant for different homebrew servers) didn't get me a usable client
result. I watched some footage of Episode 4 of PSO on Youtube and I've
decided that it's not worth the effort.

Sega Rally Revo (PC) - Uh oh. Encountered two interesting bugs that I
don't think would have shown up in normal QA testing. First of all, if you
dawdle and take more than ten minutes to finish a lap (as my son does)
then you break the replay storage mechanism and the game timing goes to
hell, which means some variable wraps around and causes it to display only
two or three frames per second. As an awful follow-up, something went
wrong with the frame timing during all other play scenarios and the game
started jumping around being unable to keep up with player input. I
finally figured out that a Windows Defender scan somehow took away the
local administrator rights, and one reinstall later I'm back in business.
I'll have to remember that one for future reference.

Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing (PC) - Oh hey, I own this on Steam. And
it's lovely. Racing Transformed is too, but I get the sense that the first
All Stars Game will make more sense to my kid. I took a *lot* of time to
browse through the stupid Steam and GoG libraries to hunt down old WRC and
Direct titles and none of them have that same arcade accessibility that
Sega Rally Revo has. Also, the old Outrun and Daytona games aren't
available on PC either. Something's gone very wrong when the crown jewels
of Sega's racing library aren't widely available except to pirates.

Sega Megadrive/Genesis Classics (PC) - Quick check to see if any of the
Outrun titles are available here? No, they are not. Oh hey, the entire
suite of downloadable Megadrive carts is on sale. Why didn't I buy this
before? Because my last laptop didn't have the grunt to run the stupid D3
emulator for some reason. Well that may be the best six bucks I've ever
spent, just having all that ready to go on the PC.

Want:
--=--

Easy virtualization (PC) - My existing Windows 7 PC is still kicking, but
it's also got quite a bit of cruft and I'm not wild about the notion of
attempting to virtualise it as-is. I'm not even sure if Hyper-V and all
the silly overhead of VM operation will run Sega Rally Revo properly. I
suppose it's inevitable that I'll try, but not this weekend. This should
really be a turnkey thing straight from Microsoft. I suppose this is less
urgent now that I actually have Sega Rally Revo working again.

All the other Sega Rallies (GBA/PS2) - Who's got two thumbs and just
bought Sega Rally Championship on the Gameboy Advance and Sega Rally 2006
(JPN-region) for the PS2 for fifty bucks a piece? This guy! I just bought
the JPN PS2 Sega Ages Outrun disk too, not remembering that they released
it in the west as part of the big Classics Collection disk. Well, as deKay
says, it's only money.

Bin:
-==-

Yakuza 0 (PC) - For now. Surely I will return to it, but at this moment I
have more urgent things to get to that aren't replaying a Yakuza game for
the third or fourth time.

A bunch of crap racing games on Steam (PC) - You would not believe how
many fly-by-night, where-did-they-go development shops put together
terrible racing games on Steam. The screenshots look nice and the demo
videos they captured look suspiciously smooth, but they're absolutely no
fun to play. I must have tried out a half dozen of them (that I can't be
bothered to name even to shame them) before just deciding that Sonic
Racing was not only good enough for my son but a better overall product.
Sumo had better damn well continue doing work for Sega after this buyout
happens.

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

Balance forward - $3,043

Sega Megadrive/Genesis Classics downloads (PC) - $6
Sega Ages 2500 Vol 13 - Outrun (PS2) - $50
Sega Rally 2006 (PS2) - $60
Sega Rally Championship (GBA) - $40

Total year-to-date - $3,199

-KKC, who should find somebody to cut his 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:

Mr. Driller (PS1) - got significantly past the halfway point finally,
but still messed up at about 80% depth.

Oekaki Puzzle (PS1) - disappointed to find one or two puzzles that
required guessing. I don't really understand why so many
Picross/nonogram games get this wrong, they're supposed to be logic
puzzles and it shouldn't ever have been hard to write a checker
program for them. Still, luckily this game works like the Wario
puzzles in Mario's Picross (with no indication of, nor punishment for,
mistakes) - so at least you can try a guess and see if it works out.

Lego Star Wars 2 (PSP) - a bit more of this.

> Want:

To get back to Lego Marvel 2, despite it clearly not being the
greatest Lego game ever.

> Bin:

LSW2 crashes. I remember this being a bit of a thing generally and
sure enough, I've had one on the PSP version.

-Rus.

In article <o1QNI.2561888$TPRa.668023@usenetxs.com>,
Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:
>Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:
>
>> Play:
>
>Oekaki Puzzle (PS1) - disappointed to find one or two puzzles that
>required guessing. I don't really understand why so many
>Picross/nonogram games get this wrong, they're supposed to be logic
>puzzles and it shouldn't ever have been hard to write a checker
>program for them. Still, luckily this game works like the Wario
>puzzles in Mario's Picross (with no indication of, nor punishment for,
>mistakes) - so at least you can try a guess and see if it works out.
>

Isn't this true of any maths puzzle though? Eventually you achieve an
arrangement where two outcomes are mathematically equivalent and there's
no useful way to distinguish between them. I'm thinking specifically of
that one Minesweeper endgame where the last mine could be to either side
of a numbered indicator and there's no way to tell because you're stuck on
an edge. I don't think there's a way to avoid those without adding
aesthetically unpleasant constraints.

-KKC, who suddenly has too much to do today.
--
-- "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 article <o1QNI.2561888$TPRa.668023@usenetxs.com>,
> Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:
>>Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:
>>
>>> Play:
>>
>>Oekaki Puzzle (PS1) - disappointed to find one or two puzzles that
>>required guessing. I don't really understand why so many
>>Picross/nonogram games get this wrong, they're supposed to be logic
>>puzzles and it shouldn't ever have been hard to write a checker
>>program for them.

Apparently solving nonograms in the general case is an NP-complete
problem (!) so the above may be very wrong. :-) Solvers do seem to
exist nowadays, but I'm not sure if they work for all cases.

> Isn't this true of any maths puzzle though? Eventually you achieve an
> arrangement where two outcomes are mathematically equivalent and there's
> no useful way to distinguish between them.

Usually - this seems to be the Nintendo/Jupiter approach at least -
nonograms are designed such that there is exactly one correct solution
which can be arrived at by repeatedly analysing one row or column at a
time, and if that's the case then solving them is entirely
deterministic. IMHO two key game features should be to a) ensure that
the above is true by only including puzzles of that type (because in
practice the puzzles get frustrating if it isn't), and b) to arrange
them roughly in order of difficulty, which is pretty subjective and
not strictly necessary but does help give a feeling of progression.

Wikipedia's Nonogram page seems less strict than that, but says:

"There are puzzles that have several feasible solutions [...] In these
puzzles, all solutions are correct by the definition, but not all must
give a reasonable picture."

That last part probably explains why nonogram games wouldn't
intentionally include puzzles with multiple possible solutions, as
unintended solutions will corrupt the intended picture.

Whether or not requiring multi-row/column reasoning is reasonable or
not is debatable I suppose. I'd say it's far too likely to lead
players to just guess in such situations even if it might be
theoretically possible not to, so from a game-design perspective it
seems like a bad idea to include such puzzles. I note also that
Nintendo/Jupiter's Mega Picross variant deliberately features
multi-row/column reasoning but limited to pairs of rows/columns -
presumably this was seen as being acceptably harder, but not as
frustrating as entirely arbitrary puzzles could be in this respect
(which is fair I think).

As for Oekaki Puzzle, it's only had I think around 5% of the puzzles
requiring guessing so far (AFAICT), which probably isn't bad enough to
just drop it given that it doesn't immediately punish you for
mistakes.

> Minesweeper

In traditional Minesweeper your first move can kill you, and there's
absolutely nothing you can do about that. It's like the exact opposite
of Picross. :-) (Though arguably in Minesweeper minimising risk is
what makes the game.)

-Rus.

On 2 Aug 2021 at 00:58:06 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

>
> Formula One talk is boring, whether or not you're a fan.
>
> Play:
> --=--
>

Breath of the Wild (WiiU/CEMU/PC) - still lush. Beat up my first Lynel
using some battle tricks gleaned from Youtube. Was on my way to the Rito
Village but got distracted by the lost woods so now I'm Shrine hunting
to build up my hearts to grab the Master Sword, up to 9 and need 13.

Katrielle Layton - whatever the thing's called (Switch) - Noodling along
in this, the bad digital-mapped-to-analogue-sticks cursor control still
offends me. Otherwise as Layton as any other Layton game, but with more
bad dog puns and lots more food.

> Want:
> --=--
>
> Easy virtualization (PC) - My existing Windows 7 PC is still kicking, but
> it's also got quite a bit of cruft and I'm not wild about the notion of
> attempting to virtualise it as-is.

VMware Workstation includes tools to do this in the box.

Ehhh nothing much on my list now that we know the far future date of
Botw2.

> Bin:
> -==-

I seem to have successfully binned my habit of getting lost in mods when
playing a moddable game :) BotW is eminently moddable, and all I've done
is look through the 'tick a box' graphics patches that come with CEMU
rather than go looking for naked Sidon mods.

Although some might say I'm just too tired to bother risking a delve
into the failure states. And anyway, fish don't even have external
genitalia so naked Sidon would look exactly like the normal model.

Of course, thirsty mod-makers don't know that... and as well as well
hung Sidon there are Mipha nipples? What?

Cheers - Jaimie

--
....there should be a feature added to the RAID 0 standard
stating that if anyone selects RAID 0 as an option, they
must type in, "I know what I am doing and that it is wrong" before they can proceed.
- Archangel Mychael, ArsTechnica comments